Judge Orders Life Sentence for Florida Keys Drug Smuggler — Who Worked for the U.S. State Department?
July 29th, 2010Via: Key News:
An admitted drug smuggler who carried millions of dollars in hash oil and marijuana in the keels of sailboats through the Florida Keys will spend the rest of his life in prison, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The life sentence of Juergen Heinz Williams, also known as Juergen Werthmann, was the last chapter in a bizarre trial that harkened back to the days when Keys waters teemed with “square grouper.”
Prosecutors convinced a jury in January that Williams spearheaded a conspiracy to smuggle hash oil from Jamaica into Monroe County, and then north into Canada, where it was distributed.
The same jury acquitted two co-defendants — Morgan Lynch, owner of MD Custom Cycles in Key Largo, and Howard Bornstein, a Key Largo online seafood purveyor.
A September 2009 trial for the three men ended in a hung jury, prompting a retrial that began Jan. 4.
Williams surprised prosecutors when he took the stand in the latter trial and admitted he took part in the conspiracy, even correcting government witnesses who understated the scope of his operation.
Some witnesses testified that there were a total of two or four loads of hash oil, but Williams testified that the true number was closer to seven.
One witness testified that one drug run brought in about $1 million for the conspirators, but Williams said he made closer to $5.5 million in the venture.
Williams also raised eyebrows when he admitted under oath to smuggling drugs, but did so, he testified, while acting as an operative of the U.S. State Department. He later fired his attorney, Joel DeFabio of Coral Gables, for not arguing that point before jurors.
Details of 100 Million Facebook Users Compiled, Distributed Over Bit Torrent
July 29th, 2010Via: MSNBC:
The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.
However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.
The information was posted by Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, on the Internet site Pirate Bay.
Bowes used code to scan the 500 million Facebook profiles for information not hidden by privacy settings. The resulting file, which allows people to perform searches of various different types, has been downloaded by several thousand people.
This means that if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy settings on Facebook, Bowes and those who have the file will still be able to access information that was public when it was compiled.
Bowes’ actions also mean people who had set their privacy settings so their names did not appear in Facebook’s search system can now be found if they were friends with anyone whose name was searchable.
CIA and Google Fund Same Web Surveillance Startup
July 29th, 2010Via: Wired:
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.
Doomers in New Zealand
July 29th, 2010Interestingly, the piece doesn’t mention Transition Towns New Zealand, which would make much more sense to average New Zealanders than wealthy British and American people, like the ones featured in the video. The 2012 woowoo element doesn’t help either. *sigh*
Via: 3news:
Many people believe that a great world catastrophe is going to happen in the year 2012 because of the predictions of the ancient Mayan people.
Others believe we are heading for some sort of environmental meltdown due to peak oil or global warming.
Whatever the reason, plenty of people from the northern hemisphere are flocking to New Zealand to save themselves and plenty of New Zealanders are hunkering down in survival mode for the approaching calamity.
Gulf of Hormuz: Japanese Tanker Damaged
July 28th, 2010Update: Cause Still Unknown
Via: BBC:
An investigation has been launched into the unexplained damage suffered by a Japanese oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz near Oman.
The M Star was damaged on Wednesday while travelling from Qatar to Japan.
Port officials in Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates say the ship was involved in a collision. However, the boat’s owners Mitsui OSK believe their vessel may have been attacked.
Early reports that the ship was struck by a freak wave have been dismissed.
Map
The M Star is currently docked in Fujairah where local officials are inspecting the damage to its hull and its interior, with the help of the British and US navies.
The incident has stirred fears of a terrorist attack in the Strait, the route for 40% of the world’s seaborne oil.
‘Submarine collision’
“What we know is some collision happened. We don’t know what it was,” said Capt Mousa Mourad, a port official in Fujairah.
“It’s possible that it could be a submarine collision, or that it could be a sea mine,” he said.
But Mitsui OSK maintained on Thursday that its oil tanker was probably attacked.
Crew members reported seeing a flash and hearing an explosion during the incident shortly after midnight local time on Wednesday.
“There are some reports saying the tanker was hit by strong waves, but it’s quite unlikely,” said Masahiko Hibino, Mitsui OSK safety management official.
“We have not reached a conclusion, but we still suspect the tanker was hit by a blast.”
At a press conference in Tokyo, Mr Hibino displayed images of the tanker which showed damage to the railings, the loss of a life vessel, a shattered window, and broken furniture and fittings and shattered glass inside a dry cabin.
Pictures of the outside of the vessel, published separately, show an indentation several metres across in the hull, but no obvious burn marks or signs of an explosion.
—End Update—
Take your pick on an explanation at this point.
Monitoring…
Via: Bloomberg:
Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd., operator of the world’s second-largest oil-tanker fleet, said one of its ships may have been attacked near the Strait of Hormuz, deemed by the U.S. to be the most important chokepoint for oil supply.
An explosion, which “may have been caused by an external attack,” occurred at 5:30 a.m. Tokyo time, injuring one of the crew, Mitsui said in a statement. The vessel, M. Star, was on its way to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates to assess the damage and no oil is leaking, Mitsui said. The tanker was damaged by rough seas, the official U.A.E. news agency WAM reported, citing Musa Murad, director of the Port of Fujairah.
Congressional Budget Office: “Growing Budget Deficits Will Cause Debt to Rise to Unsupportable Levels”
July 28th, 2010Via: Congressional Budget Office:
Unless policymakers restrain the growth of spending, increase revenues significantly as a share of GDP, or adopt some combination of those two approaches, growing budget deficits will cause debt to rise to unsupportable levels.
…
Beyond those gradual consequences, a growing level of federal debt would also increase the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would thereby lose its ability to borrow at affordable rates. It is possible that interest rates would rise gradually as investors’ confidence declined, giving legislators advance warning of the worsening situation and sufficient time to make policy choices that could avert a crisis. But as other countries’ experiences show, it is also possible that investors would lose confidence abruptly and interest rates on government debt would rise sharply. The exact point at which such a crisis might occur for the United States is unknown, in part because the ratio of federal debt to GDP is climbing into unfamiliar territory and in part because the risk of a crisis is influenced by a number of other factors, including the government’s long-term budget outlook, its near-term borrowing needs, and the health of the economy.
Be Aware of This Prevalent Corporate Scam in Life Insurance Payout Situations
July 28th, 2010Via: Bloomberg:
Lohman, a public health nurse who helps special-needs children, says she had always believed that her son’s life insurance funds were in a bank insured by the FDIC. That money — like $28 billion in 1 million death-benefit accounts managed by insurers — wasn’t actually sitting in a bank.
It was being held in Prudential’s general corporate account, earning investment income for the insurer. Prudential paid survivors like Lohman 1 percent interest in 2008 on their Alliance Accounts, while it earned a 4.8 percent return on its corporate funds, according to regulatory filings.
Sony Holographic Display
July 28th, 2010Via: Sony:
Next week at Siggraph in LA, Sony will be demonstrating the prototype of a new 360º Autostereoscopic display. The display allows you to view full colour volumetric objects from all angles, as if objects really exist. The display uses special LED light forces and can show 360 unique images to all directions in 1º separations.
Land Of The Free: Never In The Civilized World Have So Many Been Locked Up For So Little
July 28th, 2010And not a word about the profit incentive to lock people up!
America’s Private Gulag is over a decade old, but worth reading if you’re new to the concept of the prison industrial complex:
To be profitable, private prison firms must ensure that prisons are not only built but also filled. Industry experts say a 90-95 per cent capacity rate is needed to guarantee the hefty rates of return needed to lure investors. Prudential Securities issued a wildly bullish report on CCA a few years ago but cautioned, “It takes time to bring inmate population levels up to where they cover costs. Low occupancy is a drag on profits.” Still, said the report, company earnings would be strong if CCA succeeded in ramp(ing) up population levels in its new facilities at an acceptable rate”.
“(There is a) basic philosophical problem when you begin turning over administration of prisons to people who have an interest in keeping people locked up” notes Jenni Gainsborough of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
Private prison companies have also begun to push, even if discreetly, for the type of get-tough policies needed to ensure their continued growth. All the major firms in the field have hired big-time lobbyists. When it was seeking a contract to run a halfway house in New York City, Esmor hired a onetime aide to State Representative Edolphus Towns to lobby on its behalf. The aide succeeded in winning the contract and also the vote of his former boss, who had been an opponent of the project. In 1995, Wackenhut Chairman Tim Cole testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge support for amendments to the Violent Crime Control Act — which subsequently passed — that authorized the expenditure of $10 billion to construct and repair state prisons.
CCA has been especially adept at expansion via political payoffs. The first prison the company managed was the Silverdale Workhouse in Hamilton County, Tennessee. After commissioner Bob Long voted to accept CCA’s bid for the project, the company awarded Long’s pest control firm a lucrative contract. When Long decided the time was right to quit public life, CCA hired him to lobby on its behalf. CCA has been a major financial supporter of Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor and failed presidential candidate. In one of a number of sweetheart deals, Lamar’s wife, Honey Alexander, made more than $130,000 on a $5,000 investment in CCA. Tennessee Governor Ned McWherter is another CCA stockholder and is quoted in the company’s 1995 annual report as saying that “the federal government would be well served to privatize all of their corrections.”
In another ominous development, the revolving door between the public and private sector has led to the type of company boards that are typical of those found in the military-industrial complex. CCA co-founders were T. Don Hutto, an ex-corrections commissioner in Virginia, and Tom Beasley, a former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. A top company official is Michael Quinlan, once director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The board of Wackenhut is graced by a former Marine Corps commander, two retired Air Force generals and a former under secretary of the Air Force, as well as James Thompson, ex-governer of Illinois, Stuart Gerson, a former assistant US attorney general and Richard Staley, who previously worked with the INS.
More recently, Pennsylvania judges took bribes to send children to privately owned juvenile detention centers.
Books:
Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration by Tara Herival and Paul Wright
Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime by Joel Dyer
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Via: The Economist:
Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.
The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.
In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100.
US-Canada Pipeline Leaks Oil Into Michigan River
July 28th, 2010Via: BBC:
A pipeline carrying oil from the US state of Indiana to Ontario, Canada has spilled more than 800,000 gallons (3m litres) of oil into a creek which flows into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.
A spokesman for the firm running the pipeline, Enbridge Energy Partners, said a malfunction had caused the leak.
The spill has killed fish and endangered wildlife in the region.
Officials said the pumps which feed the pipeline had been shut down as soon as the leak was discovered.
The 30-inch (76cm) pipeline carries 8m gallons of oil per day between the towns of Griffith, in Indiana, and Sarnia, in Ontario.
The pipeline, called the Lakehead System, is one of the largest in the world.
A pungent odour now hangs over the Kalamazoo River valley, local media report.
The oil originally spilled into the Talmadge Creek in Calhoun County, Michigan, north-west of the Kalamazoo River.
