YAHOO! FINANCE

By Henry Blodget | Daily Ticker – Mon, Aug 6, 2012 10:12 AM EDT

Wall Street's latest disaster is the trading firm Knight Capital (KCG), which somehow managed to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in a half hour last week from a "software glitch"--a capital loss that almost destroyed it.

Knight has now received an emergency investment of $400 million from a group of investors including TD Ameritrade, Blackstone Group and Chicago-based Getgo. These new investors will own 70 percent of Knight Capital.

To read the rest of this story and see the video, visit Finance.Yahoo.com.

GFP Note: Reports indicate that this murder trial is creating another crack in China's communist party system as news of corruption at the top leaks to the public via the internet.

USAToday
Published August 8, 2012
Updated August 9, 2012

By Calum MacLeod

Bo Xilai

BEIJING – The murder trial of the wife of a disgraced Communist Party leader aims not for justice but to ensure that the public does not blame the party for the scandal, experts said on the eve of the trial.

"We will not be much wiser to what actually happened after the trial. We will only know what the party would like the rest of the world to know," said Steve Tsang, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in England.

Natural News
Tuesday, August 07, 2012 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer

(NaturalNews) America is falling apart, literally, and the extreme weather events of the past few months and years surely have not helped the situation any. A recent New York Times (NYT) piece explains that various roads, bridges, and even nuclear power facilities all across the country are crumbling, or otherwise undergoing severe structural damage, as a result of the extreme heat waves that continue to sweep the nation.

Northern states, for example, which typically do not experience extreme summer heat, have fallen victim to several unusual and extreme weather events in recent years that have caused roads and highway overpasses to buckle or separate, train tracks to kink and bend, and nuclear power facility cooling pools to run hot or completely dry. Extreme rain, drought, and storm conditions have also been problematic in many other areas as well, which has led many civil engineers to reevaluate their long-held structural standards.

To read the rest of this story, visit NaturalNews.com.

Los Angeles Times
August 6, 2012

Islamists in northern Mali reportedly changed their plans to cut off the hand of a suspected thief after they were confronted by people protesting such punishment, but a radio reporter covering the incident was badly beaten.

People in Gao took to the streets Sunday to protest the harsh punishment planned for the suspect by the Islamist group in power there, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, according to news reports.

To read the rest of this story, visit LATimesBlogs.com.

Counter Punch

by MARK VORPAHL
August 7, 2012

Though, for most, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor) interest rate fixing scandal appears to be distant and far too complex to understand, its potential consequences may be as economically devastating as a world war.

The Libor is used to set payments on $800 trillion worth of financial instruments. It sets the prices that people and corporations pay for loans and receive for savings. Given that the fraud impacted $10 trillion in consumer loans, the Libor scandal will likely leave a long list of previous financial scandals that contributed to the Great Recession look like child’s play.

To read the rest of this story, visit CounterPunch.org.