wall street journal

There’s more proof out today that the foreclosure crisis is only getting worse, despite everything that’s been thrown at it so far: Foreclosure notices reached a new record high during the first half of this year,  Bloomberg reports.
Citing data from RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure database, Bloomberg said the rising number of notices shows how job [...]

The Wall Street Journal posted a small piece — reprinting a Volokh Conspiracy post from last month — attacking Human Rights Watch for raising money in Saudi Arabia. It’s an alarming claim if, as the implication has it, the NGO is taking cash from the very government it purports to monitor. Sarah Leah Whitson, the [...]

If you are a renter or someone who took out a simple 30-year fixed mortgage, it’s not surprising that you might  feel like the mortgage crisis is, well, not exactly your problem. You’re not the one who got into any sort of messy mortgage. What does a subprime loan have to do with you?
But via [...]

Maybe the proposal was already in the works, but on Wednesday — the same day The Wall Street Journal reported on the problem of Mexican gangs smuggling undocumented immigrants into the country and then holding them hostage — Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) assured Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that he’d introduce a law to help [...]

Let’s see what Lou Dobbs makes of this one: turns out the crackdown on border crossings by undocumented immigrants has actually led to an increase in the violent smuggling, kidnapping and ransoms demanded for delivering undocumented workers into the United States.
Joel Millman at The Wall Street Journal reports today on a major shift away from [...]

Here’s an interesting, under-reported twist on Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial record: she’s apparently a conservative when it comes to criminal justice.
The Wall Street Journal reports today:
New York criminal-defense lawyers say she is surprisingly tough on crime for a Democratic-backed appointee — a byproduct, they believe, of her tenure as a prosecutor.
Makes sense. She may also have [...]

When President Obama travels to Egypt this week, he’s likely to confront some difficult questions about U.S. immigration law — specifically, why does it allow a man acquitted of criminal charges that he supported terrorism to be tried again on essentially the same claims in immigration court?
That’s what happened to Youssef Megahed, a 23-year-old Egyptian-born [...]

In insisting during his speech yesterday that President Obama and the CIA declassify the memos that he claims will show the effectiveness of the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” former vice president and anointed Republican spokesman Dick Cheney neglects to mention one critical fact: torture is illegal, even if it worked.

The investigation into disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme is taking a new turn, as the Securities and Exchange Commission begins investigating whether some of Madoff’s biggest “victims” actually were in on the scam, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Some of the victims apparently were able to state the size of the annual returns they wanted [...]

While much of the mainstream media — Charlie Savage at The New York Times and John MacKinnon at The Wall Street Journal, among others — were reporting yesterday on how it would be virtually impossible to prove that the Bush administration’s lawyers’ approval of torture amounted to a crime (relying in large part on the [...]