[Quote]:

The CEO of what had been one of the nation’s largest privately held mortgage lenders was sentenced Tuesday to more than three years in prison for his role in a $3 billion scheme that officials called one of the biggest corporate frauds in U.S. history.

The 40-month sentence for Paul R. Allen, 55, of Oakton, Va., is slightly less than the six-year term sought by federal prosecutors.

"I messed up. I messed up big," Allen told U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema before he was sentenced, apologizing to his family and "the entire financial community. "There was no excuse for my behavior."

[..]

Allen’s lawyer argued for leniency on the theory that Allen was CEO in name only. The real mastermind was Farkas, who kept Allen out of the loop on much of the company’s day-to-day operations, according to trial testimony.

“Mr. Allen was not treated as a CEO. He did not function as a CEO,” said defense lawyer Stephen Graeff. “Sentence Mr. Allen the man, not Mr. Allen the title.”

[..]

Farkas is to be sentenced next week, and prosecutors have indicated they will seek a significantly longer sentence for Farkas than for his co-conspirators.

[Quote]:

A group of firms including Coca-Cola has alleged that Goldman Sachs is manipulating the metals market by only releasing metals that it holds in certain amounts, which artificially inflates prices, according to the WSJ, via Huffington Post.

In the past few years, Goldman (and other banks) have bought up metals warehouses, which allows them to determine how much metal they release to customers and when they do it.

Now the London Metals Exchange is looking into accusations that this not only allows Goldman to inflate prices, but that Goldman’s action does inflate prices.

[Quote]:

Only 15 seconds in the limelight and she’d already created an overnight buzz. She was the newest member of the very popular all-girl Japanese idol group AKB 48. Upon seeing the new face appear on a candy commercial, the band’s faithful took to the message boards: Who is Aimi Eguchi?

This past Sunday, Ezaki Glico, the candy company which aired the commercial, confirmed what many of AKB 48’s fans had come to suspect: Aimi Eguchi wasn’t real. The new group member, it turns out, was a computer-generated composite of the real band members. Her pretty face was actually made up of the “best features” of six other members: her eyes, nose, mouth, hair/body, face outline and eyebrows were not flesh-and-blood, but cut-and-paste.

[Quote]:

“We are facing a massive mental health problem as a result of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a country we have not responded adequately to the problem. Unless we act urgently and wisely, we will be dealing with an epidemic of service related psychological wounds for years to come.” – Bobby Muller, President Veterans for America.

Too bad there’s a war against mental health aswell.

Ecstasy Shows Promise in Relieving PTSD

[Quote]:

The high school made headlines last week when a photograph depicting a 17-year-old male student with his hands inside the clothing of a 15-year-old female student at a school dance was published in the yearbook.

Sgt. Jeremiah MacKay of the Big Bear sheriff’s station said Tuesday that although his investigation was not complete, it showed that sexual penetration of a minor had occurred.

[..]

The yearbooks were immediately recalled, and students were ordered to bring them back to the school so the page with the photograph could be removed.

Officials warned that those who did not return their yearbooks could face charges of possession of child pornography.

I would tell them “Fuck no, I’m keeping it – it is evidence of the school’s crime, distribution of child pornography, and I need it for the prosecution.” This zero tolerance crap goes both ways.

Oh, and by the way, somebody call Barbara Streisand:

[Quote]:

A group of UK copyright lobbyists held confidential, closed-door meetings with Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries to discuss a plan to allow industry groups to censor the Internet in the UK. The proposal has leaked, and it reveals a plan to establish "expert bodies" that would decide which websites British people were allowed to see, to be approved by a judge using a "streamlined" procedure. The procedure will allow for "swift" blocking in order to shut down streaming of live events.

[Quote]:

But that avoids the more essential point, namely that Wal-Mart views low labor costs and a high degree of workplace flexibility as a signal competitive advantage. It is a militantly anti-union company that has been forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to current and former employees for violations of state wage and hour laws.

[Quote]:

But if the Wal-Mart decision was a victory for employers, it was short-lived with the next day’s NLRB announcement.

The agency plans to adjust rules governing how union elections occur. The gist of it is that union elections can happen more easily, which is viewed negatively by employers wanting to avoid collective bargaining.

Among the proposed rule changes are electronic election petition filing, which would allow union organizers to put an election together more easily without an employer finding out.

“The business community will say it deprives them of the opportunity to get their message out,” said Mike Blumenthal, a Seyferth Blumenthal & Harris LLC lawyer.

It also would defer litigation claims regarding the eligibility of workplace voters until after the election, which could speed up the election process for union organizers.

Administrative rule-making does not require congressional approval.

Union critics see Tuesday’s NLRB announcement as something of an end-around to the Employee Free Choice Act, a pro-union piece of legislation that has failed to gain traction on Capitol Hill.

[Quote]:

Hoping to get a case at the Indiana Southern District Court dropped as well, a Doe who saw his IP address listed in the court documents wrote to the judge. The case in question is Hard Drive Productions vs. Does 1-21, which accuses 21 does of sharing adult content via BitTorrent.

Most of the judges have no clue that the copyright holders who file these lawsuits are not really seeking a full trial, but merely want to collect settlements. The Doe in question explains this in the letter to the judge, and adds that the evidence the copyright holders claim to have is highly unreliable.

“These lawsuits have been rife with shoddy ‘evidence’ accumulation and wrongful harassment of Internet subscribers with no effort or evidence to identify the actual infringer behind an I.P. address rather than just demanding money from the person registered as the subscriber of the Internet connection,” the letter begins.

In his letter the Doe further stresses that running an open wireless network is not a crime, weakening the claims of the copyright holders even further. People have the right to offer an open connection to outsiders. There is no law that prohibits it and there are several wireless routers that have a second (unsecured) connection as a feature.

“I hope and plead with you to consider the interests of neighbors in being able to have friends over with their laptops without having to draw up legal agreements and waivers before they can connect to the Internet and share our I.P. address.

[Quote]:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle civil fraud charges that it misled buyers of complex mortgage investments just as the housing market was collapsing.

J.P. Morgan Securities, a division of the powerful Wall Street bank, failed to tell investors that a hedge fund helped select the investment portfolio and then bet that the portfolio would fail, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

Among the investors who lost money on the deal were autoworkers for General Motors, a Lutheran financial organization in Minneapolis and a retirement services company in Topeka, Kan.

[Quote]:

BP claim that because the oil spill came on the Outer Continental Shelf, which is subject to the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act OCSLA, state laws do not apply, even when the oil damaged state waters and coastlines.

By that logic, if I shot missiles into each of BP’s CEO’s houses from international waters, I couldn’t be blamed for it.

Anybody got a spare missile sub for me?

[Quote]:

The World of Jim Henson: 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: 4 :: 5 :: 6 :: 7 :: 8 :: 9 :: “An excellent biography of the Muppet master, this 85-minute film from the PBS show Great Performances mixes the history of Henson’s projects with plenty of sketches that any fan age 6 and older should enjoy. The film shows the incredible range of Henson’s creations, starting in 1955 with “Sam and Friends” then moving on to Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, and beyond. It illustrates the breadth of his genius, from creating entirely new worlds in film (The Dark Crystal) to pithy ’60s TV commercials that achieved branding and a laugh in less than six seconds. There’s footage that most fans haven’t seen in years, or at all: a regular bit from The Jimmy Dean Show; tantalizing bits of his 1965 Oscar-nominated short, Time Piece; appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show; his explanation of Wall Street on Nightline; and Miss Piggy’s hilarious deconstruction of Morley Safer on 60 Minutes.”

“We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers–thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”
– Peter S. Beagle

[Quote]:

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and a host of US megacorps are lobbying hard for a massive tax break – and they’re gaining powerful friends in business, government, and labor in support of that effort.

"This is about creating jobs, expanding US businesses and strengthening American companies," representative Kevin Brady (Rep-TX) told The New York Times, lauding his bill that would lower the amount of tax US companies pay on profits made overseas then brought back to the US, from 35 per cent to 5.25 per cent.

When profits made overseas are brought back to the US, it’s called repatriation. When a tax break such as the one outlined by Brady’s Freedom to Invest Act is instituted, it’s called a repatriation holiday.

Since this will encourage companies to make more profit outside US borders, I fail to see how this would create jobs within the US. That leaves “expanding US businesses and strengthening American companies”. At the tax payers expense, of course.

[Quote]:

A bungled FBI raid on a data centre has taken out an unknown number of Web sites.

Apparently targeting a particular – but unnamed – customer of DigitalOne, the G-men seized three enclosures of equipment, according to the New York Times.

Among the collateral damage is New York publisher the Cubed Network, and the Pinboard bookmarking site, which is now operating from a backup server. Pinboard has been unable to confirm whether or not its machines were among those lifted by the FBI, only that its main database server is offline and that it’s running with reduced capabilities.

And while the FBI hasn’t commented on the NYT story, it appears there’s a lock-out at the server farm, with DigitalOne complaining that it is unable to check which servers were taken, can’t restart its own servers, and isn’t sure when its support system will be back online.

Why would anybody want to host their site within US borders?