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In a world exclusive interview the now-exiled Kim Hyun-hee tells of life inside the kingdom and how she was groomed by North Korean spy masters to plant a bomb on a South Korean passenger plane.
The 1987 attack killed all 115 people on board and led to the United States listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.
“From the moment I got on the Korean Air flight, left the bomb in the overhead locker, and until I got off, I was nervous every second of the operation,” she said.
According to the daily, the machinery belongs to a firm that is removing limestone from the area…
…Eduardo Herrán Gómez de la Torre, director of research at Ojos de Condor, described the extensive damage in the area. “We have witnessed the irreparable destruction to a set of lines and trapezoids that existed in the area,” Herrán said.
“The limestone firm responsible has not been sanctioned or supervised by the authorities of the Regional Directorate of Culture of Ica, despite being in this great archaeological reserve.”
“The company argues that the land where the plant is installed is private property and that the owner can do whatever he wants on his land, but this is not so,” he added.
Back in 1999, Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann released the climate change movement’s most potent symbol: The “hockey stick,” a line graph of global temperature over the last 1,500 years that shows an unmistakable, massive uptick in the 20th century, when humans began to dump large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann’s back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists.
Today, it’s getting a makeover: A study published in Science reconstructs global temperatures further back than ever before—a full 11,300 years. The new analysis finds that the only problem with Mann’s hockey stick was that its handle was about 9,000 years too short. The rate of warming over the last 100 years hasn’t been seen for as far back as the advent of agriculture.
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This so-called Robin-Hood pursuit, which appeared to come to a head in March 2009, is back on again.
It was four years ago that the then 32-year-old Catalan man, Enric Durán Giralt, was sentenced to prison by a Barcelona judge for stealing from banks — and giving to his favorite leftist causes.
Between 2006 and 2008, Durán had falsely identified himself and his intentions in obtaining 68 personal and commercial loans from 39 different banks for a total value of 492,000 euors. Before the judge, Durán confessed that a significant portion of the money had been donated to social movements that he refused to identify, and the rest he spent on the publication of 300,000 copies of two editions of a magazine called “Crisis,” denouncing the inner workings of the global financial system.
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The number of student loans held by subprime borrowers is growing, and more of those loans are souring, the latest signs that a weak job market and rising debt loads are squeezing recent graduates.
In all, 33% of all subprime student loans in repayment were 90 days or more past due in March 2012, up from 24% in 2007, according to a Wednesday report by TransUnion LLC.
Meanwhile, the Chicago-based credit bureau found that 33% of the almost $900 billion in outstanding student loans was held by subprime, or the riskiest, borrowers as of March 2012, up from 31% in 2007.
“If you become subprime, it’s more likely that you will not pay your debt,” said TransUnion Vice President Ezra Becker, who oversaw the study.
Another study, released by Fitch Ratings, a unit of Fimalac and Hearst Corp., Wednesday, warned that the gap between college costs and what students can borrow under the federal student-loan program will continue to widen.
TransUnion performed its study at the request of credit unions, which make private student loans.
In the five years through last March, the portion of all student loans that were 90 days or more delinquent rose to 11.4% from 8.8%, while the average student- loan balance per borrower increased 30% to $23,829, TransUnion found.
For some borrowers, the burden is even greater. Kristin Jones, 24 years old, ran out of money to complete her education at Northeastern University in Boston and, with more than $60,000 in student-loan debt, is looking to finish her senior year at a cheaper school. Ms. Jones, who works for a company that manages corporate-benefits plans, said she fell behind on her student loans after she found she couldn’t afford to go back to Northeastern and her loan payments started kicking in.
“I’ll be pretty much trapped for life by these loans and the credit default,” said Ms. Jones, who is on a repayment plan but still owes Northeastern one semester’s tuition.
Missed student-loan payments are more likely to have a big impact on the scores of borrowers with short credit histories such as recent college graduates, TransUnion said.
Another study, released Tuesday by credit-score provider Fair Isaac Corp., found that roughly 26 million consumers had two or more open student loans on their credit report in October 2012, up from about 12 million in 2005. A majority of bank risk managers expect student-loan delinquencies to continue to rise, according to Fair Isaac.
Repaying debt has become more difficult in part because loan balances have grown and the interest rates on federal loans have increased as a result of a shift from variable-rate to fixed-rate loans. Most federal loans now carry interest rates of 6.8% or 7.9%, versus a rate of 2.875% on federal Stafford loans in May 2005, said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the financial-aid website FinAid.org.
Jennifer France became delinquent on her loan payments once, in 2009. Now, there is a good chance she will become delinquent again, she said. The 36-year-old public defender borrowed about $100,000 in federal loans and $30,000 in private loans to cover law school more than a decade ago. Her income recently went up, and her monthly payment on all loans jumped from around $500 to more than $800, which will be too much for her to keep up with.
Stafford loans, which account for more than three-fourths of federal student loans, are capped at a total of $57,500 for undergraduates. Ruben Medrano, a 52-year-old undergraduate studying business management at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, said taking out about $26,000 in federal student loans was much easier than taking out an auto loan or a mortgage. “The last vehicle we purchased, we spent four to five hours in the dealership,” Mr. Medrano said. “The student-loan process took me 30 to 45 minutes and I never had to leave my home.”
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oldParasiteSingle: Announced on @WGNNews at midday Ivy league schools are suing students in default on student loans with subprime borrowers. They claim that they can’t make any loans until the defaulters pay up. I believe the average debt load of an Ivy defaulter is slightly above the cumulative average, around $25K instead of $24.6K
articles:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/05/universities-sue-students-loans_n_2625457.html
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/02/05/yale-suing-graduates-over-unpaid-student-loans/
http://www.insidecounsel.com/2013/02/05/yale-penn-george-washington-sue-former-students-fo
WGNNews confirms Harvard will join the suits. Alma mater of Bill Gates & Barack Obama also has graduates with no goddamned jobs and a boatload of loans.
Damn!
People talk about this being the next bubble to burst but I don’t see how that’s possible considering the government’s role in distributing loans and that they and banks can both garnish your wages.
From what I’ve heard tuitions are rising in for-profit schools because the government is making the loans and aren’t negotiating for costs. And the rest of the universities are accepting cheap loans from banks on the condition that they raise the tuition fees since students are getting their loans from the same banks. It’s just a huge clusterfuck at this point
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Over the last decade (and especially during the last four years) wealthy nations have increasingly brokered deals for huge swathes of agricultural land at bargain prices in developing countries, installed industrial-scale farms, and exported the resulting bounty for profit. According to the anti-hunger group Oxfam International, more than 60 percent of these “land grabs” occur in regions with serious hunger problems. Two-thirds of the investors plan to ship all the commodities they produce out of the country to the global market. And droughts, spikes in food and oil prices, and a growing global population have only made the quest for arable land more urgent, and the investments that much more alluring.
In what a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) characterizes as a “new form of colonialism,” investors from the US, UK, and China are gobbling up foreign farmland at “alarming rates” and often with little consultation and compensation of poor small-scale farmers and local populations.
It’s not necessarily all doom and gloom. These industrial farms should be much more productive than the ones they’re pushing out, it should lower global food prices and may provide new revenue for the local governments. Who knows? Those governments might even spend it on improving infrastructure if they don’t just pocket it. But then the question is do these people even have access to global markets so they can benefit from lower food prices? And if they don’t now will that change in the future if the governments do begin to develop? And of course there’s all the disadvantages of industrial farming (environmental degradation and the growth of stronger viruses and bacteria).
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