SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert was slashed on the face and wrist by a man wielding a knife with a 10-inch blade and screaming that the rival Koreas should be unified, South Korean police said Thursday.

Media images showed a stunned-looking Lippert staring at his blood-covered left hand and holding his right hand over a cut on the right side of his face, his pink tie splattered with blood.

The U.S. State Department condemned the attack, which happened at a performing arts center in downtown Seoul as the ambassador was preparing for a lecture about prospects for peace on the divided Korean Peninsula, and said Lippert was being treated at a local hospital and his injuries weren't life threatening.

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One hundred and seventeen years goes by in a flash, according to the world's oldest person.

Misao Okawa celebrated her 117th birthday a day early on Wednesday at a nursing home in western Japan, according to the Associated Press.

During the televised celebration, she told a government official that her life, "seemed rather short."

Okawa, the daughter of a kimono maker, was born on March 5, 1898, in Osaka and was recognized as the oldest person in the world by Guiness World Records in 2013.
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Los Angeles (CNN)Federal agents on Tuesday raided more than three dozen "maternity hotels" in Southern California where foreign women give birth, allegedly for the sole purpose of having a U.S.-citizen baby, authorities said.

The "maternity tourism" sites included apartment complexes in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties where authorities believe the businesses housed the foreign nationals about to give birth, federal officials said.

Those targeted residences are believed to have catered largely to women from China, who paid $15,000 to $50,000 for lodging, transportation and food, according to a statement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Those fees don't necessarily include medical care, authorities said.

Do you hear that? It's starting.

The predictable drumbeat of dire warnings about what will happen if portions of the Patriot Act – the post-9/11 law being used to conduct controversial NSA dragnet surveillance – are allowed to expire on June 1 has already begun.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, issued what is likely to be the first of many vague warnings from the intelligence community on Monday. Faced with the expiration of the part of the Patriot Act that allows the bulk collection of information about Americans' phone calls, Clapper brought out the favored hypothetical of the surveillance hawk: An unspecified attack will occur, which would have been prevented if Congress had reauthorized the dragnet collection of Americans' phone calls.

"If that tool is taken away from us... and some untoward incident happens that could have been thwarted if we had had it," Clapper said, "I hope that everyone involved in that decision assumes the responsibility."

There's just one problem with this particular bit of emotional blackmail, however. The pesky, rather inconvenient fact is that the government's mass surveillance programs operating under Section 215 of the Patriot Act have never stopped an act of terrorism. That is not the opinion of the NSA's most ardent critics, but rather the findings of the president's own review board and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. This program has had over a decade to prove its value, and yet there is no evidence that it has helped identify a terrorism suspect or "made a concrete different in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation."

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Don't know if there is an objective to fail. Seems more like bad policies being followed. But I wouldn't say only the current administration is to blame. The general policy has been the same for over a century at least. Maybe it was most successful when America had half of the wealth on the world. And the other major powers were practically destroyed after ww2. But not so much now that there is a greater distribution of wealth and power.

Seoul (AFP) - The US ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, was injured in an attack by an armed assailant Thursday in Seoul, television reports said.

The YTN news channel, citing police sources, said one man carried out the attack as Lippert was walking to a breakfast meeting in central Seoul.

The channel carried a picture showing the ambassador after the assault with his right hand raised to his face and his left hand smeared with blood.

It's been no secret that US and a handful of UK forces have been planning on traveling
to Yavoriv this spring to begin training Ukrainian forces for their fight against pro-Russian
separatists in the eastern part of the country. But officials have at times been vague as
to dates and times and numbers.

The solicitation also states that "the US and Ukrainian Army shall conduct a joint training
mission at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center (IPSC) near L'viv, Ukraine
from approximately 5 MAR - 31 OCT 15."

The Army will rotate 300 troops at a time it appears, with March, May, July, August and
October being the relief dates for each group.

The plan to train four companies of the Ukrainian National Guard comes as part of a
US State Department initiative "to assist Ukraine in strengthening its law enforcement
capabilities, conduct internal defense, and maintain rule of law," Pentagon spokeswoman
Lt. Col. Vanessa Hillman told Defense News this year.

Funding for the initiative is coming from the congressionally-authorized Global Security
Contingency Fund (GSCF), which was requested by the Obama administration in the fiscal
2015 budget to help train and equip the armed forces of allies around the globe.

The United States has already earmarked $19 million to help build the Ukrainian National Guard...

Seems to be a common theme. The US did the same in the 80's by supporting the mujahideen during the war against the Soviets. Little did we know the mujahideen would later morph into al-Qaeda:

So if Joe public buys 10 shares will BIT then have to buy 1 bitcoin off a exchange and store it?  How does it work exactly?

Not really getting their graph. They seem to be saying that more transactions = decline in price because these transactions go to merchants who cash out for fiat. But not all things are this flat out.

Some merchants do not trade BTC to fiat, or they hold a % of BTC and cash out the rest. Also, most of these transactions aren't even probably going for merchants, or are aiding in product exchanges...

(Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, countering criticism from members of Congress, said the central bank is trying to avoid being too cozy with the Wall Street firms it supervises and wants to ensure that regulators aren’t afraid to confront the financial industry.

“The risk of regulatory capture is something the Federal Reserve takes very seriously and works very hard to prevent,” Yellen said in remarks prepared for a speech in New York on Tuesday night. “It is important that anyone serving the Fed feel safe speaking up when they have concerns about bias toward industry, and that those concerns be addressed.”

The Fed has been criticized by Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who say it’s deferential to large banks. The issue was the subject of a Senate hearing in November following allegations by Carmen Segarra, a former examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who said her colleagues had been too soft on Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

At the hearing, Warren told New York Fed President William C. Dudley that he needs to fix a “cultural problem” or “we need to get someone who will.”

The Fed has also come under fire from Republicans, including Richard Shelby of Alabama, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who called for more Fed transparency and greater congressional oversight at a hearing Tuesday.

Yellen, in her speech to the Citizens Budget Commission, also took aim at ethical lapses at large banks supervised by the Fed.

“We expect the firms we oversee to follow the law and to operate in an ethical manner,” she said. “Too often in recent years, bankers at large institutions have not done so, sometimes brazenly.”

Such incidents “raise legitimate questions of whether there may be pervasive shortcomings in the values of large financial firms that might undermine their safety and soundness,” she said.

Global regulators, including the Fed, are trying to tighten oversight of financial benchmarks that are used to price everything from student loans to mortgages, oil and currencies.

The world’s largest banks have paid billions of dollars to settle allegations of rigging Libor and other interest rates. Six firms, including Citigroup Inc. and UBS Group AG, paid $4.3 billion in November to settle probes into the manipulation of foreign-exchange rates.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Congressional Millionaires

As if this is a bad thing: this despicable, mummified, failure-of-a-human-being is finally going to terminate her reign of legalized gangstering and turn over her fiefdom to some other up-and-coming, glory-seeking congressional felon. Senator Barbara Mikulski is perhaps most known for her almost-legendary 1990 declaration during a Senate debate citing the need to use tax policy to redistribute from the ‘will-dos’ to the ‘will-nots': “So, let’s go and get it from those who’ve got it.” This courageous proclamation earned her a chorus of cheers from the left-wing brigade in attendance. Her retirement has the media collectively sobbing, while the Washington Post referred to her as a “role model for women in politics” and the National Journal marked this as “the end of an era.”

On the congressional end of the old hag spectrum is Pasteface Pelosi, one of my favorite targets for ridicule and abomination. Apropos the Homeland InSecurity shutdown fiasco, Pelosi recently dared to suggest that most folks can’t go a week or more without their paychecks, and that included members of Congress.

The most recent Roll Call annual financial disclosure review, for the calendar year 2013, revealed a combined minimum net worth of Congress of $2.1 billion, with one-third of all members of congress (188) landing in the millionaire category. The Center for Responsive Politics measured the median wealth factor on congressional members to be north of $1M. One caveat with the numbers, however:

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It's nice to have bitcoin exposure at 30,000ft. I would watch it, but I think most passengers would go for a movie or catch some sleep. 

The former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency pleaded guilty to charges associated with the way he handled classified material. That also means the former American military officer will not go to jail.

Petraeus may have been persuaded to take the plea deal once he learned it would spare him from the embarrassment of the trial procedure.

Federal prosecutors claim the retired four-star general gave Paula Broadwell, the former Army Reserve officer he had an affair with, binders of classified material. Notes concerning his private discussions with President Obama were reportedly among some of the documents he handed to Broadwell. At the time of the affair, the former officer was writing a biography on Petraeus titled All In.

According to Fox News, Petraeus may get two years of probation.

While the big news may be that the former CIA Director decided to take the easy way out, his involvement in the drafting of the Benghazi attack talking points remains cloaked in a thick fog of misleading official information.

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