Mubarak’s ‘Security’ Forces Drive Through Crowd
February 3rd, 2011Looters Included Undercover Egyptian Police, Hospitals Tell Human Rights Watch
February 3rd, 2011Via: Washington Post:
Human Rights Watch confirmed several cases of undercover police loyal to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime committing acts of violence and looting in an attempt to stoke fear of instability as demonstrations grew stronger Tuesday against the autocratic leader.
Peter Bouckaert, the emergency director at Human Rights Watch, said hospitals confirmed that they received several wounded looters shot by the army carrying police identification cards. They also found several cases of looters and vandals in Cairo and Alexandria with police identification cards. He added that it was “unexplainable” that thousands of prisoners escaped from prisons over the weekend.
Cairo Mêlée: Pro and Anti Regime Protestors Clash
February 2nd, 2011Live Video Feeds from Cairo:
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Fighting erupts in Tahrir Square as anti-government demonstrators and supporters of President Hosni Mubarak throw rocks and brandish clubs. The clashes follow a call by the Egyptian military for protesters to go home.
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code
February 2nd, 2011Via: Wired:
As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”
Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. “At the time, I had no intention of cracking the tickets,” he says. He was just curious about the algorithm that produced the numbers. Walking back from the gas station with the chips and coffee he’d bought with his winnings, he turned the problem over in his mind. By the time he reached the office, he was confident that he knew how the software might work, how it could precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random.
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Furthermore, the Massachusetts lottery has a history of dispensing large payouts to suspected criminals, at least in one Mass Millions game. In 1991, James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he’s thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed—and three others cashed in a winning lottery ticket worth $14.3 million. He collected more than $350,000 before his indictment.
At the time, authorities thought Bulger was using the lottery to launder money: take illicit profits, buy a share in a winning lottery ticket, redeem it, and end up with clean cash. In this respect, the lottery system seems purpose-built for organized crime, says Michael Plichta, unit chief of the FBI’s organized crime section. “When I was working in Puerto Rico, I watched all these criminals use traditional lottery games to clean their money,” he remembers. “You’d bring these drug guys in, and you’d ask them where their income came from, how they could afford their mansion even though they didn’t have a job, and they’d produce all these winning lottery tickets. That’s when I began to realize that they were using the games to launder cash.”
The problem for the criminals, of course, is that unless cracked, most lotteries return only about 53 cents on the dollar, which means that they’d be forfeiting a significant share of their earnings. But what if criminals aren’t playing the lottery straight? What if they have a method that, like Srivastava’s frequency-of-occurrence trick, can dramatically increase the odds of winning? As Srivastava notes, if organized crime had a system that could identify winning tickets more than 65 percent of the time, then the state-run lottery could be turned into a profitable form of money laundering. “You’ve got to realize that, for people in organized crime, making piles of money is one of their biggest problems,” says Charles Johnston, a supervisory special agent in the organized crime section of the FBI. “If they could find a way to safely launder money without taking too big a loss, then I can guarantee you they’d start doing it in a heartbeat.” There is no direct evidence that criminals are actually using these government-run gambling games to hide their crimes. But the circumstantial evidence, as noted by the FBI, is certainly troubling.
And then there’s Joan Ginther, who has won more than $1 million from the Texas Lottery on four different occasions. She bought two of the winners from the same store in Bishop, Texas. What’s strangest of all, perhaps, is that three of Ginther’s wins came from scratch tickets with baited hooks and not from Mega Millions or Powerball. Last June, Ginther won $10 million from a $50 ticket, which is the largest scratch prize ever awarded by the Texas Lottery.
Perhaps Ginther is simply the luckiest person on earth. (She has refused almost all requests from journalists for comment.) While the lotteries are extremely rigorous about various aspects of security, from the integrity of the latex to the cashing of tickets at stores, the industry appears to have not considered the possibility of plundering the games using the visible numbers on the ticket. For instance, when I contacted the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, their security experts couldn’t recall having heard of Mohan Srivastava or the broken Ontario games. This is one of the largest trade associations of lotteries in the world, and it had no recollection that at least a few of its games had been proven to be fatally flawed.
Digital Darkness: U.S., U.K. Companies Help Egyptian Regime Shut Down Telecommunications and Identify Dissidents
February 2nd, 2011Via: Democracy Now:
Doing the regime’s bidding, British-based Vodafone shut down Egypt’s phone and internet service. The American company called Narus — owned by Boeing — sold Egypt the surveillance technology that helped identify dissident voices. We are joined by Tim Karr of Free Press and CUNY Professor C.W. Anderson. Karr outlines how communications was shut down in Egypt and discusses the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, a proposed Senate bill that could lay the foundation for blocking communications in the United States in the case of a “national threat.”
Research Credit: Matt
Fed Passes China in Treasury Holdings
February 2nd, 2011Via: Financial Times:
The Federal Reserve has surpassed China as the leading holder of US Treasury securities even though it has yet to reach the halfway mark in its latest round of quantitative easing, according to official figures.
Based on weekly data released on Thursday, the New York Fed’s holdings of Treasuries in its System Open Market Account, known as Soma, total $1,108bn, made up of bills, notes, bonds and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or Tips.
According to the most recent US Treasury data on foreign holders of US government paper, China holds $896bn and Japan owns $877bn.
Australia’s Cyclone Yasi May Destroy Even ‘Cyclone Proof’ Homes
February 2nd, 2011Via: Reuters:
Australia’s Cyclone Yasi, with winds of up to 300 km (186 miles) per hour, is so powerful it could blow apart even “cyclone proof” houses, engineers said on Wednesday.
Yasi is headed for major towns and cities along the northeast coast. It is believed to be the strongest ever to hit Australia, surpassing Cyclone Tracy which largely destroyed the northern city of Darwin in 1974.
“Once you get to extreme cases, you are in uncharted ground and the test data I have got I would not trust it if I had to live there myself,” said Dr Robert Leicester, a researcher with the government’s national scientific research body.
Leicester, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, has studied the impact of Australia’s two previous worst cyclones, Tracy and Cyclone Larry in 2006.
“Of the cyclones up to now since Tracy, you have not really had a direct hit on places with a lot of housing,” he said.
Building standards have been tightened significantly since Tracy killed 71 people and destroyed about 70 percent of the northern city of Darwin.
But they may be no match for cyclones the size of Yasi. Standards are already being reviewed because of worries that cyclones are getting stronger and moving further south.
Rumsfeld to Receive ‘Defender of the Constitution Award’
February 1st, 2011Via: Raw Story:
Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will be honored with the “Defender of the Constitution Award” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual event attended by numerous conservative activists, journalists, and politicians.
Similar Absurdity: Obama Awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
Air Force’s Second X-37B Space Plane Nears Launch
February 1st, 2011Via: Space Flight Now:
Two months after a sister ship successfully concluded a demo flight, the U.S. military’s second robotic X-37B space plane is in Florida preparing for blastoff March 4 on another secret mission, according to an Air Force official.
The 29-foot-long, 14-foot-wide space plane is being readied for flight in a processing facility near its launch site at Cape Canaveral, Fla., according to Lt. Col. Troy Giese, the X-37B program manager in the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.
Australia Evacuates Coastal Cities in Path of Big Cyclone
February 1st, 2011Via: Reuters:
Australia evacuated thousands of people from its northeast coast on Tuesday as a cyclone rivalling Hurricane Katrina bore down on tourism towns and rural communities, with officials saying it could even threaten areas deep inland that were ruined by floods last month.
Mines, rail lines and coal ports were closed in Queensland state as Cyclone Yasi headed towards the coastline. Up to a third of Australia’s sugar crop was also under threat, officials said.
“This storm is huge and life threatening,” Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said, warning the system was still intensifying and picking up speed on its path from the Coral Sea, with destructive winds expected on Wednesday morning.
Cyclone Yasi is expected to generate winds of up to 280 kph (175 mph) when it hits the northern coast of tropical Queensland state early on Thursday, matching the strength of Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.
