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By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a "drunken blackout". Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

By the time PVM realised the trades were not authorised and swiftly began to unwind the positions, losses of exactly $9,763,252 had stacked up.

The amount was almost equal to PVM Oil Futures’ entire annual revenue of $12m and caused a $7.6m loss last year – shared by the senior brokers who are its only shareholders.

It swiftly emerged that Mr Perkins had been relieved of his position at PVM, but details of the bizarre incident have only just been made public after a Financial Services Authority investigation.

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"The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material–the material informs the form," says Ive. "It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way."

For the sake of Core77′s design student readership, I divert briefly into the realm of design education and ask Ive if he has any advice for students. "While [design schools today may have] sophisticated virtual design tools, the danger in relying on them too much is that we can end up isolated from the physical world," he says. "In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves–’I press too hard here, and it breaks here’ and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it’s important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials."

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We are sitting in Badam Bagh, or Almond Garden, Afghanistan’s only prison for women in the capital Kabul.

The prison is a window on a world where, outside these walls, women are constantly judged against a standard that makes many of their stories difficult to fathom.

Sixteen-year-old Sabera, with a pretty yellow head scarf, frets that she is missing school.

“I was about to get engaged, and the boy came to ask me himself, before sending his parents. A lady in our neighbourhood saw us, and called the police,” she explains.

She was sentenced to three years but, in an act of mercy, it was shortened to 18 months.

Fellow inmate Aziza was accused of running away from her husband. She says she was acquitted two months ago, but still languishes in prison.

A senior official in Afghanistan’s Ministry for Women’s Affairs told a recent UN workshop that about half of Afghanistan’s 476 women prisoners were detained for “moral crimes”.

That includes everything from running away from home, refusing to marry, marrying without their family’s wishes, and “attempted adultery”.

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Two-thirds of the women in Lashkar Gah’s medieval-looking jail have been convicted of illegal sexual relations, but most are simply rape victims – mirroring the situation nationwide. The system does not distinguish between those who have been attacked and those who have chosen to run off with a man.

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The expiration of the five-metre rule that had Toronto residents fearing arrest if they strayed too close to the G20 security perimeter came with a startling revelation Tuesday – it never existed.

The rule seemed straightforward when the news broke last Friday that the Ontario government made a regulatory change to a little-known act in secret.

Come within five metres of the summit security fence and you’d better have some identification or risk arrest.

The temporary regulation, which was passed in secret June 2, did decree that all streets and sidewalks inside the fence were a public work until 11:59 p.m. Monday. Under the Ontario Public Works Protection Act, that allowed police to search people trying to enter that area.

But there was no power to search people coming within five metres of the fence, said ministry spokeswoman Laura Blondeau.

“The area designated by the regulation as a public work does not extend outside the boundary of the fence,” Ms. Blondeau said.

Asked Tuesday if there actually was a five-metre rule given the ministry’s clarification, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair smiled and said, “No, but I was trying to keep the criminals out.”

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The Daily Kos Website has been commissioning pollster Research 2000 to run polls for it. Now the founder, Markos Moulitsas, has repudiated Research 2000 and told everyone to delete all its tracking polls from their data bases due to a statistical analysis that suggests they have been curbstoning (making up the data). Kos, as he is known, didn’t say anything about Senate polls, but if Research 2000 is unreliable with tracking polls, it is probably unreliable about everything.

[..]

Research 2000 has hired a law firm to try to intimidate the media (including the
blogs) into not talking about this issue. Nate Silver of 538.com has already
gotten his.
I’ll check my mailbox later today expectantly.

Maybe they should investigate the “Barbara Streisand effect”..

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For most of her campaign for U.S. Senate, Nevada GOP nominee Sharron Angle’s election strategy has consisted of avoiding reporters so she doesn’t get tricked into saying things publicly. Last night’s interview on Jon Ralston’s "Face to Face" is one of the few times since winning the GOP nomination that Angle has braved a media outlet that was not a wingnut blog or Fox News.

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MANDERS: I too am pro-life, but I’m also pro-choice. Do you understand what I say when I mean that?

ANGLE: Well, I’m pro-responsible choice. There’s choice to abstain, choice to use contraceptives … there’s all kinds of good choice….

MANDERS: Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

ANGLE: Not in my book.

MANDERS: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?

ANGLE: You know, I’m a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

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Attention Wal-Mart employees, doctor prescribed treatment for a pre-existing condition may get you fired if you get injured on the job.

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“The American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Michigan, in partnership with the law firm of Daniel W. Grow, PLLC, filed a lawsuit today against Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and the manager of its Battle Creek store for wrongfully firing an employee for using medicinal marijuana in accordance with state law to treat the painful symptoms of an inoperable brain tumor and cancer,” a press release sent to RAW STORY announced Tuesday.

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Even for the Pentagon’s science-fiction division, it seemed like a stretch. But in 2007, Darpa really did launch an effort to build programmable matter that could reconfigure itself on command. Then, two years later, Harvard and MIT researchers really did make progress building “self-folding origami” that just might be able to twist themselves into different shapes. Yesterday, Darpa-backed electrical engineers at the two schools released the stunning results: a shape-shifting sheet of rigid tiles and elastomer joints that can fold itself into a little plane or a boat on demand.

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The controversial Facebook page Boycott BP, which calls on individuals to "Boycott BP stations until the spill is cleaned up," mysteriously went down on Monday, with visitors automatically redirected to Facebook’s home page without explanation.

The page was back up again by early Tuesday morning, but the incident left its over-700,000-strong membership wondering if Facebook attempted to censor them.

Why anybody would use FaceBook for anything at all is beyond me, but perhaps I’m just getting old…

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A proposed anti-trust settlement between the U.S. Justice Department and a subsidiary of energy giant National Grid is under fire for allegedly being too lenient to the power company — and critics say it’s just another sign of a dysfunctional regulatory climate.

National Gird subsidiary Keyspan Energy has been accused of using Enron-style tactics to manipulate the New York State energy market between 2006 and 2008, a scheme which withdrew power capacity from the market, raising prices and increasing profits for the power distributor.

But now Congressman Dennis Kucinich has joined consumer groups and regulatory agencies to urge the Justice Department to reconsider the settlement that requires the company to pay $12 million penalty to the government while not refunding a single dime of the $100 million the market manipulation cost consumers.

If you get fined only $12m when you profit $100m, what’s to stop the company from doing it again?

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If today’s kids would just turn off their electronic games and kick the ball around in the parish playground, Italian soccer might have a future.

That was the suggestion in a commentary June 26 in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, in the wake of the humiliating first-round elimination of the Italian national soccer team in the World Cup in South Africa.

The commentary, under the headline "Let’s throw out the PlayStation and get back to the parish playground," said Italy’s national squad — defending world champions — lacked preparation, strategy and especially a deep roster of great players.

The solution in the past, it said, has been to turn attention to the younger generations playing in the "oratorio," the parish playground where countless Italian professionals have developed their soccer legs.

No doubt by having to run faster than the priests attempting to molest them.

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Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

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A new poll from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes finds that 24 percent of Americans still believe Pres. Obama was born overseas, despite a complete lack of evidence to support the claim he was foreign-born. And while nearly a quarter of Americans cling to this belief, there is no consensus among these hard core birthers about where overseas Obama was born — 6 percent said Kenya, 2 percent said Indonesia and 16 percent couldn’t specify, just somewhere other than America.

By comparison an Angus Reid Global Monitor poll from March 2010 that around 15 percent of Americans were found to be truthers, the media’s analog to birthers. In the poll, 15 percent said the collapse of the World Trade Center was the result of a controlled demolition, with 11 percent not sure; 15 percent said Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania (22 percent not sure); 13 percent said no plane crashed at the Pentagon (11 percent not sure); and 6 percent said no jets crashed into the World Trade Center towers, meaning the images in the news videos were fake (7 percent weren’t sure).

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard says she has no intention of pretending to believe in God to attract religiously-inclined voters.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd was a regular at Canberra church services and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is known as a devout Catholic.

In contrast, Ms Gillard says that while she greatly respects other people’s religious views, she does not believe in God.

Ms Gillard has been quizzed on personal topics including her attitude to religion and her relationship with her partner during interviews this morning.

She says does not go through religious rituals for the sake of appearance.

"I am not going to pretend a faith I don’t feel," she said.

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Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in Austin, desktop PCs riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions. Dell sold millions of these computers from 2003 to 2005 to major companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic and small businesses.

“The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time,” said Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near Philadelphia that had bought dozens. “It’s unheard-of, but Dell didn’t seem to recognize this as a problem at the time.”

Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute.

Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

Ten years ago Dell, IBM, HP, Compaq, Sun and Apple faced the same challenge. The technology had become a commodity and low cost competitors were killing their margins. Dell choose to use his companies market share and scale to be the lowest cost provider, effectively killing competitors. IBM chose to exit the business and sold their PC division to Lenovo and focus on services and servers with a strong emphasis on open source. Sun never could figure it out . HP and Compac merged to try to mirror Dell’s strategy. Apple released OSX and iTunes to reshape the digital experience. The focus on design and user interface was the winner. Instead of building the cheapest clone, Apple stayed out of that market and became the premium experience. The escaped the commodity trap. The result is that today while Apple has 12.5% market share in PCs, they take in half of the total profit.

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Although still early in the process, newly leaked documents about Windows 8 offer some keen insight into where Microsoft wants to head with the next version of the operating system.

One thing that is made abundantly clear is that Microsoft has been paying attention to Apple. In the documents, which appear to come from an April meeting with computer makers, Microsoft discusses its Cupertino, Calif.-based rival and outlines plans to offer a Windows Store similar to the way Apple distributes software on its iPhone. The documents, which Microsoft has declined to comment on or authenticate, also talk about plans to give Windows a more iPad-like response time through new power management settings.

In particular, one slide titled “How Apple Does It: A Virtuous Cycle,” talks about the need for simplicity in design. “Apple brand is known for high quality, uncomplicated, ‘it just works,’” the slide says, adding that “This is something people will pay for!”

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time for all the program managers at Microsoft to give their input into Windows 8, so it’ll probably be just as screwed up as all previous windows versions.

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The Royal Canadian Mint headquarters in Ottawa is operating normally again after a liquid oxygen spill prompted a weekend evacuation.

An Air Liquide tanker truck had been delivering oxygen to the mint on Sussex Drive when a valve malfunctioned on Sunday, Ottawa Fire Services reported.

Possibly you won’t understand the significance of this if you don’t know the Ottawa area. The Mint is very close to Parliament Hill, just across the locks at the end of the Rideau Canal.

Since oxygen is highly volatile at normal temperatures, there was a strong danger that a cloud of oxygen might have drifted across the canal to Parliament Hill, possibly resulting in clear thinking by some of the politicians.

Who knows what might have resulted …

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Last week, leaders of nations from both the G8 and G20 gathered in Ontario Canada, for meetings in in Huntsville and Toronto. Canadian authorities planning for the event spent an estimated $1 billion, mostly for security. Tens of thousands of protesters descended on Toronto, looking to have their voices heard on a broad range of issues, from indigenous rights to anti-capitalist ideals, to human and animal rights, and much more. Many peaceful marches took place throughout the weekend, but on Saturday, a small group of "black bloc" anarchists became violent, smashing storefronts and burning several police vehicles. Harsher tactics and more arrests by the 20,000 police officers deployed to Toronto soon followed, although many of those arrested were released from a temporary G20 detainment center soon after. (42 photos total)

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A photographer takes pictures as police officers form a line to hold back demonstrators protesting the G8/G20 summits on June 26, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario Canada. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) #

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This group of clowns first entertained and subsequently annoyed police to the point of pushing the clowns (and myself) back two blocks to University and Adelaide.

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The G20 security strategy has been spectacularly successful at cocooning the world’s leading politicians and staggeringly ineffective at protecting the property and peace of mind of Torontonians. And the one, inevitably, led to the other.

By bringing in thousands of heavily armed strangers and throwing up barricades everywhere to regular traffic, frightening off good and decent citizens, Canadian authorities created a ghost town in the heart of our city.

Perfect for the political leaders. Protesters were kept blocks away from where the deliberations were going on.

And most protesters conducted themselves faultlessly as the global good and great met behind rings of gulag-like fencing and battalions of police beating Plexiglas shields with batons in a primitive show of might.

It was, however, less than perfect for the city, its businesses and its inhabitants. The only force that can prevent vandalism and mayhem in a city is the presence of its population. Surely that was the lesson every urban planner learned from looking south to the hollowed-out urban war zones of the United States in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

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The security contractor Blackwater Worldwide tried for two years to secure lucrative defense business in Southern Sudan while the country was under U.S. economic sanctions, according to current and former U.S. officials and hundreds of pages of documents reviewed by McClatchy .

The effort to drum up new business in East Africa by Blackwater owner Erik Prince , a former Navy SEAL who had close ties with top officials in the George W. Bush White House and the CIA , became a major element in a continuing four-year federal investigation into allegations of sanctions violations, illegal exports and bribery.

The Obama administration, however, has decided for now not to bring criminal charges against Blackwater , according to a U.S. official close to the case.

Instead, the U.S. government and the private military contractor are negotiating a multimillion-dollar fine to settle allegations that Blackwater violated U.S. export control regulations in Sudan , Iraq and elsewhere.

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The number one killer of young Americans is the automobile. However, the Secular Humanists dominating our schools refuse to acknowledge that the only safe driving is abstinence from driving. Instead, they advocate courses in “Driver Education,” in which teenagers are taught “Safe Driving,” and no attention is given to traditional values. They are even taught the use of “Seat Belts” (and some classes even give explicit demonstrations of the proper method of applying these belts!) with, at best, a passing mention that the protection provided by these belts is only partial. Clearly, this sends a mixed message to our young people: it appears to condone driving, and the more inquisitive will surely feel encouraged to experiment with driving.

Stop the wanton slaughter! Contact your school board member and insist that driving be taught in the family, in a climate where the moral implications are not overlooked, not in the schools where hedonistic instructors teach driving as a mere form of pleasure.

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The story of a young, handsome PR executive’s quest to save America from a 100-year-old plot to destroy it, The Overton Window was described as "didactic, discursive [and] sporadically incoherent" in the Los Angeles Times, and as "not just a bad book … an instructively bad book because it offers a complete colour-by-numbers picture of the contemporary Wingnut psyche" in the Daily Beast.

"Thrillers often are marred by laughable prose, but few have stumbled along with language as silly as this one," added the Washington Post, pointing to hero Noah’s reaction on meeting his true love, patriot Molly, for the first time: "Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory." The Los Angeles Times agreed. "You really can’t make this stuff up," wrote its reviewer, Tim Rutten, before singling out the same passage: "Without a doubt, all the goodies were in all the right places, but no mere scale of one to 10 was going to do the job this time. It was an entirely new experience for him. Though he’d been in her presence for less than a minute, her soul had locked itself onto his senses, far more than her substance had."

Despite this, Beck’s army of fans sent the thriller racing to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list, ahead of the latest outing for Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

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Queen and Spadina was one of the epicenters of G20 activity today in Toronto. Jonas Naimark who was there and took the above photo writes:

The last day of the G20, protesters ended up at Queen and Spadina. Soon after stopping the crowd police boxed them in and began grabbing them out 1 by 1 to arrest people. They were standing there peacefully, many people weren’t even protesting they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m not sure what the police’s plan was. Shortly after this pic was taken it started to poor rain. Many of these people were forced to wait for four hours in the rain in restraints.

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When Oscar the cat lost both his hind paws in a farming accident, it was feared he’d have to trundle around in one of those wheeled-cat apparatuses. But Noel Fitzpatrick, a neuro-orthopedic veterinary surgeon in Surrey, pioneered a groundbreaking technique instead, installing weight-bearing bone implants to create a bionic kitty.

Custom-engineered metal implants — called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (ITAPs) — are fastened directly to Oscar’s little ankle bones, inside his fuzzy little legs. From there they protrude directly through the skin and fur, using a biomimicking design inspired by the way that deer’s antlers anchor to bone and then extend out through the skin. Prosthetic paws attach to the ends of the implants and let Oscar (no relation to Oscar Pistorius) walk normally.

I guess that deserves a bonus Animal video… so here it is: