Iran Claims Siemens Planted Bombs in Parts Meant for Nuclear Program
September 23rd, 2012Via: AP:
Iran on Saturday accused the German technology company Siemens of planting tiny explosives inside equipment Iran bought for its disputed nuclear program, a charge Siemens denied.
Aladdin Boroujerdi, a prominent lawmaker, said Iranian security experts discovered the explosives and removed them before detonation. The authorities believe that the booby-trapped equipment was sold to derail uranium enrichment efforts, he said.
Siemens said its nuclear division had had no business with Iran since the 1979 revolution.
Any sale of nuclear equipment to Iran is banned under United Nations sanctions, raising the possibility that if the country indeed has some, it was acquired through third parties.
Mr. Boroujerdi did not say when or how Iran had obtained Siemens equipment. Despite a wide array of international sanctions, Germany remains one of Iran’s most important trading partners.
Facebook Wants You To Snitch on Friends Using Pseudonyms
September 22nd, 2012Via: Paul Bernal’s Blog:
A story about Facebook went around twitter last night that provoked quite a reaction in privacy advocates like me: Facebook, it seems, is experimenting with getting people to ‘snitch’ on any of their friends who don’t use their real names. Take a look at this…
Wall Street Rolling Back Another Key Piece of Financial Reform
September 22nd, 2012Via: Rolling Stone:
Wall Street lobbyists are awesome. I’m beginning to develop a begrudging respect not just for their body of work as a whole, but also for their sense of humor. They always go right to the edge of outrageous, and then wittily take one baby-step beyond it. And they did so again last night, with the passage of a new House bill (HR 2827), which rolls back a portion of Dodd-Frank designed to protect cities and towns from the next Jefferson County disaster.
Jefferson County, Alabama was the most famous case – the city of Birmingham went bankrupt after being bribed and goaded into taking on billions of dollars of toxic swap deals – but in fact it was just one of hundreds of similar examples of localities being duped into suicidal financial deals by rapacious banks and financial companies. The Denver school system, for instance, got clobbered when it opted for an exotic swap deal pushed by J.P. Morgan Chase (the same villain in Jefferson County, incidentally) and then-school superintendent/future U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, that ended up costing the school system tens of millions of dollars. As was the case in Jefferson County, the only way out of the deal involved a massive termination fee that might have been even more destructive than the deal itself.
To deal with this problem, the Dodd-Frank Act among other things included a simple reform. It required the financial advisors of municipalities to do two things: register with the SEC, and accept a fiduciary duty to respect the best interests of the taxpayers they are advising.
Sounds simple, right? But Wall Street couldn’t have that. After all, if companies are required to have a fiduciary responsibility to cities and towns, how in the world can they screw cities and towns? The idea was a veritable axe-blow to the banks’ municipal advisory businesses.
So what did Wall Street lobbyists and trade groups like SIFMA (the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) do? Well, they did what they’ve been doing to Dodd-Frank generally: they Swiss-cheesed the law with a string of exemptions. The industry proposal that ended up being HR 2827 created several new loopholes for purveyors of swaps and other such financial products to cities and towns.
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
Scientists Warn That GM Wheat Could Cause Extremely Dangerous Gene Silencing Effects in Humans
September 21st, 2012Via: Safe Food Foundation:
Expert scientists warn that genetically modified wheat may cause Glycogen Storage Disease IV, resulting in an enlarged liver, cirrhosis of the liver, and failure to thrive. Children born with this disease usually die at about the age of 5.
Australia is on track to be the first country in the world to grow GM wheat commercially, and to test this in human feeding trials.
Today in Melbourne molecular biologist and risk assessment researcher Professor Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury, NZ, and Associate Professor Judy Carman, a biochemist at Flinders University, will release expert scientific opinions on the safety of CSIRO’s GM wheat. These opinions have been reviewed by Dr Michael Antoniou, reader in molecular genetics at King’s College, London.
Italy Upholds Convictions of 23 CIA Operatives in Absentia
September 21st, 2012Via: AFP:
Italy’s highest court confirmed the guilty verdicts Wednesday of 23 CIA agents tried in absentia for the 2003 abduction of Egyptian imam Osama Mustafa Hassan in Milan. The United States has already refused to extradite the agents.
Italy’s top court Wednesday confirmed guilty verdicts against 23 CIA agents for the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian imam in Milan and ordered a re-trial for five Italian ex-spies accused of taking part.
The CIA agents were all being tried in absentia in one of the world’s biggest court cases against the US “extraordinary rendition” programme to interrogate alleged Islamist militants after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The 23 CIA agents were originally sentenced in November 2009 to five to eight years in prison and in December 2010 had their sentences increased to seven to nine years on appeal and ordered to pay damages to the imam.
Italy’s justice ministry is now obliged to make a formal request for the extradition of the agents, legal sources said, but the United States has already refused.
All the agents remain at liberty but risk arrest if they travel to Europe.
Working Qubit in Silicon
September 21st, 2012Via: Register:
The University of New South Wales’ School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications has created what it says is the world’s first working qubit based on a single atom.
Detailed in a new Nature paper, A single-atom electron spin qubit in silicon, the qubit relies on the ability to impart “spin” to an electron bound to a single phosphorus atom, then read that spin.
…
The team now hopes to assemble two working qubits into a logic gate, the next logical step towards building a quantum computer. Morello said building such a device won’t require step into the unknown, but will take a year or two to accomplish.
Mainstream Medicine and Corporate Media Admit: Pot Compound Has, ‘Ability to Turn Off the Activity of a Gene Responsible for Metastasis in Breast and Other Types of Cancers’
September 21st, 2012Warning: No information that appears on Cryptogon should be considered medical advice.
But what they won’t admit is that lots of people are already effectively treating themselves with concentrated hemp oil:
Dennis Hill Talks About Curing His Stage IV Prostate Cancer with Cannabis Oil
Cured Too, A Cancer Story By David Triplett
More at phoenixtears.ca and the Rick Simpson Facebook page is VERY active.
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
A growing body of early research shows a compound found in marijuana – one that does not produce the plant’s psychotropic high – seems to have the ability to “turn off” the activity of a gene responsible for metastasis in breast and other types of cancers.
Two scientists at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute first released data five years ago that showed how this compound – called cannabidiol – reduced the aggressiveness of human breast cancer cells in the lab.
Last year, they published a small study that showed it had a similar effect on mice. Now, the researchers are on the cusp of releasing data, also on animals, that expands upon these results, and hope to move forward as soon as possible with human clinical trials.
“The preclinical trial data is very strong, and there’s no toxicity. There’s really a lot of research to move ahead with and to get people excited,” said Sean McAllister, who along with scientist Pierre Desprez, has been studying the active molecules in marijuana – called cannabinoids – as potent inhibitors of metastatic disease for the past decade.
Multibillion-Dollar Fines Won’t Change Behavior of Criminal Pharmaceutical Companies
September 21st, 2012“The pharmaceutical industry is the most lucrative, the most cynical and the least ethical of all the industries. It is like an octopus with tentacles that has infiltrated all the decision making bodies, world health organisations, governments, parliaments, high administrations in health and hospitals and the medical profession. It has done this with the connivance, and occasionally the corruption of the medical profession. I am not just talking about medicines but the whole of medicine. It is the pharmaceutical industry that now outlines the entire medical landscape in our country.”
Via: Independent:
The global pharmaceutical industry has racked up fines of more than $11bn in the past three years for criminal wrongdoing, including withholding safety data and promoting drugs for use beyond their licensed conditions.
In all, 26 companies, including eight of the 10 top players in the global industry, have been found to be acting dishonestly. The scale of the wrongdoing, revealed for the first time, has undermined public and professional trust in the industry and is holding back clinical progress, according to two papers published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine. Leading lawyers have warned that the multibillion-dollar fines are not enough to change the industry’s behaviour.
The 26 firms are under “corporate integrity agreements”, which are imposed in the US when healthcare wrongdoing is detected, and place the companies on notice for good behaviour for up to five years.
The largest fine of $3bn, imposed on the UK-based company GlaxoSmith-Kline in July after it admitted three counts of criminal behaviour in the US courts, was the largest ever. But GSK is not alone – nine other companies have had fines imposed, ranging from $420m on Novartis to $2.3bn on Pfizer since 2009, totalling over $11bn.
Kevin Outterson, a lawyer at Boston University, says that despite the eye watering size of the fines they amount to a small proportion of the companies’ total revenues and may be regarded as a “cost of doing business”. The $3bn fine on GSK represents 10.8 per cent of its revenue while the $1.5bn fine imposed on Abbott Laboratories, for promoting a drug (Depakote) with inadequate evidence of its effectiveness, amounted to 12 per cent.
Mr Outterson said: “Companies might well view such fines as a quite small percentage of their global revenue. If so, little has been done to change the system. The government merely recoups a portion of the financial fruit of firms’ past misdeeds.”
He argues that penalties should be imposed on executives rather than the company as whole. He cites a Boston whistleblower attorney, Robert Thomas who observed that GSK had committed a $1bn crime and “no individual has been held responsible”.
Research Credit: ms
OPEC Countries Pouring Billions of Dollars Into Solar Power… To Export More Oil And Gas
September 21st, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal:
Middle Eastern members of OPEC are finally diversifying their energy base, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into harnessing that other resource they feature in vast quantities: sunshine.
But it isn’t what you think. The Saudis, Abu Dhabi and Iran aren’t racing to burnish their green credentials by reducing their carbon footprints. They are investing in solar-power production mainly for one reason: to help them export even more oil and gas.
For More And More Companies, The Hiring Boss Is An Algorithm
September 21st, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal:
When looking for workers to staff its call centers, Xerox Corp. used to pay lots of attention to applicants who had done the job before. Then, a computer program told the printer and outsourcing company that experience doesn’t matter.
The software said that what does matter in a good call-center worker—one who won’t quit before the company recoups its $5,000 investment in training—is personality. Data show that creative types tend to stick around for the necessary six months. Inquisitive people often don’t.
“Some of the assumptions we had weren’t valid,” said Connie Harvey, Xerox’s chief operating officer of commercial services.
After a half-year trial that cut attrition by a fifth, Xerox now leaves all hiring for its 48,700 call-center jobs to software that asks applicants to choose between statements like: “I ask more questions than most people do” and “People tend to trust what I say.”
For more and more companies, the hiring boss is an algorithm.
Research Credit: rs
