Free Republic

Copper Tumbles 6% Eric Platt Oct. 20, 2011, 2:07 PM Copper, after tumbling 4% yesterday, plummeted again on the COMEX today. It's down 6% to $3.07 per pound. Take a look: Image: FinViz Precious metals are also taking a beating: * December gold contracts: Down 2.0% to $1,614 an ounce * December silver contracts: Down 2.8% to $30.36 an ounce * January platinum contracts: Down 2.1% to $1,491 an ounce * Southern Copper Corp. is trading 1.5% lower today. (snip)

COMPLETE TITLE: STEVE WYNN Goes On Big Rant About Occupy Wall Street, Obama, Deficits, And Anger At The Government ### Classic. On the conference call for Wynn Resorts, CEO Steve Wynn went on a big rant on Occupy Wall Street, Obama, and deficits. Here are our notes in raw form. It's all mostly paraphrased. In a nutshell, he says: Deficits are killing us, our dollars are worthless, and the Democrats are bankrupting the country and vilifying anyone who's successful. So naturally, people are protesting. *snip* You're seeing it taken to the next level in Greece. People are trying to break...

Seven American makers of solar panels filed a broad trade case in Washington against the Chinese solar industry on Wednesday, accusing it of using billions of dollars in government subsidies to help gain sales in the American market. The companies also accused China of dumping solar panels in the United States for less than it costs to manufacture and ship them. The trade case, filed at the Commerce Department, seeks tariffs of more than 100 percent of the wholesale price of solar panels from China, which shipped $1.6 billion of the panels to the United States in the first eight...

Horrific footage captured on CCTV in Foshan, Guangdong province Thursday afternoon and now making the rounds on the Chinese version of Twitter, Weibo, shows a two-year-old toddler being run over by a van as she walks across the street. In the minutes that follow, dozens of passersby walk around the bleeding girl, not stopping to look at or help her. A cyclist takes a wide berth around the body to avoid the body. One woman, holding her daughter’s hand, looks at the toddler and walks past as quickly as she can. And a second truck, apparently not realizing there is...

The world's population looks set to smash through the seven billion barrier in the next few days, according to the United Nations. It comes just 12 years since the total reached six billion - with official estimates saying the figure will top eight billion in 2025 and 10 billion before the end of the century. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049451/Room-World-population-reach-7-BILLION-days.html#ixzz1aulmmPWc

The European Union is considering a roughly 75 percent cut in funding for a program that helps feed 18 million of its poorest citizens. The cuts, set to take effect after New Year's, would come at a time of rising unemployment and consumer food prices in many parts of Europe, as well as overall economic turmoil on the continent. The looming cuts already have raised fears among people who rely heavily on the program. "We poor, small people, we cannot face up to this," said Rene Waltener, 41, who is unemployed and married with four children. "We sometimes have difficulties...

Six people have been killed in a shooting at a beauty salon in California. Nine hairdressers and customers in total are believed to have been hit when a man opened fire at Salon Meritage, a beauty salon just blocks from the Pacific Ocean in the upscale seaside resort of Seal Beach. The gunman's ex-wife is believed to have worked in the salon, according to local sources. Orange County authorities rushed to the scene and seized the male suspect in a traffic stop a half-mile from the shooting. The shooter - said to live locally - was thought to have been...

The House will likely vote this week on measures to delay or weaken Environmental Protection Agency rules reducing air pollution from industrial boilers, incinerators and cement plants. House Republicans leaders have taken aim at a new EPA rule that would require cement producers, incinerators and industrial boilers to reduce their mercury and other harmful emissions by 90 percent. The rule is set to go into effect in 2013. Republican called on President Barack Obama today to urge the Democratic-controlled Senate to support a measure that would delay or weaken the new standards. Politicians also asked him to sign the bills...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee voted Wednesday to eliminate some $50 million that President Barack Obama requested for the U.N. organization that helps women and children in developing countries with reproductive health and family planning, a reflection of growing Republican anger with both the world body and its work in China. The GOP-led Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislation that targets the yearly U.S. contribution to the U.N. Population Fund, an organization the United States helped found in the late 1960s. Republican administrations typically have withheld funds from the group, but Obama restored the money. The party-line vote was 23-17....

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Antibiotic resistant E. coli was much more prevalent in villages situated along roads than in rural villages located away from roads, which suggests that roads play a major role in the spread or containment of antibiotic resistant bacteria, commonly called superbugs, a new study finds. Many studies on various infectious diseases have shown that roads impact the spread of disease, however this is the first known study to show that roads also impact the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria, said Joe Eisenberg, co-author and professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Researchers at the U-M...

Everyone's Asking Their Broker Today: "Why Are My China Stocks Getting Killed?" Simone Foxman Sep. 29, 2011, 1:30 PM Chinese stocks are getting killed. Why? Goldman put out the following desk note specifically in response to the flood of questions coming from investors. 1) Concerns about Chinese PMI and possible slowdown of Chinese economy. 2) Merrill note yday discussing possible slowdown in China. 3) Market selling things that worked in the past - Gold, NFLX, etc. 4) Ongoing corp governance issues. 5) Qtr end might cause wholesale selling of anything Chinese due to uncertainty of "growth issue" in China. 6)...

Via Breitbart TV. Remember that liberal tea party that Van Jones is building? Here’s one of their first big initiatives: The “Contract for the American Dream,” in which fresh-faced load-bearers for an imploding entitlement regime cheerily read cue cards calling for more weight on their backs, please. If you’re wondering how we can possibly afford “Medicare for all” when we can’t afford Medicare for some, you obviously missed this video from a few weeks ago of Jones reassuring America that we are not in fact broke, no matter how many zeroes there might be up on that national debt scoreboard....

In a Bloomberg TV interview following today's quixotic "QE3/non-QE3 announcement, which is Operation Twist 2, but not LSAP, and ushers in economic recession, even as it sends risk assets soaring, and somehow pushes the 2 Year a whopping 20 bps tighter so buy,buy, buy" and is really very much ado about nothing, the always outspoken Marc Faber had some very choice words about life, the universe and especially the residents of the Marriner Eccles building. While there still appears to be some confusions as to whether today's Fed decision to peg rates at zero for 2 years is QE3 or...

Modern feminism erupted upon Western culture in 1963 with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which smeared suburban households as “comfortable concentration camps.” Friedan was a communist who knew little of housework. Her husband even furnished a maid. Yet she charged that tending the hearth repressed homemakers who would find greater contentment in roles historically filled by men. Were feminists true to their purported ideals — penetrating previously masculine domains and liberating women from reliance on men — they would adore Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. As the world actually turns, conservative women find feminists their shrillest critics. But their achievements,...

Study after study has shown that children with married parents are better off, and our society has embraced the idea that children should be raised by married adults. The latest research digs deep into this long-held belief and reveals an interesting twist. A new British study finds that kids of married parents are more intellectually advanced than those born out of wedlock, but this has nothing to do with marriage. Rather it's a reflection of the types of people who tend to get married and those who don't, . . .

Dozens of Atlanta public school educators falsified standardized tests or failed to address such misconduct in their schools, Gov. Nathan Deal said Tuesday in unveiling the results of a state investigation that confirmed widespread cheating in the city schools dating as far back as 2001. "I think the overall conclusion was that testing and results and targets being reached became more important than actual learning for children," Deal said. "And when reaching targets became the goal, it was a goal that was pursued with no excuses." Falsifying test results made the schools appear to be performing better than they really...

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not 1 percent of those who perished in World War II. Between 1942 and 1945, Japan was stripped naked of an empire that embraced Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, the entire China coast, all of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia),...

"Dr. John Guillebaud, Patron of the Optimum Population Trust (a British think tank that hates human beings and wants less of them rather than allocating resources to feed, clothe, educate and help them) gives a startling speech at Cambridge University's Triple Helix Society. We secretly film as best we can..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TPj9H0_gJQ&NR=1 http://www.philipbrennan.net/2010/10/25/dr-guillebaud-promotes-depopulation-at-cambridge-university/ He's emphatic that no one calls Population Control called Population Control. I couldn't watch it all - nauseating.

A new campaign seeks to eliminate disclosure laws which require HIV positive individuals to inform their sex partners of their potentially deadly infection. The campaign is led by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and UNAIDS, an umbrella group of UN agencies. Notably absent from this campaign is any recognition of the danger posed for the possible victims of a willful refusal to disclose HIV status. As part of the campaign, IPPF released a collection of interviews entitled “Behind Bars”, which implies that such criminal laws fuel stigma against HIV persons. Proponents of criminal laws assert, however, they are designed...

Europe is dying. The Washington Post, among others, reports that, within a hundred years, there will be the rare German in Germany or Italian in Italy. Some demographers believe it is too late to correct Europe's plunge into extinction. "The fall in the population can no longer be stopped," reported Walter Rademacher of the German Federal Statistics Office. Replacement fertility rates are 2.1 children per woman in developed nations. No nation in Europe can claim that rate, and most fall under 1.6. At those levels, each generation is barely half the number of the preceding one. The working-age population is...