Student loan debt dragging on young households - (www.cnbc.com) Younger Americans who are still paying off
student loans have a lot less money—and a lot more overall debt—than those who
don't have any student loans, a new report finds. It's not clear why, but the
report from Pew Research Center said one possible explanation is that people
paying off hefty student loans have trouble gaining financial footing because
they are bogged down by those college bills. Another possibility is that, as
more people go to college, the wealth gap between those who borrow for college
and those who don't is widening. The Pew report found that nearly 4 in 10
households headed by a person under 40 has some student loan debt, a record
high. The median student loan debt for that group was about $13,000. The
difference between those households and the ones with no student loan debt was
striking.
2
Banking Giants Implore US Authorities to Go Easy - (www.nytimes.com) Two of the world’s biggest banks, facing the threat of criminal charges, are mounting
final bids for leniency. To avoid the fallout from pleading guilty — no giant
bank has done so in more than two decades — BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse made last-ditch appeals to prosecutors
and regulators in recent weeks, according to people briefed on the talks. The
private meetings came after prosecutors sought guilty pleas from the parent
companies of both banks: BNP of France over doing business with
countries like Sudan that the United States has blacklisted,
and Credit Suisse
for offering tax shelters to wealthy Americans. While BNP and
Credit Suisse proposed more modest guilty pleas from their subsidiaries rather
than parent companies, the people briefed on the talks said, prosecutors
appeared to balk at those overtures, challenging broader public concerns that
banks have grown so important to the economy that they are effectively “too big
to jail.” In the case of Credit Suisse, which recently created a subsidiary to
house the “U.S. offshore business,” prosecutors have privately indicated that
they are unwilling to charge the newly formed unit. The bank is now expected to
strike a deal with prosecutors as soon as this week, the people briefed on the
talks said.
Ukraine
Strives to Fix Crisis as Ambush Shows War Closer - (www.bloomberg.com) Ukraine urged Russia to
condemn separatists in its eastern regions after seven government troops died
in an ambush in a signal that the ex-Soviet republic may be sliding closer to
outright civil war. After weeks of skirmishes between government troops and
rebels in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions, more than 30 attackers
struck a convoy yesterday near the city of Kramatorsk, killing six
paratroopers. One of the eight who were wounded also died on the way to the
hospital, Interfax reported. Acting Defense Minister Mykhaylo Koval said
Ukraine’s east was embroiled in an “undeclared war with Russia.” The ambush was
the rebels’ deadliest attack against Ukraine’s military since they began a
campaign to secede after Russia annexed Crimea in March. It followed a pact by
activists in Luhansk and Donetsk to join forces and signaled the conflict is
intensifying, said Dmitry Orlov, director general of the Agency for Political
and Economic Communications in Moscow.
Vietnam
mobs set fire to foreign factories in anti-China protest - (www.reuters.com) Thousands of Vietnamese set fire to foreign
factories and rampaged in industrial zones in the south of the country in an
angry reaction to Chinese oil drilling in a part of the South China Sea
claimed by Vietnam, officials said on Wednesday. The brunt of Tuesday's
violence, one of the worst breakdowns in Sino-Vietnamese relations since the
neighbors fought a brief border war in 1979, appears to have been borne by
Taiwanese firms in the zones in Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces that were
mistaken for Chinese-owned companies. A police official in Binh Duong province,
speaking by telephone, said about 200 people had been arrested. "We are
working on other areas in the province ... We haven't seen any injuries,"
the official said. Photographs posted on social media sites and blogs,
purportedly of the aftermath of the violence, showed blackened shipping
containers, smashed windows and several burnt out vehicles that had been
overturned.
New
Mexico county defies U.S. government over cattle grazing - (www.reuters.com) A rural New Mexico county has voted to defy
the federal government and give a rancher's cattle access to a watering hole
fenced off by the Forest Service in the latest dispute over federal control of
public land in the U.S. West. Commissioners in Otero County voted 2-0 on Monday
night to authorize Sheriff Benny House to open a gate allowing nearly 200 head
of cattle into the 23-acre area despite Forest Service restrictions. A third
commissioner was out of town for the vote. "We are reacting to the
infringement of the U.S. Forest Service on the water rights of our
land-allotment owners," Otero County Commissioner Tommie Herrell told
Reuters. "People have been grazing there since 1956." But a U.S.
Forest Service spokesman said the fence has also been there for decades,
protecting a delicate ecosystem surrounding a natural spring as well as an
endangered species of mouse from being trampled by cattle.
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