‘Bystander’, the pseudonymous UK magistrate (a court of first instance for lower-level offenses) blogger, wants you to know something. Well, actually he wants all British news editors to know it:
NO -REPEAT NO – COURT IN ENGLAND AND WALES USES A GAVEL – EVER!
THAT’S RIGHT – EVER!
Just sayin’, as they say.
Oh boy. This one will run and run.
A “mortgage” consists of two instruments: a promissory note, which is a IOU, and a lien against the property, which is referred to as a mortgage (in non-judicial foreclosure states, they are typically called a deed of trust and confer somewhat different rights, but we’ll put that aside for purposes of this discussion).
What appears to be happening on all too often in Florida is that when borrowers signed warranty deeds in lieu of foreclosure when they can no longer keep these homes, they often get only a satisfaction of mortgage, not a cancelled note. This is not what is supposed to happen. When a borrower deeds his property to the bank, the objective of the exercise is to cancel the debt.
There’s a lot more where that came from. Anyone involved in a foreclosure who doesn’t already know exactly what this is about should read it.
25 years ago, an attorney who did not demand the cancelled note in satisfaction of a mortgage would have been considered grossly negligent. And the risk is not theoretical. Professor Williams described how people were defrauded in the wake of the S&L crisis when notes that should have been cancelled got into the wrong hands. April Charney had just seen a case on a 2008 foreclosure where the ex parte order returned the original note to the plaintiff/servicer. The hapless borrower is now being sued by the private mortgage insurer.
— naked capitalism, Yet Another Mortgage Scam: Homeowners Not Getting Cancelled Notes After Foreclosures, Hit by Later Claims
I’ve just made a big change to the blog’s configuration. In theory this should not be noticeable to anyone (except that the blog will be down less frequently).
If, however, you notice anything different — faster or slower response time, for example — please post a comment letting me know.
For those who may care, what I’ve done is switched from PHP 5.2x with fastCGI to plain vanilla PHP 5.3. Supposedly using fastCGI speeds up WordPress, allowing more pages to be served at once, but I have come to think at least on a Dreamhost VPS it may be the source of random episodes of the server running out of memory. My plan is to run without it for a few days, and then start setting my cache back to more aggressive settings than the very limited ones now in use.
That’s the provocative title of a provocative essay by A. Morgan Cloud & George Shepherd, both of Emory University School of Law, now on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
A most unlikely collection of suspects – law schools, their deans, U.S. News & World Report and its employees – may have committed felonies by publishing false information as part of U.S. News’ ranking of law schools. The possible federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their agents’ crimes.
Some law schools and their deans submitted false information about the schools’ expenditures and their students’ undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading statistics about recent graduates’ employment rates and students’ undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.
U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law schools without verifying the data’s accuracy, despite being aware that at least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell that information even after individual schools confessed that they had submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological errors.
Which reminds me, I need to write up my analysis of U.Miami’s release of its employment figures.
Huffpo reports that among the NBA stars giving big $$$ to Team Obama are two Heat stars:
I imagine that’s a larger fraction of Battier’s salary.
Geeky and cool are not things I tend to associate with Coral Gables.
It is beautiful. It is relatively safe by Florida standards. It is relatively well-run compared to much of the County (ok, low bar, but still). Much of it feels very suburban; it’s a nice place to raise kids. The houses survive hurricanes in part due to our somewhat fanatical Building department. But not cool. Not real geeky either, despite having a major university pretty much in the middle of it.
Apparently, however, we have a new coffee shop, the Planet Linux Caffe, one that sounds like it might be both geeky and cool. Here’s how they describe themselves:
Planet Linux Caffe is a Tech coffee shop. Computers running Open Source OS and Applications, Google TV for tech webcast, web conferences, webinar, conferences, magazines and books to read in the place, play station 3 running Yellow Dog Linux…. excellent Italian style coffee, tea, soda, sandwiches, salads, cakes, pies (home made)… Welcome geeks, open source community, artist and every one that love to share information and love to chat.
It’s a few blocks north of my usual stomping grounds, but I definitely intend to stop by as soon as I can, maybe for this Saturday’s meetup on WordPress Extensions And PHP Backdoors.
(No prices on the online menu, though…)
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