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The National Whistleblowers Center, representing former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld as he fights the government over his role in helping a billionaire evade taxes, filed a complaint with the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, seeking an internal investigation and correction of the court’s records related to the case.

The complaint comes a day after a U.S. judge upheld Birkenfeld’s 40-month prison sentence, set to begin on Friday. Although U.S. officials credit Birkenfeld for a key role in exposing wrongdoing at UBS, they prosecuted him because they say he refused to provide vital information about his own role.

Birkenfeld, a U.S. citizen, went to the U.S. government in 2007 with details of tax evasion practices at the Swiss bank. The U.S. government later won changes to the bank’s practices, a $780 million settlement and the promise of the names of thousands of suspected tax cheats.

Prosecutors contend that Birkenfeld was unwilling to give details of work he personally did for his client, California billionaire named Igor Olenicoff, who eventually was indicted and pled guilty for tax evasion.

The whistleblower’s group says that Justice Department attorneys were not speaking the truth when they said Birkenfeld refused to cooperate. They say the DOJ is at fault for not providing a subpoena sought by Birkenfeld, so he would be protected under Swiss law.

“While Mr. Birkenfeld did not disclose Olenicoff’s identity at his initial meeting with the Justice Department in June 2007, he refused only because he was still a resident of Switzerland, and could not disclose Mr. Olenicoff without violating Swiss law,” the group’s lawyers wrote in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Mary Patrice Brown, acting counsel of DOJ’s office of professional responsibility.

A U.S. Justice Department spokesman was not available for comment.

Birkenfeld pleaded guilty to a single fraud conspiracy count in June 2008, when he acknowledged helping his largest U.S. client hide assets.

No other UBS banker has received jail time in connection with the case.

The case is USA v. Birkenfeld et al, U.S. District Court Southern District of Florida, No. 08-cr-60099.

Paula Sladewski and her boyfriend flew into South Florida to spend New Year’s Eve at a Lady Gaga concert at Miami Beach’s posh Fontainebleau.

But the holiday trip would end in a horrific tragedy.

At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door. The man and woman were there to salvage what had not been destroyed.

He worked quickly, never uttering a word. A bag was opened and eyed, and if it held something of promise, was tossed at the feet of the woman. She said her name was Pepa.

Were the clothes usually cut up before they were thrown out?

“A veces,” she said in Spanish. Sometimes.

She packed up a few items that had escaped the blade — a bright green T-shirt that said “Summer of Surf,” and a dark-blue hoodie in size 12, with a Divided label. The rest was returned to the pyramid.

It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.

A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block.

Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.

They were found by Cynthia Magnus, who attends classes at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Fifth Avenue and noticed the piles of discarded clothing as she walked to the subway station in Herald Square. She was aghast at the waste, and dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping that someone would be willing to take on the job of patching the clothes and making them wearable.

A TSA agent was arrested on January 3rd in Terminal One at LAX, a source told NBCLA. He had just gotten off duty and was behaving erratically, saying, “I am god, I’m in charge.”

Meanwhile, a TSA Internal Affairs investigation turned up evidence of LAX TSA agents using drugs at an after-hours party.

TSA officials say a videotape of the party was of poor quality and the employees were not in uniform, but 4 employees were tentatively identified.

Thousands of homes have been left without power, schools have closed and travellers have faced chaos as the weather hit roads, rail services and airports over the last two days. The disruption is estimated to have cost businesses around £700 million.

Councils continued to struggle with a growing salt emergency as police warned drivers in many areas not to travel unless their journey was essential.

The AA expect to have attended 20,000 breakdowns today – compared with about 9,000 for a normal Thursday – and warned that conditions were expected to remain “treacherous”.

Now, the creation by Welsh scientists of the first robot in the world to make an independent scientific discovery has been named the fourth most significant discovery of 2009 by one of the world’s most influential magazines.

Adam, a computer that fully automates the scientific process, discovered in April how a baker’s yeast converts food like sugar into the amino acid lysine to produce the protein in bread.

The robot then devised experiments to test its predictions, ran experiments using laboratory robotics and interpreted the results, before repeating the cycle.

Adam was designed by Professor Ross King and colleagues at the Department of Computer Science at Aberystwyth University to carry out each stage of the scientific process automatically without the need for further human intervention.

Its success was placed ahead of the discovery of water on the moon and the progress made this year at the large hadron collider in Switzerland – project managed by Welsh scientist Dr Lyn Evans – in Time magazine’s 10 most significant scientific discoveries of 2009. However, its importance was ranked behind the discoveries of our oldest human ancestor and a potential cure for colour blindness.

Time said of Adam: “By any standard, it was an elementary discovery — the identification of the role of about a dozen genes in a yeast cell. But what made this finding a major breakthrough was the unlikely form of the scientist: a robot.

“In April, Adam became the first robotic system to make a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input. Robots have long been used in experiments – their vast computational power assisted in the sequencing of the human genome, for example – but Adam was the first to complete the cycle from hypothesis to experiment to reformulated hypothesis without human intervention.”

Adam’s discovery was published in the journal Science in April. The scientists chose yeast because its genes provide a simple model of how human cells work. Many of the reactions within yeast are replicated within human cells.

In October, the South African government reversed its position and threw its support behind the class action, brought in 2002 by victims of apartheid crimes, including torture, rape and denationalization.

The class members filed suit on behalf of “themselves and all black South African citizens” for violations of the law of nations.

From 1960 to 1994, blacks in South Africa were deprived of their citizenship and were forced to become citizens of tribally based homelands called “Bantustans.”

U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin gave the suit new life last year when she gave the plaintiff class the opportunity to sue under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The 220-year-old law lets U.S. federal courts hear human rights cases brought by foreigners alleging violations of international law.

The defendants unsuccessfully sought dismissal, saying corporations are exempt under the statute.

Judge Scheindlin denied their bid to dismiss the case last spring, and then rejected a motion for “certification of an interlocutory appeal” in the most recent action.

Revenue dropped 13.3 percent, or $80 billion, compared with the same nine months of 2008, to $523 billion, the institute said. Collections in the third quarter alone sank 10.9 percent to about $162 billion, according to the report released today by the Albany-based body. It was the fourth straight quarterly decline. The institute is the public policy research arm of the State University of New York.

“The first three quarters of 2009 were the worst on record for states in terms of the decline in overall state tax collections, as well as the change in personal income and sales tax collections,” Rockefeller analysts Lucy Dadayan and Donald J. Boyd wrote in the report. The institute explores ways to help state and federal governments work better.

The worst economic slump since the Great Depression has forced states to cut spending, raise taxes and pass down costs to local governments to cope with $193 billion of combined budget deficits in the current fiscal year, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report issued last month.

Budget gaps have opened in 31 states since fiscal year 2010 began, Dadayan and Boyd wrote, citing a National Conference of State Legislatures study.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.