Author of Blog About the Sunny Sheu Case Claims Assault by Undercover Police Officer
July 1st, 2011Via: The Murder of Sunny Sheu:
Today, June 29th, I spoke with a reporter from BI for two hours and then left for his office to give him some information I did not want to discuss on the phone.
Outside I noticed a silver van with nobody in it illegally parked across the street from my building. Sunny had been surveilled by a silver van in the days before his murder, so to be cautious I photographed the plates.
The NY plates are number DMC 9287. Then I noticed that there was Police parking plate in the window, showing that the cop was from the 81rst precinct, which is in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
As I was taking the pictures a guy in a Yankees cap approached me and asked “you got a problem?”. I said,”The van is parked illegally” ,and he replied “well, talk to the cop over there” I looked in the direction he was pointing and asked “who’s the cop?”. To my surprise he said “your fucking mother!” I said “what?” and he repeated “your fucking mother”.
I realized this was the cop from the van. I asked “who are you?” and raised my phone to take a picture. The guy lunged at me and grabbed me by the neck, throwing me against the building. “You take a fucking picture of me and I’ll fucking crush your face” he said. A woman and some kids were walking by and I yelled “call the police” The guy yelled mockingly “yeah call the police”, to let me know that they would not interfere with their own.
As I walked away, he yelled, “you take a fucking picture of me and I’ll fucking kill you!”. I was able to get the info of a witness. To my surprise, he did not steal or smash my camera. I do not think he realized that I got clear pictures of his plates and a blurred picture of him.
Related: Was Sunny Sheu, Foe of Judicial Corruption, Murdered?
Research Credit: Pookie
Where Will You Go When the Sovereign Debt Volcano Blows?
July 1st, 2011Via: Daily Bell:
I do not have a crystal ball or inside political information on a specific imminent threat, only the observation that the sovereign debt crisis from Europe, a debt ceiling misstep from the clowns in Washington or a Middle East event could suddenly trigger the collapse. Actually any major political or economic shock could bring the Madoff style Ponzi scheme, which Greenspan and Bernanke have created, down almost overnight on top of us.
This will likely happen over a weekend and the following Monday morning you could wake up to Presidential Executive Orders “means testing” you out of Social Security benefits if you still have substantial retirement benefits or personal savings. You’ll likely discover an end to your home interest deductions, new confiscatory taxes and restrictions on US gold and silver, controls on moving private wealth and funds to safety offshore and dramatic hikes in taxes and cuts in government programs. In addition, spiking inflation rates, violence and massive protests will immediately follow these confiscatory actions and cutbacks. You can also expect severe banking and stock market liquidity restrictions, or closures, and this will only be the beginning. In short your wealth will be trapped in dollars and locked up for the duration of the emergency inside the American jurisdiction.
Therefore if you haven’t already prepared for this type of crisis contingency ahead of time, I’m telling you there will be little you can do after the fact. Washington will simply take and throw your wealth and promised benefits at the problem thus buying them more time with your wealth.
Fannie Mae Silence on Taylor Bean Opened Way to $3 Billion Fraud
July 1st, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
The first sign of what would ultimately become a $3 billion fraud surfaced Jan. 11, 2000, when Fannie Mae executive Samuel Smith discovered Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. sold him a loan owned by someone else.
Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise which issues almost half of all mortgage-backed securities, determined over the next two years that more than 200 loans acquired from Taylor Bean were bogus, non-performing or lacked critical components such as mortgage insurance.
That might have been the end of Taylor Bean and its chairman and principal owner, Lee Farkas. He was sentenced today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to 30 years in prison for orchestrating what prosecutors call one of the “largest bank fraud schemes in this country’s history.”
Instead, it was just the beginning.
Research Credit: RJ
Euthanasia Coaster
July 1st, 2011Via: Science Gallery:
Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness and eventually death.
Research Credit: EB
Case Against Strauss-Kahn Collapsing
July 1st, 2011Update: Accuser Worded as a Hooker
Via: New York Post:
Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser wasn’t just a girl working at a hotel — she was a working girl.
The Sofitel housekeeper who claims the former IMF boss sexually assaulted her in his room was doing double duty as a prostitute, collecting cash on the side from male guests, The Post has learned.
—End Update—
Via: New York Times:
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.
Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.
Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said.
Senior prosecutors met with lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn on Thursday and provided details about their findings, and the parties are discussing whether to dismiss the felony charges. Among the discoveries, one of the officials said, are issues involving the asylum application of the 32-year-old housekeeper, who is Guinean, and possible links to people involved in criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.
Hopey/Changey: Obama Awards Defense Chief Gates Medal of Freedom
July 1st, 2011Via: Reuters:
President Barack Obama awarded retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a farewell ceremony on Thursday morning.
“A humble American patriot; a man of common sense and decency; quite simply, one of our nation’s finest public servants,” Obama said of Gates.
Obama spoke at a departure ceremony outside the Pentagon. Leon Panetta has been named Gates’ successor as Defense Secretary.
Gates was originally appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and retained by Obama, making him the only defense secretary in history to be asked to remain in office by a newly elected president, according to the Department of Defense.
Flashback: The ‘Most Severely Wounded’ American Soldier
IBM: Phase Change Memory
June 30th, 2011Via: PC World:
Solid-state flash memory is widely used as a storage medium in tons of consumer devices, from cell phones to laptops like the MacBook Air. While it has big advantages over hard drives in terms of speed and a lack of moving parts, it has a limited lifespan. Now IBM researchers say they’ve crafted a way of encoding data that works better than flash—and has a greatly increased lifespan.
The discovery is called phase-change memory (PCM), and where flash memory can typically be overwritten only 3,000 to 10,000 times, PCM can endure in the order of 10 million write-erase cycles. On top of that, its read-write performance is said to be up to 100 times that of today’s flash storage.
…
It’s going to be a while before the technology is commercialized—IBM estimates about five years.
DOJ Criminal Investigation Into Deaths That Resulted from CIA Torture
June 30th, 2011Via: MSNBC / AP:
Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday he has authorized a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two terror detainees who died overseas while the CIA was involved in interrogating them.
During the Bush administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey asked a federal prosecutor in Connecticut to look into the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations. In 2009, Holder asked the prosecutor to broaden his inquiry to look into allegations that CIA personnel had mistreated detainees.
Holder said Thursday that the prosecutor, John Durham of Connecticut, looked into the interrogation of a total of 101 detainees who were in U.S. custody overseas after the 9/11 attacks. Durham recommended conducting a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two of them, and Holder has now concurred.
Judge: Google Can Be Sued for Wiretapping in Street View Debacle
June 30th, 2011Via: Wired:
A federal judge has found that Google can be held liable for damages for secretly intercepting data on open Wi-Fi routers. The ruling is a serious legal setback for the search giant over activity it has engaged in across the United States for years.
That decision, the first of its kind, was handed down late Wednesday by a Silicon Valley federal judge presiding over nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The vehicles, which rolled through neighborhoods across the country, were equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But the cars also secretly gathered snippets of Americans’ data.
Facebook: 10th Most Hated Company in America
June 30th, 2011
Dvorak is right: Facebook is a sort of AOL.
Via: Business Insider:
#10 Facebook
A common complaint includes user’s privacy and personal information protection. Social networkers worry about privacy and sometimes complain when Facebook introduces new features, like the news feed. Or when Facebook shuts down apps without warning users beforehand, like they did recently to tens of thousands of apps.
