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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.

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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.

The TSE must pay Mizuho Securities the compensation after admitting that a system fault prevented a trader from cancelling an erroneous share sale.

The trader had entered an order to sell 610,000 shares for one yen each instead of one share at 610,000 yen.

In one view, Google is our best friend and a noble public servant. In the other, Google may be the darkest force on the Internet. Which is it? We all must decide.

Here’s the news: Today Google has begun offering an experimental, but stable, Public Domain Name Server (DNS), described in a Thursday post to Google’s Official Blog.

The goal is for the new DNS to increase browsing speed and improve Internet security. I have read the technical description and believe it to the extent that I have already changed the DNS at my office to point to the new Google Public DNS. It is, however, too early to tell if my browsing has become faster.

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The downside is that Google’s Public DNS will also give the Internet giant an unparalleled look what people are doing on the Internet. It will, for example, be able to log every DNS request made by every user of its system. If that doesn’t frighten you at least a little, it perhaps ought to.

While I generally trust Google, whose response to most paranoia is, “Why would we risk our whole business to do something as stupid as that?” I am aware that many others don’t trust the company and feel they have good reasons.

We also don’t know about “passive” uses for all the data Google collects. Things we are not aware of but wouldn’t like if we knew about them. I am not accusing, just making the case that Google’s activities require careful monitoring.