Star Analyst Meredith Whitney Leaves Oppenheimer

February 19, 2009

(AP) – Bank analyst Meredith Whitney — one of the few names on Wall Street that actually gained favor during the financial crisis — is leaving Oppenheimer & Co. to start her own stock advisory firm.

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Gates Foundation, Others Provide $90M to Africa

February 19, 2009

SEATTLE (AP) — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says it is investing $48 million and private corporations are chipping in another $42 million to help small-scale farmers in Africa work themselves out of poverty and hunger by improving the way they grow cocoa and cashews.

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Obama's Housing Plan: "All of us Pay"

February 19, 2009

President Barack Obama, announcing a $75-billion federal aid plan for millions of homeowners facing mortgage foreclosures, today will say the nation is facing “a crisis unlike any we’ve ever known.”

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Malaria and Bakouma

February 19, 2009

This is Bakouma Kpatekatola, a young man from the West African nation of Togo. In 2003, when Bakouma was 9 years old, my family became his sponsor through the Childreach-Plan USA organization. In the years since we became occasional pen pals; a few times a year we’d get a letter from him, in his native […]

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Google Earth Reveals Secret US Pakistan Base

February 19, 2009

The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.

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Madden: Housing Plan is Obama's Birth of a Salesman

February 19, 2009

Feb. 19, 2009 | WASHINGTON — The Obama administration seems to have learned three big lessons in salesmanship from the bumps it endured in passing the stimulus bill and presenting its Wall Street rescue plan. One, sometimes the best way to sell Washington on an idea is to leave Washington and talk to the public. […]

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Former Senator Burris, We Hardly Knew You

February 19, 2009

IL Sen. Roland Burris loses support left and right from fellow Democrats as revelations of his relationship with former Gov. Blagojevich emerge. The Tribune and the Washington Post call for him to step down, but Burris says he won’t resign. His schedule for Thursday has been canceled, but we’re sure that’s a coincidence.

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Malanga: Feds Re-Impose Loan Standards They Undermined

February 19, 2009

Steven Malanga examines the real problem with the housing plan. New mortgages are now being issued only under exceptionally stringent underwriting standards. The market has far overcorrected for the excesses of the bubble years, and adding new regulations to control new issuance doesn’t change reality.

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Does Obama's DOJ Anti-Trust Pick Signal a Coming Assault on Google?

February 19, 2009

DOJ’s antitrust unit to be headed by Christine Varney, who believes that government should act aggressively against monopolies. And who does she think of as a monopoly? “Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem.” The problem? “Google.” But Eric Schmidt was smiling at the White House just the other day?

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Allen Stanford's Fraud Caught Thanks to Favor

February 19, 2009

How do these frauds keep churning onward with such obvious holes? “One of the biggest alleged frauds in banking history had been stumbled upon accidentally late last year by Alex Dalmady, a Venezuelan financial analyst, when he was doing a favor for a friend who planned to invest in Stanford International Bank.”

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