Americans Giving Up Citizenship Jump Sixfold
August 10th, 2013Update: Forgot to Mention
I recently received an email from an American who is attempting to renounce his or her U.S. citizenship in New Zealand. I don’t want to get into any details, because NZ is like a small village full of people who take great pleasure talking about other people in the village.
The point is this: DO NOT ASSUME THAT THE U.S. WILL MAKE IT EASY FOR YOU TO RENOUNCE YOUR CITIZENSHIP.
—
Buh bye.
Via: Bloomberg:
Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship surged sixfold in the second quarter from a year earlier as the government prepares to introduce tougher asset-disclosure rules.
Expatriates giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies climbed to 1,131 in the three months through June from 189 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register figures published today. That brought the first-half total to 1,810 compared with 235 for the whole of 2008.
The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside, is searching for tax cheats in offshore centers, including Switzerland, as the government tries to curb the budget deficit. Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport.
“With the looming deadline for Fatca, more and more U.S. citizens are becoming aware that they have U.S. tax reporting obligations,” said Matthew Ledvina, a U.S. tax lawyer at Anaford AG in Zurich. “Once aware, they decide to renounce their U.S. citizenship.”
Fatca requires foreign financial institutions to report to the Internal Revenue Service information about financial accounts held by U.S. taxpayers, or held by foreign entities in which U.S. taxpayers hold a substantial ownership interest. It was estimated to generate $8.7 billion over 10 years, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
…
The additional compliance costs for companies to ensure that Americans they hire are filing the correct U.S. tax returns and asset-declaration forms are at least $5,000 per person, said Ledvina.
For individuals, the costs are also rising. Getting a mortgage or acquiring life insurance is becoming almost impossible for American citizens living overseas, Ledvina said.
“With increased U.S. tax reporting, U.S. accounting costs alone are around $2,000 per year for a U.S. citizen residing abroad,” the tax lawyer said. “Adding factors, such as difficulty in finding a bank to accept a U.S. citizen as a client, it is difficult to justify keeping the U.S. citizenship for those who reside permanently abroad.”
China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem
August 9th, 2013Via: Network World:
The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit.
The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That’s the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update.
The problem is that a significant chunk of the world’s PCs continue to run the aged OS, and with just months to go, a seemingly impossible task faces those users: Getting off the 12-year-old XP and onto something newer.
According to analytics company Net Applications, 37.2% of the globe’s personal computers ran Windows XP last month. If Microsoft’s estimate of 1.4 billion Windows PCs worldwide is accurate, XP’s share translates into nearly 570 million machines.
But while much digital ink has been spilled on the impending deadline — what one popular Windows blogger called a “coming Windows XP Apocalypse” on Tuesday — the truth is that some countries have a bigger headache than others.
In the U.S., for example, 16.4% of all personal computers ran Windows XP in July, or about one in six, Net Applications’ data showed.
But in China, where XP remains king, 72.1% of the country’s computers relied on the soon-to-retire operating system last month, or nearly three out of every four systems. In any XP doomsday scenario, that means China is in a position four times more precarious than the U.S.
And it will get worse for China, not better, as the remaining eight months flip off the calendar.
If one assumes that recent trends in XP’s decline continue, then its share in the U.S. will drop to between 9.1% and 11.1% by April 2014 (depending on whether the forecast is based on the last three months or the last six months, respectively).
China, however, is in a tougher spot because while it’s been shedding Windows XP at about the same clip as the U.S., the country’s much larger current share puts it at a severe disadvantage. By April 2014, XP will still be on between 65.2% and 65.7% of its personal computers. Eight months from now, China’s XP problem will be six or seven times bigger than the U.S.’s.
‘Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?’
August 9th, 2013Via: BBC:
As many as a million young people in Japan are thought to remain holed up in their homes – sometimes for decades at a time. Why?
For Hide, the problems started when he gave up school.
“I started to blame myself and my parents also blamed me for not going to school. The pressure started to build up,” he says.
“Then, gradually, I became afraid to go out and fearful of meeting people. And then I couldn’t get out of my house.”
Gradually, Hide relinquished all communication with friends and eventually, his parents. To avoid seeing them he slept through the day and sat up all night, watching TV.
“I had all kinds of negative emotions inside me,” he says. “The desire to go outside, anger towards society and my parents, sadness about having this condition, fear about what would happen in the future, and jealousy towards the people who were leading normal lives.”
Hide had become “withdrawn” or hikikomori.
In Japan, hikikomori, a term that’s also used to describe the young people who withdraw, is a word that everyone knows.
Lavabit Shuts Down
August 9th, 2013Via: Lavabit:
My Fellow Users,
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.
What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.
Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC
Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.
JPMorgan Faces Criminal and Civil Investigations Related to Mortgage Securities Scam
August 8th, 2013Via: New York Times:
JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Wednesday that it faced a criminal and civil investigation into whether it sold shoddy mortgage securities to investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, the latest legal threat to the nation’s biggest bank.
JPMorgan acknowledged for the first time the existence of the investigation — one of several mortgage-related problems looming for the bank — in a quarterly regulatory filing. It said that the civil division of the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California, which covers a stretch of land that includes Sacramento and Yosemite, has “preliminarily concluded” that JPMorgan flouted federal laws with its sale of subprime mortgage securities from 2005 to 2007. The parallel criminal inquiry, according to one person briefed on the matter, is in a more preliminary stage.
Florida to Exhume Remains Found at Notorious Dozier School for Boys
August 8th, 2013Via: Guardian:
Investigators have been given permission to exhume remains found at the notorious Arthur G Dozier School for Boys in Florida, which closed in 2011 following pupils’ revelations of widespread physical and sexual abuse.
Governor Rick Scott and the rest of Florida’s cabinet voted unanimously on Tuesday to allow dozens of unmarked graves found in woods near the school to be opened up. The decision comes after a team of researchers found evidence of almost 100 deaths at the institution.
“We are not exactly sure what happened there, but we know it was not good,” Florida attorney general Pam Bondi said during Tuesday’s meeting. “It’s something we as Floridians can’t ignore.”
The University of South Florida was commissioned to look into deaths at the Dozier School, in the panhandle city of Marianna after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced the presence of 31 grave sites in 2010.
A team of anthropologists and archaeologists found that 45 people had been buried on school grounds between 1914 and 1952, with 31 bodies sent elsewhere for burial. There were 22 more cases in which no burial site was listed.
Of the 98 deaths they confirmed, two were adult staff members and the rest children aged from six to 18.
Britain: Prices Collapse for Prostitution Services
August 8th, 2013Via: The Economist:
In part, this reflects the sluggish economy. Overall consumer spending at the end of 2012 was almost 4% lower than its 2007 peak. And Vivienne, an independent escort in the south who works part-time to supplement her income as a photographer, says paying for sex is a luxury: “Food is more important; the mortgage is more important; petrol is more important.” She is offering discounts out of desperation, reckoning it is better to reduce prices by £20 ($30) than to have no customers at all. Another woman says that some punters are just as anxious to talk about the difficult job market as they are to have sex.
The days of being able to make a full-time living out of prostitution are long gone, reckons Vivienne, at least in larger towns and cities. “It’s stupidly competitive right now,” she laments. More people are entering prostitution, agrees Cari Mitchell of the English Collective of Prostitutes. Some working women in Westminster say they have halved their prices because the market has become so saturated. In London, and increasingly elsewhere, immigrants provide strong competition. But Sophie, an expensive escort in Edinburgh, says she is seeing an influx of newbies including students and the recently laid-off, many of them offering more for less.
FUKUSHIMA PLANT LEAKING 300 TONS OF TOXIC WATER INTO SEA DAILY
August 8th, 2013Via: Japan Today:
A Japanese government official on Wednesday said an estimated 300 tons of contaminated water is leaking into the ocean per day from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged on Wednesday to step up government efforts to stem radioactive water leakage.
The ministry official also said the utility would begin pumping out groundwater to reduce leakage and had aimed to be removing 300 tons per day by December, but would end up 60 tons short of that goal. Removing 300 tons of groundwater, however, would not necessarily halt leakage into the sea, he said.
Two-Year-Old Taken from Parents Because They Smoked Pot Is Murdered in Foster Care
August 8th, 2013Via: Alternet:
Two-year-old Alexandria Hill was placed in foster care after her parents were caught smoking marijuana in their home while she slept. Authorities charged them with “neglectful supervision,” and just months away from getting their baby back, the loving parents learned they would never see their young child again. Placed in a foster home to protect her from them, Alexandria was brutally killed.
On Monday night, tiny “Alex,” as her parents called her, was flown to Scott and White Children’s Emergency Hospital in Temple, Texas with severe head injuries.
“They wouldn’t tell me what condition she was in or what was wrong or what had happened,” her father, Joshua Hill, told KVUE-TV. “The only thing they would tell me is I needed to be there. When I got there, I found out that Alex was in a coma.”
Two nights passed, and Alex was taken off life support. Foster mother Sherill Small was arrested and charged with murder.
Efficient Induction of Extrinsic Cell Death by Dandelion Root Extract in Human Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML) Cells
August 8th, 2013Via: PLOS ONE:
Background
Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML) is a heterogeneous disease that is not only hard to diagnose and classify, but is also highly resistant to treatment. Available forms of therapy for this disease have not shown significant effects and patients rapidly develop resistance early on in therapy. These factors lead to the very poor prognosis observed with CMML patients, with median survival duration between 12 and 24 months after diagnosis. This study is therefore centered around evaluating the selective efficacy of a natural extract from dandelion roots, in inducing programmed cell death in aggressive and resistant CMML cell lines.
Methodology/Principal Findings
To confirm the induction of programmed cell death in three human CMML cell lines, nuclear condensation and externalization of the phosphatidylserine, two main characteristics of apoptosis, were detected using Hoechst staining and annexin-V binding assay. The induction of another mode of cell death, autophagy, was determined using a monodansylcadaverine (MDC) stain, to detect the formation of autophagy vacuoles. The results from this study indicate that Dandelion Root Extract (DRE) is able to efficiently and selectively induce apoptosis and autophagy in these cell lines in a dose and time dependent manner, with no significant toxicity on non-cancerous peripheral blood mononuclear cells. More importantly, we observed early activation of initiator caspase-8, which led to mitochondrial destabilization and the induction of autophagy, suggesting that DRE acts through the extrinsic pathway of apoptosis. The inability of DRE to induce apoptosis in dominant-negative FADD cells, confirms the mechanism of action of DRE in in vitro models of CMML.
Conclusion
The results from this study indicate that natural products, in particular Dandelion Root Extract, have great potential, as non-toxic and effective alternatives to conventional modes of chemotherapy available today.
Citation: Ovadje P, Hamm C, Pandey S (2012) Efficient Induction of Extrinsic Cell Death by Dandelion Root Extract in Human Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML) Cells. PLoS ONE 7(2): e30604. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030604
