Not too long ago, the United States used to invade nationalize nations banks for a lot less.

Bloomberg News reports that thefailed Wall Street bank, Lehman Brothers, has a stockpile of as much as 500,000 pounds of uranium “yellowcake” that could theoretically is just about enough material needed to make one nuclear bomb.

The difference between this uranium-oxide and Iraq’s “yellowcake” is, of course, that Lehman’s stockpile is real. It is one of the bankrupt bank’s many assets that liquidators have been trying to offload since September.

A supply of 500,000 pounds of yellowcake is just “slightly” less than the amount needed to make one bomb, or fuel one nuclear power reactor for a year, if the latest enrichment technologies are used, said Gennady Pshakin, an Obninsk, Russia-based nonproliferation expert.

The uranium “might fetch $20 million at today’s prices of about $40.50 per pound”. Once worth $55 a pound, the commodity price of uranium has dropped for five straight months. “More than 43 million pounds of uranium-oxide concentrate, or yellowcake equivalent sold on the spot market last year, more than doubling the 2007 trading volume”.

Lehman’s “yellowcake” is being stored, in part, in oil-rich Canada. Looking back, which was a bigger threat to the United States in 2003? A neutered Iraq or a “yellowcake” stockpiling Wall Street bank?

1. The LA Times reports President Obama touts economic progress but says ‘hard times’ still ahead. Obama “sought to temper recent optimism about an economic recovery, warning that the ‘hard times’ will not end this year and there will be ‘more job loss, more foreclosures and more pain’ before the recession ends.”

   “The market will continue to rise and fall. Credit is still not flowing nearly as easily as it should. The process for restructuring AIG and the auto companies will involve difficult and sometimes unpopular choices,” Obama said…

   “We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock,” Obama said. “We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity — a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.”

   The CS Monitor reports on 10 ways the new economy will look different. In a nutshell, expect a more sober standard of living. Here’s a few points from the article. Everyone “will be looking to get the most they can for their dollars.” “The sale of used goods may increase as secondary markets surge in importance.”

   “About one-third of US residents feel at immediate risk of downward mobility… Job insecurity has been rising for years, and that’s a trend that may become more pronounced even as prosperity returns.”

   Meanwhile, it looks like Neel Kashkari may be out. The Washington Post reports the Department of Treasury plans to tap Fannie Mae chief to run the bailout. Herb Allison has “led Fannie Mae since the government seized the firm in September” and now is likely to be asked “to run the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the $700 billion federal initiative to stabilize banks, keep struggling borrowers in their homes and spur lending.”

   Allison, 30 years senior to Kashkari, “has been close to Geithner for years. Allison served on an advisory committee to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, of which Geithner was president. Allison formerly was vice chairman of Merrill Lynch and chief executive of TIAA-CREF.”

Four at Four continues with a possible tactical change in the West with negotiating with Iran, Somali pirates vow vengeance on France and the U.S., and the Thai anti-government protesters give up.

1. The NY Times reports Soldiers bridge two stages of war in Afghanistan.

   Afghanistan has long been a land of invisible but broadly understood boundaries. If you go here, it will be friendly. If you go there, you will be attacked. There are places where almost no outsiders go at all.

   With more military units expected, the many dangerous seams outside of the control of the Afghan government, like the Taliban-run area around Wanat, could in time have a regular American presence or a fixed outpost, several of the company and battalion’s officers said. And then, patrol by patrol, the Taliban could be undermined, and the complicated geography of informal boundaries could be eroded.

   These changing expectations have made the soldiers now on the ground a bridge from the older war to a fight that stands to become more invigorated, and hopeful, albeit perhaps more bloody as American units push into longstanding Taliban sanctuaries.

Four at Four continues with Somali Islamists applaud acts of piracy, prosecuting small time Iraq and Afghanistan, reconstruction money crooks, update from Thailand, and police preemptively arrest greenhouse gas protesters in the UK.

While Americans celebrate the successful rescue of Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama, I think it is also important to keep in mind what now has been set in motion.

As the Washington Post reports “U.S. military officials acknowledged Sunday that the killing of the three pirates could worsen the problem, an outcome that shipping companies have sought to avoid.”

“This could escalate violence in this part of the world, no question about it,” said Navy Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, commander of the Fifth Fleet.

When the Maersk Alabama was boarded by the Somali pirates, the closest naval ship was 300 nautical miles away.

“We simply do not have enough resources to cover all of those areas,” Gortney said.

In Somalia, the news of the rescue, which left three pirates dead, was met with anger. The NY Times reports that some there said “they would avenge the deaths of their colleagues by killing Americans in sea hijackings to come.”

“Every country will be treated the way it treats us,” Abdullahi Lami, one of the pirates holding a Greek ship anchored in the pirate den of Gaan, a central Somali town, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying in a telephone interview. “In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying.”

So while we cheer tonight, keep in mind that this outcome set our nation on a path that we do not yet know how it will end. I think a little less bravado and a little more reflection is warranted.

1. The LA Times reports a Suicide truck bombing kills 5 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Five U.S. soldiers and two Iraq national policemen were killed by a suicide truck bomb outside the national police headquarters in southwest Mosul. 200 pounds of explosives were detonated by the bomber.

   The NY Times notes this was the Deadliest attack against American soldiers here in 13 months and “the second in Mosul since February, when four soldiers were killed in a suicide car bomb attack against their patrol.”

   Meanwhile the CS Monitor reports that Six years after Iraq invasion, Jordan still playing host to thousands of Iraqi refugees. In Jordan “only 300 of as many as half-a-million refugees have returned home” and “Iraqis are still trickling across the border.”

   “An interesting trend is that there are still new arrivals from Iraq,” says Rafiq Tschannen, the chief of mission in Amman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM). “And contrary to the first arrivals, we see people going to live in villages instead of Amman, where the cost of living is high. These refugees have less money and they look to the cheapest villages they can find.”

2. The NY Times reports Captain recaptured after trying to escape from pirates. Capt. Richard Phillips jumped into the Indian Ocean in an escape attempt, but was recaptured by the pirates and dragged back into the drifting lifeboat by the pirates. “Residents in a pirate stronghold in Somalia, meanwhile, said that the pirates, desperate to get back to shore with their captive, had themselves called in additional vessels and men.”

   The LA Times adds Phillips appeared to be unharmed by the episode.

   Keeping other pirate vessels away from the craft is key to the U.S. strategy. Defense officials believe their negotiating position will grow stronger as the pirates run low on supplies. Officials will probably try to prevent the pirates from moving to another vessel or halt any ship from re-supplying the lifeboat.

   There are now two large naval vessels in the area, the destroyer Bainbridge and the frigate Halliburton. But the Navy did not appear to have a smaller boat in the water near the lifeboat at the time of the escape.

   Um… we have a U.S.S. Halliburton? No, at least not in name. I believe this is a typo for the the U.S.S. Halyburton. Freudian slip on the part of the LA Times, perhaps?

Four at Four continues with 22,000 percent return on lobbying money for corporate America, the Obama dog, Easter eggs, and Dave Arneson runs out of hit points.

1. Wondering What will global warming look like? The LA Times reports Scientists point to Australia. “Climate scientists say Australia — beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves — epitomizes the “accelerated climate crisis” that global warming models have forecast.”

   The human toll is ongoing. Frank Eddy, a orchard farmer in Victoria, explained:

   “Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It’s devastation,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men — big, strong grown men. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. It’s desperate times.”

   A result of climate change?

   “You’d have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise,” Eddy said.

   “Some places are pretty close to being bloody unlivable anymore,” Chris Cocklin, a climate change researcher at James Cook University, said.

Four at Four continues with America’s many wars.

1. The NY Times reports Iran responds cautiously to Obama’s gesture. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran welcomes “honest” talks with the U.S.

   “The Iranian people would welcome a hand extended to it if the hand is truly based on honesty,” said Mr. Ahmadinejad in a speech at the central city of Isfahan today…

   “Yet, if it has an honest appearance but is dishonest by nature, the Iranian people would give the same response that it gave to George Bush,” he said. “Therefore the change should be in action, not in words.”

   Reuters adds the U.S. will now join major power nuclear talks with Iran. “What is different is that the U.S. will join the …discussions with Iran from now on,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Robert Wood. America will now join with ” Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain to reach a diplomatic solution to areas of concern with Iran.” Iran has been invited to talk.

   “If Iran accepts … we hope this will be the occasion to seriously engage Iran on how to break the logjam of recent years and work in a cooperative manner to resolve the outstanding international concerns about its nuclear program,” Wood said. “Any breakthrough will be a result of collective efforts of all the parties.”

   Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden warns Israel off any attack on Iran reports the LA Times. Biden said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would “ill advised” to attack Iran.

   With his brief comment Tuesday, Biden became the highest-ranking administration official to caution the Jewish state against a military strike. In the interview, Biden was asked whether he was concerned that Netanyahu might strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

   “I don’t believe Prime Minister Netanyahu would do that. I think he would be ill advised to do that,” Biden said.

   “And so my level of concern is no different than it was a year ago.”

Four at Four continues with cyber attacks on U.S. infrastructure, piracy, and a new trial for the men accused of murdering Dorothy Stang.

1. McClatchy reports a federal judge has concluded that the U.S. hid witness’ mental illness in Guantanamo cases. Federal Judge Judge Emmet Sullivan found the “Justice Department improperly withheld important psychiatric records of a government witness who was used in a ‘significant’ number of Guantanamo cases”.

   The government censored parts of the records, but enough has been made public that it’s clear that the witness, a fellow detainee, was being treated weekly for a serious psychological problem and was questioned about whether he had any suicidal thoughts. The witness provided information in the government’s case for detaining Aymen Saeed Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who the government announced last week it would no longer seek to detain…

   “To hide relevant and exculpatory evidence from counsel and from the court under any circumstances, particularly here where there is no other means to discover this information and where the stakes are so very high . . . is fundamentally unjust, outrageous and will not be tolerated,” Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

   “How can this court have any confidence whatsoever in the United States government to comply with its obligations and to be truthful to the court?”

   Also, the Washington Post reports the Red Cross calls the CIA treatment of prisoners ‘inhuman’.

   Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”

   Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”

   Valtin has more details in “Full ICRC Report on CIA Prisoner Abuse Now Published Online“.

Four at Four continues with Obama in Iraq, former FBI Director Freeh says Saudi payments are not bribes, and greening the Empire State Building.

1. Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post writes Millions of reasons to doubt Larry Summers.

   The latest White House Friday-night document dump had its desired effect, as it’s Monday morning and there’s little to no attention being paid to how stupendously beholden it turns out President Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers, is to the financial industry that he is ostensibly trying to rein in.

   Summers, it turns out — according to financial disclosure statements released by the White House late on Friday — was paid $5.2 million for his part-time work for a massive hedge fund last year. He also raked in more than $2.7 million in fees for speaking engagements at such places as Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. For one speech alone last April, Goldman Sachs paid him a cool $135,000.

   All of a sudden, Obama’s expressions of outrage over the culture of excessive pay on Wall Street are a bit harder to take at face value. And the advice Obama is getting from Summers, his economic guru, is looking very suspect.

   And Michael Tomasky of The Guardian adds:

   This is legal corruption. And $5 million is a helluva lot of money. Should having accepted that much money from a firm that does work that’s controversial in Democratic circles a priori bar one from serving in a Democratic administration? I wouldn’t quite say yes. But by cracky it comes awfully close. It’s pretty appalling news. Summers would be an unusual human indeed not to have been influenced by this.

   The NY Times, yesterday, has the low down in A rich education for Summers (after Harvard). “Little attention” has been given to Summers’ “two years in New York, from late 2006 to late 2008, advising an elite corps of math wizards and scientists devising investment strategies for D. E. Shaw & Company.”

   Mr. Summers and Shaw executives say his role there was to be a sounding board for Shaw’s traders. But interviews with friends and former colleagues suggest that Mr. Summers’s role at D. E. Shaw was wider and more complex…

   Mr. Summers, who taught economics and public policy at Harvard while advising Shaw, also met with investors in the United States, as well as in the cash-rich Middle East and Asia. He spoke at industry conferences, mixing with officials from public pension funds, endowments and other large institutions with many billions of dollars to invest…

   Mr. Summers joined the hedge fund world after his tempestuous, five-year term as the president of Harvard came to an unhappy end in February 2006, after a statement he made that women might lack an intrinsic aptitude for math and science…

   Some people in the financial world say they have more confidence in the White House’s plans because of Mr. Summers’ time at D. E. Shaw…

   Asked about that, Mr. Shaw laughed. “Oh, boy, I have no idea,” he said. “Thankfully he’s doing what he’s doing. I’m really glad he’s running this. It’s a scary time, and I can’t think of anybody I’d rather see there.“

   No doubt. At $5.2 million, D. E. Shaw is getting their money’s worth. As for American taxpayers (present and future) — bailout promises “works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.” already. In other words, small change Wall Street can believe in.

Four at Four continues military spending and missile defense, suicide bombings in Baghdad and Obama in Turkey, ice is melting at both poles, and good news from Beijing.

1. The LA Times reports Wind turbines could more than meet U.S. electricity needs. According to the U.S. Department of Interior, “wind turbines off U.S. coastlines could potentially supply more than enough electricity to meet the nation’s current demand”.

   Simply harnessing the wind in relatively shallow waters — the most accessible and technically feasible sites for offshore turbines — could produce at least 20% of the power demand for most coastal states, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, unveiling a report by the Minerals Management Service that details the potential for oil, gas and renewable development on the outer continental shelf.

   The biggest wind potential lies off the nation’s Atlantic coast, which the Interior report estimates could produce 1,000 gigawatts of electricity — enough to meet a quarter of the national demand.

   The report also notes large potential in the Pacific, including off the California coast, but said the area presented technical challenges.

   An executive summary of the report is available.

2. The Washington Post reports the Unemployment rate jumps to 8.5 percent in March. The umployment rate rose from 8.1 to 8.5 percent last month. Employers destroyed “663,000 jobs in March, the fourth straight month in which job losses have topped 600,000, according to Labor Department data. A total of 5.1 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007, and more than 13 million people are unemployed.”

   The U-6 Alternative measures of labor underutilization has March 2009 unemployment at a not seasonally adjusted 16.2 percent. Up from percent from 16 percent in February.

   According to the NY Times the 8.5 percent unemployment is the “highest level since 1983“.

   The severity and breadth of the job losses – which afflicted nearly every industry outside of education and health care – prompted economists to conclude that an agonizing plunge in employment prospects was still unfolding, with no clear turnaround in sight.

   “It’s really just about as bad as can be imagined,” said Dean Baker, a director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “There’s just no way we’re anywhere near a bottom. We’ll be really lucky if we stop losing jobs by the end of the year.”

   I dunno… I can imagine worse, a lot worse. This guy isn’t even trying.

Four at Four continues with Iraqis formerly on the American payroll now fighting the U.S. (again) and Iowa Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling.