cryptogon.com

The 7,100 acres, or 11 square miles, of Crow Creek Sioux tribal land in central South Dakota ranch sold for almost $2.6 million, less than the $4.6 million it was appraised at, said IRS spokeswoman Carrie Resch. She did not say who bought the land.

The tribe filed a lawsuit Monday in U.S. District court in Pierre seeking to block the sale. Judge Roberto A. Lange declined their request but promised to schedule a trial to hear the tribe’s arguments.

The land in question was part of the tribe’s original reservation established in an 1868 treaty, and was held by the federal government in a trust for the tribe. But it was eventually allotted to individual tribal members, who then sold it to non-Indians, putting it outside the tribe’s legal jurisdiction.

The tribe bought the ranch back in 1998 but the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not put the land back into trust, which would have protected it from seizure, Tribal Secretary Tommy Thompson said.

Tribal Chairman Brandon Sazue said he hopes the tax dispute can still be resolved in a way that allows the tribe to keep the land.

“It’s very disgraceful, very shameful. It’s devastating to us,” Sazue said after the auction. “Our land is never for sale.”

Lawyers said the tribe can purchase the land back during a 180-day redemption period, and the land will not change possession during that time. A trial is tentatively set for March 29-30, which is within the redemption period.

According to the lawsuit, the IRS was auctioning the land to recover more than $3.1 million in federal employment taxes owed by the tribe. The tribe didn’t pay the taxes because it was told, erroneously, by an official connected to the BIA that federally recognized tribes do not have to pay the taxes, according to the lawsuit.

The auction was unnecessary because the tribe is seeking a loan to pay off its tax bill, the lawsuit said.

The tribe contends the IRS cannot legally seize and sell the land because it is owned by Crow Creek Tribal Farms Inc., a corporation set up by the tribe that is not legally responsible for settling the tribe’s tax debts.

Members of the tribe have used the land and lived on it for a long time, according to the suit. “Members died and were buried on the land. Indeed, the lands were considered so important to the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe that the Tribe went into debt to acquire the land as part of its land consolidation effort to enlarge the Crow Creek Indian Reservation,” it contends.

The tribe also argues that the seizure is illegal because the land cannot be taken without congressional approval and the IRS has not followed a federal law requiring an environmental assessment of the sale’s impact.

The tribe’s lawyer, Mario Gonzalez of Rapid City, said the IRS action was unusual. “This is the only instance that I know of where the IRS has levied on tribally owned land on an Indian reservation.”

Resch, the IRS spokeswoman, said she could not comment on the tribe’s legal arguments because the IRS does not comment on pending litigation.

Thompson said the IRS should have negotiated with the tribe, and that the tax bill could have been paid from trust money held for the tribe by the federal government.

“I’m kind of upset and kind of furious with the IRS,” Thompson said.

The land is particularly valuable to the tribe because it has been designated as a site for construction of wind towers to generate electrical energy, Sazue and Thompson said.

Only this month, Britain’s Simon Mann won a pardon for his part in a foiled 2004 coup attempt on Equatorial Guinea, an old-style adventure whose glittering prize was the central African state’s multi-billion-dollar oil riches.

Contrast that to reports last week that a band of South African and other mercenaries had flown into the chaos of Guinea to train up a militia loyal to the incumbent junta leader — on a salary put at barely $3,500 a month.

That’s not bad money in most parts of the world, and there were reports that the company involved would have won extra remuneration in the form of minerals from Guinea’s fecund soil.

But it would have been peanuts to Mann, whose Equatorial Guinea coup was known as the “Wonga Plot” after the English slang for the money they hoped to yield in buckets.

While mercenaries are often seen as in the business of bringing governments down, it is not new that they should be trying to prop one up, as is happening in Guinea.

Mann himself is reported to have worked for the Angolan government in the 1990s to help it wrest back control of a key port from rebels, and again for Sierra Leonean authorities in the 2002 civil war there.

But what has changed since then is the economics. Thanks to the steady flow of new oil and mineral finds on the continent, the private security business in Africa is booming. A lot of the real pros now find there is steady money to made in guarding a gold mine in northern Congo, for example.

The more dubious end of the business is now increasingly the preserve of what some describe as cowboys.

“They couldn’t get enough people to do the job,” Henri Boshoff, a military analyst who served in the South African army, told Reuters of the mercenaries hired by Guinean junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. “(The South Africans) were very desperate. They are not being very well paid.”

The Guinea mercenaries may not be in the same league as Mann and his fellow Wonga plotters, but their capacity to stir up trouble should not be underestimated.

The fact that Camara’s militia is being selected on tribal lines could add an alarming new ethnic dimension to Guinea’s instability.

Security sources also told Reuters that part of their job is to ensure the arrival of arms acquired by the junta in Ukraine in direct contravention of an international arms embargo.

South Africa is keen to get rid of its reputation as a training ground for hired guns and is officially investigating the activities of its nationals in Guinea.

Depending on what it finds, it may have to decide whether they are in breach of its
three-year-old anti-mercenary law that still contains grey areas as to what is mercenary behaviour.

The No B (Berlusconi) Day march was organised by grassroots groups via the internet and social networking sites.

Mr Berlusconi faces separate tax fraud and bribery trials after he lost his immunity from prosecution in October.

As of last Friday, even searchers who aren’t logged into Google in any way have their data tracked in the name of providing a ‘better service’.

Anonymous cookie

The company explained: “What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customise search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.”

Rachel Porcaro knows she’s hardly rich. When you’re a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don’t need government experts to tell you how broke you are.

But that’s what happened. The government not only told Porcaro she was poor. They said she was too poor to make it in Seattle.

It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit.

She couldn’t believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.

“I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — ‘I don’t have anything, why are you auditing me?’ ” Porcaro recalled. “I said, ‘Why me, when I don’t own a home, a business, a car?’ ”

The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.

“They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area,” says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle’s G.A. Michael and Co. “The auditor said, ‘You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”

“They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money.”

Seriously? An estimated 60,000 people in Seattle live below the poverty line — meaning they make $11,000 or less for an individual or $22,000 for a family of four. Does the IRS red-flag them for scrutiny, simply because they’re poor?

I asked the local office of the IRS. They said they couldn’t comment for privacy reasons.

“We can’t give you any kind of broad interview because your request is associated with the case of an individual taxpayer,” IRS Media Relations said in a statement.

…

Driver, the tax specialist, says it’s well-known that the system targets the weak — people with sloppy returns, for example, who don’t tend to be well off.

“It’s the way a wolf goes after the weakest sheep.”

Rachel says an irony of her year in tax hell is that the IRS is right about one thing — you can’t get by in Seattle on what she makes. That’s why she’s living with her parents. To try to make a life in our shimmering city without relying on welfare, food stamps or other public assistance.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, said it took over AmTrust Bank, based in Cleveland, with about $12 billion in assets and approximately $8 billion in deposits.

The family-owned AmTrust had been in trouble for more than a year following its aggressive foray into mortgage and construction lending. The bank’s failure is expected to cost the federal deposit insurance fund about $2 billion.

New York Community Bancorp Inc., Westbury, New York, will acquire AmTrust and its 66 branches. In addition to assuming all of the deposits of the failed bank, New York Community Bank has agreed to purchase approximately $9.0 billion in assets of AmTrust Bank. The FDIC will retain the remaining assets for later disposition.

Last fall, AmTrust’ primary regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision or OTS, had rejected the bank’s requests for aid through the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. AmTrust operated under OTS’ approved risk reduction plan since the start of 2009, but the bank was unable to comply with the minimum capital requirements.

Attempts to find an investor to recapitalize the bank, which was first established in 1889 as The Ohio Savings and Loan Company, were unsuccessful.
The FDIC also seized three Georgia banks on Friday – Buckhead Community Bank in Atlanta, First Security National Bank in Norcross, and Tattnall Bank in Reidsville. State Bank and Trust Company, Macon, Georgia, will assume all of the deposits of First Security National Bank and Buckhead Community Bank, while HeritageBank of the South, Albany, Georgia, will assume all of the deposits of Tattnall Bank.

THE FDIC also said it closed Benchmark Bank, based in Aurora, Illinois, and entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with MB Financial Bank, National Association, Chicago Illinois, to assume all of the deposits of Benchmark Bank.

Greater Atlantic Bank of Reston, Virginia was also shuttered by the regulators. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with Sonabank, McLean, Virginia, to assume all of the deposits of Greater Atlantic Bank.

During a one-month experiment conducted last year, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello felt like his lost arm had grown back again, although he was only controlling a robotic hand that was not even attached to his body.

“It’s a matter of mind, of concentration,” Petruzziello said. “When you think of it as your hand and forearm, it all becomes easier.”

Though similar experiments have been successful before, the European scientists who led the project say this was the first time a patient has been able to make such complex movements using his mind to control a biomechanic hand connected to his nervous system.

The challenge for scientists now will be to create a system that can connect a patient’s nervous system and a prosthetic limb for years, not just a month.

The Italy-based team said at a news conference in Rome on Wednesday that in 2008 it implanted electrodes into the nerves located in what remained of Petruzziello’s left arm, which was cut off in a crash some three years ago.

The prosthetic was not implanted on the patient, only connected through the electrodes. During the news conference, video was shown of Petruzziello as he concentrated to give orders to the hand placed next to him.

During the month he had the electrodes connected, he learned to wiggle the robotic fingers independently, make a fist, grab objects and make other movements.

“Some of the gestures cannot be disclosed because they were quite vulgar,” joked Paolo Maria Rossini, a neurologist who led the team working at Rome’s Campus Bio-Medico, a university and hospital that specializes in health sciences.

The euro2 million ($3 million) project, funded by the European Union, took five years to complete and produced several scientific papers that have been submitted to top journals, including Science Translational Medicine and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rossini said.

In London, there are more CCTV cameras than any other city in the world with one camera for every eight Londoners.

But as victims of crime have found to their cost, catching criminals on camera is dependent on the equipment being both monitored and maintained.

BBC Inside Out’s investigation has found that all too often Big Brother either is not watching, had a broken camera, lost the footage or could not be bothered to go through the tapes.

Even within the Metropolitan Police itself, there are differences of opinion about the value of CCTV.

One senior Met officer, Mick Neville, described London’s CCTV network as an “utter fiasco”, claiming it takes 1,000 cameras to solve just one crime per year.

But another senior Met officer disagrees. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Worker said: “For me, it is the most useful tool amongst the armoury of investigative tools that the Metropolitan Police and other police services throughout the country use. We are probably market leaders in the way that we utilise CCTV.”

One UK businessman thinks he has come up with a solution by recruiting volunteers to watch live CCTV footage streamed over the web in return for cash prizes.

…

Although mainly un-reported, there’s a great deal of controversy surrounding Connell’s death – largely in part because he was the architect of many Republican websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95% of his email correspondence. Connell was also considered a key witness in the election fraud lawsuit King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell. The suit implicates Former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell, Karl Rove and others of 2004 election night vote rigging.