Buddah Lineage

   Greeks are emptying their bank accounts, Italians are proposing that the Roman Catholic Church begin to pay nearly $1 billion in property taxes on lucrative hotels and businesses, and in the UK, protesters sans jobs have settled near 10 Downing in the wake of the nation’s biggest general strike in years. Spain has seen well-dressed panhandlers in Madrid. The Netherlands report higher bankruptcies and lower exports. French banks are cutting thousands of jobs. And in bailed-out Portugal, two religious and two civil holidays – weekdays off – will now fall on weekends, even as healthcare costs there have suddenly doubled in many hospitals. All across Europe, the severity of belt-tightening and public anger has brought a new stream of “austerity stories” to the fore: job cuts and their effect, new instances of ethnic hate, worry about social stability. Rising right-wing violence The majority of these stories flow out of Europe’s southern t...

   I understand that Hague, like the Chancellor, now believes this will happen soon. Osborne told Cabinet colleagues on Monday that the Merkel-Sarkozy plan for greater fiscal discipline within the eurozone was no solution to the current  crisis. Rather, he said, ‘it was like standing over a man having a heart attack and telling him that to avoid one in future he should do more exercise and cut down on cholesterol’. This view that the euro is unlikely to survive is why there are, so far, few worries about Britain being isolated by the eurozone bloc and its allies. The Government is also confident that the differences between the countries in the single currency will remain – that the Netherlands and Finland will continue to take a more liberal attitude to financial services and the single market than the French and the Italians. But there’s little doubt that Cameron’s decision to wield the veto changes Britain’s relationship with t...

  I can watch my serenity level rise when I discard my expectations. But then my “rights” try to move in, and they, too, can force my serenity level down. I have to discard my “rights,” as well as my expectations, by asking myself, “How important is it, really? How important is it com­pared to my serenity, my emotional sobriety?” And when I place more value on my serenity and sobriety than on anything else, I can maintain them at a higher level—at least for the time being.   -- Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict, Alcoholics Anonymous, page 452 (3rd Ed.) -- Acceptance Was The Answer, Alcoholics Anonymous, page 422 (4th Ed.)

Suspects accused of selling guns and drugs. Authorities collared 38 Bronx and upper Manhattan gangbangers Wednesday after a two-year probe into a notorious crew, officials said. The alleged members of the Dominican-based Trinitarios gang all face charges of racketeering, narcotics conspiracy and gun trafficking, authorities said. The undercover investigation — which involved officers from the NYPD, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Homeland Security — netted about $25,000 worth of drugs and 12 firearms in Wednesday’s raid, police said. One weapon recovered, a Mac-11 machine gun, was painted the same shade of green the gang uses in its colors. Federal prosecutors said the crew committed and planned violent acts, including murder, to protect its turf from rival gangs that include the Bloods, Crips, the Latin Kings and Dominicans Don’t Play. “We believe we put a big dent in the Trinitarios gang,”...

  Glenn Mulcaire, the private eye at the centre of the News of the World phone hacking scandal, has been arrested by Scotland Yard detectives pursuing a fresh investigation into phone intercepts, according to a person familiar with the inquiry. Officers working on Operation Weeting – the Metropolitan Police’s second probe into phone hacking at News International, which owned the now-defunct Sunday tabloid – announced on Wednesday that they had arrested a 41-year-old man who was being held on suspicion of conspiracy to hack voicemail messages and perverting the course of justice.  Mr Mulcaire is the 16th person to be arrested under the new operation, and has already served a six-month prison sentence in 2007 after pleading guilty to intercepting phone messages. He was arrested at his home in Surrey in a dawn swoop and held in a south London police station. Detectives on Operation Weeting have used the private investigator’s notebooks – which contai...