More than 1,300 tubes that carry radioactive water inside the San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California are so damaged that they will be taken out of service, the utility that runs the plant said Tuesday.

The figures released by Southern California Edison are the latest disclosure in a probe of equipment problems that have kept the coastal plant sidelined for more than three months.

At issue has been the integrity of tubing that snakes through the plant's four steam generators, which were installed in a multimillion-dollar makeover in 2009 and 2010.

This rather unhappy AP story was picked up by abcnews.com yesterday...and I thank Casey Research's own Bud Conrad for bringing it to my attention. The link is here.

Bank of America has started sending letters to thousands of homeowners in the United States, offering to forgive a portion of the principal balance on their mortgages by an average of $150,000 each.

The reduction for qualifying homeowners could amount to monthly savings of up to 35 percent on mortgage payments, Bank of America said in a news release on Monday evening.

The principal reduction offers from Bank of America Home Loans are the result of a $25 billion settlement agreement earlier this year with 49 state attorneys general as well as federal authorities who had been investigating allegations of abuses over the handling of foreclosures.

This short story was out of The New York Times...and was posted on the finance.yahoo.com website yesterday. I thank Scott Pluschau for sending it along. The link is here.

Tony Yang is getting beaten to a pulp.

He's not wanted by mobsters nor is he another Cybercrime bully. The former University of California doctoral student (c/o '09) just says that's what it feels like each quarter when he wraps up an adjunct teaching gig and goes home without a permanent job offer.

"It can be very tough on the psyche," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "The darkest moment had to be when I finished my dissertation. I turned it in and there (was) no job ... So when I graduated, the first thing I had to do was file for unemployment."

As a kid, his family supplemented their income with food stamps. Decades later, he found himself in the same position, applying for welfare to get by when his doctoral degree wasn't enough to bring home a steady paycheck.

This businessinsider.com story was posted on their website late last night...and I thank Roy Stephens for digging it up on our behalf. The link is here.

On most issues, former Gov. Mitt Romney tries to distinguish himself from President Obama and set his policies apart from those of the current administration. Yet, in one area Romney is not only a clone of Obama but has doubled down and insisted that the president's policies be applied with even greater force. This area involves China and its alleged currency manipulation.

The exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and Chinese yuan is the main battlefield in the global currency wars. Romney demands that China be officially branded a currency manipulator and suffer retaliation in the form of taxes and trade sanctions from the United States. This is just a more extreme form of Obama's continual diplomatic pressure on the Chinese to revalue their currency upward.

The currency wars that Romney has vowed to fight are a recipe for disaster. The right course is sound money as embodied in the King Dollar policies of Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan. The way to compete in international trade is not with a cheap currency but with technology, innovation, education, good labor-management relations, and a business-friendly environment. This is exactly how the Germans succeed at the export game. Germany has had export success for decades even with a strong currency because they have a favorable business climate.

This must read Rickards commentary was posted over at the usnews.com website on Monday. I was saving it for the weekend, but thought the better of it. I thank reader Randall Reinwasser for bringing it to our attention...and the link is here.

Spain will swoop in with public money this week to clean up huge bad loans at the nation's fourth-biggest listed bank, Bankia, the government said Monday.

As news emerged of the impending rescue of Bankia, created in 2010 from a merger of seven savings banks, its executive chairman Rodrigo Rato announced his resignation.

Spain's banks are still struggling to emerge from a 2008 property bubble collapse, which eliminated millions of jobs and left the financial sector buried in risky assets.

This AFP story was picked up by news.yahoo.com on Monday. I borrowed it from yesterday's King Report...and it's definitely worth skimming. The link is here.

The trade row between Argentina and Spain took another twist on Tuesday after the Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica was ordered to pay $43m (£26.6m) for an interruption in mobile phone services lasting just a few hours.

The fine by Argentina comes just days after President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner seized control of domestic energy company YPF from Spain’s Repsol.

Julio De Vido, the Argentine planning minister, said on Tuesday that the penalty against Telefonica, which owns O2 in the UK, was intended to be a warning to other telecoms providers that service interruptions will not be tolerated.

This is another offering from Roy Stephens. It was filed over at The Telegraph just before midnight their time last night...and the link is here.

A political landslide brought Viktor Orbán into power in Hungary, where he quickly cemented his position with a two-thirds majority. But halfway through his term, the state of his administration is grim.

Orbán probably would have envisioned his mid-term review differently. Two years ago, after the triumphant election victory of his right-wing nationalist Fidesz Party, the beaming winner Orbán announced the "overthrow of the old and the development of a new national order." In the meantime, the situation in Hungary could hardly be more desolate. The country is on the brink of financial ruin, its economy is headed downhill and the impoverishment of large groups of people is creating social problems. Hungary is extremely polarized domestically, and on the international stage it is more isolated than any other European Union country has ever been before.

As if all of this weren't enough, Orbán is also grappling with unpleasant personnel issues. On the morning of May 2, the parliament had to elect a new president. The previous officeholder, Pál Schmitt, had resigned in early April after only 20 months. The former Olympic gold medalist in fencing, hand-picked by Orbán in the summer of 2010 to play the role of a loyal rubber-stamper of laws, stumbled into a plagiarism scandal. His 1992 doctoral thesis consisted almost entirely of Hungarian translations of other works.

This story was posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and is another offering from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych wanted to take revenge on his arch-rival Yulia Tymoshenko. But locking up the former prime minister was the worst mistake of his presidency, say analysts. Tymoshenko has the upper hand in the battle for public opinion, while Yanukovych is ruining his presidency.

The humiliation that Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych experienced on March 27 couldn't have been worse.

The Ukrainian president had traveled to the South Korean capital Seoul to attend an international summit on nuclear safety. On the day before the summit, he had handed over the last highly enriched uranium still in Ukraine's possession to nuclear power Russia, in keeping with its commitment to relinquish its stock of the material before the summit. And now he wanted to receive the praise he thought he deserved from US President Barack Obama, the most important guest at the Seoul meeting.

The Foreign Ministry in Kiev had done everything in its power to arrange a private meeting with the America president. But the US president had no intention of enhancing the status of his Ukrainian counterpart with such a gesture. Instead, Obama spent only four minutes talking to Yanukovych while standing up in the conference center. It was clearly meant as a punishment for a political pariah.

This is another story that was posted on the spiegel.de website yesterday...and another hat tip goes out to Roy. It's a short story...and the link is here.

Left-wing leader Alexis Tsipras was handed a mandate to attempt to form a coalition, after the two mainstream parties failed to reach a deal following Sunday’s inconclusive election.

But fresh elections loom as soon as next month, after the politician said he would rip up the agreement under which Athens was bailed out by the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), cancelling cuts and reforms.

The turmoil is seen as raising the chances of Greece leaving the shared currency.

This is another Roy Stephens contribution. It, too, was posted late yesterday evening in The Telegraph...and the link is here.

The political dam has broken in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel no longer has enough allies in the club of EU prime ministers to impose her hair shirt agenda. Her methodical plans are disintegrating on every front.

Mrs. Merkel has insisted on austerity and reforms alone, imposing the full burden of adjustment on the weaker states. She has brushed aside arguments the EMU's crisis is in essence a North-South imbalance in trade and capital flows that cannot be corrected in this fashion within a currency union.

Her government has ignored warnings that simultaneous contraction in the whole of southern Europe - without offsetting monetary stimulus or expansion in North Europe - can only lead to a replay of the Gold Standard errors of the early 1930s.

This phase of the crisis over. Now Germany itself will have to adjust.

This AE-P offering last night in The Telegraph is a must read...and another offering from Roy Stephens. The link is here.

Iran is accepting renminbi for some of the crude oil it supplies to China, industry executives in Beijing and Kuwait and Dubai-based bankers said, partly as a consequence of US sanctions aimed at limiting Tehran's nuclear programme.

Tehran is spending the currency, which is not freely convertible, on goods and services imported from China.

Most of the oil that goes from Iran to China is handled by the Unipec trading arm of Sinopec, China's second-largest oil company, and through another trading company called Zhuhai Zhenrong, the oil industry executives said.

This story was posted in the Financial Times of London on Monday...and is posted in the clear in this GATA release...and the link is here.

Mainland China’s gold imports from Hong Kong surged more than six-fold in the first quarter, adding to signs that the country may displace India as the world’s largest consumer of the precious metal on an annual basis.

Imports from Hong Kong were 135,529 kilograms (135.53 metric tons) between January and March, from 19,729 kilograms in the year-earlier period, according to data from the Census and Statistics Department of the Hong Kong government. Shipments in March rose 59 percent from February, yesterday’s data showed.

Demand has climbed in the world’s second-largest economy as rising incomes and curbs on property speculation boosted purchases. China may become the biggest user annually this year, according to a forecast from the producer-funded World Gold Council. Last year, total Indian demand including for jewelry and investment was 933.4 tons to China’s 769.8 tons.

This Bloomberg story was filed from Singapore and Beijing early yesterday morning in the Far East...and it's no surprise that Australian reader Wesley Legrand was the first one through the door with it. It's a must read...and the link is here.

Part of this Goldcore Limited article contains the information in the previous Bloomberg story. The information contained in the headline to this story follows immediately after the China Gold Import story. This, too, is a must read...and I thank reader 'David in California' for bringing it to our attention. It's posted over at the goldseek.com website...and the link is here.

The first blog is a must read from Nigel Farage. It's headlined "There Will Be an attempt to Install a Dictatorship". The next blog is an exclusive piece written for KWN by Bob Fitzwilson. It's entitled "Global Meltdown of Historic Proportions & A Fork in the Road". And lastly is the audio interview with James Turk. I posted the blog of this interview in my column yesterday.

Gold is basically back to breakeven for the year, and analysts say the precious metal looks set to go even lower.

June gold futures plummeted $35 an ounce Tuesday to end the session at $1,604.50, after briefly dipping to $1,595.50, the lowest settlement and intraday price for gold since Jan. 3.

Gold has plunged about $120 from this year's high near $1,715 an ounce in early February.

The primary catalyst for gold's slide, say traders and analysts, has been the euro's decline and resulting strength in the U.S. dollar due to worries about the economic future of the eurozone, following weekend elections in Greece and France.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see bilge water stories like this in the main stream press. West Virginia reader Elliot Simon said the same thing in his covering e-mail. It's posted over at the cnbc.com website...and the link is here.

“Investors who would like to take delivery of Gold Bars in exchange for their Shares (Delivery Applicants) may submit Shares to the Trust in exchange for Gold Bars,” the proposed ETF’s prospectus said—a new twist that may add to the allure of gold at a time when many believe it’s the only true store of value since the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

While it’s not at all clear that investors would even take advantage of this convertibility feature, it seems a fair bet that giving shareholders the option to turn their paper certificates into physical gold pretty much obviates objections raised by some of the more fervent gold holders who believe that gold—as in actual bars or coins—is really what investors should own.

More to the point, the plan takes off the table suspicions some gold investors have with physical gold ETFs that don’t allow for shares to be converted into actual gold. The most ardent gold bugs are quick to suggest that because current ETFs can’t be converted into bullion, it might be possible that they don’t actually hold gold. ETF sponsors are dismissive of such suspicions.

This story was posted over at the indexuniverse.com website yesterday...and I thank Randall Reinwasser for sending it along. The link is here.

Sprott Asset Management's John Embry today tells King World News that the counterintuitive drubbing of the monetary metals is an indication of the desperate circumstances of fiat money and its managers. He suspects that it presages another 100-percent-up year for the mining shares.

Meanwhile, mining entrepreneur and gold advocate Jim Sinclair tells gold investors that they should depart the kitchen if they can't stand the heat, but he's staying. [As am I. - Ed]

The links to both stories are contained in this GATA release...and the link to that is here.

Insofar as the price of gold is an international political decision as much as a market decision, we particularly do not know when crucial political decisions affecting the gold price will be made. But they have been made before, they will be made again, and we are seeing now so many developments that correspond to the developments immediately preceding the last great revaluations of gold, in 1968 and 1971.

[And] we do know from history that the biggest circumstances with gold, and thus gold's valuation, tend to change overnight, when all is revealed suddenly. The central bankers won't be calling us, or you, about this a day or two ahead of time. They'll be calling their agents at JPMorganChase and HSBC. All we can do is strive to hasten the day of change. And such days do happen, and have happened in times much like the ones we are experiencing now.

This op-ed piece by Chris is a must read...and it's posted over at the gata.org website. The link is here.