Cisco and Abuses of Human Rights in China
August 25th, 2011Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation:
What responsibility do corporations have to consider human rights when making business deals? Are companies that build and market equipment for the purpose of surveilling and censoring pro-democracy activists in authoritarian regimes culpable when those activists are imprisoned or tortured? Do companies bear a special responsibility if they customize products to improve the efficacy of tracking dissidents and choking free speech? What if the companies train government agents in using the technology to ferret out activists?
Two cases — one in the United States District Court of Maryland and another in the Northern District of California — are attempting to create legal precedent around these issues of corporate social responsibility. In Du v. Cisco, three named plaintiffs – Chinese citizens Du Daobin, Zhou Yuanzhi, and Liu Xianbin – are joining 10 unnamed “John Doe” plaintiffs in suing the American company Cisco Systems for their role in assisting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in violating human rights. The complaint against Cisco alleges that the plaintiffs in the case:
Have been and are being subjected to grave violations of some of the most universally recognized standards of international law, including prohibitions against torture, cruel, inhuman or other degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest and prolonged detention, and forced labor, for exercising their rights of freedom of speech, association, and assembly, at the hands of the Defendants through Chinese officials.
Britain Will Take in Billions of Pounds from Taxes on Swiss Bank Accounts
August 25th, 2011Via: BBC:
A UK government minister has defended a deal with the Swiss that could capture tax of up to £5bn but keep bank account holders’ identities secret.
Undeclared money held by UK taxpayers in Swiss accounts will be taxed for the first time, at up to 34% of the total.
Treasury minister David Gauke said the deal was historic, with no chance of the Swiss abandoning tax secrecy altogether.
Research Credit: Neo
Cheney Says He Urged Bush to Bomb Syria in ’07
August 25th, 2011Ahh, so that’s who Obombya is channeling…
Via: New York Times:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.
“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
Warren Buffett to Invest $5 Billion in Bank of America
August 25th, 2011Via: Reuters:
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway will invest $5 billion in Bank of America, stepping in to shore up the company in the same way he helped prop up Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis.
Bank of America shares rose 24 percent to $8.65 in early trading, erasing a large part of the stock’s August losses.
…
Bank of America will sell Berkshire 50,000 shares of cumulative perpetual preferred stock with a 6 percent annual dividend, it said in a statement on Thursday. Bank of America can buy back the investment at any time by paying Buffett a 5 percent premium.
British Government Discusses Riots with Social Media Firms
August 25th, 2011Via: CBC:
Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Canadian BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. are meeting the British government and police Thursday in the wake of the riots to discuss how to prevent social networks from being used to plot violence.
Police and politicians claim young criminals used Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry’s simple and largely cost-free messaging service to co-ordinate looting sprees during riots in England this month, and Prime Minister David Cameron has said police and intelligence services are looking at whether there should be limits on the use of social media sites or services like BlackBerry Messenger in times of disorder.
IKEA Founder Ingvar Kamprad Was Nazi Recruiter
August 25th, 2011Via: news.com.au:
IKEA’S founder Ingvar Kamprad is many things. He’s a billionaire. He’s a frugal shopper. And according to a new book, he’s also in denial about his Nazi past.
Author Elisabeth Asbrink says Mr Kamprad was such an enthusiastic supporter of the Swedish Nazi party that he recruited new members and “missed no opportunity to work for the movement”.
She claims the 85-year-old’s youthful ties with Nazi groups extended beyond what he has admitted, saying Sweden’s intelligence agency even set up a file on him.
She says the secret service file, from 1943, proves for the first time that Mr Kamprad was an active member of Svensk Socialistisk Samling, and has called on him to come clean about his past.
Research Credit: db
Kevin Slavin: How Algorithms Shape Our World
August 25th, 2011Via: TED:
Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control.
Gold: Intraday Prints Under $1800
August 24th, 2011Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Spot gold: $1798. That is all…
Update: Initial Pullback Targets Based on Fibonacci Retracements of Recent Ramp Up
Hint: There’s more to that 38.2% level than meets the eye. I’ve left substantial woowoo off this chart, but if you’re looking for a run-and-gun long side play…
Spot Gold, Daily Interval
New York Police Department Runs Intelligence Operations Outside Its Jurisdiction with Help and Personnel from CIA
August 24th, 2011This week in The Land of the Free…
Via: AP:
In New Brunswick, N.J., a building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 one balmy Tuesday and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.
The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.
From that apartment, about an hour outside the department’s jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.
Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, is told exactly what’s going on.
The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.
A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.
And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.
Research Credit: MS
How to Get $12 Billion of Gold to Venezuela
August 24th, 2011I think the more immediate and pressing matter will be: How to Get $12 Billion of Gold in the First Place.
Dear Leader Chavez doesn’t actually believe these banks actually kept all of Venezuela’s gold on hand, does he? He can’t be that stupid. So, I see this as a pretty cunning bit of economic warfare.
Did it force the crooked banks, who did who knows what with the alleged gold on their books, to stand on the bid in the spot market recently to come up with physical metal? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what happened.
I’d say that there’s about a 99% chance that fake bars will be passed to Chavez, so the regime had better be ready for that. They might look to James Turk’s GoldMoney for some ideas on how to proceed. (Note: I have no association with GoldMoney at all.)
On a different note: See the part in bold below that reveals how infuriated the mainstream financial press is with people who insist on holding the physical metal. HAHA.
Via: Reuters:
Ever since the news broke last week that Hugo Chávez wanted to transport 211 tons of physical gold from Europe to Caracas, I’ve been wondering how on earth he possibly intends to do such a thing.
There are 99 tons already being held at the Bank of England; according to the FT, the plan is to transfer other gold to the Bank of England from custodians such as Barclays, HSBC, and Standard Chartered; then, once it’s all in one place, um, well, nobody has a clue what might happen. Here’s the best guess from the FT:
Venezuela would need to transport the gold in several trips, traders said, since the high value of gold means it would be impossible to insure a single aircraft carrying 211 tonnes. It could take about 40 shipments to move the gold back to Caracas, traders estimated.
“It’s going to be quite a task. Logistically, I’m not sure if the central bank realises the magnitude of the task ahead of them,” said one senior gold banker.
I put the ever-resourceful Nick Rizzo on the task, but he came up with little more: the market in physical gold is tiny, and largely comprised of nutcases. The last (and only) known case of this kind of quantity of gold being transported across state lines took place almost exactly 75 years ago, in 1936, when the government of Spain removed 560 tons of gold from Madrid to Moscow as the armies of Francisco Franco approached.
Research Credit: alvinroast
