Corruption

Catholic nuns have made themselves a force in the worldly realm of shareholder activism. In recent years, they have sponsored resolutions at a number of companies, including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Now, four order of nuns--The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Boston, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the Sisters of St Francis of Philadelphia and the Benedictine Sisters of Mt Angel, who are all investors in Goldman Sachs--are outraged that the bank's board has decided to pay the top executives so well, reports The Guardian.

By Barney Frank

If you thought that America’s financial sector had gotten enough of bad publicity, think again. The insider-trading trial of Raj Rajaratnam, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, has now begun. It is likely to provide an especially lurid exposé of the corrupt underbelly of the financial world.

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is the ideal environment for laundering money - and if such a scandal emerges, it will mean the end of the cap-and-trade programme, a leading investment banker has warned.  

Teodorin's World: Playboy bunnies. $2 million Bugattis. Bags full of cash. Meet the world's richest minister of agriculture and forestry.

In the Economist:

Two men have been injured in what officials say was an accidental shooting at a central Illinois gun show.

Every time there is a new shooting tragedy the spokespeople from the NRA have to create a response. I’ve heard enough of them to anticipate their verbiage. Here is my impression of an NRA supporter’s response.  I think it will go a little like this:

The West has to deal with tyrants, but it should do so on its own terms

LESS than two years ago, at the G8 summit in L’Aquila in Italy, prime ministers and presidents sat down to talk about world trade and food security with Muammar Qaddafi. Today Libya’s tyrant is paying mercenaries to shoot his people in the streets like “rats” and “cockroaches”.