UK: Pointless, result-free, legally-mandated wealth transfer attracts con artists

Now, who could have predicted that?

Figures obtained from the Financial Services Authority (FSA) revealed an explosion in companies fraudulently offering to deal in carbon credits – transferable certificates that allow companies to pollute. More than 100 companies have been reported to the watchdog over the past 12 months. The figure is up from just six prior to June last year.

The City watchdog has already published the names of 21 companies in its list of unauthorised firms. The list comes with the warning that some of the firms “knowingly run scams”.

The companies, including Green Carbon Solutions, Global Climate Agency and Carbon Credit International, have names designed to suggest probity. In fact many of them are run by individuals who used to operate boiler room scams selling shares to unsuspecting investors.

Telegraph

Pakistan: Al-Qaeda No.2 killed by drone strike

A US drone strike has killed al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, in a significant blow to the terrorist network that has lost a string of top leaders since the death of Osama bin Laden last year.

Abu Yahya al-Libi was considered a media-savvy, charismatic leader who escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and helped preside over the transformation of al-Qaeda into a terrorist movement aimed at winning converts around the world.

Al-Libi was the latest in the dozen-plus senior commanders removed in the clandestine US war against al-Qaeda since Navy SEALs killed bin Laden.

via SMH

And seven others, who barely rate a mention; collateral damage in reason’s war of self-defence on religion.

UK: This just in — global warming causes earthquakes

Oh, and some other stuff.

Telegraph

Global warming is causing earthquakes and giant landslides, and could bring about an age of “geological havoc” including “volcano storms” and tsunamis, a top academic told the Telegraph Hay Festival today.

Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College, London – and a member of the Government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, established after the 2004 tsunami – said: “climate change is already beginning to affect the solid earth. We are seeing the effects today”.

Your taxes at work — keeping the intellectually challenged off welfare.

Vatican: Nuns gone wild!

Silence and obedience? I guess they got out of the habit.

SMH

The Vatican has condemned an American nun for writing a book in which she praises female masturbation and approves divorce and gay sex and marriage, warning that the book must not be used by Catholic educators.

The Vatican’s criticism of Sister Margaret Farley, a professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Yale University, comes amid escalating tension with America’s nuns, after the Holy See accused them of preaching ”radical feminist” ideas.

But this ‘radical feminist’ is still not quite radical enough to pull out of the misogynist Catholic patriarchy and take responsibility for her own thinking. As many much less bright but far more sensible women have done.