London (CNN) -- Media baron Rupert Murdoch has not apologized to the family of a murdered British teenage girl whose phone messages were illegally intercepted by people working for his News of the World newspaper, a lawyer for the girl's family said Monday......

The News of the World struck a wistful yet proud tone in its final editorial Sunday, and repeated its owner's apology for the criminal activities that brought the paper down.

"Phones were hacked, and for that this newspaper is truly sorry," it said in an unsigned piece. "There is no justification for this appalling wrongdoing."

The paper welcomed Cameron's call for two different inquiries, one into how police investigated the allegations of phone hacking, and a separate one into the ethics and standards of British journalists...

“THE ADVENT OF celebrity chefs and cooking-as-entertainment have influenced the way people eat in restaurants, and made chefs a lot more self-conscious,” says Mollie Katzen, the Berkeley, California-based author of the Moosewood Cookbook, who is something of a celebrity chef herself, having hosted cooking shows on television and sold more than six million cookbooks under 15 different titles. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good meal in a restaurant—I do. But with chefs trying to make names for themselves—it’s socompetitive—a lot of times it’s about trying to be clever, rather than just trying to be delicious. I had a meal the other day in a new restaurant here that’s getting a lot of press for all its local sourcing and so on—and the food was extremely precious, very fussed-over and complicated. There was a lot of discussion with the waiter about what you were getting; it was a big, ornate deal. And it didn’t taste all that good! Just give me a beautiful, perfectly prepared salad. I don’t want a cerebral experience in a restaurant—I’m not going for entertainment.”

[I've made the same complaints about magazine architecture, and I suppose it could apply to a lot of pursuits.]

HMMMMM

‘They should have let Bear Stearns fail,”

....

Long viewed as a bureaucratic backwater, the F.D.I.C. has had a tumultuous five years while being transformed under Bair’s stewardship. Not long after she took charge in June 2006, Bair began sounding the alarm about the dangers posed by the explosive growth of subprime mortgages, which she feared would not only ravage neighborhoods when homeowners began to default — as they inevitably did — but also wreak havoc on the banking system. The F.D.I.C. was the only bank regulator in Washington to do so. During the financial crisis of 2008, Bair insisted that she and her agency have a seat at the table, where she worked — and fought — with Henry Paulson, then the treasury secretary, and Timothy Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, as they tried to cobble together solutions that would keep the financial system from going over a cliff. She and the F.D.I.C. managed a number of huge failing institutions during the crisis, including IndyMac, Wachovia and Washington Mutual. She was a key player in shaping the Dodd-Frank reform law, especially the part that seeks to forestall future bailouts. Since the law passed, she has made an immense effort to convince Wall Street and the country that the nation’s giant banks — the same ones that required bailouts in 2008 and became known as “too big to fail” institutions — will never again be bailed out, thanks in part to new powers at the F.D.I.C. Just a few months ago, she went so far as to send a letter to Standard & Poor’s, the credit-ratings agency, suggesting that its ratings of the big banks were too high because they reflected an expectation of government support. If a too-big-to-fail bank got into trouble, she wrote, the F.D.I.C. would wind it down, not bail it out.

“The Orlando Police Department has demonstrated that you can count on them to enforce the law,” the protester explained stoutly. “If it was against the law for women to vote, I think they would would be there to arrest women who tried to vote. And if it was still against the law for African-Americans to use the same restroom facilities as Caucasian-Americans, Orlando Police Department would be right there to arrest them. Because they will enforce the law no matter what it is, so we have to support them for that.

“Because in America,” he went on, “the last thing you need is liberty, justice, conscience getting in the way of the law. We don’t want that. So we need to have officers who will just blindly obey and follow anything that they’re told. Because this country was founded on bootlicking. … I’m a tax-paying American. I want to see my tax dollars put to use. I like to see people getting arrested. … So I think they’re doing a great job, and as long as they continue to arrest people for feeding the homeless, I’ll continue to support them, because they’re doing their job.

Lead story in today's WashPost.

Has the Supreme Court lost faith in the American court system? That is a strange question to ask about the justices who sit at the top of the country's judicial hierarchy. But in case after case in the just-completed term, the court, usually in 5-4 decisions with the conservatives in the majority, denied access to the courts.

Consider just a few of the examples:

• The court ruled that patients who suffer devastating injuries from generic prescription drugs cannot sue the manufacturers for failing to provide adequate warnings even when drug companies making the non-generic versions of the same drugs can be sued on the same basis.

• The court held that standard clauses in consumer contracts calling for arbitration preclude consumers from joining class-action suits even when the effect almost surely would be that no individual lawsuits would be filed because the amount involved was too small.

• The court decided that employees who claim to be victims of sex discrimination cannot sue in class actions when the employer has a policy that prohibits discrimination.

• The court concluded that a man who spent 18 years in prison for a murder that he did not commit could not sue the prosecutors who hid key evidence.

• The court said that taxpayers cannot bring an action in federal court arguing that a state impermissibly established religion by giving tax credits that go almost entirely to religious schools.

• The court held that prisoners convicted in state court cannot obtain a hearing in federal court even when they have new evidence that calls into question their convictions — because of matters such as ineffective defense counsel or failure of prosecutors to turn over evidence — notwithstanding a federal statute that expressly authorizes such hearings.

The big money for Better Place lies in the monopoly it received from the state on building and operating charging stations.

The first electric cars in the Better Place system are due to arrive on Israel's roads in the next few days. The cars themselves are an electric version of the Renault Fluence: Instead of a gasoline engine, the car will be powered by a large battery. When the battery is used up, it will either be charged at a charging station or quickly replaced with a full battery at a special battery-swapping station.

Better Place's electric car network was supposed to bring us glad tidings of an innovative high technology that would preserve the atmosphere and the environment, redeem us from our dependence on oil and, above all, save us money.

But it is very doubtful that the electric car will indeed reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in Israel. And now that the full costs and the technical specifications have been revealed, there are equally serious questions about how much consumers will save.
...
The problem is that Better Place's calculations display a troubling resemblance to the pricing tricks employed by the cell phone companies. It turns out the the average private car in Israel travels 16,700 kilometers a year. But the minimum package that Better Place customers will have to buy - for once they have bought the electric car, they will have no choice - is for "up to 20,000." And just like the cell phone companies, which never return a single cent for unused portions of a package, Better Place, too, will presumably not refund the change from unused kilometers.
...
And here's another outrageous fact: According to Better Place's own data, the amount of electricity it will buy from the Israel Electric Corporation in order to power one car for 20,000 kilometers is 2,600 kilowatt-hours. At current electricity prices, this quantity of power costs NIS 1,300. So why is Better Place demanding 10 times that sum from its customers? Granted, it invested time and money in developing and setting up the charging system, but 10 times the actual cost? What is this, cottage cheese?
 

As it happens, the willingness of the rich to defend their wealth from taxation to the point of national ruin is nothing new in world history, as Francis Fukuyama recounts in his magisterial new book The Origins of Political Order. The Han dynasty in China fell in the third century AD after aristocratic families with government connections became increasingly able to shield their ever-larger land holdings from taxation, which helped precipitate the bloody Yellow Turban peasant revolt. Nearly a millennium and a half later, the great Ming dynasty went into protracted decline in part for similar reasons: unable or unwilling to raise taxes on the landed gentry, the government couldn’t pay its soldiers and was overrun by Manchu invaders.

In the fifteenth century, the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus persuaded his reluctant nobles to accept higher taxes, with which he built a professional military that beat back the invading Ottomans. But after his death the resentful barons placed a weak foreign prince on the throne and got their taxes cut 70 to 80 percent. When their undisciplined army lost to Suleiman the Magnificent, Hungary lost its independence.

Similarly, the cash-strapped sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy sold municipal and state offices off to wealthy elites rather than raise their taxes—giving them the right to collect public revenues. The elites, in turn, raised taxes on commerce, immiserating peasants and artisans and putting Spain on a path of long-term economic decline. This same practice of exempting the wealthy from taxation and selling them government offices while transferring the tax burden onto the poor reached its apogee in ancien regime France and ended with the guillotine.

In simple terms, Mexican families are smaller than they had once been. The pool of likely migrants is shrinking. Despite the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico, birth control efforts have pushed down the fertility rate to about 2 children per woman from 6.8 in 1970, according to government figures. So while Mexico added about one million new potential job seekers annually in the 1990s, since 2007 that figure has fallen to an average of 800,000, according to government birth records. By 2030, it is expected to drop to 300,000.

Even in larger families like the Orozcos’ — Angel is the 9th of 10 children — the migration calculation has changed. Crossing “mojado,” wet or illegally, has become more expensive and more dangerous, particularly with drug cartels dominating the border. At the same time, educational and employment opportunities have greatly expanded in Mexico. Per capita gross domestic product and family income have each jumped more than 45 percent since 2000, according to one prominent economist, Roberto Newell. Despite all the depictions of Mexico as “nearly a failed state,” he argued, “the conventional wisdom is wrong.”

[D'oh!]

3. Energy Shortages
The last few weeks have seen what appears to be a substantial increase in electricity and liquid fuels shortages across many parts of the world. The common theme behind these shortages is higher prices for liquid fuels and hot, dry weather which is reducing hydro generated power and increasing the demand for air conditioning. Brent oil prices that have now been above $100 a barrel for the last six months are placing a strain on many poorer nations that can no longer afford to import enough oil to run power stations. Theft of electrical power is endemic in much of the underdeveloped world leaving many power companies without the revenue to pay for increasingly expensive fuel.

In many countries, a paradox is developing in which widespread, lengthy blackouts are in some cases saving fuel for power stations, but at the same time increasing the demand for diesel fuel to keep essential utilities, factories and computerized offices running.

Last week several new or worsening situations were reported. In Mongolia, which until recently had only a diesel crisis due to the ban on exports by its only neighbors, Russia and China, is now facing a gasoline crisis. Power cuts in Tanzania, where 70 percent of the power comes from hydro, are up to 12 hours a day for an indefinite period. Japan has now issued an official order that large power users in the service areas of the Tokyo and Tohoku power companies must cut their usage by 15 percent. Japanese car manufactures are stopping production on Thursday and Friday. Nissan says it will shift production to the weekend when more power is available.

Jordan’s electric company which was dependent on cheap natural gas from Egypt ran into troubles when the pipeline was blown up for the third time and the company was forced to turn to expensive imported oil. Botswana and Argentina in the southern hemisphere are facing shortages of electricity and natural gas respectively as temperatures fall. Nigeria is dealing with growing kerosene shortages and longer blackouts. In Nigeria the electric company is increasing prices to cope with revenue shortfalls from lower production.

Energy shortages in Pakistan continue without end. There are near-daily protests against the blackouts, and a CNG shortage has cut bus service in many regions. Gasoline is in short supply. Last week, Tehran, in an effort to supplant US influence in Pakistan, offered to sell the country electricity. The offer came at the same time Iran’s electric company reported that it was about to close 15 thermal power plants because of a fuel shortage.

While some of these shortages will be short-lived, others are systemic stemming from the rising energy consumption by a growing world running into the limits to growth.

On Saturday Amy Goodman moderated a conversation with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and renowned Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek in London. In this rare event talked about information, power and world politics.

[Two hours - I found the first hour interesting, will watch the rest later. No transcript yet.]