Ireland Jails Three Top Bankers Over 2008 Banking Meltdown
July 30th, 2016Nearly destroy a country, face a prison sentence of less than three years. Not bad.
Via: Reuters:
Three senior Irish bankers were jailed on Friday for up to three-and-a-half years for conspiring to defraud investors in the most prominent prosecution arising from the 2008 banking crisis that crippled the country’s economy.
The trio will be among the first senior bankers globally to be jailed for their role in the collapse of a bank during the crisis.
…
Former Irish Life and Permanent Chief Executive Denis Casey was sentenced to two years and nine months following the 74-day criminal trial, Ireland’s longest ever.
Willie McAteer, former finance director at the failed Anglo Irish Bank, and John Bowe, its ex-head of capital markets, were given sentences of 42 months and 24 months respectively.
Breakthrough Solar Cell Captures CO2 and Sunlight, Produces Burnable Fuel
July 30th, 2016I’ve posted lots stories about similar technologies and the main problems are, very low yields, scalability, short lived and/or expensive catalysts.
But who knows? Maybe it will become viable before the Mr. Fusion.
Via: University of Illinois:
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.
The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.
Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such “artificial leaves” could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.
“The new solar cell is not photovoltaic — it’s photosynthetic,” says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study.
“Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight,” he said.
While plants produce fuel in the form of sugar, the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels.
The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete.
Venezuela: Forced Labor
July 30th, 2016Via: CNN:
A new decree by Venezuela’s government could make its citizens work on farms to tackle the country’s severe food shortages.
That “effectively amounts to forced labor,” according to Amnesty International, which derided the decree as “unlawful.”
In a vaguely-worded decree, Venezuelan officials indicated that public and private sector employees could be forced to work in the country’s fields for at least 60-day periods, which may be extended “if circumstances merit.”
“Trying to tackle Venezuela’s severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas’ Director at Amnesty International, said in a statement.
President Nicolas Maduro is using his executive powers to declare a state of economic emergency. By using a decree, he can legally circumvent Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly — the Congress — which is staunchly against all of Maduro’s actions.
Electronic Voting Systems and Security
July 30th, 2016Of course, it’s worse than Bruce admits: Clinton Foundation and Electronic Voting Machines
Via: Bruce Schneier:
Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with Internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack.
But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.
We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.
Longer term, we need to return to election systems that are secure from manipulation. This means voting machines with voter-verified paper audit trails, and no Internet voting. I know it’s slower and less convenient to stick to the old-fashioned way, but the security risks are simply too great.
Trump Picks Former Goldman Partner And Soros Employee As Finance Chairman
July 29th, 2016This came out back in May.
Via: ZeroHedge:
In an oddly ironic twist, today Donald Trump announced that he has picked as chairman of his newly launched fundraising operation none other than a former employee of the bank he has repeatedly criticized in the past, and which he used as a foil to criticize Ted Cruz: Goldman Sachs.
Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built a fortune of $46 million before launching his own hedge fund.
While employed at Goldman, he purchased the remains of IndyMac Bank (now known as OneWest Bank), the Pasadena, California-based mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008. “Notoriously press-shy, the executive endured 2011 protests on the lawn of his Bel Air mansion by foreclosed homeowners angered at his lender’s handling of soured mortgages.”
Research Credit: almaverdad2
After 100 Years World War I Battlefields Are Poisoned and Uninhabitable
July 29th, 2016Via: We Are the Mighty:
At places like Verdun, the artillery barrages were so overwhelming, 150 shells hit every square meter of the battlefield. Concentrated barrages and driving rains turned the battlefield into a quagmire that swallowed soldiers and shells alike.
Further complicating the cleanup is the soil contamination caused by the remains of humans and animals. The grounds are also saturated with lead, mercury, and zinc from millions of rounds of ammunition from small arms and artillery fired in combat. In some places, the soil contains such high levels of arsenic that nothing can grow there, leaving haunting, desolate spaces.
Hundreds of Democratic Party Delegates Replaced with Actors
July 29th, 2016I don’t know about the white noise generator theory. That could be some sort of wi-fi hardware. If that’s a white noise generator, let me know the manufacturer and model number.
But never mind that! The fact that people off the street are apparently being paid to sit there for the cameras is absolutely bizarre.
The Clintons are dangerous animals. They’re not even back in the White House yet and look at the nonsense that’s happening already.
More: Hillary’s Dirty Tricks of the 2016 DNC Convention
Judge Dismisses Case Against Chandra Levy Suspect
July 28th, 2016Via: USA Today:
A judge dismissed the indictment Thursday against the man charged with killing intern Chandra Levy, after prosecutors asked to drop the case that drew national interest and embroiled a lawmaker in scandal.
Ingmar Guandique, who lived in Washington, was found guilty in 2010 of killing Levy, who disappeared in 2001. Guandique, who has protested his innocence from the start, was granted a new trial last year based on questions about the credibility of a jailhouse informant. Prosecutors now say he will be deported.
Superior Court Judge Robert Morin ordered the case dismissed, based on the request from U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips.
“Mr. Guandique has maintained since the beginning, when he passed an FBI administered lie detector test, that he did not kill Ms. Levy. This dismissal vindicates Mr. Guandique,” Lauren Hankins, general counsel for the public defender service that represented him, said in a statement. “Finally, the government has had to concede the flaws in its ill-gotten conviction.”
Highest-Paid CEOs Run Worst-Performing Companies
July 28th, 2016Via: Independent:
The highest-paid CEOs tend to run some of the worst-performing companies, according to new research.
The study, carried out by corporate research firm MSCI, found that for every $100 (£76) invested in companies with the highest-paid CEOs would have grown to $265 (£202) over 10 years.
But the same amount invested in the companies with the lowest-paid CEOs would have grown to $367 (£279) over a decade.
Titled ‘Are CEOs paid for performance? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Equity Incentives’, the report looked at the salaries of 800 CEOs at 429 large and medium-sized US companies between 2005 and 2014 and compared it with the total shareholder return of the companies.
France to Create New National Guard
July 28th, 2016Via: The Local:
France will soon have its own National Guard the president announced on Thursday as he aims to boost security to protect the French population facing repeated terror attacks.
President François Hollande announced on Thursday that a new National Guard would be created from existing reserve forces.
The move comes after a spate of recent terror attacks, including the killing of a priest as he gave mass in Normandy on Tuesday and the horrendous Nice truck attack which left 84 dead.
Following the atrocity in Nice, Hollande had announced that thousands of reservists would be called up to boost the under-pressure security forces suffering from fatigue after 18 months of heightened alert and repeated attacks.
The government urged all able-bodied volunteers to come forward with the aim of boosting the current 28,000 reservists by 12,000.
