Pakistan Declares Short Selling To be Un-Islamic!

In the recent US financial crisis, limits have been placed on short selling of financial stocks. It appears that Pakistan has actually found it to be a sin. I suppose the next step is for the financial industry to lobby for the application of Shariah law in New York City.

http://www.dawn.com/2008/10/25/top8.htm

Stocks short-selling against Islam: FSC

By Nasir Iqbal
ISLAMABAD, Oct 24: The Federal Shariat Court (FSC) on Friday held ‘short selling’ and ‘blank sale’, a common practice in stock markets, against Islam.

The court suggested to the federal government to amend the Companies Ordinance of 1984 within six months for safeguarding the interests of ordinary shareholders of a company.

A five-member bench, comprising Chief Justice Haziqul Khairi, Justice Dr Fida Muhammad Khan, Justice Salahuddin Mirza, Justice Muhammad Zafar Yasin and Justice Syed Afzal Haider, had taken a suo motu notice to examine different provisions of the Companies Ordinance to determine whether the law violated the injunctions of Islam.

Unrestricted short selling, under Section 223 of the ordinance, is done on a financial instrument that the seller does not own at the time of the sale, but purchases the same later at a lower price to earn profit from an expected decline in the value of the instrument.

Section 223 of the ordinance requires that: “No director, chief executive, managing agent, chief accountant, secretary or auditor of a listed company, and no person who is directly or indirectly the beneficial owner of not less than ten per cent of the listed equity securities of such company, shall practice directly or indirectly short-selling such securities.”

Similarly, under the “Regulations for Short Selling under Ready Market, 2002,” blank sale is a sale by a party that does not own shares or is a sale by a party that has not entered into a contractual borrowing arrangement to meet delivery requirements.

It was essential, the judgment observed, to protect the interest of an individual shareholder and collective interests from the clutches of vested interest of monopoly stockholders and mafia operating in stock markets. Such measures will also inspire confidence and good corporate governance in the business world, the judgment said.

It said that this objective could be attained only when the federal government took steps to eliminate fraudulent malpractices in stock markets.

In exercise of its powers under Article 203-D of the Constitution, the judgment held, the FSC required the federal government through the President to take steps for such amendments within six months as may not be repugnant to the Holy Quran and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him), envisaging penal provisions in respect of short sale and blank sale.

Focus on the Family Goes Off The Deep End

Desperation must be getting bad for the Republicans, because Focus on the Family just put out a letter aimed at scaring the crap out of the faithful.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/files/Focusletter.pdf

Apparently, Obama will put liberals on the Supreme Court who will reuire states to have gay marriage, ban the Boy Scouts, turn elementary schools into indoctrination camps for the homosexual agenda, close all the Christian adoption agencies, take conservatives like James Dobson off the air for "hate speech", fire all the counselors, doctors, nurses, etc, who are Christians, because apparently all real Christians can't possibly obay antidscrimination laws or work anywhere where abortions are allowed, take all the Christains out of the military (again because they can't tolerate the evil fags), kick all the Christains out of college (again because of the evil fag disrimination laws), ban the Pledge of Allegiance because of the phrase "under God", which has only been in it since 1952, the abortion rate will skyrocket because all the abortions blocked by current laws (WTF?) will be allowed, pornography will be freely available (can't these freaks use a web browser?), guns will be banned, causing inner-city crime (NIGGERS! NIGGERS!) to skyrocket, home-schooling will be banned (once again by the evil fags), al-Qaida will take over Iraq and kill millions for being collaborators (as if the US had millions of supporters in Iraq), terrorists will bomb the US, Russian tanks will roll across Eastern Europe (?!?), Venezuelan "communists" will seize control of Latin America, Iran will destroy Tel Aviv with nuclear weapons and Israel will be forced to give up the Palestinian territories (apparently the yellow-bellied Jews will not use their hundreds of nuclear weapons in response), health care will be turned into a single-payer socialist gulag which will cancel all health care for people over 80 because it is their time to die and put all other Americans needing care on endless waiting lists (because as we know, all private insurance plans immediately give everyone all the care they want as soon as they have the wish to want it free of any additional charges), put the whole lower half of the income distribution on welfare paid for by taxes so onerous that the upper half leaves for "overseas" (apparently to the free Christian nations that don't have any taxes), causing government revenues to plummet, industries are "completely unionized" destroying the American economy, which as we know is based on paying lower wages and benefits than competitors such is China, gas costs $7 a gallon with coal and nuclear energy is banned, the evil Obama administration bans talk radio, ending the careers of "Rush Limbaugh, Laura
Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Dennis Prager, Janet Parshall, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt, and
broadcasters like Dr. James Dobson." (YAY!!!), and all Christian books are banned by hate mobs vandalizing Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com.

The final charge leveled by Focus on the Family, believe it or not, is that the Obama administration will put Bush Administration officials in jail by "posting secret White House papers on the Internet" to be used by "ACLU attorneys". No explanation is given of why these secret papers will allow charges against the Bush Administration, which everyone knows to be just and wise.

Apparently, the most important thing for these defenders of "family values" is that their Lord and Savior, George W. Bush, be allowed to have impunity for his secret conspiracy to stick foreign objects up an Arab's asshole. Because if Bush is convicted of conspiring to stick foreign objects up an Arab's asshole, THE FAGGOTS WIN!!

Financial Crisis Update- Which Countries Will Go Bankrupt?

The global financial crisis has hit a new phase- sovereign governments are becoming insolvent. Today Iceland and Ukraine went to the IMF for loans. Iceland is the first developed country to seek an IMF loan since Great Britain in 1976. Pakistan, Belarus, Serbia, and Hungary are reported to be in discussions with the IMF.

Reportedly, Iceland and Ukraine turned to the IMF after attempts to obtain loans from Russia failed, and Pakistan has attempted unsuccessfully to seek aid from China and is now in talks with Saudi Arabia.

There are major political implications for some of these countries. Reportedly, the IMF is demanding a one-third cut in Pakistan's military budget as a condition for aid. That might be a problem for a country with active insurgency connected with the unstable situation in Afghanistan. It could even lead to a coup. One wonders where the US is in all of this, since the amount sought from the IMF is a loan of $9.6 billion, which may actually be paid back. That is small change on the scale of US spending on its own internal bailout and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Belarus, a virtual dependency of Russia, is remarkable because it means that Russia itself is in serious trouble. It is reported that CDS premiums on Russian debt have increased to 10.5%, which is (if the notoriously dysfunctional CDS market actually worked) supposed to approximate the difference between the interest rate on the covered bonds and prevalent interbank lending rates. The most recent edition of the Forbes billionaire list has stated that Russian billionaires have had $260 billion (!) in trading losses in recent weeks, and the Moscow stock market has had repeated trading halts because margin calls have led these "oligarchs" to dump shares in search for cash, which cannot be sold because the Russian non-oligarch population cannot afford to buy. Apparently the security of rich individuals depends on having a middle class to trade with. Who knew?

Ukraine, also affected by the Russian troubles, is in deep political crisis over allegations by Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko that President Viktor Yushchenko is involved in illegal arms trade with Georgia and Sudan. The Sudan allegation is connected with the interception of a shipment of Ukrainian tanks by pirates off the Somali coast. The political crisis has led to a dissolution of Parliament and the calling of the third elections since the Orange Revolution in 2005, which were first set for December 7 but have apparently been postponed. The postponement is at least for a week while the now un-dissolved parliament discusses the bailout.

Kazakhstan, another state linked to Russia, is also reported to be in major trouble, with its CDS rates being even higher than Russia's.

Hungary, a European Union member, may avoid needing an IMF bailout if European countries do it instead. Its currency has already dropped 16% against the euro since October 1 because it is unable to support its value with its euro reserves. Reportedly, Hungary has already recieved a loan of €5 billion from the European Central Bank.

Other countries with potential for default include Romania, Turkey, Latvia, and Argentina. Turkey is also in serious political crisis, with many opposition politicians implicated in the massive Ergenekon case, which in a 2,544-page indictment against 86 individuals which is expected to take weeks just to read, alleges that a secret state-sponsored terrorist organization is responsible for many unsolved incidents in the last fifty years of Turkish history.

So, we can expect a lot of turmoil in upcoming months. Meanwhile, the US government can be expected to be paralyzed until January 20 because of its own political upheaval, scheduled for a week from Tuesday.

Major Operation Possibly Founded by CIA 60 Years Ago Busted In Turkey?

In the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in setting up secret insurgency cells in some European countries to resist a future Warsaw Pact invasion. Many of these groups were rumored to wealthy individuals, organized crime networks, and remnants of the defeated fascist organizations. In Italy and Turkey there has been suggestion that such groups have been behind bombings and political assassinations leading up to the present day.'

It appears that the Turkish government has put the leadership of this network, known in Turkey as "Ergenekon", on trial, on the grounds that they were planning a coup against the ruling party, which is hated by hardcore secularists because it has abandoned some of the anti-religious policies of the modern Turkish state such as the ban on headscarves in universities. This group is rumored to have been involved in many attacks in the past, including the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. The Wikipedia page is full of wacky stuff. This could be one of the biggest conspiracy theory bonanzas of modern times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/world/europe/21turkey.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

86 on Trial in Turkish Coup Case

Murad Sezer/Associated Press

A demonstration outside the prison in Silivri, Turkey, on Monday as the trial of 86 people accused of conspiring to overthrow the government began.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and SEBNEM ARSU

Published: October 20, 2008

SILIVRI, Turkey — One of the most sensational public trials in Turkish history began on Monday when a court started hearing a case against 86 people, among them retired army generals, journalists, and common criminals, charged with crimes including assassinations and bomb attacks in a plot to topple the government.

The main focus of the case is an illegal ultranationalist network, known as Ergenekon — the name is a reference to a central Asian Turkic legend. Prosecutors claim that the organization’s members used violence to try to manufacture chaos in society and weaken support for the government to pave the way for the fifth coup in the history of modern Turkey.

The charges against the group, unveiled this summer in a 2,455-page indictment, include the murders of a judge, a priest, a journalist, three workers of a Christian publishing house, and the bombing of a newspaper. The group is also charged with plotting to kill public figures, including Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the governing Justice and Development party has been accused of using the case to silence critics who say his party has an Islamist agenda that undermines the secularism enshrined in Turkey’s founding as a democracy in 1923. The party, known by its Turkish abbreviation AKP, insists that it has moved past its Islamic roots and has a modernizing agenda that includes greater freedom of religious expression.

A powerful elite of military officers, judges and senior bureaucrats has steered the country from behind the scenes since its inception, and has overthrown the government four times. That group’s violent fringe was in effect on trial here Monday, in what appears to be the first major effort for a public accounting of state-sponsored crime.

There are other issues besides the suspected coup involved in the case — including political assassinations, other murder plots and possible attacks on NATO sites — that make it appear broader than a struggle between the elite and the governing party, and one of the accused is a member of the governing party: Turhan Comez, a Parliament member who has fled Turkey.

The case has shocked Turkish society. Criticism of the military, even of former officers, is extremely rare, and the fact that Turkey is holding the trial at all is seen by some as victory for open society here.

The indictment states that network “turned our country into a mafia and terror heaven.”

The investigation started last year, when the police, following a telephone tip, raided an apartment in a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul and found a cache of hand grenades. The grenades had the same identifying number as those used in a bomb attack on the offices of a newspaper supporting the elite, Cumhuriyet.

The Turkish police later arrested several suspects, including Veli Kucuk, a retired army general, and Dogu Perincek, a political leader believed to have ties to a Kurdish separatist group that the military has been fighting for years. The police also confiscated documents that prosecutors say outlined in a power point presentation how to restructure the state.

During a raid of a nationalist group in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, the police found a document on one of the suspect’s laptops that outlined an action plan to be taken if anyone from the governing party were to win the presidency. But there was no violence after a party member, Abdullah Gul, was elected president in August 2007.

Actions included what the indictment described as “shock assassinations” of the Greek and Armenian religious leaders in Turkey, as well as a prominent Jewish businessman, Ashak Alaton.

The Justice and Development Party and Mr. Erdogan, its leader, were clearly an important focus for the plotters.

One of the suspects, Tuncay Ozkan, a journalist and the founder of a television network, Kanalturk, was a principal organizer of anti-government rallies that drew hundreds of thousands onto the streets last year.

On Monday, a large, noisy crowd of the suspects’ supporters waved flags and hurled insults outside the court, which is located on the grounds of a prison.

Nutjob Arizona Sheriff Raids City Hall- Fails To Find Illegal Aliens

In a possible example of an election gimmick gone wrong, controversial Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio sent a heavily armed SWAT team to raid a city hall and library in his jurisdiction, which includes over three million people in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Supposedly they were looking for "illegal aliens". Three janitors were arrested at the library.

The city government of Mesa, headed by officials who had criticized Sheriff Arpaio's immigration sweeps in the past, had no prior notification of the allegations. The lack of notification of city police means that there was potential for conflict, but no one was hurt.

Arpaio, who is himself a son of Italian immigrants, has put pretrial detainees in tents outside the Maricopa County Jail in midsummer, fed inmates substandard food, marched 700 prisoners four blocks to a new jail wearing only flip-flops and pink underwear, and set up a civilian "posse" of dubious legality to go after illegal immigrants. His antics have resulted in over 2,000 lawsuits against the county for a total of over 50 million dollars. In fact, one of these suits, which resulted in an award of $635,532, was the result of a claim that an inmate was injured because the jail had done nothing to prevent the stakes from one the tents from being used as weapons. Oops.

Arpaio's antics have also resulted in Maricopa County being declared a human rights violator by Ireland and Iceland, blocking extraditions from those two countries. In the Irish case, the blocked extradition was of Father Patrick Colleary, an accused child molester.

One wonders if this year, the voters will finally realize that the man who is actually described on official county websites as "America's Toughest Sheriff" is a danger to himself and others.

Jordanian Royal Implicated in War Profiteering By Republican Insider

The New York Times reports on a scandal in which the Pentagon was overcharged on fuel deliveries to US forces in Iraq. The interesting part is not that a corrupt McCain fundraiser, Harry Sargeant III, was involved- it was the complicity of Mohammad al-Saleh, husband of Princess Alia Bint al-Hussein of Jordan, the older half-sister of King Abdullah II, who may have gotten the Jordanian state to block other bidders from making deliveries through its territory. And then, he apparently got burned.

I'm not holding my breath for a proper parliamentary investigation of this corruption of Jordan's state institutions.

To further complicate matters, Sargeant apparently had a third business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a, who "collected checks" from McCain campaign contributors. Mr. Abu Naba'a, who owns a third of the company supplying fuel to the Air Force, is a citizen of Jordan and the Dominican Republic, and therefore this activity may have violated campaign finance law.

Many of the donations collected by Mr. Abu Naba'a came from a single extended family, the Abdullahs, who live in western Riverside County in California. Abdullahs also donated to Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who was reportedly a fraternity brother of Sargeant's in college.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/world/middleeast/17fuel.html?ref=us (excerpt of important part):

The contracting company, called the International Oil Trading Company, or I.O.T.C., was briefly in the news over the summer when a former partner filed a lawsuit against Mr. Sargeant in a Florida circuit court.

The former partner, a Jordanian named Mohammad al-Saleh, is a brother-in-law of King Abdullah II of Jordan. The court papers laid out his assertion that he obtained special governmental authorizations for the company to transport the fuel through Jordan and was then unlawfully forced out by Mr. Sargeant, who strongly disputed those allegations.

But the latest claims of impropriety by the company, presented by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, go much further. Mr. Waxman uses e-mail messages, company documents, Pentagon reports and other information to make the case that Mr. Sargeant repeatedly received contracts to deliver the fuel even though his company was not the lowest bidder.

In one case, the letter from Mr. Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asserts that Mr. Sargeant’s company submitted the highest of six bids, but received the contract anyway. In fact, Pentagon contracting officers complained that the company’s prices were unreasonably high and initially said they could not justify giving the work to Mr. Sargeant.

But for reasons the company was never able to explain, Mr. Waxman’s letter indicates, no other American company was given an authorization to transport the fuel through Jordan. And when the United States Central Command declared that the need for the fuel was urgent, the Pentagon was forced to award the contract to Mr. Sargeant’s company.

Is Joe The Plumber Related to Charles Keating?

Joe Wurzelbacher, also known as "Joe the Plumber", has the same last name as Charles Keating's son-in-law Robert Wurzelbacher.

A Robert Wurzelbacher in the Cincinnati area was once a major contributor to Republican candidates. However, "Robert Wurzelbacher" died on January 10, 2004, according to the Kenwood Country Club. That would account for the lack of donations in this election cycle. This Wurzelbacher was married to a Dorothy, who gives her maiden name as "Schmitt" on a genealogy site. Since "Robert Wurzelbacher" is known to have been born in 1954 from the article in the New York Times on Keating's conviction, Robert and Dorothy may be the parents of the convicted Robert.

Breaking News: A guy in South Dakota is on this too!

There's another problem: Joe is only 33:

http://www.reunion.com/people-search-directory/L3/413639