Big news yesterday in the United Kingdom, where the citizenry surveyed its domestic banking system and discovered that it couldn't find a single person trustworthy enough to put in the top job at the Bank of England. So they went to Canada and stole that country's central banker, Mark Carney, who just happens to be a former Goldman, Sachs executive – he was once Goldman's managing director of investment banking.
Carney's appointment may be seen as an admission that the British banking sector is now so tainted, only an outsider can be trusted to govern them. Almost all of the major English banks have been dinged by ugly scandals. The LIBOR mess, in which banks have been caught messing around with global interest rates for a variety of sordid reasons, has most infamously implicated Barclays, but the Royal Bank of Scotland is also a cooperator in those investigations.
The Northwest Regional SWAT team can now take to the air in unmanned flights when responding to dangerous situations.
The team has purchased a remote flying drone, which it can use for surveillance and intelligence gathering, said Merrillville police Sgt. Bob Morgan, commander of the SWAT team.
The drone, which can be operated with a cellphone, has a high-definition camera to take video and pictures.
The team — consisting of officers from Merrillville, Crown Point, Schererville, Dyer, Griffith, Hobart and Lowell — most likely would use the device during hostage or barricade situations, Morgan said.
If President Obama wants to avoid an economic calamity next year, he could always show up at a news conference bearing two shiny platinum coins, each worth . . . $1 trillion.
Okay, that sounds utterly insane. But some economists and legal scholars have suggested that the “platinum coin option” is one way to defuse a crisis if Congress cannot or will not lift the debt ceiling soon. At least in theory.
The U.S. government is, after all, facing a real problem. The Treasury Department will hit its $16.4 trillion borrowing limit by February at the latest. Unless Congress reaches an agreement to lift the debt ceiling, the government will no longer be able to borrow enough money to pay all its bills.
DUBAI // The work of a key committee at the global conference that is determining the future of the internet has been disrupted by an apparent hacking attack.
One of the websites of the World Conference on International Telecommunications, which is under way in Dubai, was disrupted for two hours on Wednesday.
Members of Committee 5, the main working group, were unable to call up documents they needed for their deliberations. The conference, run by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is a paperless event - documents can only be accessed online.
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