Sapere Aude
Tag: crime
wow:
operatives use their phones to record 25 spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, it transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.
Louisiana is still extremely racist, to no one’s surprise.
In 2008, John Conyers, the chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana state representative, learned about Woodfox and Wallace’s decades of confinement and visited them at C.C.R. A “massive amount of evidence” showed that Woodfox and Wallace were innocent. Brent Miller’s widow, Teenie Rogers, had also begun to question the state’s evidence, after a young investigator on the case, Billie Mizell, befriended her and made charts mapping inconsistencies in the state’s testimony. Rogers wrote Richmond a letter saying that she was “shocked to find out that no real attempt was made to find out who the fingerprint did belong to, which should have been a very simple thing to do.”
More even than the laws of the world’s tax havens, the offshore financial system is kept afloat by the legions of professionals — accountants, lawyers, incorporation agents — who are paid well to service it. But the people who work to dismantle that system also have to be paid. If the case Fisher had constructed against Oesterlund was correct, I once proposed to him, then at least some of the money coming to him and Pursglove would seem to be tainted. Fisher disagreed, and unspooled an intricate accounting of his own. When he cracked open the Cook trusts, Fisher argued, the money would come back home. Whatever liabilities Oesterlund had to consumers would be payable by what remained of the businesses. Pursglove and her payout would live in Boca Raton, within easy reach of United States law. “I would always view the $ that I get to be legitimate $”.
why there’s far less competition than there should be:
Economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price. While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists suggest that it is 1 important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment.
reminds me how in austria, seating at formal events is by academic rank.
German law in the past prohibited foreign Ph.D.s from using the title “Dr.” American Ian T. Baldwin, a Cornell-educated professor of ecology in eastern Germany, received a summons from his local police chief in early 2008. “He wanted to know how I planned to plead to the charge of Titelmissbrauch,” or misuse of titles, recalled Prof. Baldwin, who directs the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. “I couldn’t even pronounce it.”
Deep in the Swiss Alps, next to an old airstrip suitable for landing Gulfstream and Falcon jets, is a vast bunker that holds what may be one of the world’s largest stashes of gold. The entrance, protected by a guard in a bulletproof vest, is a small metal door set into a granite mountain face at the end of a narrow country lane. Behind 2 farther doors sits a 3.5-ton metal portal that opens only after a code is entered and an iris scan and a facial-recognition screen are performed. A maze of tunnels once used by Swiss armed forces lies within.
switzerland continues to do what it does best: hide illegitimate money.
An unlikely, and surely extremely rare, positive outcome from the “war on terror”: much better interrogation techniques.
In 2010, to make good on a campaign promise that he would end the use of torture in US terror investigations, President Obama announced the formation of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a joint effort of the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon. In place of the waterboarding and coercion that took place at facilities like Abu Ghraib during the Bush years, the HIG was created to conduct non coercive interrogations. Much of that work is top secret. HIG-trained interrogators, have questioned would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The public knows nothing about how those interrogations, or the dozen or so others the HIG have conducted, unfolded. Even the specific training methods the HIG employs—and that it has introduced to investigators in the Air Force, Navy, and elsewhere—have never been divulged. Since that first interrogation by Stearns and Marcia, Severino’s unit has conducted about 60 interrogations using HIG methods, he says—in cases involving human trafficking, murder, and terrorism. Severino has modified his interview room to be more welcoming and tries to have his detectives talk to witnesses and suspects as soon as they’re identified, to set the right tone for the interviews. “We make our living talking to people. And the HIG teaches us the best approaches—how to gain people’s trust.” By not single-mindedly seeking out confessions, Severino has found that he’s netted enough information from some suspects to amount to an admission of guilt.
spot on
2018-06-04:
Local 124, the union at Sanitation Salvage, also represents workers at several other Bronx companies owned by the Squitieris, including Metropolitan Transfer Station and D&J Ambulette. It turns out that Local 124 often gives to the same politicians as the Squitieris — and often on the same day. On 5 separate occasions between 2006 and 2010, Local 124 donated to the same Bronx political causes on the exact same days as the Squitieris and their companies. 1 of those same-day matching donations was to Bronx Borough President Diaz, and 2 of them were to Klein. “The Squitieris run the Bronx”. In 2016, the de Blasio administration came out in support of a plan for overhauling the private trash industry. New York would be carved up into zones, companies would make bids to collect the garbage in a given zone, and then the city would pick the winners. In this system, backers have argued, the city could make winning a bid contingent on meeting strict benchmarks for things like safety training, wages, hours or recycling rates.
The day Ahmad Khan Rahami planted 2 bombs in Chelsea, 2 thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street
A California aluminum executive commissioned a pilot to fly over the Mexican town of San José Iturbide and snap aerial photos of a remote desert factory. He made a startling discovery. Nearly 1M tons of aluminum sat neatly stacked behind a fortress of barbed-wire fences. The stockpile, worth some $2b and representing 6% of the world’s total inventory quickly became an obsession for the US aluminum industry.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 