DENVER - A charter plane carrying NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol crashed and burst into flames during takeoff from a southwest Colorado airport Sunday, killing at least two people and seriously injuring Ebersol and one of his sons. Rescue crews were searching for another son.
Dick Ebersol, 57, and son Charles Ebersol survived the crash at the Montrose Regional Airport outside this southwest Colorado town, NBC said in a statement through its Denver affiliate KUSA-TV.
Eyewitness Chuck Distel told The Associated Press by phone that Charles, a college senior, helped his father out through the front of the plane, whose cockpit had been ripped off by the force of the crash. read
HOUSTON - A private jet that was en route to Houston to pick up former President Bush (news - web sites) clipped a light pole and crashed Monday as it approached Hobby Airport in thick fog, killing all three people aboard.
The Gulfstream G-1159A jet, coming into Houston, went down about 6:15 a.m. in an undeveloped area 1 1/2 miles south of the airport, officials said. The former president had been scheduled to travel to Ecuador for a conference.
"I was deeply saddened to learn of the plane crash this morning," Bush said through spokesman Tom Frechette. "I'd flown with this group before and know them well. I join in sending heartfelt condolences to each and every member of their families."
Finally -- finally! -- an obituary that mentions some of the unpleasant truths about Reed Irvine:
Ideologically, [Accuracy in Media] paved the way for the tide of conservative talk shows, Web sites and news programming that would follow decades later. And while AIM occasionally lived up to its name, it also spent much of its time pursuing conspiracy theories.
In recent years, for example, Mr. Irvine turned his attention to such speculative topics as whether the death in 1993 of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration, was really a suicide. He also challenged the government's explanation of the crash in 1996 of T.W.A. Flight 800, alleging that it had been caused by a rocket.
Irvine also pimped the theory that the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was the work of al-Qaeda.
Yes, Irvine had no respect for the survivors of tragedy -- or for the truth.
When even Warren Buffett, who is no Boy Scout himself, is calling them out, you know it's bad:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, launched an attack Saturday on big-bank executives, calling for penalties for those who led their companies to near-ruin.
In his latest letter to shareholders, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. decried the fact that while shareholders suffered during the recent crash, the top people at the banks got off relatively lightly.
"It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country's largest financial institutions," wrote Buffett. "Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been 'bailed-out' is to make a mockery of the term.
"The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style," added Buffett.
Spitzer, along with Frank Partnoy, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, and William Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, make the case in today's Times for releasing all the AIG emails before they're lost forever - and we never really know what happened to trigger their crash. Obviously, it serves the nation to know:
We end this extraordinary financial year with news that the Treasury is in discussions with American International Group about selling the taxpayers’ 80 percent ownership stake in that company. The government recently permitted several banks to break free of its potential oversight by repaying loans made during the rescue. But with respect to A.I.G., the Treasury should not move so fast. There is one job left to do.
A.I.G. was at the center of the web of bad business judgments, opaque financial derivatives, failed economics and questionable political relationships that set off the economic cataclysm of the past two years. When A.I.G.’s financial products division collapsed — ultimately requiring a federal bailout of $180 billion — those who had been prospering from A.I.G.’s schemes scurried for taxpayer cover. Yet, more than a year after the rescue began, crucial questions remain unanswered. Who knew what, and when? Who benefited, and by exactly how much? Would A.I.G.’s counterparties have failed without taxpayer support?
The three of us, as experienced investigators and prosecutors of financial fraud, cannot answer these questions now. But we know where the answers are. They are in the trove of e-mail messages still backed up on A.I.G. servers, as well as in the key internal accounting documents and financial models generated by A.I.G. during the past decade. Before releasing its regulatory clutches, the government should insist that the company immediately make these materials public. By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of “open source” investigation.
Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story. In past cases of financial fraud — from the complex swaps that Bankers Trust sold to Procter & Gamble in the early 1990s to the I.P.O. kickback schemes of the late 1990s to the fall of Enron — e-mail messages and internal documents became the central exhibits in our collective understanding of what happened, and why.
So far, prosecutors and regulators have been unable to build such evidence into anything resembling a persuasive case against any financial institution. Most recently, a jury acquitted Bear Stearns employees of fraud related to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, in part because available e-mail messages suggested the employees had done nothing wrong.
Perhaps A.I.G.’s employees would also be judged not guilty. But we would like to see the record to find out. As fraud investigators, we would like to examine the trading patterns of A.I.G.’s financial products division, and its communications with Goldman Sachs and other bank counterparties who benefited from the bailout. We would like to understand whether the leaders of A.I.G. understood that they were approaching a financial Armageddon, and whether they alerted their counterparties, regulators and shareholders to the impending calamity.
Here's a collection of posts by angry, right wing conservatives who were freaking out when the DHS report was released. Obviously our soldiers aren't the focus of the report, but the right wing kooks needed to find something to attack it with because the report perfectly highlighted the issue at hand. And as we've seen so far, right-wing violence is up dramatically since President Obama was elected.
I can't imagine the thinking behind this. We lend them the money and then let them pay it back - before we've fixed the problems that lead to the crash in the first place? And it won't do much for consumers, since half of them are investment banks.
Elizabeth Warren is skeptical, and wants to hear the terms of repayment. She also warns that the stress tests were not as strong as they should have been. Stay tuned:
... The decision to allow the banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, also ushered in a new, and potentially risky, phase of the banking crisis. Letting the lenders out now — earlier than many had envisioned, and without the industry reforms some consider necessary to prevent future crises — raises many sobering questions for policy makers, bankers and taxpayers.
The program was aimed at purchasing assets and equity from banks to strengthen them and encourage them to expand lending during a tightening credit squeeze. But after banks return the TARP money, the administration will forfeit much of its leverage over them. With that loss goes a rare opportunity to overhaul the industry. The administration’s ability to push institutions to purge themselves quickly of bad assets and do more to help hard-pressed homeowners will be diminished.
Of even deeper concern is the running trouble inside the banking industry. Despite tentative signs of revival, many banks remain fragile. Four of the nation’s five largest lenders, including Citigroup and Bank of America, were not allowed to return their bailout funds.
Some analysts worry that financial institutions that repay bailout money now may turn to Washington again if the economy worsens and losses overwhelm banks. One of the most vexing problems of the credit crisis — how to rid banks of their troubled mortgage investments — remains unresolved.
Which, of course, is why so many experts were urging the administration to nationalize the banks. Those bad mortgages have to be dealt with sooner or later, and the bailout program simply postponed the day of reckoning.
The banks are eager to escape TARP and the restrictions that come with it, particularly the limits on how much they can pay their 25 most highly compensated workers. (Even so, the Obama administration plans to propose guidelines on executive compensation for the broader industry as early as Wednesday.)
Yet even banks that return taxpayers’ money will remain dependent on other forms of government aid. Among them are enhanced deposit insurance, incentive payments to modify home mortgages and federal guarantees on bonds that banks sell to raise capital.
“They may need the government’s money to get through this storm,” Christopher Whalen, a managing partner at Institutional Risk Analytics, said of the banks. “If the banks have to come back and ask for more money in a few months, I don’t think the response from Washington will be too kind.”
The Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat reveals: How Iraq descended into chaos, how a plane crash laid for foundations for the national security state, how Oliver Stone poisoned the well of truth about John F. Kennedy and how the Confederacy set out to win the war by other means
Calling Gov. Corzine a crash dummy is pretty appalling. This was a tragic event, and a serious car wreck, but these morons can't help themselves. Yes, he should have worn his seat belt, but his family are suffering tremendously right now and you'd think they would give it a few days before they turned ugly like they always do.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 20 American service personnel were killed in military operations Saturday in one of the deadliest days for U.S. forces since the
Iraq war began, and authorities also announced two U.S. combat deaths from the previous day. The day's worst loss came from the crash of a U.S. Army helicopter northeast of Baghdad that killed 13 service members. An attack Saturday night blamed on militiamen in the city of Karbala killed five soldiers. Roadside bombs killed another soldier in the capital and one in Nineveh province north of Baghdad.
