FT.COM:   … Under a new Franco-German plan that senior European officials said is likely to be included in a new Greek rescue, eurozone officials would create an escrow account to accept new bail-out funding instead of paying it all directly to Athens as in the past.

The new fund would then ensure bondholders are paid off, while additional cash to run the Greek government could still be withheld if Athens did not live up to tough new reform demands.

A senior French official said the plan, which has backing from the European Commission in Brussels as well as several other eurozone countries, was a way of “removing the Damocles sword of default” while keeping pressure on Athens to reform…  (more)

PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW: A jury convicted former state House Speaker Bill DeWeese today of five criminal charges that he used taxpayers’ money to get re-elected.

DeWeese, 61, faced six felony counts of theft, conflict of interest and conspiracy. Four of the charges were theft. He was acquitted of one theft charge…

Prosecutors accused him of using Harrisburg and district office staffers to campaign for him from 2000 to 2006 and of having an aide whose primary duties were allegedly campaign fund-raising…  (more)

EDITOR: We will not defend DeWeese for his actions.  But we see much irony in one politician  going to jail for relatively small and not that unusual infractions and the governor who used the attorney general’s office to further his career  and whose campaign  accepted huge funding from Marcellus Shale interests in presumed exchange for future favorable treatment .

From the PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW:

…Conserving resources in the Senate race enables Republicans to pump resources into the row office races — two of which are critical to Corbett’s political well-being.

The last thing Corbett wants is to wake up the day after the November election and find out Democrat Patrick Murphy or Kathleen Kane is state attorney general and Democrat Rep. Eugene DePasquale is the new auditor general.

Democrats in both or either one of those two offices could make Corbett miserable during the last two years of his term…

Click here to read the full article.

NEWSMAX: ..Thirty-two undergraduate students are enrolled at Roosevelt University’s “Occupy Everywhere” class. It’s a three-credit political science course that looks at the movement that started last summer near New York City’s Wall Street and spread nationwide.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports (http://bit.ly/w7Fgm7 ) students’ assignments include reading the movement’s newspaper and attending Occupy Chicago’s general assembly meetings held near Roosevelt’s downtown campus…

Professor Jeff Edwards studies social movements. He says the Occupy movement has been unfolding before students and the class is a good opportunity for them. He says they are reading a range of analysis on the movement concerned with corporate greed and the division of wealth…  (more)

USA TODAY:  ….For what a new federal indictment alleges was a secret rendezvous in a plot that enabled more than 100 wealthy Americans to evade federal taxes on at least $1.2 billion in assets hidden in foreign bank accounts…

“It’s standard procedure for private bankers like this to go to extreme lengths to conceal their clients’ transactions. You hear stories about hiding money in ski poles or using phony names and things like that,” said George Clarke, a Miller & Chevalier law firm partner in Washington, D.C., who has represented clients with foreign accounts.

The charges, the first time a foreign bank has been indicted on charges of facilitating U.S. tax fraud, mark the latest escalation of a long-running Justice Department crackdown on offshore tax evasion that has shattered Switzerland’s vaunted tradition of banking secrecy. UBS in 2009 paid a $780 million settlement to avoid criminal prosecution on charges that its bankers helped thousands of American clients duck federal taxes….  (more)

EDITOR: To dishonestly avoid paying income taxes is stealing from the poor.  Some rich people have no sense of being a responsible citizen.  For a  portion of the fortunate  0.01%, greed rules!

ABC NEWS:   … The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives…

In the May 11, 1961, speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason to argue that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but instead must forge their own identities and culture.,,

Malcolm X was prompted to come to Brown by an article about the growing Black Muslim movement published in the Brown Daily Herald. The article by Katharine Pierce, a young student at Pembroke College, then the women’s college at Brown, was first written for a religious studies class. It caught the eye of the student paper’s editor, Richard Holbrooke…  (more)

ALJAZEERA: …”We will work to seek regional and national sanctions against Syria and strenghten the ones we have. They will be implemented to the fullest to dry up the sources of funding and the arms shipments that are keeping the regime’s war machine going”, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told journalists in Sofia on Sunday.

Senator Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic presidential candidate, went further than Clinton and talked of the military option. …

[t]he commander of the Free Syrian Army [FSA] said they have no choice now but to fight to free the country of Assad’s regime after Russia and China vetoed the UN resolution… (more)

HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS Editorial: … The Patriot-News spoke out fervently against expanding gambling beyond horse racing, saying Pennsylvania should not “embrace a radical departure from its past to profit from the enticements of gambling, along with the accompanying social problems.” …

Yet today, the gloom and doom predictions we and others had haven’t come to pass: The casino industry is booming.

The average property owner in Pennsylvania sees $190 in tax relief a year and, according to local district attorneys who spoke to this editorial board last year, crime has not increased significantly in the midstate because of gambling expansion. …  (more)

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER:  Former Gov. Ed Rendell says he has assembled a group of corporate and political leaders that has offered to buy the owner of The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com.

Rendell’s group includes New Jersey businessman Lewis Katz; Comcast-Spectacor chairman Edward M. Snider; William P. Hankowsky, chief executive of Liberty Property Trust; George E. Norcross III, insurance executive, New Jersey Democratic leader, and chairman of the board of Cooper Health System and Cooper University Hospital in Camden; and Krishna “Kris” Singh, president and chief executive officer of Holtec International in Marlton.

In a conference call with reporters, Rendell said the group was motivated to take over the financially struggling Philadelphia Media Network Inc. more out of a sense of civic duty than a desire to earn a profit…   (more)

HUFF POST:  The Daily Show has done the best journalism to date on the growing trend of opportunistic lawmakers introducing legislation to drug test people who receive unemployment benefits.

Last night, Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi did a powerful and humorous segment that features elected officials, including Florida Governor Rick Scott, hypocritically forcing poor people to piss in a cup for money to feed their children, but refusing to take the piss test themselves.

The segment successfully counters stereotypes and misinformation (by showing that people who receive benefits do not use drugs more than the general public) and the myth that these tests are about saving taxpayer money (these programs actually cost much more money than they save)…  (more)