Moscow: Hundreds Arrested
May 10th, 2012Via: Moscow Times:
As Moscow gears up to celebrate its victory in World War II, 67 years ago Wednesday, the shadow of political conflict shrouds the capital as hundreds of arrests cloud Victory Day festivities. ??
Police said over 200 arrests were made Tuesday and overnight Wednesday on the eve of the anniversary, including repeat detentions for Left-Front leader Sergei Udaltsov and anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who was arrested twice in a single evening, Interfax reported. Socialite Kseniya Sobchack and State Duma Deputy Dmitry Gudkov were also among those arrested during the protests against President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration, though they were later released.
Fed Clears China’s First U.S. Bank Takeover
May 10th, 2012Via: AFP:
The United States on Wednesday opened its banking market to ICBC, China’s biggest bank, for the first time clearing a takeover of a US bank by a Chinese state-controlled company.
Just days after high-level US-China economic talks in Beijing, the Federal Reserve approved an application from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to buy a majority stake in the US subsidiary of Bank of East Asia.
The transaction will make ICBC the first Chinese state-controlled bank to acquire retail bank branches in the United States.
ICBC has been the most aggressive of China’s “big four” banks in expanding overseas.
According to the Fed the bank has total assets of roughly $2.5 trillion.
It will buy up to 80 percent of the US unit of the Hong Kong-based Bank of East Asia, which operates 13 branches in New York and California.
Queen Unveils Draft Internet Super-Snoop Bill
May 9th, 2012Via: Register:
The Queen has detailed the government’s upcoming programme of law-making on a grey day darkened by the gloom of a double-dip recession and plans to massively increase surveillance of the internet in the UK.
Opening the new session of Parliament, Her Majesty confirmed on Wednesday that “draft clauses” would be introduced to allow MPs to scrutinise Home Secretary Theresa May’s Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) – the controversial project to allow security services in Blighty to monitor the population online.
U.S. Air Force Can ‘Accidentally’ Spy On American Citizens for 90 Days
May 9th, 2012Via: Wired:
As long as the Air Force pinky-swears it didn’t mean to, its drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. And it can hold data on them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon are actually legitimate targets of domestic surveillance.
The Air Force, like the rest of the military and the CIA, isn’t supposed to conduct “nonconsensual surveillance” on Americans domestically, according to an Apr. 23 instruction from the flying service. But should the drones taking off over American soil accidentally keep their cameras rolling and their sensors engaged, well … that’s a different story.
“Collected imagery may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent,” reads the instruction (.pdf), unearthed by the secrecy scholar Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. That kind of “incidental” spying won’t be immediately purged, however. The Air Force has “a period not to exceed 90 days” to get rid of it — while it determines “whether that information may be collected under the provisions” of a Pentagon directive that authorizes limited domestic spying.
In other words, if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place.
Disclosure: Long DBA
May 9th, 2012WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Update 23 May: Out DBA
I have no position in DBA.
—End Update—
I took PowerShares DB Agriculture (symbol: DBA) long just now.
Gareth Williams: Voluntary DNA Screening of MI6 Personnel to Find Killer?
May 9th, 2012Voluntary? What’s the point of making the screening voluntary? Maybe the killer will have a few too many pints and think, “I better go get my DNA screening so they can figure out it’s me.”
Also, wouldn’t the SIS have DNA records of all personnel? In a DNA database crazed nuthouse like Britain, it seems like a safe assumption. Maybe not.
Via: Telegraph:
MI6 agents could be asked to volunteer DNA as part of a renewed bid to discover how Gareth Williams died, the head of the Metropolitan Police confirmed yesterday.
Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said the force was considering a mass screening programme among the spy’s colleagues at the Secret Intelligence Service.
But he stressed that without an official suspect in the case, they could not compel anyone to take part in a DNA screening programme.
Last week the coroner at Mr Williams’ inquest said the 31-year-old, whose naked, decomposing remains were found in a locked sports holdall, had probably been killed unlawfully by a mystery third party.
Dr Fiona Wilcox also raised the prospect that another spy may have been involved in his death, remarking that it was a “legitimate line of inquiry” for police.
Asked if he expected MI6 personnel to co-operate in the investigation, Mr Hogan-Howe said: “It’s called the law.”
Federal Inmate Keith Judd Receiving Sizable Percent of Vote in West Virginia Democratic Primary
May 9th, 2012Via: ABC News:
Barack Obama was not the only Democrat on the ballot on Tuesday in West Virginia’s Democratic Presidential Primary. Keith Judd — also known as Inmate No. 11593-051 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas — was running against him.
Judd, who is serving out a 17.5 year sentence for extortion, currently has received 40 percent of the vote, with 83 percent of precincts reporting, according to The Associated Press. Obama currently has received 60 percent of the vote.
Lehman E-Mails
May 9th, 2012Via: Bloomberg:
If one wants to understand the full complicity of Wall Street in the Great Recession, look no further than the voluminous package of pre-collapse Lehman Brothers documents that have been made available by the law firm Jenner & Block LLP, which has acted as the coroner in the Lehman post-mortem.
Most important, the cache dispels the myth that Dick Fuld, chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and his close associates were unaware of the risks their business faced in 2007 and 2008. That would be bad enough, but the more devastating reality is that Fuld and his sycophants were warned repeatedly but were blinded by their hubris.
The records confirm, yet again, that the “forces-out-of- our-control” argument we hear from Wall Street leaders is bunk. It is the ill-advised behavior of one banker after another, day in and day out, that leads to the sort of devastating financial crisis we are only now emerging from.
For instance, at a Lehman board meeting in September 2007, according to a copy of the presentation in the data cache, Lehman executives presented a clear summary of the brewing crisis. “The initial tremors were felt at the end of 2006,” the board was told, “when the poor loan performance of sub- prime borrowers began to be a cause for concern in the marketplace. This was evidenced by a gradual spread widening in the asset backed index.” The presentation continued: “The market continued to widen as it became apparent that the performance problems in mortgage loans was not going to abate and was no longer limited to the sub-prime market but also affecting the Alt-A product.”
Google’s Self-Driving Car Licensed to Hit Nevada Streets
May 9th, 2012Via: PC World:
Google’s self-driving car is growing up right in front of our eyes: The fledgling autonomous vehicle program recently passed its driver’s license test in Nevada, the first license of its kind in the United States. Obtaining Nevada’s self-driving car license clears the way for Google to test its technology on public roads in the state.
Google’s modified Toyota Prius was given the thumbs up after successful test drives in Carson City and on the Las Vegas strip. Alongside the special license, Nevada also issued the car a unique set of red license plates that include the infinity symbol and the words “autonomous car.” With any luck, those plates should differentiate all the other vehicles on the road from Google’s car, which has cameras and radar equipment strapped to the roof.
‘CIA Unraveled Bomb Plot from Within’
May 9th, 2012Mmm hmm.
Via: Washington Post:
The latest al-Qaeda bomb plot targeting U.S. aircraft was unraveled from inside the terrorist group by operatives — including a double agent — working on behalf of the CIA and its counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, said U.S. and Middle Eastern officials.
The Saudi intelligence service played a particularly important role in penetrating al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and recovering the explosive device, according to officials, who described an elaborate espionage operation in which the CIA tracked the bomb’s movements for weeks and then killed suspected plotters in a drone strike after the device was seized.
Senior U.S. officials continued to withhold certain details, including the location and status of the individual — described by officials as a Saudi informant — who penetrated the terrorist group posing as a willing suicide bomber and then turned over the device to authorities after leaving Yemen.
But comments by White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan and others made it clear that the involvement of the CIA and its partners went well beyond simply watching the plot unfold.
“We’re confident that neither the device nor the intended user of this device posed a threat to us,” Brennan said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program. “We had the device in our control, and we were confident that it was not going to pose a threat to the American public.”
The bomb arrived at an FBI laboratory in Quantico about a week ago and is being examined by explosives technicians, law enforcement officials said. One said the explosive was made from a chemical compound that was “built to get around U.S. security and had the potential to do that.”
