(Click photo to enlarge.)

I saw this yesterday at the Airport, with the version in French being right beside this poster.

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Last year Mr Gore’s venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology. The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.

The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.

The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

It is quite interesting that it’s NYDailyNews who’s reporting both stories:

School nurses mistakenly gave the swine flu vaccine to two students who didn’t sign up for it – including a Brooklyn girl with epilepsy who wound up in the hospital.

Officials at Public School 335 in Crown Heights called an ambulance to take Nikiyah to SUNY Downstate Medical Center when she fell ill following the arm jab.

Officials admitted on Friday that a third student was mistakenly given the swine flu vaccine – an error the school nurses union blamed on the city.

Three children have received the H1N1 vaccine without parental permission – including a kid at Public School 8 on Staten Island – since the in-school program began.

 

Just to be clear, he does believe in global warming, but thinks that the Cap and Trade legislation will destroy the US economy.

He added, “If the US passed a cap and trade and other countries did not, it wouldn’t work. It would ruin the US economy and it wouldn’t save the climate either. So this is a global issue, the global climate statistics are global in nature, global carbon emissions are global in nature, and we really have to have an international consensus of what to do. That is going to stretch our international diplomacy to its limit, there’s no doubt about that.”

It is quite interesting to see some part of the list of people who visited the White House over the last ten months.

Some of the biggest names in finance, including individuals with clear legislative interests before the executive branch, stopped by the White House during Obama’s first nine months in office.

The list includes Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein – who made three visits, and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – who stopped by six times. These sessions were primarily to chart the government bailout of their respective institutions and other big banks.

Sarkozy spends £250,000 of French EU budget on shower he did not use – The Guardian

French financial watchdogs slammed Nicolas Sarkozy for spending £160m during his country’s six-month stint in charge of the EU – including £250,000 on a personal presidential shower that he never used. The vast expense is set out in a report blaming poor management and a lack of transparency by the president’s staff.

Costs soared because so many of the EU-related events were organised at the last minute, said the report.

On one occasion Sarkozy triggered the cancellation of an entire EU event he was due to host in Evian, because he wanted to sleep in his own bed at the Élysée palace. By then, hundreds of journalists, EU officials and national delegations had either already arrived in Evian or were on their way.

Golly. The shower must have been made of gold. I’d have thought you could get a golden shower much cheaper than that in Paris.

“We’re having a swell un-foreclosure party tonight. We’ll start stacking the loan papers for his bonfire about 8. Can you come? Bring smores!”

Five people are charged with torturing and robbing two loan modification agents they thought falsely promised to save their home from foreclosure.

Two men were charged Monday with torture, robbery and false imprisonment.

Another man and two women pleaded not guilty to the same charges Friday.

Prosecutors say Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee hired two loan modification agents in hopes of keeping their home but believed the men took their money and did nothing.

Prosecutors claim the victims were lured to Glendale on Oct. 20, held for hours, beaten and robbed before one escaped.

The Science of Scams website is devoted to debunking the paranormal scammers like Houdini did a century ago and magicians Penn and Teller are doing today in an assortment of areas. Combine not teaching critical thinking in the schools with a decline in science education and you get a gullible public who buy into hucksters in paranormal to religion to politics and so much more.

It’s time again for Project Censored’s list of news stories that have been censored, covered up or just not generally discussed in depth or even mentioned in the Main Stream Media. Some of them them are well known to those who read DU and other online sources, and some have a bit of a political bias, but the average Joe has probably never heard of them. Go to the site to read about each story.

1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

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While this is in one state, you can bet lawyers for homeowners in every state will pounce on this immediately. Read the whole article to understand the depth of this decision. Then read Matt Taibbi’s take on it where he calls much of the mortgage industry a criminal enterprise.

A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages. That is the number of American mortgages currently reported to be held by MERS. Over half of all new U.S. residential mortgage loans are registered with MERS and recorded in its name. Holdings of the Kansas Supreme Court are not binding on the rest of the country, but they are dicta of which other courts take note; and the reasoning behind the decision is sound.

[I]n December 2007 attorney Sean Olender suggested in an article in The San Francisco Chronicle that the real reason for the bailout schemes being proposed by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was not to keep strapped borrowers in their homes so much as to stave off a spate of lawsuits against the banks. Olender wrote:

“The sole goal of the [bailout schemes] is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value – right now almost 10 times their market worth. The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.

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