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Broadway Bank was among seven Illinois banks whose failure was announced on Friday. U.S. regulators have seized 15 banks in the past two weeks, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp ratchets up efforts to clean up the bank industry. Regulators have closed 57 banks this year.

Amcore Bank (AMFI.O) was the largest to close on Friday, with $3.8 billion in assets and $3.4 billion in total deposits as of Dec. 31, 2009, the FDIC said. It will be purchased by Harris National Association, a part of Canada’s BMO Financial Group.

Broadway Bank, a community bank with $1.2 billion in assets, had been limping along for months under the weight of bad commercial real estate loans.

The bank is owned by the family of Alexi Giannoulias, the first-term Illinois state treasurer who is in a tight race for Obama’s previous post to be decided in the November election.

The FDIC said MB Financial (MBFI.O) is assuming the deposits of Broadway Bank.

Obama backed Giannoulias, a banking scion, for treasurer, and the two have played basketball together, with Giannoulias having played professionally. He highlighted his banking experience in running for the post.

Republicans have condemned Giannoulias’ role in the bank’s soured real estate portfolio, including loans to such figures as convicted prostitution ring operator Michael “Jaws” Giorango. Loans were also made to convicted influence peddler Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who also was a fund-raiser for Obama.

Giannoulias has said his father was not alive to say how Giorango and Rezko became the bank’s customers. The elder Giannoulias died in 2006.

But it is these loans, says DePaul University political science professor Michael Mezey, that could hurt Giannoulias even more than the failure of the bank.

“They’ve (the Giannoulias campaign) been talking about it (the bank) and claiming it would fail. … It’s not news at this point,” he said. “The thing that may be more damaging than the closing is the loans to people of questionable character.”

Some 9 percent of $240 million in nonperforming assets at the bank originated while Giannoulias was a senior loan officer and vice president from 2002 to 2006, the bank has said.

Broadway Bank, founded 30 years ago, was recently ordered by government regulators to raise additional capital — after Giannoulias received his share of $70 million in proceeds following his father’s death.

The bank had been ordered to raise $75 million by April, but Giannoulias said he could contribute less than $1 million to try to save the bank, according to press reports.

The bank’s failure gives further ammunition to Giannoulias’ Republican opponent, five-term congressman Mark Kirk.

“While years of risky lending schemes, hot money investments and loans to organized crime led to today’s failure, it’s a sad day for Broadway Bank employees who may lose their jobs due to Mr. Giannoulias’ reckless business practices,” Kirk campaign spokesperson Kirsten Kukowski said in an email statement.

Giannoulias has characterized Broadway Bank’s troubles as similar to those of other community banks hurt by the harshest recession in decades.

His links to the failed bank comes at a time when the Illinois Democratic party is already in disarray.

The Illinois legislature impeached and removed Democrat Rod Blagojevich during his second term as governor in January 2009, after he was charged with racketeering, fraud, and lying to investigators — including an accusation he tried to sell Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Scott Cohen, a pawnbroker-turned-politician who won the Democratic nod to run for lieutenant governor in the state’s February primary election, relinquished the nomination following embarrassing disclosures about his relationships with women.

In addition to Broadway and Amcore, the FDIC said five other Illinois banks failed on Friday. They are: New Century Bank, Citizens Bank&Trust Co, Wheatland Bank, Peotone Bank and Trust Company and Lincoln Park Savings Bank.

American college students are hooked on cellphones, social media and the Internet and showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Maryland who asked 200 students to give up all media for one full day found that after 24 hours many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links.

Susan Moeller, the study’s project director and a journalism professor at the university, said many students wrote about how they hated losing their media connections, which some equated to going without friends and family.

“I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening,” said one student. “Between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin.”

Moeller said students complained most about their need to use text messages, instant messages, e-mail and Facebook.

“Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.”

Few students reported watching TV news or reading a newspaper.

The American Psychiatric Association does not recognize so-called Internet addiction as a disorder.

The SEC’s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

The staffers’ behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.

It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:

– A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

– An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “Sex” or “Pornography.” Yet he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.

The group has designed what it claims is the largest, most detailed, and realistic computer model of the lives of about 100 million Americans, using enormous amounts of publicly available demographic data. The model’s makers hope the simulation will shed light on the effects of human comings and goings, such as how a contagion spreads, a fad grows, or traffic flows. In the next six months, the researchers expect to be able to simulate the movement of all 300 million residents of the United States.

As many as 163 variables, mostly drawn from the U.S. Census, come into play for each synthetic American. Called EpiSimdemics, the model almost perfectly matches the demographic attributes of groups with at least 1500 people, according to Keith Bisset, a senior research associate who works on the simulation’s software. The software generates fake people to populate real communities and assigns each person characteristics such as age, education level, and occupation to mirror local statistics derived from the most recent national census. In accordance with the data, some individuals are clustered into families, while others live alone.

Every synthetic household is assigned a real street address, based on land-use information from Navteq, a digital-mapping company. Using data from a business directory, each employed individual is matched to a specific job within a reasonable commute from the person’s home. Similarly, actual schools, supermarkets, and shopping centers identified through Navteq’s database are also linked to households based on their proximity to the home. When an artificial American goes grocery shopping, the simulation algorithm assigns probabilities that he or she will visit one store over another, adding an element of unpredictability to a person’s daily schedule.

Though the simulation is not restricted to the study of contagious diseases, a major application so far has been modeling how a flu epidemic might propagate through different regions. To accomplish this, each person has an embedded model of how he or she might respond to the flu, with probabilities derived from epidemiological data and the person’s age and general health.

Now imagine that a few of those model citizens become infected with the flu. Discerning the impact of millions of unique behaviors on infectious disease patterns involves performing many millions of tiny but intertwined calculations. As the sample population grows, those calculations quickly become a hefty computing task. ”The lack of symmetry and regularity makes these types of problems very different from traditional physics problems that require large computing power,” says Stephen Eubank, the physicist on the project.”We have to address all kinds of scaling issues with the very irregular communication patterns in the model.”

To break up the problem into computable chunks, the software treats each person and each location as a separate set of calculations. In a flu experiment, the algorithm starts with a person in a given health state. If the person is recently infected, his or her health will steadily deteriorate over the course of a day. The victim may begin to show symptoms, and at a certain time the person will become contagious. The algorithm stores a record of each person’s health state as it was at each of the locations he or she visited throughout the day.

Once they have been compiled, those health records are dispatched to the modules of code representing the locations visited by each person. The algorithm checks all the interactions among people who were at a location at the same time and determines the number of new infections that arose from the day’s encounters. After those calculations are finished, the location module sends the updated infection data back to the modules representing each person. Each person and each location is calculated on a unique processing element so that many parts of the algorithm can be computed in parallel on a supercomputer. ”This brute-force computation changes qualitatively how we think about the problem,” says Christopher Barrett, who works on the project and is the director of Virginia Tech’s Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory.

For a recent experiment on flu transmission over three months in the Chicago area, for example, the researchers ran 10 iterations of the simulation in 30 minutes each on a cluster of three dozen machines. By virtue of organizing the problem into people and location entities, they were able to speed up the software substantially; using the algorithms available five years ago, a single simulation on comparable machines would have taken up to six hours.

The lawsuit demands the Vatican release the names of thousands of Catholic priests that the suit says have “credible allegations of sexual misconduct” against them.

The alleged victim, who is now an adult, says he was molested by Father Lawrence Murphy while a student at St. John’s School for the Deaf, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“The defendant, [the] Holy See, has known about the widespread problem of childhood sexual abuse committed by its clergy for centuries, but has covered up that abuse and thereby perpetuated the abuse,” the suit says.

Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, declined to comment on the case.

Pope Benedict XVI was named as a defendant because he has the ultimate authority to remove priests and because of his involvement in reviewing sex abuse cases when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the suit says.

I try to keep an open mind, but my brain is just boggled by the Buckets for the Cure partnership between KFC and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

“Help make the largest single donation to end breast cancer forever,” the campaign urges. The suggestion is that KFC will donate money — its goal is $8.5 million — to the charity at a rate of 50 cents for every special pink bucket of chicken sold over the next month.

But bear in mind that the “F” in KFC stands for “fried.” Here’s a line from the National Cancer Institute’s Web site:

“. . .studies have shown that an increased risk of developing colorectal, pancreatic, and breast cancer is associated with high intakes of well-done, fried, or barbequed meats.”

Beyond that, since obesity raises breast cancer risk, it’s worth looking at some numbers: According to the KFC Web site, an original-recipe fried chicken breast has 320 calories, 15 grams of total fat (including 3.5 grams of saturated fat); a thigh has 220 calories, 15 grams of total fat (4 of them saturated).

Facebook spent $41,390 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2010. That’s on top of the $207,878 it spent last year — the first year Facebook began releasing such disclosures. Although these numbers are tiny compared to the $4.3 million Google spent on lobbying last year, expect them to grow with the company’s influence and ambitions.

What’s interesting about Facebook’s lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President — for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.

Andrew Noyes, the company’s manager of public policy communications, says most of Facebook’s work in D.C. consists of basic education — helping legislators and agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work. The U.S. Navy used Facebook to alert Hawaiians of a possible tsunami from the Chilean earthquake earlier this year, while the company says 35 government agencies are using social media for governance.

He said the meetings with intelligence agencies were similar. “We disclose this because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. (To be fair, Google and Microsoft also lobbied the Department of Defense last year although they did not reach out to intelligence agencies.)

At the very top of Facebook’s agenda in D.C. is privacy, he said. There’s much at stake. The ease of data collection and sharing on the web is on a collision course with privacy. The suite of projects the company unveiled yesterday at its f8 conference in San Francisco may spark further privacy concerns about the mass of data it will now be tracking on users as they traverse the web. To head off concerns that it is too cavalier with pushing users to be more public, Facebook made a savvy move when it brought longtime privacy advocate Tim Sparapani from the American Civil Liberties Union on-board last year.

Neither of these women knew about the other. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders — more than any other health insurance company in the United States.

The women paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, neither had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.

They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.

Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. WellPoint declined to comment on the women’s specific cases without a signed waiver from them, citing privacy laws.

That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as “rescission,” for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.

…

In his push for the health care bill, President Barack Obama said the legislation would end such industry practices.

But many critics worry the new law will not lead to an end of these practices. Some state and federal regulators — as well as investigators, congressional staffers and academic experts — say the health care legislation lacks teeth, at least in terms of enforcement or regulatory powers to either stop or even substantially reduce rescission.