Random Politics & Religion #00

Did you get these numbers from the same people who polled the midterm elections?

Global regulators fined five major banks, including UBS (UBSN.VX), HSBC (HSBA.L) and Citigroup (C.N), $3.4 billion for failing to stop their traders from trying to manipulate the foreign exchange market.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L) and JP Morgan (JPM.N) also face penalties in a year-long probe that has put the largely unregulated $5 trillion-a-day market on a tighter leash. The banks earned a 30 percent discount for settling early.

Dozens of dealers have been suspended or fired for sharing confidential information about client orders and coordinating trades to make money from a foreign exchange benchmark used by asset managers and corporate treasurers to value their holdings in the latest scandal to hit the financial industry.

They used code names to identify clients without naming them and created online chatrooms with pseudonyms such as "the players", “the 3 musketeers” and “1 team, 1 dream” in which to swap information. Those not involved were belittled.

Switzerland's UBS swallowed the biggest penalty paying $661 million to Britain's Financial Services Authority (FCA) and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

UBS was ordered by Swiss regulator FINMA, which also said it had found serious misconduct in precious metals trading, to hand over 134 million Swiss francs after failing to investigate a 2010 whistleblower's report.

The misconduct at the banks stretched back to the previous decade and up until October 2013, more than a year after U.S. and British authorities started punishing banks for rigging the London interbank offered rate or Libor, an interest rate benchmark.

RBS, which is 80 percent owned by the British government, received client complaints about foreign exchange trading as far back as 2010 and a year later a dealer at the bank questioned its information sharing.

The bank said it regretted not responding more quickly to the complaints. The other banks were similarly apologetic.

Nothing like a little fraud to start the day.

Regulators fine global banks $3.4 billion in forex probe

What it does not say is how much was made, at that level easily billions but hey some people got fired! Not the top execs but w/e they fired people!

If I remember correctly, it was a PEW pole this last spring. Just so you know, about an additional 10% identified specifically as Tea Party, Libertarian, or "Constitution" parties.

American's overwhelmingly identify themselves as conservative, almost 2:1 in comparison to those who ID as liberal. Gallup tracks this.

But it didn't come from an overly biased source like Pew Institute, so it can't be true!

American's overwhelmingly identify themselves as conservative, almost 2:1 in comparison to those who ID as liberal. Gallup tracks this.

For his job with IBM, Yang Bo has so far traveled to the United States at least 10 times — and is heading to North Carolina soon for more meetings. Li Aiqi is preparing to start her bachelor's degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology. And Ye Peng, an English teacher in Beijing, wants to take four of her elementary school students to San Jose to take classes with Americans kids.

On Wednesday, they were among 11 people given the first-ever U.S. visas to let Chinese citizens travel back and forth to the United States for up to 10 years. In a new agreement, announced this week during the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Beijing will issue similar visas to Americans looking to make repeated trips to China.

The rules will cut red tape for frequent travelers at a time when Washington is looking to boost economic ties with Beijing. The Obama administration also is hoping the extended visas will lure even more Chinese — and their wallets — to the United States.

"This will pay huge dividends for American and Chinese citizens and it will strengthen both of our economies," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said at a short ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he handed out the visas to the 11 Chinese travelers.

"We're going to make history here," Kerry said. "You are literally helping to write the next great chapter of the history between the United States and China."

More U.S. visas are issued to Chinese tourists, business people and students than citizens of any other country, including nearly 2 million last year alone, according to the State Department.

Under the new rules, both the United States and China will allow tourists and business travelers to apply for visas that allow multiple entries to the others' country for up to 10 years. Ten years is the longest length of time a visa can be issued to a visiting foreigner under U.S. laws.

Students, exchange visitors and their immediate families will be able to travel in and out for up to five years — generally, the length of their studies. Chinese citizens make up the largest group of foreign students in the U.S.

The media-shy Chinese travelers who picked up their visas were not available for interviews, save some gentle queries by Kerry as he handed them their passports.

"Congratulations to you. What are you going to do?" Kerry asked Kang Yusi, a graduate of the University of Kansas who wants to return to the U.S. as a tourist.

The soft-spoken woman's reply could not be heard, but Kerry relayed her answer.

"She's going to travel with her parents, and I'm going to get her to promise to spend a lot of money," he said.

Conservative is not the same as Republican. Are you purposefully simple?

I would love to meet a Tea Party democrat/liberal.

Conservative and Liberal are political spectrums, Democrat and Republican are political parties. Don't pretend you don't understand that there is a difference.

Nice nonanswer. Maybe you would understand that in reality, there are no "conservative democrats" or "liberal Republicans," just confused people who don't know what they are.

They would be more honest to themselves if they identified themselves as "moderate independents"

There are conservative independents and liberal independents. Independent doesn't mean moderate, it means you don't identify with a political party. No wonder you can't wrap your tiny mind around anything larger than irrational hatred, you don't even know the meaning of words you chain into incomprehensible partisan parroting.

Uh, no, that's completely moronic. Moderate independents are not at odds with being moderate or independent, and voting for a party member doesn't somehow make you not an independent. I'd say you just lost what little credibility you had left, but you didn't really have any before the years of making absolutely stupid statements like "the slaves could have just run away".

Seems like I touched a nerve. Are you one of those confused people who think they are a "conservative democrat"?

The reason why I said that it would be more honest to identify themselves as "moderate independents" because they are at odds with what they believe in (ideology) over what they practice (self-identified party).

WASHINGTON — The White House is planning to focus on improving the lives of girls and women of color, after months of complaints that they were left out of the "My Brother's Keeper" initiative for young men.

White House aides planned Wednesday to convene a Working Group on Challenges and Opportunities for Women and Girls of Color, an offshoot of White House Council on Women and Girls, which is chaired by White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. The administration will also release a report on the work it has done to help minority women and girls.

The gathering comes at a time when black women are in the spotlight courtesy of President Barack Obama's announcement that he would nominate a black woman, Loretta E. Lynch, to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, and midterm elections in which Mia Love of Utah became the first black female Republican elected to the House.

The president, who is on a trip to China, will not attend.

Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation who convened the Black Women's Roundtable Public Policy Network, hopes the discussion will spark a movement to help women and girls.

"This is part of the White House listening and engaging and figuring how they can continue to address issues impacting women and girls and knowing that there are unique things that affect women and girls of color," Campbell said.

Advocates have called for a separate focus on minority girls and women since the My Brother's Keeper initiative was unveiled in February. Under the initiative, businesses, foundations and community groups coordinate investments to come up with or support programs that help keep young men out of the criminal justice system and improve their access to higher education. Several foundations pledged more than $200 million over five years to promote that goal.

Anything less than full inclusion in My Brother's Keeper is "basically another frame for separate and still unequal," said Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum. Last June, she made the case for inclusion in My Brother's Keeper in a letter to Obama that was signed by more than 1,000 women.

"The need to acknowledge the crisis facing boys should not come at the expense of addressing the stunted opportunities for girls who live in the same households, suffer in the same schools, and struggle to overcome a common history of limited opportunities caused by various forms of discrimination," the letter said.

Crenshaw said the exclusion was "just an intersectional failure that is breathtaking," considering that minority women were a key, unwavering demographic that helped lift Obama to two terms in office.

In the report being released Wednesday, the White House acknowledged that girls of color face some of the same issues as boys, and other unique challenges:

—The teen pregnancy rate for Hispanic and black girls is more than twice as high, and American Indian/Alaska native girls is nearly twice as high as that for white girls, despite double-digit drops in pregnancy rates since 1990.

—Asian-American women make 79 cents, black women make 64 cents and Hispanic women make 56 cents to every dollar paid to white non-Hispanic men.

—Black girls are 14.6 percent less likely, Hispanic girls are 12.8 percent and American Indian/Alaska native girls are 16 percent less likely to graduate from high schools than white girls.

—About 40 percent of Native American girls, 39 percent of black girls and 30 percent of Hispanic girls live in poverty, compared with 20 percent of all girls.

African Americans complain that My Brother's Keeper excluded them in its execution. White House responds "looking at the data trends,you may have point we'll work on it". Internet yahoo with selective reading comprehension makes URL headline alluding to administration now being racists... Only in America.

Such as?

This isn't discrimination, it's about helping minorities so they can be on the same level as everyone else, that law passed and 50 years later we still have huge discrepancies between races.

It's obviously somebody else's fault, and not the fault of the parents and/or children.

Now please explain, how you push parents to become more pro-active

are you saying non-white parents are bad parents.