Eideard

No banker is likely to risk describing what they do as “God’s work”, but they might hope at least not to get on the wrong side of His earthly followers. Unlucky then for Germany’s Deutsche Bank and US investment bank Morgan Stanley, who are facing a $5m lawsuit led by a group of Irish nuns.

The Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, the Holy Faith Sisters and the Irish Veterinary Benevolent Fund are among a group of 88 Irish individuals suing the two banks.

The nuns allege the two banks profited at their expense by failing to redeem an investment linked to the debt of German financial group Dresdner Bank and in so doing cost them millions of pounds.

In 2005 the nuns and other Irish investors bought euro-denominated notes worth €5.88m linked to Dresdner Bank bonds, but accuse Morgan Stanley of failing to deliver on a contractual pledge to redeem the debt after the German bank’s credit rating was cut below an agreed point.

Instead, Morgan Stanley is alleged to have postponed redeeming the notes until the value of Dresdner Bank debt had recovered to a level whereby the US bank would incur no losses, but which the nuns say ended up costing them $4.7m, as well as $718,734.80 in lost interest payments.

Morgan Stanley is alleged to have made an estimated $11.2m gain by delaying the redemption of the notes.

Here comes that really big bolt of lightning. Hardly anyone deserves it more than Morgan Stanley.

In strikingly unenthusiastic fashion, federal Judge Jed Rakoff signed off on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s plan to fine Bank of America $150 million after failing to tell shareholders of about $16 billion in impending losses at Merrill Lynch.

“While better than nothing, this is half-baked justice at best,” wrote Mr. Rakoff in his ruling released Monday, a week before the case was scheduled to go to trial. “The amount of the fine appears paltry.”

The judge wrote in his report that his court was “shaking its head” and that, based solely on the merits, the settlement between the SEC and BofA should be rejected as “inadequate and misguided.” Yet he elected to go along with the SEC’s proposal, citing deference to the authority of regulators and adding that federal judges should be wary of the “power to impose their own preferences…”

The judge’s ruling also seems like a final slap at the reputation of the SEC. The federal agency was prepared to accept a $33 million fine from BofA last year until Mr. Rakoff rejected that settlement.

In the end, the judge signed off on the $150 million penalty—equal to about 3% of BofA’s pretax income last year—by citing a distinguished soothsayer and baseball player. In considering the tortured nature of the BofA case, the judge quoted Yogi Berra, who is said to have said: “I wish I had an answer to that because I’m getting tired of answering that question.”

In other words, everyone’s favorite cronies at the SEC are still taking care of their country club buddies. They’re just getting better at covering their tracks.

Female ducks have evolved an intriguing way to avoid becoming impregnated by undesirable but aggressive males endowed with large corkscrew-shaped penises: vaginas with clockwise spirals that thwart oppositely spiraled males…

“In species where forced copulation is common, males have evolved longer penises, but females have coevolved convoluted vaginas with dead-end cul-de-sacs and spirals in the opposite direction of the male penis,” said Patricia L.R. Brennan, lead author of the paper…“This coevolution results from conflict between the sexes over who is going to control fertilization.”

The research builds upon a 2007 Yale study that first described the strange morphology of a duck’s sexual organs. While most birds have no phalluses, ducks turn out to have relatively large, flexible penises—up to 20 centimeters—tucked inside their bodies. During sex, male ducks extend, or evert, their phalluses inside the female. Brennan and her Yale colleagues used high-speed video to document the erection of the duck penis for the first time and found the whole process takes less than half a second—an act the Yale team described as “explosive.”

Such large phalluses are supposed to give males a reproductive advantage when there is much forced mating. However, the Yale team hypothesized that females could make copulation difficult for the males with their complex genitalia…

Cripes. I thought finding a quiet place to park was the toughest challenge to sex in the wild.