Shell Claimed it Inserted Staff Into Main Ministries of Nigerian Government
December 9th, 2010Standard operating procedure.
Via: Guardian:
The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians’ every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.
The company’s top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew “everything that was being done in those ministries”. She boasted that the Nigerian government had “forgotten” about the extent of Shell’s infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.
The cache of secret dispatches from Washington’s embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.
Steve Wozniak: ‘We’ve Lost a Lot of Control’
December 8th, 2010Via: CNN:
The world has mostly caught on to Steve Wozniak’s vision of having a computer in every home. But this digital lifestyle can sometimes turn rotten, he said last week.
Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed, programmed and built some of the world’s first personal computers, laments the byproducts of a culture that’s always connected to electronics.
Leading a tour through an exhibit of computer artifacts — including giant supercomputers and Atari game systems — that opens next month at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Wozniak paused to criticize the stranglehold technology has on our lives.
“We’re dependent on it,” he said at the museum, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of vintage computers and sits about six blocks from Google’s headquarters. “And eventually, we are going to have it doing every task we can in the world, so we can sit back and relax.”
Wozniak’s musings have undertones of science-fiction, drawing parallels between the internet and robots bent on taking over humanity.
“All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,” he said. “We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers.”
“You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God,” he quipped.
Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.
“Little things that work one day; they don’t work the next day,” he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. “I think it’s much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have … is going to work tomorrow.”
Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.
“There is no solution,” Wozniak said of tech troubles. “Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things,” he said with a smile.
Update: Steve Wozniak Is a Mason
Research Credit: SP
Saudi Arabia: U.S. TV Effective for Countering Jihad
December 8th, 2010In summary, the U.S. military is aware that “American Culture” is a strategic weapon that is capable of defeating an enemy, or entire populations, without necessarily having to kill them. The U.S. military, however, must and will kill in order to allow “American Culture” into a society in order to repurpose it. Military failures will result from failing to thrust, “that bayonet into an enemy’s heart.”
—The American Culture Bomb: Satire from the Onion and a Long Forgotten U.S. Army War College Essay
Via: Guardian:
Satellite broadcasts of the US TV shows Desperate Housewives and Late Show With David Letterman are doing more to persuade Saudi youth to reject violent jihad than hundreds of millions of dollars of US government propaganda, informants have told the American embassy in Jeddah.
Broadcast uncensored and with Arabic subtitles alongside sitcoms such as Friends on Saudi Arabia’s MBC 4 channel, the shows are being allowed as part of the kingdom’s “war of ideas” against extremist elements. According to a secret cable titled “David Letterman: Agent of Influence”, they have been proving more effective than Washington’s main propaganda tool, the US-funded al-Hurra TV news channel.
Al-Hurra has shown lengthy interviews with US politicians, including George Bush, but has run into problems with locally hired journalists. On one occasion it broadcast a call to arms against Israel by Hezbollah, which was not the plan when the channel was launched across the Middle East in 2004 after the Iraq invasion.
Diplomats said they believed the allure of actors such as Eva Longoria, Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer meant commercial TV had a far greater impact than al-Hurra which, according to one report, has cost US taxpayers up to $500m (£316m).
“It’s still all about the war of ideas here, and the American programming on MBC and Rotana [a channel part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation] is winning over ordinary Saudis in a way that al-Hurra and other US propaganda never could,” two Saudi media executives told a US official in a meeting at a Jeddah branch of Starbucks. “Saudis are now very interested in the outside world and everybody wants to study in the US if they can. They are fascinated by US culture in a way they never were before,” the May 2009 cable says.
North Carolina: Police Will Take Fingerprints from People in the Field
December 8th, 2010Here’s a glimpse at the future of the U.S.: Army Reveals Afghan Biometric ID Plan; Millions Scanned, Carded.
And here’s what the opening phase looks like.
Via: McClatchy:
Next month, 13 law enforcement agencies in the region will begin using a new handheld device that lets an officer scan a person’s fingerprints and seek a match in an electronic database – all without going anywhere.
Police say taking fingerprints in the field will allow them to work more efficiently and safely. But the ACLU North Carolina in Raleigh worries that the device may allow officers to violate privacy rights.
The ACLU is concerned about what will become of fingerprint scans that are sent to other databases, such as the National Crime Information Center.
“Part of the danger is the idea of the government creating a database on its citizens,” said Sarah Preston, policy director for ACLU North Carolina. “Citizens should be allowed some degree of privacy.”
Food Stamp Rolls Continue to Rise
December 8th, 2010Via: Wall Street Journal:
More people tapped food stamps to pay for groceries in September as the recession and lackluster recovery have prompted more Americans to turn to government safety net programs to make ends meet.
Some 42.9 million people collected food stamps last month, up 1.2% from the prior month and 16.2% higher than the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Nationwide 14% of the population relied on food stamps as of September but in some states the percentage was much higher. In Washington, D.C., Mississippi and Tennessee – the states with the largest share of citizens receiving benefits – more than a fifth of the population in each was collecting food stamps.
Tax Appeals Swamp U.S. Cities, Towns as Property Prices Plunge
December 8th, 2010Via: Reuters:
A fiscal flood that threatens to swamp local government budgets across the U.S. overflows from file cabinets in the office of Patty Halm, chair of the Michigan Tax Tribunal.
The backlog of cases from taxpayers seeking to lower property-tax bills of more than $100,000 shot up to 14,236 this year from an annual average of about 6,000 during the past decade. The backlog of smaller claims was at 28,558 at the end of September, eight times higher than a decade ago, according to records at the tribunal, a Lansing-based administrative court.
From Los Angeles to Atlantic City, the New Jersey gambling resort that had its credit rating lowered three levels by Moody’s Investors Service last month, property owners are filing protests to lower their taxes after real-estate values plunged. The disputes over billions in taxes come as municipalities are already cutting services such as police protection and may depress revenue further as communities try to recover from the longest recession since the 1930s. In Michigan, Governor-elect Rick Snyder has warned that hundreds of towns face financial crises.
“We’re just getting swamped,” said Halm, 54, who was appointed in 2003. “We’re constantly buying new file cabinets to hold all the cases. We even have six surplus file cabinets in the courtroom.”
Haiti Cholera: UN Peacekeepers to Blame
December 8th, 2010Wow. I actually didn’t think much of a cholera outbreak in Haiti. Thousands of people, packed close together in camps without proper sanitation—it’s not much of a stretch to think that cholera could result.
Weirdly, though, my dad was cryptically trying to tell me something about cholera on the phone a few weeks ago, but knowing that the call was under surveillance, he just said to be on the lookout for news about cholera, but that he couldn’t go into details, “If you know what I mean,” he said, which means that it was related to something he overheard at work.
My dad works in a capacity that could be described as the equivalent of a janitor at a five star hotel. He’s not a janitor at a five star hotel, but, sometimes, he might find himself a few feet from billionaires, as he earns his $10 per hour, or whatever pittance he makes, and he hears weird things that the elite talk about (most of which he never mentions to me at all, because he rightly assumes that I’ll just blab about it on here).
And then…
Via: BBC:
UN peacekeepers were the most likely source of the cholera epidemic sweeping Haiti, according to a leaked report by a French disease expert.
Epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux conducted research in Haiti on behalf of the French and Haitian governments.
Sources who saw the report said it had evidence the outbreak was caused by river contamination by Nepalese troops.
The UN said it had neither accepted nor dismissed the findings. The Nepalese army condemned the study as unfounded.
The cholera epidemic has killed 2120 people, and nearly 100,000 cases have been treated, according to the Haitian government.
The report by Mr Piarroux found that the source of the outbreak was a Nepalese peacekeeping base, whose toilets contaminated the Artibonite river, according to a copy seen by the Associated Press news agency.
The river was the main focus of the outbreak when it began in October, but cholera has since spread throughout the country.
The UN mission in Haiti, Minustah, said there was “no conclusive evidence” that UN peacekeepers were the source of the epidemic.
Minustah said the report by the French expert was “one report among many,” but it was taking it “very seriously”.
A spokesman for the Nepalese army told the French news agency AFP the report’s conclusion was “hypothetical”.
“We strongly condemn the making of such allegations with no firm evidence or facts,” said Raminda Chhetri, speaking in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu.
Many Haitians have blamed the Nepalese peacekeepers for bringing cholera to the country, and there have been violent demonstrations against them.
Imported strain
The strain of cholera had already been matched to one from South Asia, although it is present in other Latin American countries.
In an interview last week, Mr Piarroux said it was clear cholera had been introduced to Haiti, which had not seen an outbreak of the disease for more than a century.
“It started in the centre of the country, not by the sea, nor in the refugee camps. The epidemic can’t be of local origin. That’s to say, it was imported,” he told the French news agency, AFP.
UN peacekeepers have been in Haiti since 2004 to help restore political stability after years of unrest.
They have also been helping relief efforts following last January’s massive earthquake, which killed about 230,000 people.
Unverified: Swiss Bank Finally Handed Over Client’s Physical Gold After a Month Delay and Legal Threats
December 8th, 2010WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Update: More Similar Anecdotes
—End Update—
According to the story, which cannot be verified, and is mentioned here for entertainment purposes only, the client kept a ton of gold in an unnamed Swiss bank.
In terms of dumb moves, that would get a 10/10, with 10 being the dumbest of all possible moves, in my opinion.
Keep your metal yourself, or with a private vault and never, ever, in a bank; never with an organization involved with credit, leverage, borrowing, lending, swindling, etc.
Via: GATA:
Interviewed by King World News, market analyst and scholar Jim Rickards of Omnis Inc. says he knows of a gold investor who recently had to struggle for a month with a Swiss bank to arrange return of his gold — not a futures contract receipt but real gold that had been put on deposit at the bank. Only the gold owner’s threat to restore to legal action and the news media pried the gold loose, Rickards says. He concludes that the bank didn’t have the gold it should have had and that this shorting is endemic to the Western banking system. He advises gold investors to use “private non-bank storage” for their gold to get it outside the banking system and expects that at some point governments may seek to freeze gold in the banking system.
Research Credit: P
Rogers: U.S. Government Inflation Data Is a ‘Sham’
December 8th, 2010Via: Reuters:
U.S. government inflation data is “a sham” and is causing the Federal Reserve to vastly understate price pressures in the economy, influential U.S. investor Jim Rogers said on Tuesday.
The U.S. central bank uses inflation data that relies too heavily on housing prices, Rogers told the Reuters 2011 Investment Outlook Summit, and he criticized the Fed’s $600 billion bond-buying program.
Rogers, who rose to prominence after co-founding the now defunct Quantum Fund with billionaire investor George Soros some four decades ago, said he was betting against U.S. Treasuries. “I expect interest rates in the U.S. to go much, much, much higher over the next few years,” he said.
The core personal consumption expenditure index, which removes food and energy costs, is the Fed’s favored measure of inflation and was flat in October for the second straight month.
“Everybody in this room knows prices are going up for everything,” Rogers told the Reuters Summit.
The Fed began its $600 billion bond buying program last month, its second round of quantitative easing, to boost a sluggish U.S. economy, citing excessively low inflation and high unemployment.
Bank of America to Pay $137 Million in State Fraud Cases
December 8th, 2010Bum change.
Via: Washington Post:
Bank of America will pay $137.3 million to settle allegations that it defrauded schools, hospitals and dozens of other state and local government organizations, federal officials said Tuesday. The settlement stems from a long-running investigation into misconduct in the municipal bond business that raises money for localities to pay for public services.
Bank of America is accused of depriving local organizations of millions of dollars by engaging in illegal behavior when investing the proceeds of municipal bond sales.
The bank is paying $107.8 million to these organizations in restitution, $25 million to the Internal Revenue Service for abuses related to the tax-free status of municipal bonds and $4.5 million to state attorneys general for costs related to their investigations.
