cryptogon.com

The crime group, which has overtaken the Sicilian Mafia for control of drug trafficking, was responsible for the slaying of six Italians in a pizzeria in Germany last August.

The Eurispes research group estimated that the ‘Ndrangheta’s turnover — ranging from drugs and extortion to arms trafficking and prostitution — was valued at 44 billion euros in 2007.

This was equivalent to 2.9 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product in the same year and about equal to the GDP of two small European Union countries — Slovenia and Estonia — combined.

Italy has the euro-zone’s third largest economy.

Crime experts say the ‘Ndrangheta, based in the southern Calabria region, overtook the Mafia in the 1990s as Italy’s largest drug trafficking group and has since spread throughout Europe and beyond.

Feuds between clans of the ‘Ndrangheta have flared over the years, with the latest explosion of violence occurring in Duisberg, Germany, outside a pizzeria last August.

The report, called “‘Ndrangheta Holding,” said the Calabrian mob’s drug business alone in 2007 was estimated at about 27.2 billion euros, or some 62 percent of its total illegal profits.

“We defined it as a ‘holding company’ because the ‘Ndrangheta, more than all other crime organisations, acts in business terms like a company that holds a majority stake in satellite companies, the clans, which nurture it and make up the complex network structure,” said Eurispes president Gian Maria Fara.

“Because of its ability to act as a network, it survives and extends its ramifications riding the wave of opportunities offered by a globalised world,” he told reporters.

MIDDLEMEN

Raffaele Rio, head of the Eurispes office in Calabria, said the ‘Ndrangheta had managed to make even more money on drug trafficking, mostly cocaine, by cutting out middlemen and dealing directly with South America’s drug cartels, particularly the Colombians.

Unlike the Sicilian Mafia, which ran a large drug operation in the 1980s, the tightly-knit and family-based ‘Ndrangheta has not been haemorrhaged by defections by so-called “pentiti” — defectors who cooperate with investigators.

With a few exceptions, it has also avoided the kind of high-profile killings of politicians and magistrates carried out by the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in the 1990s that sparked a crackdown by the state.

But inter-clan warfare is on the rise, the report said.

Since 1999, homicides related to the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria alone numbered more than 200, an increase of more than 650 percent.

Police have cracked down on the ‘Ndrangheta in recent months and stepped up their repression with several high-profile arrests since the killings in Germany.

In February, they arrested Pasquale Condello, 57. Known as “U Supremo” (The Supreme One), Condello is said by the interior ministry to be the ‘Ndrangheta’s number one boss.

“For squatters, foreclosed homes like this are like a camp-ground with free camping,” says real-estate broker Marc Charney, a foreclosure specialist, as he enters the home in Brockton, Massachusetts, and shines a flash-light at a mattress where homeless people have been sleeping each night.

Squatting is on the rise across the United States as foreclosures surge, eviction notices mount and homes go unsold for months, complicating the worst U.S. housing slump in a quarter century and forcing real-estate brokers to enlist the help of law enforcement and courts to sell empty houses.

In some regions, squatting is taking on new twists to include real-estate scams in which thieves “rent out” abandoned homes they don’t own. Others involve “professional squatters” who move from one abandoned home to another posing as tenants who seek cash from banks as a condition to leave the premises — a process known by real-estate brokers as “cash for key.”

“There are people who move in and know exactly who to contact and say ‘If you want this house, why don’t you come out here and offer me cash,'” said Detective Erin Camphouse of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Real Estate Fraud Unit.

“It’s just cheaper for the banks to do that rather than going into the courts,” she said. “The squatters are getting sophisticated and turning it on these banks who own the properties.”

She cited another case in which a Los Angeles man recently “leased” three abandoned homes to unsuspecting renters through Craig’s List, the online classified advertising company. The renters paid first and last month deposits, moved their belongings in and lived in the homes for several months.

Incidents were reported today in Cleveland, just south of the city center, in Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg, Primrose in the east as well as in Tembisa, Reiger Park and Zandspruit, police spokesman Govindsamy Mariemuthoo said in an interview. The Times newspaper, based in Johannesburg, showed a picture of a policeman dousing an immigrant with a fire extinguisher after he had been set alight by a mob.

“In some places police have come under fire, in some places we are overstretched,” Firoz Cachalia, the head of safety and security for Gauteng, told reporters in Johannesburg today. “Our primary concern is for safety and to bring the violence to an end,” he added, saying that there is no need to call in the army. Cachalia didn’t elaborate on how many additional police officers may be deployed or when.

South Africa has as many as 3 million illegal Zimbabwean immigrants and is also host to others from African countries, including Mozambique and Somalia. An increasing number of Zimbabweans have entered South Africa, driven south by a decade of economic recession and the world’s highest inflation rate, 355,000 percent, according to the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper.

Searches on YouTube return dozens of videos branded with an icon or logo identifying the videos as the work of one of these Islamist terrorist organizations. A great majority of these videos document horrific attacks on American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. Others provide weapons training, speeches by al-Qaeda leadership, and general material intended to radicalize potential recruits.

The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.

The intelligence officer, who cannot be named for security reasons, left the service last month after it emerged that his wife was one of the five call girls who took part in the sadomasochistic sex session with Mosley.

Exposure of the lurid orgy led to calls for Mosley, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the wartime British fascist leader, to step down from his post as president of the FIA, the governing body of world motor sport.

In an extraordinary turn of events yesterday, MI5 was forced to deny through Whitehall channels that the orgy had been a “sting” that it had set up to discredit Mosley. “Any suggestion that the service was involved in setting up Mosley is total nonsense,” a senior Whitehall official said.

The official did disclose, however, that one of MI5’s officers had left the agency after his wife’s involvement as a call girl in the orgy became known. “I cannot talk about individual cases, but we do expect high standards of behaviour from all staff at all times, both professionally and privately,” the official said.

“In any case where a member of staff is believed to have fallen below those standards, action will be taken.”

The officer is understood to be in his forties and to have served in the military before joining MI5, where he was involved in surveillance operations.

The disclosure is a severe embarrassment to Jonathan Evans, director-general of MI5, who is understood to have informed Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, and assured them the agency was not involved in any sting.

Questions will now be asked about why the service’s vetting procedures failed to expose the secret, which could have made the officer vulnerable to blackmail.

Mosley, who is 68 and has been married since 1960, is one of the most powerful men in world sport. His father was a hate figure who led the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. His mother was the society beauty Diana Mitford, a great admirer of Adolf Hitler.

When the story broke, Mosley said he had been told by a source close to the security services that he had been targeted in a covert investigation of his private life “by a group specialising in such things for reasons and clients as yet unknown”.

The F1 boss’s five-hour sex session with the five call girls took place in an underground “torture chamber” in Chelsea, west London. The Oxford-educated former barrister is alleged to have re-enacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate.

The session is alleged to have involved prostitutes dressed as German officers and camp inmates. It was secretly caught on video by one of the call girls, who used the name Mistress Abi. Sources said it was Abi’s husband who worked for MI5 and that she sold the story to the News of the World newspaper for an undisclosed sum. According to the paper, Mistress Abi wore a Luftwaffe uniform during the session and oversaw beatings of Mosley.

In the video Mosley can be seen standing naked as Abi ties him up with chains before ordering him to lie face down on the bed. Later she screams: “Face down! Did I say move? We don’t want you comfortable.”

Mosley was condemned by Jewish groups and leading figures in the motor racing world. He was snubbed by the crown prince of Bahrain, who told him not to attend the Bahrain Grand Prix last month.

Sir Jackie Stewart, the former world motor racing champion, said that Mosley’s position was “untenable”. The Monaco royal family, the Grimaldis, have made it clear that he is not welcome at next Sunday’s showpiece grand prix in the principality.

Mosley has been unapologetic and has claimed that he needs to stay on to fight the Nazi allegations in a libel action. He denied the orgy had any Nazi theme and said it was “harmless” and “completely legal”. Disclosure of the MI5 officer’s role appears to be his latest tactic in a desperate attempt to save his job. “This is an astonishing piece of information, which I will pass on to my legal advisers,” he said last night.

The News of the World denies there was any collusion between itself and the secret services.

MI5 employs 3,500 people in the fight against Al-Qaeda and hostile powers and prides itself on its discretion. It has been horrified to discover that an officer has become involved, even indirectly, in a high-profile sex scandal.

The service will have been forced to conduct a thorough review of the officer’s work and personal life to establish whether he has put any state secrets at risk.

Security sources say that in any case where an MI5 officer or a close family member is involved in prostitution there is a risk that their integrity — and hence national security — could be compromised.

One official said: “Clearly there would be a conflict there for any member of the service. Prostitutes by the very nature of their business will be connected to people who are probably in the criminal fraternity.”

An internal MI5 investigation is trying to establish whether the officer knew his wife was involved in prostitution and whether he was involved in her business affairs.

The matter is also being examined by the Quest security company, run by Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, the former Metropolitan police commissioner who investigated the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Quest was already working for the FIA when it was asked to investigate the Mosley affair.

Mosley is facing a confidence vote in a secret ballot of the 220 members of the FIA assembly in Paris on June 3. He has written to the presidents of member clubs painting a doomsday scenario if he is forced out of office. He says he needs to stay at the helm of the Formula One governing body until October next year in the interests of the sport.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.” The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world’s attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

…

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

…

n 2006, Yao tells me, “I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail.” For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company’s proprietary software, allowing him to “build a lot of development software based on L-1’s technology.” Since then, L-1’s partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn’t really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: “We’ll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China.” Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company’s research headquarters in New Jersey. (“Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It’s such a historic place.”) L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. “It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results.”

L-1’s enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company’s ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world. But here’s the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1’s Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to “some large international opportunities,” not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou.

After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1’s involvement in China’s homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications. She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company’s head of research. “We have nothing in China,” she tells me. “Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don’t have any relationships at all.”

I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She’ll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: “Absolutely, we’ve sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test.” Yao’s use of the technology, she said, is “within his license” purchased from L-1.

The company’s reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with “crime control or detection instruments or equipment.” That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the “detection instruments” that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents.

“The intent of that act,” a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, “was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China.”

…

Mike Turner, the chief executive of BAE Systems, was held with a senior colleague as they landed in America. Personal electronic equipment, including laptops and BlackBerries, was seized and examined before the pair were released.

The detentions are part of an investigation by the US Department of Justice into allegations surrounding the £43 billion al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia. BAE has been accused of making tens of millions of pounds in illegal payments to Saudi officials, although the company maintains it has always acted lawfully.

A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven.

The results of the study, the first of its kind, have taken the top scientists who conducted it by surprise. But they follow warnings against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pose “is not much lower than the risk to children’s health from tobacco or alcohol”.

The research – at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark – is to be published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology and will carry particular weight because one of its authors has been sceptical that mobile phones pose a risk to health.

UCLA’s Professor Leeka Kheifets – who serves on a key committee of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, the body that sets the guidelines for exposure to mobile phones – wrote three and a half years ago that the results of studies on people who used them “to date give no consistent evidence of a causal relationship between exposure to radiofrequency fields and any adverse health effect”.

The scientists questioned the mothers of 13,159 children born in Denmark in the late 1990s about their use of the phones in pregnancy, and their children’s use of them and behaviour up to the age of seven. As they gave birth before mobiles became universal, about half of the mothers had used them infrequently or not at all, enabling comparisons to be made.

They found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the radiation. And when the children also later used the phones they were, overall, 80 per cent more likely to suffer from difficulties with behaviour. They were 25 per cent more at risk from emotional problems, 34 per cent more likely to suffer from difficulties relating to their peers, 35 per cent more likely to be hyperactive, and 49 per cent more prone to problems with conduct.

The scientists say that the results were “unexpected”, and that they knew of no biological mechanisms that could cause them. But when they tried to explain them by accounting for other possible causes – such as smoking during pregnancy, family psychiatric history or socio-economic status – they found that, far from disappearing, the association with mobile phone use got even stronger.

They add that there might be other possible explanations that they did not examine – such as that mothers who used the phones frequently might pay less attention to their children – and stress that the results “should be interpreted with caution” and checked by further studies. But they conclude that “if they are real they would have major public health implications”.

Professor Sam Milham, of the blue-chip Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and the University of Washington School of Public Health – one of the pioneers of research in the field – said last week that he had no doubt that the results were real. He pointed out that recent Canadian research on pregnant rats exposed to similar radiation had found structural changes in their offspring’s brains.