Marc Faber: Lateline Business Interview
August 31st, 2009Via: YouTube:
The World’s 50 Safest Banks
August 31st, 2009For whatever it’s worth…
Via: Global Finance:
With bank stability still high on corporate and investor agendas, Global Finance publishes its 18th annual list of the world’s safest banks.
What Every American Should be Made to Learn About the IG Torture Report
August 31st, 2009Via: Salon:
The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle — all things that we have always condemend as “torture” and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies (“torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .”) — reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.
FBI Investigating Laptops Sent to U.S. Governors
August 31st, 2009Via: Computer World:
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to figure out who is sending laptop computers to state governors across the U.S., including West Virginia Governor Joe Mahchin and Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal. Some state officials are worried that they may contain malicious software.
According to sources familiar with the investigation, other states have been targeted too, with HP laptops mysteriously ordered for officials in 10 states. Four of the orders were delivered, while the remaining six were intercepted, according to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The West Virginia laptops were delivered to the governor’s office several weeks ago, prompting state officials to contact police, according to Kyle Schafer, the state’s chief technology officer. “We were notified by the governor’s office that they had received the laptops and they had not ordered them,” he said. “We checked our records and we had not ordered them.”
State officials in Vermont told him they’ve received similar unsolicited orders, Schafer said. Representatives from those states could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Schafer doesn’t know what’s on the laptops, but he handed them over to the authorities. “Our expectation is that this is not a gesture of good will,” he said. “People don’t just send you five laptops for no good reason.”
The computers are now being held as evidence by state police, who are working with the FBI to figure out how the machines were sent to the governor’s office, said Michael Baylous, a sergeant with the West Virginia State Police.
The West Virginia laptops were delivered Aug. 5, according to the Charleston Gazette, which first reported the story.
The laptops sent to the Wyoming governor’s office arrived in two separate shipments on Aug. 3 and Aug. 6, according to Cara Eastwood, a spokeswoman for Governor Freudenthal.
“We received one package, opened it and realized that it was an error since no one in our office had ordered them,” she said. “The next day we received another package. At this point we realized that they needed to be turned over to law enforcement.”
Although there is no evidence that the computers contain malicious code, HP confirmed Thursday that there have been several such orders and that they have been linked to fraud. “HP is aware that fraudulent state government orders recently have been placed for small amounts of HP equipment,” spokeswoman Pamela Bonney said in an e-mail message. “HP took prompt corrective action to address the fraudulent orders and is working with law enforcement personnel on a criminal investigation.”
With users now more reluctant to install suspicious software or open attachments on their networks, scammers appear to be looking for new ways to get inside the firewall.
Criminals have tried to put malware on USB devices and then left them outside company offices, hoping someone would plug them into a computer and inadvertently install malicious software on the network. Many Windows systems are configured to automatically run software included on CDs and USB devices using a Windows feature called AutoRun.
Many organized criminals would be happy to spend the cost of five PCs in order to access government computers, said Steve Santorelli, director of investigations with security consultancy Team Cymru. “What is a netbook? $700? You send five of them; you’re dropping three grand, and say you get into the Congressional e-mail system. How valuable would that be?”
Cheney Says Cooperation with CIA Probe “Will Depend”
August 31st, 2009Via: Reuters:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he might refuse to speak with a prosecutor investigating suspected CIA prisoner abuses, a probe he branded as political and bad for national security.
Cheney has been one of the fiercest critics of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision last week to name a new special prosecutor to look deeper into harsh interrogations of captured terrorism suspects during the Bush administration.
Asked whether he would talk to prosecutor John Durham if eventually sought out, Cheney told “Fox News Sunday”: “It will depend on the circumstances and what I think their activities are really involved in. I’ve been very outspoken in my views on this matter.”
The cases under investigation include a mock execution, use of a power drill to scare a prisoner and the waterboarding of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.
“I’m very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the past eight years, successfully,” Cheney said in a recorded interview. “And it won’t take a prosecutor to find out what I think. I’ve already expressed those views.”
Backbone of Complex Networks of Corporations: The Flow of Control
August 31st, 2009From: Backbone of Complex Networks of Corporations: The Flow of Control, by J.B. Glattfelder, S. Battiston:
Having identified important shareholders in the global markets, it is now also possible to address the following questions. Who holds the power in an increasingly globalized world? How important are individual people compared to the sphere of influence of multinational corporations? How eminent is the influence of the financial sector? By looking in detail at the identity of the power holders featured in the backbones, we address these issues next. If one focuses on how often the same power holders appear in the backbones of the 48 countries analyzed, it is possible to identify the global power holders. Following is a top-ten list, comprised of the company’s name, activity, country the headquarter is based in, and ranked according to the number of times it is present in different countries’ backbones: the Capital Group Companies (investment management, US, 36), Fidelity Management & Research (investment products and services, US, 32), Barclays PLC (financial services provider, GB, 26), Franklin Resources (investment management, US, 25), AXA (insurance company, FR, 22), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (financial services provider, US, 19), Dimensional Fund Advisors (investment management, US, 15), Merrill Lynch & Co. (investment management, US, 14), Wellington Management Co. (investment management, US, 14), and UBS (financial services provider, CH, 12). Next to the dominance of US American companies we find: Barclays PLC (GB), AXA (FR) and UBS (CH), Deutsche Bank (DE), Brandes Investment Partners (CA), Soci´et´e G´en´erale (FR), Credit Suisse Group (CH), Schroders PLC (GB), and Allianz (DE) in the top 21 positions. The government of Singapore is at rank 25. HSBC Holdings PLC (HK/GB), the world’s largest banking group, only appears at position 26. In addition, large multinational corporations outside of the finance and insurance industry do not act as prominent shareholders and only appear in their own national countries’ backbones as controlled stocks. For instance, Exxon Mobil, Daimler Chrysler, Ford Motor Co., Siemens, and Unilever. Individual people do not appear as multinational power holders very often. In the US backbone, we find one person ranked at ninth position: Warren E. Buffet. William Henry Gates III is next, at rank 26. In DE the family Porsche/Piech and in FR the family Bettencourt are power-holders in the top ten. For the tax-haven KY one finds Kao H. Min (who is placed at number 140 in the Forbes 400 list) in the top ranks.
Via: Inside Science:
A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world’s finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system’s vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.
A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.
“You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense,” Glattfelder said. “From that you’re able to … unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn’t at all important.”
The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston’s analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.
“If you would look at this locally, it’s always distributed,” Glattfelder said. “If you then look at who is at the end of these links, you find that it’s the same guys, [which] is not something you’d expect from the local view.”
Matthew Jackson, an economist from Stanford University in Calif. who studies social and economic networks, said that Glattfelder and Battiston’s approach could be used to answer more pointed questions about corporate control and how companies interact.
“It’s clear, looking at financial contagion and recent crises, that understanding interrelations between companies and holdings is very important in the future,” he said. “Certainly people have some understanding of how large some of these financial institutions in the world are, there’s some feeling of how intertwined they are, but there’s a big difference between having an impression and actually having … more explicit numbers to put behind it.”
Based on their analysis, Glattfelder and Battiston identified the ten investment entities who are “big fish” in the most countries. The biggest fish was the Capital Group Companies, with major stakes in 36 of the 48 countries studied. In identifying these major players, the physicists accounted for secondary ownership — owning stock in companies who then owned stock in another company — in an attempt to quantify the potential control a given agent might have in a market.
The results raise questions of where and when a company could choose to exert this influence, but Glattfelder and Battiston are reluctant to speculate.
“In this kind of science, complex systems, you’re not aiming at making predictions [like] … where the tennis ball will be at given place in given time,” Battiston said. “What you’re trying to estimate is … the potential influence that [an investor] has.”
Glattfelder added that the internationalism of these powerful companies makes it difficult to gauge their economic influence. “[With] new company structures which are so big and spanning the globe, it’s hard to see what they’re up to and what they’re doing,” he said. Large, sparse networks dominated by a few major companies could also be more vulnerable, he said. “In network speak, if those nodes fail, that has a big effect on the network.”
In 2006 a New Zealand Woman Was Held in a Psychiatric Ward for Saying 9/11 Was an Inside Job
August 31st, 2009Here’s the formal apology letter from the Northland DHB.
Via: Clare Swinney:
I was wrongly diagnosed as delusional by the psychiatric staff of Ward 7 at Northland Base Hospital in Whangarei and held hospital against my will for 11 days in mid-2006, because I maintained the attacks of 9/11 were orchestrated by criminal elements inside the US Administration.
…
Another astounding aspect to what occurred was that Section 4 of the New Zealand Mental Health Act makes it clear that no one can be judged to be mentally ill solely on the basis of their political beliefs. The District Inspector for Mental Health – Northland, barrister Julie Young; Bridget Westenra, the lawyer she appointed to assist me and the staff of Ward 7, including the chief psychiatrist, did not appear to know this. As can be seen, it is written in layman’s language on page 33 of Chapter 2 of Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act 1992, which is on the Ministry of Health’s own website: ‘You cannot be considered to have a mental disorder just because of your: political, religious or cultural beliefs…’.
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Illuminati Symbolism Inside St. Louis Catholic Church
August 31st, 2009The Shrine of St. Joseph Catholic Church
St. Louis, Missouri
Via: Reddit:
