Deadly Ice Storm Turns Atlanta Into Parking Lot, Strands Thousands
January 29th, 2014Via: Reuters:
A rare ice storm turned Atlanta into a slippery mess on Wednesday, stranding thousands for hours on frozen roadways and raising questions about how city leaders prepared for and handled the cold snap that slammed the U.S. South.
The storm, which has killed at least seven people, on Tuesday swept over a region of about 60 million largely unaccustomed to ice and snow – stretching from Texas through Georgia and into the Carolinas – and forecasts called for more freezing weather on Thursday.
Two Top American Bankers Commit Suicide in London
January 29th, 2014Oh sure.
Via: Daily Mail:
Two top ranking American bankers working in senior positions in London have committed suicide in the space of two days.
Gabriel Magee, a 39-year-old JP Morgan bank executive, died early this morning after he jumped 500ft from the top of the bank’s European headquarters. His body was discovered on the ninth floor roof, which surrounds the 33-story Canary Wharf skyscraper.
Just two days earlier, on Sunday, fellow American banker, William ‘Bill’ Broeksmit, 58, was found hanging in his South Kensington home.
Broeksmit – who retired last February – was a former senior manager at Deutsche Bank and had lived in London many years. He started working for the bank in 1996 but left for a period of 7 years before returning in 2008.
“What have you heard about Barry Seal having flown a get-away plane out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination?”
January 29th, 2014Via: Mad Cow Productions:
Is there evidence that there was a get-away plane? The answer is yes.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment
January 29th, 2014Via: io9:
Towards the end of World War II, word got through that certain people in occupied territories were eating a near-starvation diet. American researchers wanted to study the effects of starvation, so they recruited volunteers – and starved them some more.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment pretty much lived up to its name. It was an early experiment in nutrition prompted by news about the conditions in Europe during World War II. The full horror of concentration camps was still to come, but word came in that people in war-torn territories were living on severely restricted diets. Everyone knew that things were going to get worse before they got better, and concerned researchers wanted to find out the effects of starvation and how to rehabilitate a severely starved person. In November of 1944, at The University of Minnesota, a study began on the effects of starvation.
Iceland Let Banks Fail, Jailed Criminal Bankers and Now Has Only 4% Unemployment
January 29th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
Iceland let its banks fail in 2008 because they proved too big to save.
Now, the island is finding crisis-management decisions made half a decade ago have put it on a trajectory that’s turned 2 percent unemployment into a realistic goal.
While the euro area grapples with record joblessness, led by more than 25 percent in Greece and Spain, only about 4 percent of Iceland’s labor force is without work. Prime MinisterSigmundur D. Gunnlaugsson says even that’s too high.
The Very First Porsche Was an Electric Vehicle
January 28th, 2014Via: Cnet:
The very first Porsche, an electric carriage, sat untouched in a warehouse for 111 years, but now it’s come home.
On June 26, 1898, Ferdinand Porsche’s “Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle,” better known as the “P-1,” rolled on to the streets of Vienna for the first time. In 1899, the P-1 took the gold medal (by a full 18 minutes!) against a field of other electric vehicles in Berlin. Then in 1902, as Porsche put the first all-wheel drive passenger car into production, the P-1 was parked in a warehouse…where it sat untouched for the next 111 years.
Baltimore: Speed Cameras Issue Hundreds of Thousands of “Erroneous” Tickets
January 28th, 2014Via: Baltimore Sun:
Baltimore’s speed cameras likely charged motorists for thousands more erroneous tickets than previously disclosed, according to data from a secret audit conducted for the city last year and obtained by The Baltimore Sun.
Consultant URS Corp. evaluated the camera system as run by Xerox State and Local Solutions in 2012 and found an error rate of more than 10 percent — 40 times higher than city officials have claimed. The city got those findings last April but never disclosed the high error rate, refusing calls by members of the City Council to release the audit.
The city issued roughly 700,000 speed camera tickets at $40 each in fiscal year 2012. If 10 percent were wrong, 70,000 would have wrongly been charged $2.8 million.
City Council members reacted with dismay and anger when told Wednesday of the audit’s results, asking why the Rawlings-Blake administration didn’t reveal the high error rate months ago and take steps to fully refund fines paid by motorists.
Scientists Find Ancient Plague DNA in Teeth
January 27th, 2014Via: AP:
Scientists say two of the deadliest pandemics in history were caused by strains of the same plague and warn that new versions of the bacteria could spark future outbreaks.
Researchers found tiny bits of DNA in the teeth of two German victims killed by the Justinian plague about 1,500 years ago. With those fragments, they reconstructed the genome of the oldest bacteria known.
They concluded the Justinian plague was caused by a strain of Yersinia pestis, the same pathogen responsible for the Black Death that struck medieval Europe. The study was published online Tuesday in the journal, Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The two plagues packed quite a punch. The Justinian Plague is thought to have wiped out half the globe as it spread across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. And the Black Death killed about 50 million Europeans in just four years during the 14th century.
“What this shows is that the plague jumped into humans on several different occasions and has gone on a rampage,” said Tom Gilbert, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark who wrote an accompanying commentary. “That shows the jump is not that difficult to make and wasn’t a wild fluke.”
The plague is usually spread to humans by rodents whose fleas carry the bacteria.
“Humans are infringing on rodents’ territory, so it’s only a matter of time before we get more exposure to them,” Gilbert said.
NSA Targets ‘Leaky Apps Spew Everything’ from Smartphones
January 27th, 2014Via: New York Times:
When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.
In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.
According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from the smartphone identification codes of users to where they have been that day.
Dimon Gets 74 Percent Raise After Billions in Fines
January 27th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
After agreeing to pay $23 billion in penalties and settlements in 2013, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) Chief Executive Jamie Dimon was rewarded today by the board he chairs, receiving a 74 percent pay raise to $20 million.
Dimon has presided over a series of costly settlements with government investigators, including paying $13 billion for mortgage activity that helped lead to the financial crisis and $2 billion for failing to do anything about signs that client Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. But in the amoral logic of the stock market, each payout has been met with gains in the company’s stock price, as investors see one fewer uncertainty looming over future profits.
