Alessandra Mussolini tells Carla Bruni to house Libyan immigrants ‘in her chateaux’

Ms Mussonlini's stinging comments will cause further controversy around EU immigration policy.

Mussolini’s granddaughter has lashed out at France’s ‘socialist’ First Lady Carla Bruni for not doing enough for illegal immigrants.

Alessandra Mussolini, an Italian MP and granddaughter of the country’s Second World War fascist leader, said Ms Bruni should welcome Africans displaced by revolutions in Tunisia and Libya into her numerous ‘chateaux’.

Mocking Ms Bruni as a Marie-Antoinette-style Leftist, Ms Mussolini said she should have ‘protested against the shutting of French borders to illegal immigrants decided by her husband’, President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Ms Mussolini, who like Ms Bruni has worked as a model and actress, is angry that the French have not accepted thousands of refugees arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa.

‘Why doesn’t the first lady welcome immigrants who want to come to France in her chateaux?’ Miss Mussolini told Le Figaro newspaper.

French riot police have turned back many of the immigrants as they try to enter France to claim asylums.

Many are massing in the town of Ventimiglia, which the French media has already likened to Sangatte – the Red Cross Centre in Calais which acted as a magnet to thousands of migrants hoping to reach Britain before being closed in 2002.

Franco Frattini, Italy’s Foreign Minister has already attacked France’s ‘absence of solidarity’ while the EU has said France had no right to ‘send migrants back to Italy’.

Ms Mussolini’s mocking attack on Ms Bruni will add to the controversy, while also illustrating the increasingly chaotic nature of Europe’s immigration policy.

Since the start of the Arab Spring in January, some 20,000 illegal migrants have arrived on Lampedusa, roughly midway between Sicily and Tunisia.

Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, who is a friend and political ally of Ms Mussolini, has sent ferries to clear the island.

But Ms Bruni, who was born in Italy, dislikes him intensely, saying in 2008 that Mr Berlosconi made her ‘very happy that I have become French’.

Ironically, Ms Bruni’s mutli-millionaire industrialist family had close links with the wartime regime of Benito Mussolini as it built up its fortune.

The family moved to France in the 1970s because of death threats by terrorist groups in post-war Italy.

Despite remaining fabulously rich, Ms Bruni has styled herself as a champagne socialist in the past, although becoming Mr Sarkozy’s third wife three years ago has drawn her further to the right.

Source

Related posts:

Did you like this information? Then please consider making a donation or subscribing to our Newsletter.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

NASA picture shows 1,235 planets that could house extra-terrestrial lifeforms

Home » Astronomy, North America » NASA picture shows 1,235 planets that could house extra-terrestrial lifeforms

Alien home? The black spots represent 1,235 planets orbiting their suns. As a point of reference, the lone planet on the right below the top row represents our sun, with Earth and Jupiter as tiny black silhouettes.

If aliens exist, these are what their planets look like, according to NASA.

Astronomers at the U.S. space department have spent the last two years scouring the Milky Way for Earth-like planets in their quest for foreign life forms.

And this is what they have come up with. The black spots represent 1,235 planets orbiting their suns, which have been arranged by order of size.

As a point of reference, the lone planet on the right below the top row represents our sun, with Earth and Venus as tiny black silhouettes.

Of these candidate planets, there are 54 where life could possibly exist in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’.

The ‘Goldilocks Zone’ is the distance from a star where an Earth-like planet can maintain liquid water and Earth-like life on its surface.

Kepler’s main mission is not to examine individual worlds, but give astronomers a sense of how many planets, especially potentially habitable ones, there are likely to be in our galaxy.

They would use the one-four-hundredth of the night sky that Kepler is looking at and extrapolate from there.

Scientists figured one of two stars has planets and one of 200 stars has planets in the habitable zone, announcing these ratios Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington.

And that’s a minimum because these stars can have more than one planet and Kepler has yet to get a long enough glimpse to see planets that are further out from the star, like Earth, Borucki said.

For example, if Kepler were 1,000 light years from Earth and looking at our sun and noticed Venus passing by, there’s only a one-in-eight chance that Earth would also be seen, astronomers said.

To get the estimate for the total number of planets, scientists then took the frequency observed already and applied it to the number of stars in the Milky Way.

For many years scientists figured there were 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but last year a Yale scientist figured the number was closer to 300 billion stars.

Either way it shows that Carl Sagan was right when he talked of billions and billions of worlds, said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, who praised the research but wasn’t part of it.

And that’s just our galaxy. Scientists figure there are 100 billion galaxies.

Source

Related posts:

Did you like this information? Then please consider making a donation or subscribing to our Newsletter.

View the original article here

NASA picture shows 1,235 planets that could house extra-terrestrial lifeforms

Home » Astronomy, North America » NASA picture shows 1,235 planets that could house extra-terrestrial lifeforms

Alien home? The black spots represent 1,235 planets orbiting their suns. As a point of reference, the lone planet on the right below the top row represents our sun, with Earth and Jupiter as tiny black silhouettes.

If aliens exist, these are what their planets look like, according to NASA.

Astronomers at the U.S. space department have spent the last two years scouring the Milky Way for Earth-like planets in their quest for foreign life forms.

And this is what they have come up with. The black spots represent 1,235 planets orbiting their suns, which have been arranged by order of size.

As a point of reference, the lone planet on the right below the top row represents our sun, with Earth and Venus as tiny black silhouettes.

Of these candidate planets, there are 54 where life could possibly exist in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’.

The ‘Goldilocks Zone’ is the distance from a star where an Earth-like planet can maintain liquid water and Earth-like life on its surface.

Kepler’s main mission is not to examine individual worlds, but give astronomers a sense of how many planets, especially potentially habitable ones, there are likely to be in our galaxy.

They would use the one-four-hundredth of the night sky that Kepler is looking at and extrapolate from there.

Scientists figured one of two stars has planets and one of 200 stars has planets in the habitable zone, announcing these ratios Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington.

And that’s a minimum because these stars can have more than one planet and Kepler has yet to get a long enough glimpse to see planets that are further out from the star, like Earth, Borucki said.

For example, if Kepler were 1,000 light years from Earth and looking at our sun and noticed Venus passing by, there’s only a one-in-eight chance that Earth would also be seen, astronomers said.

To get the estimate for the total number of planets, scientists then took the frequency observed already and applied it to the number of stars in the Milky Way.

For many years scientists figured there were 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but last year a Yale scientist figured the number was closer to 300 billion stars.

Either way it shows that Carl Sagan was right when he talked of billions and billions of worlds, said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, who praised the research but wasn’t part of it.

And that’s just our galaxy. Scientists figure there are 100 billion galaxies.

Source

Related posts:

Did you like this information? Then please consider making a donation or subscribing to our Newsletter.

View the original article here

House face.

There is a Thing called pareidolia, which everyone has. It's not a disability. The human brain is programmed to look for human faces and to hear human voices. That's because if you're out in the woods in your bearskin G-string and with your mega-baseball bat (both made by, curiously enough, Ugg), you need to be able to spot the other tribe before they spot you.

So when you stare at the fuzz on an untuned TV you see things. When you listen to white noise you hear voices. When you lie back and watch the clouds or look at a random pattern in the grain of wood, you'll see faces. That's pareidolia. Your brain is trying to find faces and human sounds and in the woods with the other tribes, a false positive is much, much safer than a false negative. It's safer for the brain to find something that might be human but isn't, than to ignore something that might be an enemy and is.

On a totally different tack, it must be hard to come up with enough news to fill a 24-hour rolling stream but there's scraping the barrel and then there's lifting the barrel and scraping beneath it right down to bedrock.

This surpasses bedrock and can only be described as journalistic magma.

I said pareidolia wasn't a disability. Perhaps, for certain journalists at least, it has developed into one.

How the hell did they decide a house in Swansea looked like Hitler? Well, the census form from that house is likely to be very interesting indeed. Mr. Dai Hilter, I presume? Anyone live with you?

'Oh, ja, mein lodger, Mr. Dai Gobbles and his boyo pal innit Mr. Dai Meingoolies. Ve are born in Vales, ja? Oh sure, whateffa, lovely boy, innit mon? Zeig Heil - ach, scheisse.'

Alternatively, there might have been a rally in Nazi Germany where some wag piped up 'Oi, Hitler, your face looks like a corner house in Swansea!' Now that would have been newsworthy.

Oh, and top comment on that story has to be 'Tile Hitler!'

View the original article here

White House Economists Predict Crisis to “DWARF” 2008!

I have great confidence in mankind’s ability to ultimately overcome even the most extreme of challenges. But at this juncture, America has yet to begin that arduous process. We live an unrealistic lifestyle on borrowed money and borrowed time.

That’s why, we have long been warning you about a looming crisis with the power to crush the U.S. economy. Unless Washington makes a 180-degree turn, we face a catastrophe that could end our way of life as we know it.

Now, just as we predicted, America’s massive debt crisis is exploding into the headlines. Our warnings — the same ones for which we were scoffed at earlier — are now being echoed by many among the political elite.

And on Thursday, no fewer than TEN former members of the White House Council of Economic Advisers — including President Obama’s former top economic adviser Christina Romer — added their voices to those warning of a looming economic catastrophe.

In an editorial published by Politico, the bipartisan group warned that unless the White House and Congress slash the federal deficit, bond investors are likely to turn on the United States, triggering an economic crisis that could — again, I quote — “DWARF 2008.”

Consider that for a moment: In 2008, Wall Street came within a whisker of a financial meltdown. Financial monoliths like Citigroup and Bank of America nearly went bust. And Lehman — one of the giants of Wall Street — simply ceased to exist.

Now, these top economists and Congressmen are saying, in effect, “That was NOTHING. Just wait until you see what happens NEXT!”

For the last week, I’ve been renewing my warnings to you nearly every day. I’ve told you that unlike the credit crisis that triggered the last major stock market collapse …

The “Fiscal Armageddon” that could “dwarf 2008? will be intensely personal. Millions of Americans will face the specter of lost incomes … lost savings … lost buying power … lost homes … lost liberty.

I detail the three massive crises — all converging in this time frame — that are capable of changing history: What you must do to protect your family and your finances before it’s too late.

I reveal the infuriating reason why you could find yourself paying more than $11 for a gallon of gasoline and over $10 for a gallon of milk. And I show you how to protect your family’s financial security with investments designed to nearly quintuple your money as this crisis unfolds.

I document why you could soon see interest rates exploding into double digits … your Social Security and Medicare benefits slashed … even riots in the streets. PLUS I tell you about the self-defense investments that could triple, quadruple and more.

I drop a huge bombshell on America’s banks — why more than 2,000 of them are now vulnerable to this crisis. And I describe the $51 investment with the power to nearly quintuple your money when the dominoes fall.

And I give you the details on why thousands of U.S. stocks are now as vulnerable as toy balloons in a room full of RAZOR BLADES. Plus I tell you about the investments that could make you 134.4% richer if a decline happens in the next 12 months … and 155.4% richer if it comes sooner.

Good luck and God bless!

Martin

Dr. Weiss began his career in 1971 when he founded Weiss Research, dedicated to evaluating the safety of financial institutions and investments for consulting clients.  He is the publisher and contributing editor of the financial newsletter, Safe Money, known for its track record in picking major turns in interest rates, and serves as co-editor for a number of Premium Services. He is also the author of The Ultimate Safe Money Guide and The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide.

View the original article here

Why You Should Buy a House

03/04/11 Laguna Beach, California – Chairman Ben Bernanke promises to “promote inflation.” We take him at his word…and so do the commodity markets. The Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of commodity prices has soared 80% from its lows of early 2009 – touching a fresh two-and-a-half-year high yesterday.

But even if commodity prices weren’t soaring (yet), we would take the Chairman at his word. After all, trusting a central banker to promote inflation is like trusting water to flow downhill.

Inflation is not good for very many things, but neither is it all bad. For example, inflation is great for debtors who are trying to cheat their creditors. Inflation is also great for the folks who happen to own the stuff that’s inflating.

The traditional winners during inflationary cycles are hard assets like gold and real estate. The traditional losers are long-dated bonds and, of course, the currency in your wallet. Every cycle is different, but we have no reason to doubt that the upcoming inflationary cycle will produce the typical distribution of winners and losers. Hard assets will win; the currency in your wallets and purses will lose.

If, therefore, inflation is taking root in American soil once again, how should the forward-looking investor prepare?

“Buy gold,” is the time-honored answer…and we would not quarrel with it. But an alternative answer, especially this time around, might be: “Buy a house.”

Consider the table below, which tracks the price history of specific houses in the United States that were standing in 1913 – the year the Federal Reserve came into existence – and are still standing today. While this sample of homes is not scientific, it does illustrate housing’s value as an inflation hedge. On average, this collection of American homes produced the identical annualized return as gold.

Obviously, the actual returns on housing would be lower than that of gold, since housing is subject to taxes, maintenance, etc. On the other hand, have you ever tried to raise a family inside a gold bar?

Maybe compromise is the best course of action: Buy a house and then put some gold bricks inside. That’s right, we said, “Buy a house.”

As faithful readers would be well aware, we have not always been so sanguine about the US housing market. From early 2005 through early 2007, your California editor published numerous columns predicting the demise of the housing bubble.

May, 2005: Affluenza

May, 2005: Houses and Spouses

June, 2005: The After-Life

October, 2005: No Way Out

May, 2006: Homeless

August, 2006: The Housing Bust Begins

October, 2006: A Housing Bubble White Paper

January, 2007: When Realtors Become Waiters

Your editor also took to the airwaves to offer his gloomy observations and grim expectations for the housing market.

In May of 2005, he showed up at CNBC studios to take part in a segment about the housing market entitled “Bubble: Fact or Fiction?” Your editor argued the “fact” side of the debate, while Jerry Howard, the CEO of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), argued the “fiction” side.

Unfortunately, as we noted in our essay “Outside Day Reversals and the Return of the Housing Market” in Wednesday’s edition of The Daily Reckoning, Mr. Howard’s forecast did not pan out. The residential housing market began to implode almost as soon as the two of us unhooked our microphones and stepped away from the CNBC cameras…and that’s no fiction.

Four months after this CNBC interview, your editor put his home in Pound Ridge, New York, up for sale…and waited. The wait seemed like an eternity. Seven months later, the wait ended…favorably. A few days after escrow closed, in May of 2006, your editor published the following remarks:

Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan both agree that the housing boom is over and that it will begin an “orderly” decline. We agree that the housing boom is over and that home prices will begin to decline, but we aren’t so sure about the “orderly” part.

Throughout the seven months that prospective buyers streamed through your editor’s home, it became increasingly clear that the prospective buyers were becoming increasingly price-sensitive…and picky…and arrogant. Before our very eyes, literally, we watched the balance of power in the housing market shift from seller to buyer…

A home is a wonderful thing to own; but it is also a wonderful thing to sell…especially when prices are slumping and buyers are disappearing…

In October 2006, when we published a white paper, entitled simply, “Housing Bubble,” we observed:

By now, everyone knows the housing boom has busted. Even the National Association of Realtors admits as much… The only issues worth pondering, therefore, are how low prices might fall and/or how long the bust might last. Without trying to be too specific, we’d guess that prices will fall a lot and/or that the bust will last a long time…

Without easy credit, and lots of it, real estate could never have achieved its epic valuations. Credit not only enabled first-time buyers to “stretch” a bit, it also enabled and emboldened speculative buyers, speculative builders, second-home buyers, second-home builders and every other variant of housing market participant/speculator.

But because financing became so exotic, and speculative participation in the market became so great, the simultaneous unwinding of both will be as pleasant as hanging out with your in-laws during a root canal…

We all know what happens NEXT. But we just don’t know how bad it will be.

Please allow your editor to offer a prediction:

Home sales continue plummetingPrices begin to plummetExotic loans begin to squeeze over-leveraged homeownersPrices plummet some moreA bull market in housing begins in 2020…or maybe a little sooner.

As a post-mortem to the Housing Bust White Paper, we published a column in January, 2007, entitled, “When Realtors Become Waiters.” To lead off this column, we remarked, “Out here in the Golden State, jokes like the one below are becoming all too common:

Question: What’s another name for a California real estate agent?

Answer: A waiter.

Home sales volumes in California are sliding sharply…

Why should we care what happens in California? We should care because California epitomized the excesses of the late great housing bubble. It was here in California where quirky, high-risk mortgages flourished; it was here where the median home became unaffordable to 84% of the average residents; and it was here where actors became waiters, then became real estate agents…only to become waiters again.

What happens in the California real estate market, therefore, might anticipate what will happen in the rest of the country…and that’s probably not good news… The increasingly dire conditions of the mortgage industry suggest that a genuine recovery remains a delusional hope. The willingness to lend and the willingness to borrow are both in retreat. This is how cascades start…

Over the near-term, therefore, do not be surprised to hear an occasional California diner call out, “Hey waiter! Could we please see a menu…and a copy of your newest listings?”

Four years have elapsed since your editor published the column above. During that timeframe, home prices have dropped substantially…and they continue to drop. But now that the bubble has burst, and the housing market is devoid of hope, your editor has become slightly more hopeful.

Undoubtedly, the housing market will continue to produce ample pain and suffering in the months ahead…along with ample anxiety in the years ahead. But it is possible, if not likely, that the pain and suffering will yield a highly satisfactory reward.

Read on…

Eric Fry
for The Daily Reckoning

Eric J. Fry, Agora Financial’s Editorial Director, has been a specialist in international equities for nearly two decades. He was a professional portfolio manager for more than 10 years, specializing in international investment strategies and short-selling.  Following his successes in professional money management, Mr. Fry joined the Wall Street-based publishing operations of James Grant, editor of the prestigious Grant's Interest Rate Observer. Working alongside Grant, Mr. Fry produced Grant's International and Apogee Research —  institutional research products dedicated to international investment opportunities and short selling. 

Mr. Fry subsequently joined Agora Inc., as Editorial Director. In this role, Mr. Fry  supervises the editorial and research processes of numerous investment letters and services. Mr. Fry also publishes investment insights and commentary under his own byline as Editor of The Daily Reckoning. Mr. Fry authored the first comprehensive guide to investing internationally with American Depository Receipts.  His views and investment insights have appeared in numerous publications including Time, Barron's, Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Business Week, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Money.

View articles by Eric Fry

The articles and commentary featured on the Daily Reckoning are presented by Agora Financial.

Sign Up for The Daily Reckoning e-letter and receive a copy of our newest report How to Survive the Fall of Social Security… at NO CHARGE.

We Will Not Share Your Email.
We Value Your Privacy.

View the original article here