Katie Piper’s Christmas Message
by Zero Hedge - December 25th, 2009 8:12 am
Tragic story, with a powerful message. - Ilene
Katie Piper’s Christmas Message
Courtesy of Leo Kolivakis
Submitted by Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse.
The Telegraph recently published an article, Appreciate beauty, acid attack victim tells Christmas viewers:
The model and aspiring TV presenter before the attack has received thousands of supportive messages from the public.
In her message, appeared in a Cutting Edge documentary titled Katie: My Beautiful Face this autumn -she reflects on her progress over the last year and how strangers’ words of kindness have helped her to move forward.
Piper was left fighting for her life after former boyfriend Daniel Lynch raped her and then arranged for another man to hurl the corrosive liquid.
The acid burned through all four layers of skin on her face, some spilling down her throat, and she was left blind in one eye.
Piper has undergone more than 30 operations on her face and throat.
But she tells how it took the tragedy for her to reassess her ‘’self-obsessed” life.
Piper says: ”This year I wanted to give a Christmas message to everybody out there who might have had a Christmas like I did last year.
”In March 2008 I was attacked with acid and left fighting for my life. I was at an all time low, too scared to leave the house.
”I didn’t see how things could ever get better.”
She says that before the attack she would go home to her parents on Christmas Eve and: ”Have a few drinks, see them, spend Christmas Day with them chilling out and go home on Boxing Day.
”My life before was very self-absorbed, self-obsessed and it took a tragedy for me to reassess my life and how I felt and what I thought was important.”
Lynch sent Piper a message on Facebook and the pair began dating, but the martial arts fan quickly became obsessively jealous. He raped Piper in a London hotel room.
Lynch refused to let her return home for hours afterwards and telephoned her, insisting that she visit an internet cafe near her flat and mysteriously asking what she was wearing.
This was so that he could direct Stefan Sylvestre to throw acid over her.
In the wake of the attack and only able to communicate by writing, she told her mother Diane ”kill me”.
Piper decided to go public to raise awareness of the plight of burns victims.
She says in her message: ”Don’t wait ’til there is tragedy in your life. Don’t wait ’til you…
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
Facebook
Twitter
Goldman’s Global Oil Scam Passes the 50 Madoff Mark!
by Phil - November 11th, 2009 6:18 am
$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of of the global oil scam.
It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in "Madoff Units" ($50Bn rip-offs). That’s right - $2.5Tn is 50 TIMES the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, yet it is also LESS than the MONTHLY EXCESS price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil.
Where is the outrage? Where are the investigations?
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate "dark pool" trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.
A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.
"Traders of the the ICE core membership (GS, MS, BP, DB, RDS.A, GLE & TOT) wouldn’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market. Indeed the evolution of the Brent market has been a response to declining production and the fact that traders could not resist manipulating the market by buying up contracts and “squeezing” those who had sold oil they did not have. The fewer cargoes produced, the easier the underlying market is to manipulate." - Chris Cook, Former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, which was bought by ICE.
How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades? The Congressional Research Service looked at trading patterns in the energy sector and this is what they reported: This pattern of trading…
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
Facebook
Twitter
THE GURU OUTLOOK: GEORGE SOROS SAYS MARKET AT RISK OF DOWNTURN
by ilene - October 28th, 2009 9:40 pm
Here’s an interesting update on George Soros’s outlook on the market. - Ilene
THE GURU OUTLOOK: GEORGE SOROS SAYS MARKET AT RISK OF DOWNTURN
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
This week’s Guru Outlook takes a look inside the mind of George Soros – one of the original masters of the global macro hedge fund universe. Soros, of course, became famous for breaking the Bank of England. Soros made a spectacularly leveraged bet against the British Pound which netted him over $1B in a day.
Soros rose to recent notoriety for predicting the financial crisis. He was far more bearish than most others and appeared to have a crystal ball with a play-by-play for each step of the crisis. Like some of the guru’s we’ve spoken of lately, he wasn’t bearish all the way up. Soros saw the decline in markets as a buying opportunity and has taken the liberty to make billions for his investors on both the way down and the way up.
Although Soros has turned more bullish over the course of the last 6 months he has not lost sight of the forest for the trees. Much like Jeremy Grantham, Soros believes we are confronted with massive structural long-term problems – particularly in the United States. He believes U.S. consumers are in the middle of a long-term deleveraging process and earlier this month he described the U.S. banking system as “bankrupt”. He sees very weak consumer spending and a drag from the banking sector holding down global growth for years to come.
In a recent interview, he said the market is now very overextended and at substantial risk of another downturn. But that doesn’t mean the market will turn down immediately. Soros says the market is likely to remain buoyant throughout the remainder of 2009 and will likely face its reality of weak global growth in 2010. He says the rally has been driven by the government stimulus and little else. Soros says the recent uptick in bank earnings is essentially a fraud:
“Those earnings are not the achievement of risk-takers. These are gifts, hidden gifts, from the government.”
Soros recently said the move down in the dollar was unsustainable (he obviously reads too much TPC) and that its link to the Renminbi would reduce the overall decline. Despite this, Soros is betting big on all things “real”. In particular, Soros is betting big on oil related names. Soros has over 33% of his…
Email This Post
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Yahoo
Facebook
Twitter
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(