Canadian Scientists Charged with Smuggling Dangerous and Highly Contagious Pathogens from China
April 5th, 2013Via: AFP:
Canadian federal police on Wednesday charged two former government scientists with allegedly trafficking in dangerous and highly contagious germs.
Klaus Nielsen and Wei Ling Yu, former researchers at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), are accused of attempting to export harmful pathogens that could infect humans and livestock to China.
Nielsen was apprehended as he was heading to the Ottawa airport last October with 17 vials of live brucella bacteria, which can cause infections of bovine reproductive organs, joints and mammary glands, as well as infertility.
It mostly affects cattle, deer and horses, but can also be passed on to humans and cause flu-like symptoms. There is no vaccine and the only way to control its spread is to cull animals suspected of being infected.
Nielsen was reportedly praised in 2006 for helping to develop a quick test for detecting brucellosis in cattle.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said he and Yu were allegedly making “unlawful efforts to commercialize (the) intellectual property belonging to the CFIA and a private commercial partner.”
US company Diachemix currently manufactures and licenses the test.
Research Credit: RP
Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze
April 5th, 2013How many intelligence services have cutouts listed in this heap of data???
Via: International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:
Dozens of journalists sifted through millions of leaked records and thousands of names to produce ICIJ’s investigation into offshore secrecy
A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.
The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.
They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.
The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike.
The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.
The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010.
To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.
Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen’s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC. He said the documents remind him of the scene in the movie classic The Wizard of Oz in which “they pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.”
Police Warned A Month Before Colorado Movie Theater Attack That Holmes Was A Public Danger
April 5th, 2013Via: USA Today:
Records show Colorado university psychiatrist warned police a month before July mass shooting that suspect had homicidal thoughts and was a public danger.
A University of Colorado psychiatrist told campus police a month before the Aurora movie theater attack that James Holmes had homicidal thoughts and was a public danger, according to records unsealed Thursday.
Lynne Fenton, a psychiatrist at the Denver campus, told police that Holmes had also “threatened and harassed her via email/text messages” in June 2012. He is standing trial for the July 20 shooting rampage that killed 12 and injured 70 during a midnight premiere of the latest Batman movie.
Campus police would not comment, and a university spokeswoman did not immediately respond, the Associated Press said.
Soon after the shooting, university police said they had not had any contact with Holmes, a graduate student doing neuroscience research. But a search warrant affidavit released Thursday revealed that an officer had told investigators that Fenton had contacted her to report “his danger to the public due to homicidal statements he had made.”
Italy: Police Find Unmarked Gold Bars Worth $7.5 Million Hidden in Car
April 5th, 2013Maybe I should consider adding an Italy-Switzerland Border category…
The whole situation is strange, but the fact that the bars have no identifying stamps (manufacturer, weight, serial number, fineness) is extraordinarily strange.
Of course, the suspects’ names and the company the husband says he “represents” were not released.
Gold bars seized by Italian Financial Police
I have no idea why the AP version of this story says that a “ton” of gold was intercepted, when what is shown in the video and the estimated value indicate the weight is nowhere near any sort of ton.
The version of the story from Herald Sun indicates that both the husband and wife gave evasive answers:
“It looked like an ordinary Easter day out with the family,” the financial police said in a statement, adding that the couple had given “evasive answers” and were therefore taken to a police station for a full-scale search.
The video below might as well have the theme from The Twilight Zone playing in the background.
Via: AP:
Italian border police intercepted a ton of gold bullion worth $7.5 million hidden in a car.
The gold bars were wrapped in newspaper and stashed in an under-floor storage compartment. They didn’t bear any engraving, and their origin is unknown.
The car’s 53-year-old driver was accompanied by his wife and their three young children.
Police said he was a legal representative for a Swiss company and was unable to explain where the gold came from. He has been reported to the local prosecution office for the crime of money laundering.
The gold bars were found on Easter Sunday on the border with Switzerland.
Border police confiscated the gold and the car and are conducting an investigation. They also released video purporting to show the gold bars being discovered.
Classics:
Here We Go Again: U.S. Authorities Investigate $100 Billion Bond Seizure in Italy
Enron’s Skilling May Be Released From Prison Over A Decade Early
April 4th, 2013Via: Zero Hedge:
Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling may be the latest beneficiary of the culture of pervasive permitted, even according to some – encouraged, crime. After being sentenced to prison for 24 years in the aftermath of Enron’s spectacular 2001 bankruptcy, the former CEO may be released after serving well less than half of his term. As a result his prison term, which scheduled to end in 2028, may be cut by more than half as a result of a new agreement with the Department of Justice. It appears that AG Eric Holder is so busy not prosecuting Wall Street for being Too Big To Prosecute, he has decided it is far wiser to spend his time productively by commuting the sentences of convicted financial felons, because apparently there is nothing more important to do.
New Hybrid Memory Cube Spec to Boost DRAM Bandwidth by 15X
April 4th, 2013Via: Computer World:
Backed by 100 tech companies, the three largest memory makers announced the final specifications for three-dimensional DRAM, which is aimed at increasing performance for networking and high performance computing markets.
Micron, Samsung and Hynix are leading the technology development efforts backed by the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMC). The technology, called a Hybrid Memory Cube, will stack multiple volatile memory dies on top of a DRAM controller.
The DRAM is connected to the controller by way of the relatively new silicon VIA (Vertical Interconnect Access) technology, a method of passing an electrical wire vertically through a silicon wafer.
…
The first Hybrid Memory Cube specification will deliver 2GB and 4GB of capacity, providing aggregate bi-directional bandwidth of up to 160GBps compared with DDR3’s 11GBps of aggregate bandwidth and DDR4, with 18GB to 20GB of aggregate bandwidth, Black said.
Bank of Japan to Pump $1.4 Trillion Into Economy in Unprecedented Stimulus
April 4th, 2013Via: Reuters:
The Bank of Japan unleashed the world’s most intense burst of monetary stimulus on Thursday, promising to inject about $1.4 trillion into the economy in less than two years, a radical gamble that sent the yen reeling and bond yields to record lows.
New Governor Haruhiko Kuroda committed the BOJ to open-ended asset buying and said the monetary base would nearly double to 270 trillion yen ($2.9 trillion) by the end of 2014 in a shock therapy to end two decades of stagnation.
The U.S. Federal Reserve may buy more debt under its quantitative easing, but with the Japanese economy about one-third of the size of the United States, the scope of Kuroda’s “Quantitative and Qualitative Monetary Easing” is unmatched.
“This is an unprecedented degree of monetary easing,” a smiling Kuroda told a news conference after his first policy meeting at the helm of the central bank.
Italy Seizes Record Assets from Wind Farm Tycoon
April 3rd, 2013Via: BBC:
The Italian authorities have seized assets worth 1.3bn euros ($1.7bn: £1.1bn) from a Sicilian businessman involved in renewable energy.
Investigators allege that Vito Nicastri was a front man for the Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, investing illegal earnings in his business empire.
The anti-mafia agency said in a statement it was the biggest ever seizure of mafia-linked assets.
Mr Nicastri has been confined to his home town as investigations continue.
The 57-year-old’s assets include 43 wind and solar energy companies and 98 properties.
So heavily was Mr Nicastri involved in renewable energy, Italian media dubbed him the “Lord of the Wind”.
Arturo de Felice, head of the anti-mafia agency, said: “This is a sector in which money can easily be laundered.”
Mafiosi constantly seek to penetrate areas of legitimate business activity, the BBC’s Alan Johnston reports from Rome.
Not only are they drawn by the profits that can be made in normal trading but they can also use their connections in these areas to launder money that they have made elsewhere in illegal activities such as extortion or drug-trafficking, he adds.
Obama Administration Pushes Banks to Make Home Loans to People with Weaker Credit
April 3rd, 2013Via: Washington Post:
The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.
President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.
In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.
Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.
Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps.
‘Let Them Eat Teslas’
April 3rd, 2013Why are tuition costs so high in the first place?
Government Inflated the College Loan Bubble:
The real problem is that we’ve been running a higher education bubble, one that — like the real-estate bubble — has been pumped up by cheap government money. Since 1999, student loan debt has increased by 511%, while disposable income has increased by only 73%.
That’s because when the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can. College is no exception. Tuition has been increasing much faster than disposable income, and families — believing that a college education is a can’t-lose investment, much as they used to think houses were — have been making up the difference with debt.
Never mind all of that. The Slashdot hive mind instead seizes upon the stupid government subsidies on the car, which are going to be noise level compared to the trillion dollar student loan boondoggle.
Now, who’s making the easiest money from all of this nonsense?
It’s the usual suspects: The banks.
Via: Slashdot:
“If you’re a bright kid who wants to prepare for the 21st century workforce (PDF) by studying engineering at Purdue, the government will help your parents pay the $100,000 or so tuition tab with a 7.9% interest loan (plus 4% fees) that’s likely to be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and paid back with after-tax money. If, on the other hand, you want to buy a tricked-out $100,000 Model S, Tesla has teamed up with the government, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank on what it calls a ‘Revolutionary New Finance Product’ that enables those who play the game right to avoid paying sales tax, get the government to pick up the first $15,000 (no down payment needed!), and also receive a 2.95% bankruptcy-dischargeable loan for the balance, the payments for which could be tax-deductible. Yep, ‘Revolutionary’ may be about right!”
In Other News: Obama Administration Pushes Banks to Make Home Loans to People with Weaker Credit
