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New Plant Hardiness Zone Map Illustrates a Hotter 21st Century The U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled a new “Plant Hardiness Zone Map” at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. The map — a vital tool for gardeners, farmers, researchers and policy makers — has changed in part to reflect changing climate patterns across the United States. The color-coded map of planting zones, often seen on the back of seed packets, has been updated by the government, illustrating a hotter 21st century. Global warming is hitting not just home, but garden.

As shown above (see the datapoint in the square box), the UAH AMSU daily temperatures are the coldest for the globe at 600mb of all the years tracked since 2002 (warmest 2010, previously coldest 2008). (More Graphs at link)

Link only - MF Global Clients May Lose in $700 Million Bankruptcy Fight

A website — Forecast the Facts – devoted to calling out weather forecasters who aren’t convinced of man-made global warming and informing them about “the most important weather story of our lifetime” launched Sunday. In addition to drawing criticism from some meteorologists, the site also seems to have a curious connection with billionaire George Soros. Michael Lewis and Anthony Watts write on the Watt’s Up With That? (WUWT) blog that Forecast the Facts partner, Citizen’s Engagement Laboratory — a “non-profit, non-partisan organization that uses digital media and technology to amplify the voices of underrepresented constituencies” — has received funding from...

United States The US now presents some of the best real estate opportunities not only of all developed countries but also compared to most developing markets. Prices in a number of states have declined so much that there is deep value to be found. In fact, there are many locations around the country where properties now sell below replacement cost. As is always the case, nobody wants to even think about buying real estate now that prices in many areas have dropped by 50-60% and yields are higher than seen for decades. Yet just a few years ago at the...

This clip, taken from C-Span, from a House session dating back to March 2001, shows Ron Paul stating there is nothing to fear from a global currency.... as long as it's backed by gold, of course. Listen at 0.32 (more in your face numerology), where Paul states there being nothing to fear from a "single, worldwide currency." He then goes on to praise the wonders of globalism, which he also claims is nothing to fear. Is the establishment running scared of Ron Paul, or is that what "they" would like you to think? Is it so absurd to think they...

Investigation Into MF Global Expected to Heat UpBy BEN PROTESS December 30, 2011, 1:30 pm When customer money disappeared from MF Global over Halloween weekend, it seemed implausible the cash would remain at large come New Year’s Day. But two months later, the hunt for roughly $1.2 billion in client money continues. Some MF Global customers, including farmers and hedge funds, are still without about a third of the money in their accounts at MF Global, the brokerage firm once run by Jon S. Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey. Against this backdrop, and as 2012 gets ready to...

Feds: MF Global improperly moved customer moneyBy Azam Ahmedben Protess New York Times News Service Posted: Dec 29, 2011, 7:02 am WASHINGTON — Federal authorities investigating the demise of MF Global think that the firm began improperly moving customer money to a middleman on Oct. 27, according to people briefed on the matter. The transfers, which indicate the brokerage firm misused client funds earlier than previously believed, represent a new line of inquiry in the hunt for more than $1 billion in missing money. In MF Global's last days, the brokerage house was frantically winding down trades to shore up...

BEIJING — A rich Chinese couple who had eight babies with the help of two surrogate mothers has been forced to move out of their villa following a public uproar and could face a large fine for breaching strict family planning laws mandating only one child. The couple in the booming southern metropolis of Guangzhou had the children last year, according to state media, but the story only came to light after a picture of the children — four boys and four girls — was used by a photography studio in an advertisement. The story was first featured in the...

The UN’s global warming unit, IPCC, is so discredited that “it is not clear how much additional benefit there is to having a huge bureaucratic scientific review effort under UN auspices” said Ken Caldeira in announcing that he is resigning as one of its leading authors on the next IPCC report. The previous one won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Outside of a few skeptical bloggers, you will not see this story anywhere else. If anyone doubts there is a bias in the media for the bright and shiny object called Global Warming (aka Climate Change, Climate Disruption and...

E-Mail Clues in Tracking MF Global Client FundsBy BEN PROTESS and AZAM AHMED December 20, 2011, 9:00 pm Federal authorities investigating the collapse of MF Global have uncovered e-mails that detail the transfers of money in the firm’s last days, including transfers that contained customer money, according to people close to the investigation. One e-mail chain refers to the transfer of roughly $200 million that MF Global owed JPMorgan Chase on Oct. 28 — the firm’s last business day before it filed for bankruptcy. In that chain, a senior official in the firm’s Chicago office was told to make the...

Bradley Abelow, President, MF Global Inc., is a Senior Advisor at the Firm. Mr. Abelow was a Partner at NewWorld before joining MF Global, where his long-time associate Jon Corzine is CEO. Prior to co-founding NewWorld, he was Chief of Staff to Jon Corzine, then Governor of the State of New Jersey, where he oversaw state-level environmental programs, and earlier served as Treasurer of New Jersey. Before that, Mr. Abelow was a General Partner and Managing Director of The Goldman Sachs Group, where he held a variety of senior leadership positions. Mr. Abelow has been active in environmental matters for...

"does not represent a way forward for Canada" In a move that was at least partially expected from Steven Harper's Conservative government, Canada has chosen to exercise her right to withdraw from the global warming scam's centerpiece 'acheivement' to this point, the 1997 Kyoto agreement... they are first nation to do so: _______________________________________________________________________ "Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past, and as such we are invoking our legal right to withdraw from Kyoto," (Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent) said in Toronto. He said he would be formally advising the United Nations of his country's intention to pull out. (Kent) said the...

The House Agriculture Committee is questioning former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine on the bankruptcy of the financial firm and a dispute over $1.2 billion in missing funds. According to the Committee's website, the purpose of the hearing is "to examine the facts and circumstances that led up to the bankruptcy, and the efforts underway to recover customer funds and return them to their rightful owners." The former Senator and New Jersey governor is at the center of a dispute over $1.2 billion in missing customer funds. The trading firm’s bankruptcy is the 8th largest in the nation's history.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Jon Corzine, the former chief executive officer of the bankrupt broker MF Global, apologized for his firm's failure Thursday and told a House committee that he doesn't know where the missing money went. "I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date," said Corzine, in prepared testimony to the House Agriculture Committee on Thursday. He also apologized "to all those affected." "My sadness, of course, pales in comparison to the losses and hardships that customers, employees and investors suffered as a result of MF Global's bankruptcy,"...

OTTAWA -- Republicans turned up the heat on U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday to reverse his decision to delay what was described at a congressional hearing as the safest oil pipeline ever proposed. A parade of witnesses appeared at a House sub-committee meeting on energy to defend the safety and economic benefits of the Keystone XL pipeline, and to warn of the consequences should it rupture. And in between partisan sniping between Democrats and Republicans, pipeline junkies learned Alberta-based TransCanada Corp. has adopted 57 additional safety measures, including 21,000 censors linked to satellites to detect problems. "This is the...

They come out from under their rocks every time we have a few tornados and never miss an opening when it comes to exploiting popular ignorance. An AP column last Friday titled Science panel: Get ready for extreme weather opened by asserting – “Think of the Texas drought, floods in Thailand and Russia's devastating heat waves as coming attractions in a warming world. That is the warning from top international climate scientists and disaster experts after meeting in Africa.” And of course their thesis is that this weather is the fault of mankind. They fail to mention that for the...

MF Global proves Enron-era accounting lives onBy Nanette Byrnes | Reuters – 2 hours 14 minutes ago REUTERS - The off-balance-sheet accounting methods that Enron and Lehman Brothers made famous in their epic failures years ago have a modern-day poster child: MF Global . Like its predecessors, the bankrupt brokerage formerly run by Jon Corzine took advantage of an accounting maneuver to keep certain financial obligations off its books, making the firm look less indebted and thus less a risk than it really was. On Thursday, Mary Schapiro, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told a committee of Congress...

MF Global Money Found in Britain?By: Ben Protess and Azam Ahmed The New York Times Published: Tuesday, 29 Nov 2011 | 7:01 AM ET About $200 million in customer money that vanished from MF Global is believed to have surfaced at JPMorgan Chase in Britain, according to people briefed on the matter. The discovery could be the most significant breakthrough in a monthlong hunt for the missing funds. During MF Global's [MFGLQ 0.00 --- UNCH (0) ] last chaotic days, the brokerage firm overdrew an account at JPMorgan [JPM 29.16 0.68 (+2.39%) ], according to another person who is close...

....Rick Perry says he would consider pulling the United States out of the U.N. altogether. ....One of the loudest U.N. critics among the candidates is Perry, the Texas governor who has recently slipped in the polls. "I think it's time for us to have a very serious discussion about defunding the United Nations," he declared in October. Romney, the former Massachusettsgovernor, in 2007 characterized U.N. failures as "simply astonishing" but has been more measured during the current campaign. U.N. supporters say that when the candidates bash the world organization, they are simply playing to the most conservative Republicans: the primary...

Screw you, Jon Corzine. All 1,066 employees of the bankrupt trading house MF Global got the boot yesterday in a pre-holiday massacre that left workers without severance and benefits -- and they blamed only one man for their woes. ... If Corzine were around, DiMatteo told Bloomberg News, “I would punch him in the face.” ... Bankruptcy trustee James Giddens is still trying to find about $600 million in missing customer money. Forensic probers are trying to account for the brokerage firm’s assets, and federal agencies are investigating whether MF mixed company funds with money missing from customer accounts.

, Nov. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- In the run-up to the international climate negotiations in Durban later this month, China has responded to efforts to ban the trading of widely discredited HFC-23 offsets by threatening to release huge amounts of the potent industrial chemical into the atmosphere unless other nations pay what amounts to a climate ransom. China's threat comes after the European Union and other nations moved to ban HFC-23 credits from internal carbon markets in recognition of the perverse incentives created by these credits under the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The vast amounts paid for...

Corzine lobbied feds to ease regsBy MARK DECAMBRE and KAJA WHITEHOUSE Last Updated: 11:42 PM, November 3, 2011 Months before the stunning collapse of MF Global, the embattled brokerage firm mounted a full-court press to compel regulators to allow it to tap customer funds to invest in the kind of dicey sovereign debt that led to its demise. The lobbying effort was in response to new rules that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, run by chairman Gary Gensler, was planning to impose on broker-dealers, restricting them from making investments with client money in sovereign debt securities. Broker-dealers are allowed to...

NBC Nightly News Blames Halloween Snowstorm on Global Warming By Noel Sheppard Created 11/03/2011 - 11:12am You knew some major news outlet was going to blame this weekend's east coast snowstorm on global warming. On Tuesday, the folks on the NBC Nightly News did precisely that (video follows with transcript and commentary): BRIAN WILLIAMS, anchor: Everybody out East said the same thing about this freak snowstorm, `This kind of thing didn't used to happen. This never happened before.' And while that is true, it may also be true that we'll all have to start getting used to this kind of...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- MF Global, Jon Corzine's embattled securities firm, moved millions in missing client funds last week and tried to avoid detection, a regulator said Wednesday. MF apparently made "substantial transfers" of customer money after an on-site audit last week, said the regulator, CME Group Inc. CME is a private company that oversees firms such as MF Global on behalf of federal regulators. It also operates exchanges where MF Global traded investments. The money was moved in a way that "may have been designed to avoid detection," CME said in a statement. MF Global filed for bankruptcy protection Monday...

Corzine's firm admits to using clients' money, fed saysBy Associated Press Published: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 WASHINGTON — MF Global, the securities firm led by former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, admitted using clients’ money as its financial troubles mounted, a federal official says. An MF Global executive admitted that to federal regulators in a call early Monday, after regulators raised questions about the company’s books, according to an official familiar with the conversation. It is not clear where the money ended up or what it might have been used for, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity...

I spent 25 years of my life worried about global warming. And one of the best proofs that the scientists and the media both had to keep me convinced was warmer winters, with less snow. Al Gore talked about it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote about it. Dozens of scientists published papers showing that winters were getting warmer, with less snow. Well, in the midst of this kind of certainty about warmer winters, with less snow, some scientists, among them a Russian named Habibullo Abdussamatov, dared to question the idea that warmer winters, with less snow, were caused by carbon...

It must be global warming climate change. New York City is expecting its earliest snow storm since the Civil War.

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen. In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery. In 1898 the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years,...

We’re in this for the long haul. There are no “solutions” that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It’s in those moments that we have to push the envelop [sic], pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabalize [sic], but maintain momentum. And when that’s the new “normal” then we go farther. That’s how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of...

When the financial crisis hit three years ago, many gleeful leftists assumed that the long-anticipated failure of the free-market system had finally come and that this crisis would do for capitalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall did for communism. In fact, it is not capitalism that is failing. We are beginning to see this in Europe, where the debt crisis is a crisis of the welfare state. I think we are also about to see it, possibly in a more spectacular way, in another leading example of a capitalism-socialism hybrid: the so-called "state capitalism" of China. As the...

The globalists at the United Nations are busy preparing their agenda for the Rio + 20 Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which will be held on June 4 – 6, 2012. They have prepared a draft entitled “Enabling a Flourishing Earth: Challenges for the Green Economy, Opportunities for Global Governance”. It is truly amazing that this is not being devised in Dr. Evil’s hidden lair in the depths of some inactive volcano or on a deserted island. This has been made available for everyone to read. It reveals the true intent; the hopes, dreams and aspirations for this new...

CHENGDU/WUHAN, China (Reuters) - When China announced a nearly $600 billion package to ward off the 2008 global financial crisis, city planners across the country happily embarked on a frenzy of infrastructure projects, some of them of arguable need. Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan province, answered the call for stimulus action with a bold plan for a railway hub modeled after Waterloo railway station in London. Except London's Waterloo was not ambitious enough. > China's local governments have piled up a mountain of bad debt, some of it to finance bridges to nowhere and other white elephant projects, which...

Milton Friedman shows the stupidity of tariffs.

Federal authorities are warning that the killing of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in a CIA-led strike on his hideout in Yemen early Friday may trigger revenge attacks ....

Jews around the world gathered on Sunday for first-ever global Shofar FlashMob hosted by Art Kibbutz NYC, the newly-launched international artist community. The event was meant to give the Jewish tradition of sounding the Shofar daily during the Hebrew month of Elul a 21st century post-modern twist. The Shofar, traditionally made from a ram’s horn, was used in Biblical times for many purposes, including announcing the new month, to herald the commencement of the festivals and in battle. Besides being sounded during Elul, the Shofar is also sounded on Rosh Hashanah and at the conclusion of Yom Kippur. There are...

An Italian court has rejected a request for new testing of crucial DNA evidence in the Amanda Knox appeal, as a prosecutor predicted the American will be acquitted of the Meredith Kercher murder. Court appointed experts have criticised the way the original forensic investigation was carried out by police, raising hopes 24-year-old Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 27, will be cleared. Meredith, 21, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was in Perugia as part of her Leeds University and had only been in Italy for two months before she was brutally murdered in 2007. Knox and Sollecito were jailed in December...

Calder's Updates Nigel Calder takes the pulse of science, as the author of Magic Universe and Einstein's Universe. He checks predictions of the past half-century, to see how they worked out. And his hand is on the brow of frenzied climatology, as a co-author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.   CERN experiment confirms cosmic ray action Climate Change – News and CommentsThe global warmists’ dam breaks A graph they'd prefer you not to notice. Tucked away near the end of online supplementary material, and omitted from the printed CLOUD paper in Nature, it clearly shows...

This guy and his hypocrisy has got to stop. Right after this interview he was probably chauffered to his private corporate jet and probably once again flew to Europe to preach his doctrine of Global Warming. The real science is catching up to this guy and he is starting to panic. By calling the other side "RACISTS". This video is really an ad hominem attack. Algore your science is junk along with your logic. BTW. Senator Al Gore Senior voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Legislation in 1964. The science community has said (CERN and NASA) man made global warming or...

Three years after the release of the remake The Day the Earth Stood Still, a team of American researchers has made the film’s theme a scientific theory: They are suggesting that an alien race might destroy man to stop our release of greenhouse-gas emissions and global warming. Writes Fox News: The thought-provoking scenario is one of many envisaged in a joint study by Penn State and the NASA Planetary Science Division, entitled "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis." It divides projected close encounters into "neutral," those that cause mankind "unintentional harm" and, more worryingly, those...

Appropriately, the core point of contention in political economy, the government’s size and role in society, will be at the center of election-year debate. With rioting abroad as a real-time reminder of what happens with loss of spending discipline, the U.S. economy now faces the near arrival of a long-developing fiscal reckoning, and how it is handled will determine what kind of country we have in the coming century. Stark facts underline the 2012 debate in the U.S.: Job creation and personal income growth are moribund. The U.S. has entered an alternative universe not seen since the 1930s: in the...

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain. This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make...

BEDFORD, N.H.- GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry told New Hampshire voters Wednesday that he does not believe in manmade global warming, calling it a scientific theory that has not been proven. "I think we're seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change," the Texas governor said on the first stop of a two-day trip to the first-in-the-nation primary state. He said some want billions or trillions of taxpayer dollars spent to address the issue, but he added:

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...

The U.S. dollar may weaken and Treasury yields rise when Asian markets reopen on Monday, though any selling in response to ratings agency S&P's downgrade of the United States is likely to be tempered by the escalating crisis in the euro zone. The S&P cut in the U.S. long-term credit rating by a notch to AA-plus is an unprecedented blow and results from concerns about the nation's budget deficits and climbing debt burden. It called the outlook "negative," signaling another downgrade is possible in the next 12 to 18 months. "The initial reaction will be a high degree of uncertainty...

(Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the United States Monday of living beyond its means "like a parasite" on the global economy and said dollar dominance was a threat to the financial markets. "They are living beyond their means and shifting a part of the weight of their problems to the world economy," Putin told a Kremlin youth group while touring its summer camp north of Moscow. "They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar." President Barack Obama announced a last-ditch deal to cut about $2.4 trillion from the U.S. deficit...

Since the days of sail, sea captains have served as scientific field observers for shorebound researchers, turning in reports of wind and waves, water temperatures and currents. Since World War II, an armada of specially equipped scientific vessels sponsored by governments, universities and foundations has increasingly augmented the amateur observers. These ships do everything from drilling beneath the seafloor to study the Earth’s crust to counting fish to studying climate change. But in the past few years, vast swaths of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean — some 1 million square miles — have been all but emptied of fishing...

A global public debt crisis, in which private sector deleveraging is offset by public debt, to the point where Reinhart and Rogoff say "no more" (and often times beyond) has only four possible outcomes. These are: 1) a debt trap; 2) hyperinflation; 3) austerity but in conjunction with actual economic growth and 4) default. Currently in the developed world, the only two outcomes actively pursued, are (1), the debt trap, best seen in the US, where the only solution to debt is "more debt", and half of (3), ... First a look at the the sad reality of what is...

What kind of a guy actually places an ad on Craigslist seeking to purchase marijuana?

As predictable as a full moon, the monthly release of Commerce Department figures on U.S. trade invariably provokes a uniform response from economic commentators: If imports slow and the trade deficit shrinks, they hail it as good news for growth and jobs. If imports and the deficit grow, they pronounce it to be bad news and "a drag on growth." Typical was the comment last week from Peter Morici of the University of Maryland, who wrote as the latest numbers were being released that "a rising trade deficit slows growth and jobs creation." The prevailing view on trade deficits and...