I think I’ve gone about six months this time without slamming one of my toes into something, usually resulting in a broken toe or a lost toenail. So it was about time for it to happen again. Fortunately, this time nothing’s broken.
And after all these years, I still hear my father yelling, “What the hell have I told you kids about running around the house in your bare feet?”
KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s Parliament on Tuesday ordered law enforcement agencies to immediately disarm unofficial paramilitary groups, signaling growing resolve in the interim government to confront nationalists and other vigilantes who played a big role in the overthrow of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the country’s pro-Kremlin former president who was deposed more than a month ago.
The bill, introduced and passed unanimously, ordered both the Interior Ministry and the Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s successor to the K.G.B., to disarm the groups because of the “aggravation of the crime situation and systematic provocations on the part of foreigners in southeastern Ukraine and in Kiev.”
The attempt to further consolidate control domestically came as Russia delivered yet another blow to the fledgling Ukraine government, which the Kremlin regards as illegal. Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant, announced a 40 percent increase in the price of natural gas sold to Ukraine, which is heavily dependent on Russia for its gas supply.
The passage of the anti-paramilitary bill comes as tensions in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, have grown between nationalist groups who continue to patrol the main squares of the city and Arsen Avakov, the country’s new interior minister.
H/t William “Ben” Mann.
Prince and Zoey Deschanel:
http://youtu.be/uivs-kt5h1Q
Ex Hex:
Temples:
There are a LOT of people who won’t want Bloomberg poking around in this:
The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records has ordered the City of Philadelphia to release more information about interest-rate swaps transactions and city deals with Wall Street bankers dating back to 1990.
Last October, Bloomberg reporter Romy Varghese asked Philadelphia to make available “all records,” including emails, notes and correspondence as well as financial reports, for at least 18 swaps deals, in which Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Merrill Lynch & Co. (now part of Bank of America), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Wells Fargo (and predecessors) variously set up bets on interest rates for the city, the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, the Philadelphia Gas Works, Water Department, and the state Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority fiscal oversight body.
According to the state office’s Final Determination by appeals officer Jill S. Wolfe, the city, which has already made some swaps records available to Bloomberg, is also required to provide emails and an unedited financial report that the city has been withholding, within 30 days. Some “internal” notes that Bloomberg also requested don’t have to be provided, Wolfe added, citing past cases in Radnor Township and other towns.
City officials have said they hoped to use the swaps to limit bond borrowing expenses from inflating when interest rates rise — but ended up owing the banks and their clients millions when rates stayed low. Bloomberg did not request documents from the city school district as part of the city request; the district has also reported multimillion-dollar swaps losses. Both city and district have shown little interest in revisiting what went wrong or who should be held responsible.
Yeah, I’ll bet they have.
Andrew Cuomo may be short, but that just means he’s even more suited to giving blowjobs to monied interests. He is and will always be a whore who would suck the chrome off a bumper to get ahead:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has struck a budget deal with Republican legislators that includes unprecedented new giveaways to charter schools, particularly in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio had threatened to modestly rein them in.
The private corporations that manage charter schools in New York City will never have to pay for using public space.
The de Blasio administration must offer space to all charters approved in the dying days of the Bloomberg administration. De Blasio had previously approved 14 of 17; now he must approve all 17. Whatever Eva Moskowitz wants, Eva gets.
The charters located inside public school buildings may expand as much as they wish, and the mayor can’t stop them. If this means pushing out children with severe disabilities, so be it. If it means taking control of the entire building and pushing all of the students out of their public school, so be it.
If a charter chooses to rent private space, the New York City public schools must pay their rent. Where will the money come from? Well, the public schools can always increase class size, or they can lay off social workers and counselors and psychologists. Or they could cut back on the arts. That’s their problem.
So the privately run schools that serve six percent of the students in the city get to make decisions over the city’s elected mayor and the best interests of the other 94 percent of students. These are chains that pay their executives more than the city’s education chancellor. Chains that achieve their testing success (when they achieve it) by pushing out special needs kids, back into the public schools that the charters are taking space from; those public schools are also educating the homeless kids and English Language Learnersthat charters disproportionately do not educate.
This is the system that Cuomo is working not just to protect but to expand, giving private companies rights over public property, giving schools that exclude the kids they don’t want to educate rights over the schools that educate all kids. It’s appalling.
H/t Attorney Kush Arora.
When Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans, Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. The Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the company’s owners argued, forced them to violate their religious beliefs. But while it was suing the government, Hobby Lobby spent millions of dollars on an employee retirement plan that invested in the manufacturers of the same contraceptive products the firm’s owners cite in their lawsuit.
Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).
Several of the mutual funds in Hobby Lobby’s retirement plan have holdings in companies that manufacture the specific drugs and devices that the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is fighting to keep out of Hobby Lobby’s health care policies: the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella, and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices.
Thanks to Jason Kalafat.
As World War I got underway, Romain Rolland and Hermann Hesse, two Swiss writers, appealed to their war-frenzied friends in France and Germany citing the lede to the choral movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen! (Friends, not these sounds! Let us rather make more pleasant, more joyous notes). And last Saturday, in Odessa, a Russian-speaking city of Ukraine, one of the cultural treasure-houses of Europe, the city that gave us Anna Akhmatova and Issak Babel, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milshtein and Emil Gilels, performers from the Philharmonic flash mobbed a performance of the last bars of the symphony at the Odessa fish market. A decidedly political musical statement. Amazing.
Imagine! Not having enough workers actually affects your business:
Walmart will begin adding worker hours this year as part of an effort to address complaints about empty shelves at the company’s understaffed stores. The retail giant’s top executives said that fixing the chain’s stocking problems could be worth $3 billion per year, a tacit acknowledgment that Walmart’s notorious efforts to wring productivity out of skeleton crews have hurt its bottom line.
Executives announced “plans to add labor hours as part of an effort to bolster ‘in-store execution’” at the company’s annual Year Beginning Meeting in March, Bloomberg reports. The news service did not offer specifics on how the plan will work, but Walmart has historically preferred scheduling workers for part-time hours to avoid paying them benefits required for full-time hours. Walmart workers around the country have gone on strike repeatedly in recent years, often listing the need for more staff hours among their reasons for protesting.
Regardless of how the company goes about staffing up, the decision to foreground in-store personnel issues at a major annual meeting confirms that Walmart is reconsidering the relationship between its workforce and its profits. Despite opening more than 600 new stores over the past five years, Walmart now employs 20,000 fewer people than it did in 2008. That aggressive decrease in staff eventually left stores unable to do the most basic thing for any retail company: putting merchandise on the shelves.
