Weather.com - AP, Jim Suhr, 9/20/12

Barge Heading Southbound on the Mighty Mississippi

A barge eases southbound in a Mississippi River channel toward a lock that remained shut down Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012, in Granite City, Ill., causing a traffic jam of dozens of tugboats and hundreds of barges.

GRANITE CITY, Ill. -- Crews scrambled to make repairs Wednesday near the busiest Mississippi River lock shut down because of damage blamed partly on the summer drought, snarling hundreds of barges and tugboats in a backlog that was growing worse by the hour.

Workers closed Lock 27 just north of St. Louis last Saturday after discovering that a protection cell -- a vertical, rock-filled steel cylinder against which barges rub to help align them for proper entry into the lock -- had split open, spilling into the channel tons of the rock that ultimately obstructed passage.

PressTV - 9/18/12

Human rights activists are to start a broad campaign against the highly controversial security company G4S, as the firm is taking over more control of Britain’s public services despite various fiascoes surrounding it.

Huff Post - Mark Gongloff, 9/19/12

Interest rates all over the world are mostly made up. That's the verdict of a new study by the International Organization of Securities Commissions, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg. It found that more than half of the benchmark lending rates in the U.S., Europe and Asia are "calculated by methodologies that were unclear, not transparent and only rarely subject to specific regulatory standards or obligations." Less than half of all benchmark lending rates, in contrast, were based on actual market transactions.

In other words, the interest rates that affect personal and business loans, and hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives contracts around the world, are based on either guesses or lies: Not particularly comforting.

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