Journalists irked by slow pace of massacre trial 

 Journalists and activists gathered for an overnight vigil late Sunday, criticizing the slow pace of the trial over a massacre that left 57 persons, including mediamen, dead.
The protesters, who assembled at Bantayog ng mga Bayani in Quezon City, also assailed President Aquino for the continued spate of killings of media workers despite his promises to crack down on such crimes.
About 150 persons arrived for a ceremony marking the 1,000th day since the massacre — allegedly by a powerful political clan — said organizer Sonny Fernandez.
Thirty-two journalists were among the dead.
“We are remembering the victims, stressing the demand for justice and urging the government to take concrete steps to end the impunity in media killings,” said Fernandez of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP).
“The Aquino government is not doing much to stop the killings,” he noted, citing 13 journalists killed since Aquino took office in 2010.
The 2009 massacre was allegedly carried out by the powerful Ampatuan political clan to prevent a rival from challenging one of their members in elections in Maguindanao province.
But of 196 suspects in the case, a hundred remain at large while the rest are being tried or face legal processes which have dragged on for months.
Fernandez said families of the victims were being bribed to dropped the case.
Other reports say witnesses and potential witnesses live in fear of being silenced.
The NUJP said since 1986, when democracy was restored to the Philippines, 153 journalists have been killed and only 10 persons have been convicted of these killings, with the masterminds going unpunished.
“If the government can show that they can haul to court and punish the mastermind, that will make perpetrators think twice before killing journalists,” he stressed.
Human rights and media groups widely blame the killings on a “culture of impunity,” where powerful figures believe they can carry out violent attacks on their critics without being punished.       

All Blacks irked by lack of respect

All Blacks assistant coach Steve Hansen views the Wallabies’ arrogant comments in the media as a sign of disrespect.


The Reds’ triumph in Super Rugby and the recent hammering of a second-string Springbok side has done wonders for the Wallabies’ confidence. Coach Robbie Deans has come out saying that he believes this young side are world beaters, while fullback Kurtley Beale has said that on the day the Wallabies can tear any team apart.

Perhaps the confidence and media bragging is premature. While the Super Rugby trophy has been won for the first time since 2004, not much has been achieved by the Test side. They haven’t won the Bledisloe Cup since 2003, or the Tri-Nations since 2001. They haven’t won at Saturday’s venue, Eden Park, in 25 years, and haven’t won in New Zealand in a decade.

Hansen said the comments from some of the Australians in the media have surprised him.
‘Australians aren’t in awe of us; they probably don’t even respect us,’ he told stuff.co.nz. ‘You only have to read what they have got to say.’

Prop Ben Franks said earlier in the week that the Aussies’ wild celebrations after tries and victories during the Super Rugby competition had not been forgotten. While this arrogant attitude is something that clearly irks the All Blacks players and management, Hansen said it won’t disrupt their preparations for a must-win game.

‘We have our own motivation, we don’t need anyone else to motivate us. The black jersey motivates us and has done for centuries and will continue to do so because it’s such an important jersey.’

He added that it was important to extend the All Blacks’ winning streak at Eden Park, especially since the World Cup semi-finals and final will be staged at this ground.

‘Auckland is obviously the home here in New Zealand where most of the big games are played because of the size of the venue. So the importance of those matches are usually right up there. Wanting to stay tight and a fortress for the want of a better term is pretty important.

‘That’s where they are going to play the World Cup final. We want to be in it and we want to win it. So it’s important.’

How E*Trade Irked Citadel 

Capital One Financial Corp. COF -0.87% approached E*Trade Financial Corp. ETFC -5.50% last fall about a potential bid for the online brokerage, according to people familiar with the situation.
Though an offer never materialized, and Capital One ultimately didn't pursue it further, those discussions are a key reason hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin, who is on E*Trade's board, has lately been aggressively and publicly pushing E*Trade to sell itself.

The failure of the preliminary discussions to lead to a concrete offer represented a tipping point for Mr. Griffin, founder and chief executive of Citadel LLC, E*Trade's largest shareholder, according to a person familiar with the situation. Mr. Griffin felt the approach wasn't properly evaluated by the board, the person said.

The question of how E*Trade treated the discussions is a matter of contention. While Mr. Griffin wasn't satisfied with the process, people familiar with the matter said, some other people familiar said that E*Trade gave the Capital One approach the appropriate attention and that there is no indication otherwise.
Some other people familiar with the matter said E*Trade acted responsibly by not exploring a sale at the time since it probably would have been acquired at a relatively cheap price due mainly to its loan portfolio, which could have also angered investors.

In recent weeks, the fight over E*Trade's future has essentially become a battle between E*Trade, the iconic brand known by many consumers for its talking-baby TV commercials, and Mr. Griffin, one of the hedge-fund industry's most prominent managers.

Citadel has criticized the company's management in two separate letters to E*Trade CEO and interim Chairman Steven Freiberg over the past two weeks. In one letter, Citadel cited E*Trade's "catastrophic losses" for shareholders over the past four years—when the company's stock plummeted as it was rocked by souring mortgages in its banking arm.

Citadel is demanding a shareholder meeting to discuss a potential sale of the New York-based online brokerage. Citadel owns 9.8% of E*Trade's stock. E*Trade has not called such a meeting.
Capital One didn't hire an investment bank and a price wasn't discussed, the people familiar with the situation said.

The talks, however, were serious enough that E*Trade's board asked J.P. Morgan Chase & Co JPM -1.63% .—which it had already hired to perform a strategic review—to advise E*Trade on the matter, these people said. The strategic review focused on valuation of the company, including how the mortgage portfolio affected it, the sources said.

J.P. Morgan wasn't hired to explore a sale of E*Trade or to run an auction process for the company, but it didn't rule out that possibility if it were in the best interest of the company and shareholders, the people said.
E*Trade didn't feel the need to reach out to other potential buyers about a counteroffer, according to people familiar with the matter. Analysts have long counted TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. AMTD -2.24% and Charles Schwab Corp. SCHW -3.40% as E*Trade's most likely suitors.

Representatives for TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab declined to comment.
One issue for E*Trade in sizing up the right time and price for a sale has been its loan portfolio. Chief Financial Officer Matthew Audette told investors during a conference call in January that losses from soured loans had declined for the sixth consecutive quarter, and improving delinquency trends were "exceeding our expectations." By Dec. 31, the company's loan portfolio had shrunk 21% from a year earlier, to $15 billion. Nevertheless, E*Trade at the time felt further improvements in the mortgage book would boost its value, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Wall Street Journal recently said TD Ameritrade was scheduled to discuss a possible offer for E*Trade at its previously scheduled board meeting last Tuesday, citing people familiar with the situation. Ameritrade was lukewarm to a bid for E*Trade in recent days, given the possible price and the size of the company's mortgage portfolio, these people said.

During the discussions with Capital One, which hadn't become public knowledge until now, E*Trade's stock price rose, a factor in the McLean, Va., bank's decision to move on. Capital One later agreed to buy the ING Direct online-banking business from ING Groep NV ING -4.57% for $9 billion in cash and stock.
While Citadel rescued E*Trade with a big investment four years ago, it couldn't push for large changes until recent months. In 2008, the hedge fund received a waiver that prevented it from being regulated as a bank holding company as it accumulated a roughly 25% stake in E*Trade, which was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision. The agreement gave Citadel a seat on the board, but the firm couldn't exert control over the company or its management. Once Citadel's stake in E*Trade fell below 10%, that agreement was terminated.

The firm also likely saw an opportunity to push for new corporate governance, given the exit of E*Trade's former Chairman Robert Druskin in May and the decision by C. Cathleen Raffaeli not to seek re-election to the board.

 

Irked

I am so irritated with everyone, especially myself.

All day long, all I hear in my head are ridiculous cliches. If you want something done, you better do it yourself. Why aren’t the whites whiter? A mother’s work is never done. You’re doing the most important job there is. Really? The early bird gets the worm. Cleanliness begets cleanliness. (Thanks, Martha Stewart, not at our house!) Fail. Fail again. Fail better. There will be time, there will be time. ( No there won’t, I scream after I hear that one. There won’t be time! This is the time!)  One must know how to work and how to love. But how, I wonder, can one get everyone else to just shut the fuck up?

I am tired of the children. I am tired of the house. I am tired of the tight budget borne of a single income. I am tired of the worn out clothes that don’t fit, and the laundry that smells even when it comes out of the washer. I am tired of the small counters and the endless pile of dishes. I am tired of feeling ugly and old and used up. I am tired of my mind feeling broken and interrupted and put upon.

Even the dog. The compulsive eater of a dog. Lurking, furtive, trying to look inconspicuous under the table, his eyes black and shining. He cannot help help himself. Some ancient message in his scandinavian DNA that whispers to him, Eat, eat the oatmeal. Lick the plates of the scrambled eggs. Eat. I hate him, too. As soon as I leave the room, I hear the clinking, the sound of his toenails, lifting his giant silver back, up, up, onto the table.

There is a jolly rancher stuck to the baby car seat. Right in the seat. I ignored it at Easter, when it made its debut, when it was still green. Now it is black, and covered with dog hair. It has fused with the fabric and I can’t pull it off now, even though I tried. When Mr. Mac is put into the seat, his body heat starts to soften the black lozenge, and it leaves sticky black smear on all his pants.

The dishes, again. Our counters are too small. Our sink is too small. We aspire to be a family who cooks, but our kitchen is a small horseshoe of stingy workspace. The sink I want costs $500 and will require cutting a larger hole in the counter, which still would be, too small.  The only answer is a new house, which is yet again, too expensive. And I so do dishes that are too big for our small sink, and I load and reload the dishwasher, all the time stewing about the poor fit of everything.

I am a poor fit for a housewife. I am Lisa Simpson. I need to be graded. ( Remember that Simpsons episode, when Bart repaints the school parking spaces too small and the school has to be shut down. Lisa can’t handle it and has a fit in front of her mother. Grade me! She screams. Grade me! Marge, not sure what to do, hurriedly scribbles an A+ on a piece of paper. Lisa sighs in relief and walks away. Marge is freaked out.

That’s me. I need grades. Compliments. Feedback. Honorable mention. There isn’t much of that in my current line of work.

No one ever says to me:

A+ for going to the grocery store, nice way to handle that tantrum. Good save the way you used the inside of your skirt to wipe up the puke. Nice ball handling with that crap filled diaper you changed, again, in the pouring rain, I think maybe someone even checked you out a little, when you were all bent over like that, ‘cause on top of being a mama,  you’re a cutie!

And there is no one to do it. No honor roll for being a stay at home mother. No bonuses, no raises, no promotions for on the job know-how. Those three phone calls I made to the pediatrician yesterday, politely but firmly requesting that someone call me the fuck back about the open sores on my son’s mouth? No honorable mention for those soft skills, all while piloting one of those goddamn car carts around Wegman’s. Silence.

The only thing that I get in the way of feedback is just another knocked over glass of juice, another fight at the table. I know I sound melodramatic. I know I am melodramatic. And I hate myself for it. A crappy housewife and a drama queen. I get an F.

And here’s the worst part, I have nothing to fall back on. I’ve been at this game since I was 25, and I didn’t manage to get a master’s degree at night. I don’t happen to be a registered nurse, or know how to wait tables. I am dependent on my husband for income, the least feminist thing of all. Not earning a salary so I could stay home with my kids was much cuter when I was in my twenties.

Having kids in your twenties is such a fun ride. You’re young, they’re young. You probably only have two. It blows your mind. You start a garden. Do DIY projects on the house. Life is adorable, and you take lots of pictures. Then you have three kids and you are in your thirties. You can’t find the camera anymore, and if you do, it is never charged. You stop getting invited places, and people stop coming to see you. The upstairs shower never gets tiled. The backer board  just sits there, disapproving, while you cuss and plunge the toilet. Again. What do they do to this toilet? You ask yourself, ignoring the boxes of tiles and the tile cutter ( cortadora baldosa, in Spanish,  cause of course, I can’t ignore them). I am thirty-two, and I am bad at my job.

So when I cry at Wegman’s because I hate everyone SO MUCH, I feel terrible. We are so lucky. Three healthy children. An employed husband. Safe in our home, food purchased for the children to eat.  No war nearby. Why can’t I be satisfied with that?

Why should it bother me so much that the chicken house needs to be shoveled out, that there ants all over the kitchen and bathroom counters?

I need to wash my face. I need to believe that I haven’t lost my looks, my brains, that the adult that I never quite got to know in my twenties will still be there, waiting for me here in my thirties, while I finish the dishes and call the mechanic to apologize for forgetting our appointment, again. Here’s hoping.

 

The definition of Irked is to annoy someone.Have you ever been irked? Of course you have, we all have. Sometimes you are irked because you are disappointed. This disappointment comes from the fact that someone you thought very highly of did something that you never thought that they were capable of. But it isn't only people that can irk someone. It can be animals, products, the government, religious institutions, countries and even your favorite movie house. I remember the time, many years ago, when a certain movie theater was cleaning their glass doors. What made this theater so unusual was the fact that it had a line of these glass door across the entire front of the theater. There must have been at least ten of them. The doors were made of perfectly clear glass with clear glass handles. All the doors were open, or so I thought. Leave it to me, I marched full steam ahead right into the only closed door in the entire row. It was so clean that I hadn't noticed that it was closed. Ouch! My nose hurt for a week after that and my friends were still laughing about this for months afterward. They would meet other people and retell my tale of woe without any mercy. I think that I would have to classify this as a double irk. First, I was irked at the movie theater for not leaving all the doors open or at least putting a sign on the door and second, I was irked at my friends for making me feel like a jerk.

This wasn't as bad as the time the IRS was irking me. It all started with a phone call from someone who represented himself as an IRS agent. He told me that I was short on my taxes and I had to come to the IRS office and give him the cash I owed which he said was about $1,000. Strange, very strange I thought. Since I was only about 20 years old at the time and really didn't care about anything, I told him to drop dead and hung up. The calls continued for years. Threats were exchanged but nothing ever happened. Finally I went into the US Army and I got a call there. Can you imagine that this guy tracked me down? He said he was sending me to jail if I didn't come over with the cash, and only cash, to his office within the week. I was stationed only about 100 miles from there but I had decided that this was some kind of a scheme and refused to go. Boy I was really irked. About a year later the front page headline in the papers was that several IRS agents were arrested for shaking down people. About two weeks after that I got a letter in the mail with an apology from the District Director, he stated that my name was found on a shakedown list of one of the arrested agents.

Did you ever get irked by a car dealer? I have. Several times we had to bring our Ford in for repairs. The car was purchased new and was less than one year old so it was covered by the warrantee. I guess this particular dealer felt he didn't make enough money on warrantee. repairs so he would always leave this car until last. First the front seat broke and it was in for over a week. Next the front end went out and it was in for over a week. Next alternator went and it was in for over a week. Then came the Big IRK, they had to replace a part in the engine and it was in for TWELVE WEEKS and the dealer wouldn't even give me a replacement to drive for the time. I called and called working my way up to the owner who was almost impossible to reach and took about 12 calls to get to. I shouldn't have wasted my time. After several calls to the district representative I finally got my car back repaired, boy was I really irked.

Work has a way of really irking you sometimes. At times even the work irk is too tender to describe how you feel. I remember when I first started working for (I better not name the company). I had what was known as a substitute position. Slavery would have been a better definition. There was no overtime pay. Oh you would work many hours overtime sometimes but you would get straight pay. Sometimes you might work all night but you wouldn't get night differential. When there was work you would be 'clocked on', when it got slow you would be 'clocked off'. If you ever left without being let go, even though you were 'clocked off' and on your own time, you would be fired. You could actually only get two or three hours pay and yet have to stay at least eight hours, and the bosses were very nasty to you. Talk about being irked, this was super irking taken to a whole new level. There was a rule that no one could work more than 12 hours straight. When the busy season came, I did my twelve hours. Clocking out, I began to head home. The boss came running over to me and asked, "Where the h... do you think you are going?" He then clocked me on to a different card. This went on for 72 hours until I fell and hit the floor sound asleep. I was then sent home. If I hadn't needed the money so bad at the time, I would have told all those bosses where to go. As I said this was a whole new art of irking.

The US Army irked me when I enlisted. I remember when I had to report to an address on Whitehall Street in Manhattan for a physical and induction. Now let me tell you, the army never understood about privacy. One of the first things that happened was that I and about 200 other men were ordered to strip which we did. Several doctors entered the auditorium sized room. We were told to stand against the wall. Problem, there was a huge picture window overlooking the street and people were looking up and laughing at us. It was especially embarrassing with the women would point up, to show their friends because we were only on the second floor. After this irksome experience, I thought the worst was over, but I was wrong. Next we were ordered to go stand in the hall. Yes in the hall. While we were out there, female secretaries would walk by giggling. Sometimes they would walk by in pairs and could hardly contain themselves. I never saw so many secretaries. Finally after a different medical examination we were allowed to get dressed. I think this was a course in humiliation. But maybe it was a lesson in "I order you and you do it, no matter how unpleasant". I was irked for weeks after this.

So you see, there are many things that happen to a person as he or she travels through life that can irk you. I guess you just have to roll with the punches.