And Now… ‘Time to Profile White Men?’
December 20th, 2012Via: Salon:
Yesterday, during a cable news discussion of gun violence and the Newtown school shooting, I dared mention a taboo truism. During a conversation on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong. I suggested that’s the case because as opposed to people of color or, say, Muslims, white men as a subgroup are in such a privileged position in our society that they are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way. Indeed, unlike other demographic, white guys as a group are never thought to be an acceptable topic for any kind of critical discussion whatsoever, even when there is ample reason to open up such a discussion.
Research Credit: TB
U.S. Taxpayers Likely to Lose Billions of Dollars on GM Bailout
December 20th, 2012Via: Detroit News:
The Obama administration said Wednesday it will sell 200 million shares — or 40 percent of its remaining stake in General Motors Co. — back to the automaker and announced plans to completely exit the Detroit automaker by March 2014.
The Detroit automaker said it will purchase 200 million shares of GM stock held by Treasury for $5.5 billion — or $27.50 per share — nearly $2 above the stock’s closing price on Tuesday. GM shares jumped sharply on the news and were up 7.5 percent to $27.36, or $1.90, early afternoon in very heavy trading.
…
The exit timetable signals the end of one of the most extraordinary government interventions in the U.S. economy in history — the rescue and partial nationalization of two U.S. automakers and their finance arms supported by two U.S. presidents.
Still, taxpayers will almost certainly lose billions of dollars in the $49.5 billion GM bailout – and the government would need to sell its remaining shares for about $70 each to break even. If the government sold the rest of its stock at current prices, taxpayers would lose more than $13 billion. But profits from the bank and AIG bailouts will largely offset the auto bailout losses.
Citizen Drone Warfare?
December 20th, 2012How long until direction finding and jamming equipment will have to be carried by police?
I know: Ban drones!
Via: YouTube:
Guns and Magazines: Panic Buying
December 20th, 20124K for an AR-15??? Really?
Via: Bloomberg:
With President Barack Obama endorsing sweeping gun restrictions in the wake of the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, prices for handgun magazines are surging on EBay (EBAY) and semi-automatic rifles are sold out at many Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) locations.
…
On EBay Inc.’s auction website, shoppers have recently bid up gun magazines. The current bid for four Glock handgun magazines, ammunition for one of the guns used at Newtown, is $118.37 compared with $45 on the day before the shooting. The bid for seven Glock magazines hit $201 on Dec. 17 from $71.01 before the massacre.
Gun buyers have flooded other firearms retailers too. The Hyatt Gun Shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, racked up more than $1 million in sales yesterday for the best single-day performance since the store opened in 1959, according to Justin Anderson, director of online sales. At the top of shoppers’ lists was the Bushmaster AR-15, the model of rifle used at Newtown that sells for as much as $4,000 and had almost sold out, he said.
Irving Women Claim Assault, Humiliation After Roadside Cavity Search
December 19th, 2012Update: Troopers Indicted After Roadside Cavity Search Of Two Women
Via: CBS:
CBS-11 has learned two state troopers involved in a controversial roadside cavity search of two North Texas women have been indicted on criminal charges by a Dallas County Grand Jury.
CBS-11 has learned that one of the troopers, Kelley Helleson, who left the courthouse after testifying Friday, is charged with two counts of sexual assault and two counts of official oppression.
She was seen on dashcam video searching the body cavities — front and back — of the two women along an exit ramp of the Bush Turnpike in Irving last summer.
The Texas Department of Public Safety fired Helleson.
CBS-11 has learned the other trooper in the case, David Farrell, is charged with theft after one of the women said her prescription bottle of the painkiller hydrocodone was missing after the search.
Farrell initially stopped the women after seeing them throw a cigarette out of their car window.
—
Via: CBS:
Two Irving women have filed a federal lawsuit against State Troopers and the head of their department alleging that they were subjected to a humiliating and illegal “cavity search” during a traffic stop.
38-year-old Angel Dobbs and her niece, 24-year-old Ashley Dobbs, were pulled over last July near the area of Highway 161 and Beltline Road for allegedly tossing cigarette butts out of the window of their vehicle while on a ‘road trip’ to Oklahoma.
The women’s attorney Scott Palmer says State Trooper David Farrell claimed he smelled marijuana coming from the vehicle and performed a search, which turned up nothing.
Recovery: More Homeless Young Adults
December 19th, 2012Via: New York Times:
Across the country, tens of thousands of underemployed and jobless young people, many with college credits or work histories, are struggling to house themselves in the wake of the recession, which has left workers between the ages of 18 and 24 with the highest unemployment rate of all adults.
Those who can move back home with their parents — the so-called boomerang set — are the lucky ones. But that is not an option for those whose families have been hit hard by the economy, including Mr. Taylor, whose mother is barely scraping by while working in a laundromat. Without a stable home address, they are an elusive group that mostly couch surfs or sleeps hidden away in cars or other private places, hoping to avoid the lasting stigma of public homelessness during what they hope will be a temporary predicament.
These young adults are the new face of a national homeless population, one that poverty experts and case workers say is growing. Yet the problem is mostly invisible. Most cities and states, focusing on homeless families, have not made special efforts to identify young adults, who tend to shy away from ordinary shelters out of fear of being victimized by an older, chronically homeless population. The unemployment rate and the number of young adults who cannot afford college “point to the fact there is a dramatic increase in homelessness” in that age group, said Barbara Poppe, the executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.
How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico
December 18th, 2012Via: New York Times:
Wal-Mart longed to build in Elda Pineda’s alfalfa field. It was an ideal location, just off this town’s bustling main entrance and barely a mile from its ancient pyramids, which draw tourists from around the world. With its usual precision, Wal-Mart calculated it would attract 250 customers an hour if only it could put a store in Mrs. Pineda’s field.
One major obstacle stood in Wal-Mart’s way.
After years of study, the town’s elected leaders had just approved a new zoning map. The leaders wanted to limit growth near the pyramids, and they considered the town’s main entrance too congested already. As a result, the 2003 zoning map prohibited commercial development on Mrs. Pineda’s field, seemingly dooming Wal-Mart’s hopes.
But 30 miles away in Mexico City, at the headquarters of Wal-Mart de Mexico, executives were not about to be thwarted by an unfavorable zoning decision. Instead, records and interviews show, they decided to undo the damage with one well-placed $52,000 bribe.
The plan was simple. The zoning map would not become law until it was published in a government newspaper. So Wal-Mart de Mexico arranged to bribe an official to change the map before it was sent to the newspaper, records and interviews show. Sure enough, when the map was published, the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field was redrawn to allow Wal-Mart’s store.
Problem solved.
‘A Dog on Two Legs?’
December 17th, 2012Via: Der Spiegel:
A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can’t do it anymore.
…
Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.
“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
Rudi Dekkers Behind Bars for Drug Trafficking
December 17th, 2012Indeed, why now?
Via: Mad Cow Morning News:
The long run of Rudi Dekkers, 56, the Dutch national who first passed out bunks to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi when they arrived in the United States to enroll at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, ended last week when he was arrested for drug trafficking in Houston.
Research Credit: latitude38
UBS Faces $1 Billion+ Fine Over LIBOR Rate Rigging
December 17th, 2012$1.5 Billion Fine
Via: BBC:
Swiss banking giant UBS has agreed to pay $1.5bn (£940m) to US, UK and Swiss regulators for attempting to manipulate the Libor inter-bank lending rate.
It becomes the second major bank to be fined over Libor after Barclays was ordered to pay $450m to UK and US authorities in the summer.
—
Meh, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Via: Reuters:
UBS AG is expected to be hit with a $1 billion (618.4 million pounds)-plus fine to settle charges of rigging Libor interest rates this week, making it the second bank to be brought to book for its role in the global scandal.
The fine, to be imposed by regulators in Britain and the United States, would be the latest blow for the Swiss bank that suffered a rogue trading scandal last year, paid a $780 million fine to settle a U.S. tax investigation in 2009 and nearly collapsed in 2008 under the weight of huge subprime losses.
Sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters the fine will be $1 billion or more, which would be more than double the $450 million levied on British bank Barclays Plc in June for interest rate manipulation.
The penalty could be as high as $1.6 billion and UBS will admit 36 traders around the globe manipulated yen Libor between 2005 and 2010, Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger said, citing unnamed sources.
UBS declined to comment on the report or on the timing of a settlement. Reuters could not independently verify the $1.6 billion figure.
