Rotten to the Core: Barclays Paying $453 Million to Settle Libor Probe
June 28th, 2012Via: Reuters:
U.K. bank Barclays will pay $453 million to U.S. and British authorities to settle allegations that it manipulated key interest rates, increasing pressure on other banks to cooperate in a probe that could cost the financial industry billions of dollars.
The settlement raises fresh questions about the reliability of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, which underpins some $360 trillion of loans and financial contracts.
The attempted manipulation, which according to authorities took place from 2005 through 2009, meant that millions of borrowers paid too little or too much interest on their debt.
The U.S. government implicated senior executives at Barclays in its settlement. It cited reams of emails that showed how the bank sought to move Libor rates to profit on trades and to hide its high borrowing costs during the financial crisis.
Barclays Chief Executive Bob Diamond acknowledged on Wednesday that the settlement would damage customer trust in the bank. He said he and other senior executives would forgo their bonuses this year. Much of the improper trading and manipulation occurred under the watch of Diamond, a fixed-income trader who replaced John Varley as CEO in 2011.
Libor underlies everything from derivatives trades to U.S. consumer credit card rates to loans as far afield as those financing Turkish phone networks. Barclays also tried to manipulate Euribor, a separately managed series of euro-denominated rates.
Related: Why the Global Political Class Lies in Fear of the LIBOR Scandal [Thanks, HPLovecraft666]
Mutated Pests Are Quickly Adapting to Biotech Crops
June 28th, 2012Via: io9:
Genetically modified crops are often designed to repel hungry insects. By having toxins built into the plant itself, farmers can reduce their use of environmentally unfriendly insecticide sprays. But as any first-year evolutionary biology student can tell you, insects are like the Borg in Star Trek: they quickly adapt. And this is precisely what is happening – but in ways that have startled the researchers themselves.
The discovery is a wakeup call to geneticists because it has highlighted the importance of having to closely monitor and counter pest resistance to biotech crops. The development also raises the question of the potential futility of having to change the genetic structure of crops in perpetuity; given that insects are constantly evolving, to what degree will geneticists have to go to ensure crop immunity to pests? And what does that say to the ongoing safety of such crops as far as human consumption is concerned?
Top CIA Spy Accused of Being a Mafia Hitman
June 27th, 2012Via: Wired:
Enrique “Ricky” Prado’s resume reads like the ultimate CIA officer: veteran of the Central American wars, running the CIA’s operations in Korea, a top spy in America’s espionage programs against China, and deputy to counter-terrorist chief Cofer Black — and then a stint at Blackwater. But he’s also alleged to have started out a career as a hitman for a notorious Miami mobster, and kept working for the mob even after joining the CIA. Finally, he went on to serve as the head of the CIA’s secret assassination squad against Al-Qaida.
That’s according to journalist Evan Wright’s blockbuster story How to Get Away With Murder in America, distributed by Byliner. In it, Wright — who authored Generation Kill, the seminal story of the Iraq invasion — compiles lengthy, years-long investigations by state and federal police into a sector of Miami’s criminal underworld that ended nowhere, were sidelined by higher-ups, or cut short by light sentences. It tracks the history of Prado’s alleged Miami patron and notorious cocaine trafficker, Alberto San Pedro, and suspicions that Prado moved a secret death squad from the CIA to Blackwater.
“In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole — an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests — to penetrate command,” Wright writes.
Related: Blackwater Worldwide Changes Its Name to Xe; Same Mercenaries, but Now with More “Aviation Support”
Research Credit: druff
Google Tries Something Retro: Made in the U.S.A.
June 27th, 2012I initially thought that this was just a PR stunt, and that the bulk of the components were manufactured in China and then shipped back to the U.S. for assembly. My maximally cynical guess turned out to be wrong. A lot of it is actually made in the U.S.
Via: New York Times:
Google’s Q links a TV or home sound system to the Internet cloud in order to play video and audio content downloaded from the Internet. The engineers who led the effort to build the device, which is based on the same microprocessor that is found in Android smartphones, and which contains seven printed circuit boards, said they had been able to almost completely source components from manufacturers in the United States.
Google was able to find a company to make the metal base in the Midwest and another supplier for the molded plastic components like the case in Southern California. Semiconductor chips are more of a challenge. In some cases, the chips are made in the United States, but then shipped to Asia to be packaged with other electronic components.
Longtime CIA Case Officer and Chief Propagandist in Hollywood Claims JFK Was Shot from the Front, and ‘That There Was a Craft from Beyond This World that Crashed at Roswell’
June 27th, 2012In this Coast to Coast interview, longtime CIA employee, Chase Brandon, establishes limited hangouts for conspiracies related to the JFK assassination and the Roswell incident.
In case you don’t know what a limited hangout is, this definition is from Wikipedia:
A limited hangout, or partial hangout, is a public relations or propaganda technique that involves the release of previously hidden information in order to prevent a greater exposure of more important details. It takes the form of deception, misdirection, or coverup often associated with intelligence agencies involving a release or “mea culpa” type of confession of only part of a set of previously hidden sensitive information, that establishes credibility for the one releasing the information who by the very act of confession appears to be “coming clean” and acting with integrity; but in actuality, by withholding key facts, is protecting a deeper operation and those who could be exposed if the whole truth came out. In effect, if an array of offenses or misdeeds is suspected, this confession admits to a lesser offense while covering up the greater ones.
Got that? If not, read it again before continuing.
I subjected myself to the entire Coast to Coast interview, which mostly consisted of hours of boilerplate Agency bullshit, interrupted by commercial breaks. I’m highly confident that most Cryptogon readers won’t learn anything new about JFK or Roswell. But… As propaganda, this offers a valuable lesson, which is that the Agency rolled out this dinosaur because, I’m guessing, facts related to either the JFK or Roswell imbroglios (or both) are threatening to come out.
That Chase Brandon supposedly saw a box of relics from Roswell in the CIA museum, that had been stored amongst detritus found in old desks and file cabinets, etc. is some of the happiest horse shit I’ve ever heard in my life. And, Mr. Brandon, a professional liar (read about what case officers do) assures us, that anything left over is lost in a government warehouse, like in, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Same deal with JFK. The End.
In other words, yes, an alien spacecraft crashed out there New Mexico, but it and the dead aliens just got boxed up and then lost in the shuffle with the dull pencils and scraps of old paper as the CIA remodeled. Don’t worry, in the age of the Internet, there are no secrets anymore.
Now, move along, nothing to see here.
Via: Silver Screen Saucers:
Chase Brandon, a thirty-five year veteran of the CIA, will tonight appear as a guest on Coast to Coast AM with John B. Wells. Many listeners will no doubt be unfamiliar with Brandon and his career with the CIA, but his name has passed my lips literally thousands of times over the past several years.
Brandon spent twenty-five years in the Agency’s elite Clandestine Service as an undercover, covert operations officer. His foreign assignments involved international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics trafficking and weapons smuggling. He was also an Agency foreign political affairs analyst, Presidential briefer to Bill Clinton and an instructor in paramilitary and espionage tactics at multiple secret CIA training camps.
Brandon is perhaps best known as the CIA’s former Entertainment Liaison Officer – a position that required him to establish working relationships with many of the biggest names in Hollywood and to provide advice to filmmakers on matters of “accuracy and authenticity” with regard to the CIA’s image onscreen. He was – though he prefers to phrase it more sympathetically – the CIA’s chief frontline propagandist in Hollywood. He advised on countless films and TV series – often uncredited – quietly shaping scripts, characters and concepts.
Pilger on ‘Insidious Propaganda’
June 27th, 2012Via: John Pilger:
Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20th century. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as best they could.
Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the “collection room” and, unofficially, as the “room of horrors”. It has shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses. During its invasion of Vietnam, the United States sprayed a defoliant herbicide on vegetation and villages to deny “cover to the enemy”. This was Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, poisons of such power that they cause foetal death, miscarriage, chromosomal damage and cancer.
In 1970, a US Senate report revealed that “the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children”. The code-name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand. Today, an estimated 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children.
Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society, recently returned from Vietnam with a letter for the International Olympic Committee from the Vietnam Women’s Union. The union’s president, Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa, described “the severe congenital deformities [caused by Agent Orange] from generation to generation”. She asked the IOC to reconsider its decision to accept sponsorship of the London Olympics from the Dow Chemical Corporation, which was one of the companies that manufactured the poison and has refused to compensate its victims.
Aldis hand-delivered the letter to the office of Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee. He has had no reply. When Amnesty International pointed out that in 2001 Dow Chemical acquired “the company responsible for the Bhopal gas leak [in India in 1984] which killed 7,000 to 10,000 people immediately and 15,000 in the following twenty years”, David Cameron described Dow as a “reputable company”. Cheers, then, as the TV cameras pan across the £7 million decorative wrap that sheathes the Olympic stadium: the product of a 10-year “deal” between the IOC and such a reputable destroyer.
History is buried with the dead and deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal. And history is the new enemy. On 28 May, President Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society. It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey, “one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history”.
Research Credit: noncompliant
America Sets a New Record for Old Cars
June 27th, 2012Via: CNBC:
Feel like you’re driving an old car? You’re not alone. In fact, the average age of vehicles in the U.S. has hit a new all-time high. Experian Automotive says the average age of the 245 million vehicles registered in the U.S. in the first quarter of this year was 11 years.
That’s an increase of just over 2 months compared the first quarter of last year.
What’s behind the increase? Part of it is because the recession and sluggish recovery forced many people to put off buying or trading-in for a new or used car. Another factor is the fact cars and trucks are built to run longer. That quality improvement picked up momentum in the early ’90s. Now, many of those cars and trucks are 13 to 22 years old, and yes there are millions of them still on the road.
Bank Scam ‘Operation High Roller’ Incorporates Attack for Two-Factor Authentication
June 27th, 2012Via: SC Magazine:
Many banks utilise a two-factor authentication (2FA) system that combines something you know with something you have. Solutions banks use range from clumsy card reader devices to SMS/text messaging, each with their own merits and pitfalls. These systems aim to prove that you are who you say you are, and not to prove that you are doing what you mean to do.
With the High Roller attack, the bad guy gets around 2FA systems by getting the user to enter the valid 2FA information/one-time password (OTP) into their browser. The malware is then able to give this information to the fraudster to use in an attack either directly from the user’s machine, or from a remote server – all while showing the user a fake page. Once the fraudster has a valid and unused OTP they can then use it to process their own fraudulent transaction as if they were the legitimate user.
Stockton to File for Bankruptcy, Will be Largest U.S. City to Fail
June 27th, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times:
This Gold Rush-era port city, an epicenter of California’s agricultural exports, will become the nation’s largest city to seek protection under the U.S. bankruptcy code after its City Council on Tuesday stopped bond payments, slashed employee health and retirement benefits and adopted a day-to-day survival budget.
City Manager Bob Deis likened the process to cutting off an arm to save the body. He is expected to file bankruptcy papers immediately.
Infographic: Nukes Ready to Fly
June 27th, 2012Via: National Post:
This graphic attempts to look at the number of immediately available nuclear weapons in the world; weapons that could at a very short notice — because that is the point — be used in a war. Taking the latest data available from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists we have constructed a graph of instantly available launch devices — missiles with nuclear warheads installed and ready to fly or drop.
