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Javier E

It's Shockingly Easy For Your Boss To Steal From You And Get Away With It | HuffPost - 0 views

  • In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute found that 17% of low-income workers were earning less than the minimum wage due to skimming by their employers.
  • A 2009 survey carried out in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago found that three-quarters of low-wage workers weren’t compensated at a higher rate for overtime.
  • Though the vast majority of wage theft goes unreported, the $933 million recovered by workers in court settlements in 2012 amounted to three times the cost of all robberies combined.
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  • their business models,” said Jason Conway, a wage theft lawyer in Philadelphia. “We’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s easy for employers to commit wage theft and hard for workers to do anything about it
jlessner

Grand Theft Auto V and the Culture of Violence Against Women | Malika Saada Saar - 0 views

  • In GTA V, a gamer can purchase a woman (or is she a girl?) to perform a menu of different sexual acts that he experiences in first person. After purchasing the woman/girl, the gamer can choose to kill her -- and actually is incentivized to kill her to get his money back. At present, GTA V is one of the most popular and money making video games.
  • If Cambodia, India, or Nigeria produced such a video game, there would be global outrage. It would serve as unequivocal evidence of their misogynistic cultures in which women and girls are systemically raped and murdered with impunity. We would critique the ways in which their cultures and values are organized around the normalization of gendered violence.
  • Interestingly, there has been little to none such backlash against the American made and marketed GTA V in the U.S. The release of GTA V has been met with a very muted response. Any criticisms are reduced to being mere moral panics. Free speech advocates, GTA V fans, and other supporters insist that GTA V is simply a game, a victimless form of entertainment.
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  • GTA V is certainly not the only video game, or only iteration, of celebrated violence against women. Nor can GTA V be faulted for actually causing gendered violence. But GTA V's new standard for ramped-up, graphic violence against women comfortably exists in our rape culture, and reifies the distinct ways in which women and girls are propertied, humiliated, and abused.
zachcutler

Feds: NSA contractor's secrets theft 'breathtaking' - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Feds: NSA contractor's secrets theft 'breathtaking'
  • A former government contractor who's charged with stealing thousands of classified and sensitive intelligence files committed "breathtaking" crimes, according to a new filing from federal prosecutors.
  • Before his arrest, Martin worked as a contractor to the National Security Agency through
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  • consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which fired him after he was charged.
  • He has a long history working with sensitive government intelligence, and served in the US Navy and Naval Reserves for more than 10 years, reaching the rank of lieutenant
  • Prosecutors characterized the notes as seemingly intended for a non-intelligence community audience
  • Martin had classified information dating from 1996 to 2016, the government said, including a document "regarding specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies."
  • FBI investigators haven't concluded what Martin's motivation was for stealing the documents. So far, they don't believe he did it for a foreign country.
  • In a subsequent filing, Martin's attorneys argued he presents no flight risk, noting as the government does that he does not have his passport. Given that his wife and home are in Maryland and noting his military service, they said there was no reason nor legal basis to deny him bail.
  • "There is no evidence he intended to betray his country," they wrote.
jordancart33

Yves Bouvier charged over 'concealed theft' of Picasso paintings - Telegraph - 0 views

  • The bail sum of €27m was the amount that Russian billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev, who owns Monaco football club, paid for the two paintings, judicial sources told AFP. He also owns the 58 drawings, though it is not known where the third painting is. There has been no suggestion that Mr Rybolovlev, who bought his art through a family trust, knew that any of the works might have been stolen.
katyshannon

N.S.A. Contractor Arrested in Possible New Theft of Secrets - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The F.B.I. secretly arrested a former National Security Agency contractor in August and, according to law enforcement officials, is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer code developed by the agency to hack into the networks of foreign governments.
  • The arrest raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, a contractor for the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton managed to steal highly damaging secret information while working for the N.S.A.
  • In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, who was also a Booz Allen contractor, took a vast trove of documents from the agency that were later passed to journalists
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  • The contractor was identified as Harold T. Martin III of Glen Burnie, Md., according to a criminal complaint filed in late August and unsealed Wednesday
  • Mr. Martin, who at the time of his arrest was working as a contractor for the Defense Department after leaving the N.S.A., was charged with theft of government property and the unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents.
  • two dozen F.B.I. agents wearing military-style uniforms and armed with long guns stormed the house, and later escorted Mr. Martin out in handcuffs.
  • F.B.I. discovered thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers or other electronic devices at his home and in his car, a large amount of it classified. The digital media contained “many terabytes of information,” according to the documents
  • also discovered classified documents that had been posted online, including computer code, officials said. Some of the documents were produced in 2014.
  • authorities cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Martin leaked the information, passed them on to a third party or whether he simply downloaded them.
Javier E

Rich robbers: why do wealthy people shoplift? | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Shoplifting in the United States (American Journal of Psychology, 2008), states that people with incomes of $70,000 shoplift 30% more than those earning $20,000 a year
  • So why do otherwise law-abiding (and well-off) citizens ignore their better angels and go full Winona Ryder?
  • “Stealing is just the first layer of the onion,” explains Terrence Shulman, the founder of the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending and Hoarding. “Beneath that are all the unresolved losses, traumas, abuses and repressed memories.” He emphasizes that these psychic scars aren’t always rooted in the past. Tragic events like a recent divorce, a bankruptcy or death in the family could trigger a shoplifting episode. “These people are self-medicating. Theft becomes their drug of choice,”
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  • Psychologists have a label for this maladaptive behavior: nonsensical shoplifting, or shoplifting not apparently motivated by need or desire
  • Psychologist Stanton E Samenow, the author of The Myth of the Out of Character Crime, is convinced wealthy people shoplift because, as he puts it: “Why buy it if you can steal it?”
  • Samenow recounts a case study, a patient that he treated several years ago: “He had more than enough money to buy the item. He took it for the thrill of it, to outsmart the establishment. He enjoyed every aspect of shoplifting: scanning the aisles for the objects, looking for the exits, trying to outsmart the surveillance and store personnel, the theft and the getaway. This was all about excitement and building up one’s self-worth.
  • Social hierarchies is an established field of psychology that focuses on the effects of wealth, power and privilege. The study results in this area are remarkably consistent: the rich tend to be unethical, and are more likely to cheat and steal than the poor are.
  • In one experiment, the drivers of luxury cars were less likely to obey the right-of-way laws at a busy four-way intersection than the drivers of cheaper or older model cars. Then there’s the grim and troubling “candy experiment”, where researchers observed wealthy people remove twice as much candy from a jar that had been earmarked for children than people of more modest means did. Experiments have also shown that wealthy people are more likely to cheat on their taxes and their romantic partners.
  • One theory to explain this contrast in behavior is that low-income people are less likely to cheat and steal because they are more invested in their communities and fear being publicly humiliated. Conversely, the rich harbor feelings of entitlement and self-interest, which destabilizes their moral compass.
  • Here’s another factor that may apply: the poor have a heightened fear of authority figures, and the rich do not
Javier E

The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the effort to try to solve the crime of bike theft themselves, the group’s members have come close to a world of violence and despair that lurks barely below the surface of this beautiful place and, at times, bursts into the open
  • In some years, Burlington has gone without a single gunfire incident, according to the police. But in 2022 there have been 25 such incidents, including four murders — the most in at least 30 years, the police say.
  • The Progressives on the Council tend to be left leaning on many issues and often at odds with the city’s Democratic mayor. And in June 2020, the Progressive members of the Council successfully sponsored a measure that sought to reduce the size of the city’s police force by about 30 percent. The move, which the mayor opposed, came just weeks after the murder of George Floyd, and amid concerns about how the Burlington police had used force against Black people.
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  • The city’s population remains about 85 percent white — in a state that is among the whitest in the nation. But Burlington is a college town, drawing people from around the country. It’s also a refugee resettlement hub, where people from war-torn countries in Asia and Africa come to live.
  • The measure capped the number of officers at 74, down from a maximum of about 100. Most of the reduction was expected to happen over time through attrition.
  • Still, the Burlington Police say many kinds of crimes have increased in 2022. Larceny of all types is up 107 percent this year in Burlington compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021, and downtown businesses have begun to react.
  • “And 85 percent of the time that is probably true,” she said, “but there is the other 15 percent that has to be dealt with.”
  • “Street level crime, like bike thefts, they are not being dealt with before it escalates into something bigger,’’ said Joseph Corrow, a patrol officer and president of the local police union.
  • The police say making arrests for bike thefts could be challenging. They cite a memo from the local prosecutor which stipulates that, according to Vermont law, in order to effectively prosecute someone the police must prove the person “actually knew” the property was stolen.
  • Tammy Boudah, a street outreach worker in Burlington, said she supported the broad examination of race and class by the city government. But the notion of replacing the police with more social workers, she said, “is predicated on the idea that everyone just wants to get along.”
  • Mr. Weinberger readily admits, however, that the police cuts do not explain everything that’s going wrong in Burlington, particularly the increase in violence.Over the course of two weeks in September, a man in a wheelchair was hit in the face and robbed while withdrawing money from an A.T.M., another man suffered multiple skull fractures and nearly lost an eye after being beaten outside a Walgreens and a third man, a college student, was robbed at gunpoint and forced to strip naked.
  • “We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Mr. Weinberger said at a news conference announcing a double murder in early October.
  • “I no longer feel safe going into City Hall Park at any time of the day,” said Ms. Toof, who has worked in street outreach for seven years.Those concerns are exacerbated because the outreach workers say they can no longer depend on the police to accompany them on certain calls because of staffing constraints.
  • Michael Hutchins, who moved to Florida last October to get away from the drug scene in Burlington, said some meth users he knew in Burlington stole bikes for transportation. “To get from Point A to Point B,” he said.
  • Others stole for the sheer thrill of taking something. Up for days without sleeping, some rode the bikes around with no real purpose. Mr. Davis said he had watched one bike change hands six times in the park
  • Last year, when the police dismantled a large encampment in an empty lot, they found the “severed limbs of hundreds of bikes” strewn about, Chief Murad said.
  • “Bikes were a quick easy grab that fulfilled the need to take something for an adrenaline rush,” Mr. Hutchins, 40, said in a phone interview from Florida.
  • Stealing and hoarding were common among the people Mr. Hutchins knew in Burlington struggling with addiction.
grayton downing

Cow Thefts on the Rise in India - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But the brutal kidnappings continue, and the victims — scrawny cows, which are slowly losing their sacred status among some in India — are slaughtered and sold for meat and leather.
  • increasingly affluent Indians develop a taste for meat, even the flesh of cows, which are considered sacred in Hinduism.
  • Meat consumption — chicken, primarily — is becoming acceptable even among Hindus. India is now the world’s largest dairy producer, its largest cattle producer and its largest beef exporter,
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  • Steaks can be ordered from these illicit vendors in transactions that are carried out like drug deals.
  • Bharatiya Janata Party, one of the country’s two major political parties, has demanded that laws against cow slaughter be strengthened.
  • The thieves can usually fit about 10 cows on a truck, and each fetches 5,000 rupees — about $94
  • “The social and religious status of cows has been under attack in India,”
Javier E

What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

  • How can you say Wilson had “no need” to shoot Brown that many times? The reason law enforcement went to high-capacity handguns and dumped the six shooters is because of the ability of people to withstand multiple gunshot wounds and continue fighting (or shooting.) The catalyst for this approach was the 1986 Miami shooting in which to FBI officers were killed AFTER they had shot two bank robbers multiple times. The robbers eventually died of their wounds, but in the meantime, they kept firing and killed the agents. Officer Wilson adhered to his training: shoot until the suspect is on the ground.
  • Mike Brown is to the Left what Benghazi is to the Right. Preconceptions are everything. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.
  • Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.
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  • I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.
  • Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.
  • there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.
  • Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.
  • on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.
runlai_jiang

Russian Influence Campaign Extracted Americans' Personal Data - WSJ - 1 views

  • That was in early 2017. It wasn’t until recently, after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, that Ms. Hales would learn that Black4Black and “partner” groups, including BlackMattersUS, were among hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts set up by a pro-Kremlin propaganda agency to meddle in American politics, Facebook records show.
  • The fake directory is one example of the elaborate schemes that Russian “trolls” have pursued to try to collect personal and business information from Americans, the Journal has found. Leveraging social media, Russians have collected data by peddling niche business directories, convincing activists to sign petitions and bankrolling self-defense training classes in return for student information.
  • which also owns Instagram, said the company allows users to find out whether they have “liked” or “followed” any Russia-backed accounts through an online tool..
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  • It isn’t clear for what purpose the data were collected, but intelligence and cybersecurity experts say it could be used for identity theft or leveraged as part of a wider political-influence effort that didn’t end with the 2016 election
  • Russian operators used stolen American identities to open bank and PayPal accounts, create fake driver’s licenses, post messages online and buy political advertisements before the 2016 election, according to the indictment.
  • Another Russian group, “Don’t Shoot,” identified as Russia-linked in congressional hearings last fall, appeared to collect information by asking followers to sign petitions and report police misconduct on its website, DoNotShoot.us.
  • The operators allegedly kept a list of more than 100 Americans and their political views to “monitor recruitment efforts,
  • Their targets included niche groups ranging from Texas secessionists and “Southern heritage” proponents to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the Black Lives Matter movement.
  • Black4Black and its partner account BlackMattersUS, which had hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, asked the American entrepreneurs to answer detailed questions so it could write articles promoting their companies. More than a dozen entrepreneurs contacted by the Journal said they turned over data to participate in the directory, yet none reported gaining any new customers.
  • However, the tool doesn’t notify users who exchanged messages with or turned over information to the accounts.
  • “We’re all just trying to make an honest living here,” said Ms. Hales, the business owner from Cleveland. “I would feel comfortable knowing that whoever’s behind this and whatever information they were pursuing has been shut down.”
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    Facebook and other activists Social Media accounts like Black4black and Donotshoot.us are revealed to associate with Russian Operator to steal personal information and political inclination for manipulating election, stealing bank and Paypal accounts and create....
Javier E

This Is Super Big and It's Not Impeachment | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • If this set allegations bears out it will be a stunning, massive story. We may not care about Bezos’s marital embarrassment. But we should care a lot if a foreign head of state attempted to use theft and extortion to control the coverage of one of the most influential press organizations in the United States.
  • if it bears out, this will be yet another example of a larger reality, perhaps the signature reality of the Trump Era and the era of global plutocracy and autocracy of which it is only a part. That is, the role of information theft and extortion as a key tool taking over the international system.
  • secrecy, money, familial relationships and extortion appear to be common tools or currencies in many of these relationships. We see a growing number of examples where they are exerting an influence over events entirely out of the public eye and outside public channels.
Javier E

It May Be the Biggest Tax Heist Ever. And Europe Wants Justice. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “the robbery of the century,” and what one academic declared “the biggest tax theft in the history of Europe.” From 2006 to 2011, these two and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.
  • The scheme was built around “cum-ex trading” (from the Latin for “with-without”): a monetary maneuver to avoid double taxation of investment profits that plays out like high finance’s answer to a David Copperfield stage illusion. Through careful timing, and the coordination of a dozen different transactions, cum-ex trades produced two refunds for dividend tax paid on one basket of stocks.
  • One basket of stocks. Abracadabra. Two refunds
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  • The process was repeated over and over, as word of cum-ex spread like a quiet contagion. Germany was hardest hit, with an estimated $30 billion in losses, followed by France, taken for about $17 billion. Smaller sums were drained away from Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Finland, Poland and others
  • Outrage in these countries has focused on the City of London, Britain’s answer to Wall Street. Less scrutinized has been the role played by Americans, both individual investors and branches of United States investment banks in London, including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Merrill Lynch Bank of America.
  • American bankers didn’t try cum-ex at home because they feared domestic regulators. So they moved operations to London and treated the rest of Europe as an anything-goes frontier
  • ”There was this culture in London, and it really came from New York,” he said. “These guys were either from New York or trained in London at New York banks, and they looked at Europe as their playground. People at the highest levels were collaborating to rip off countries.”
  • uffice it to say, the goal was to fool the financial system so that two investors could claim refunds for dividend taxes that were paid just once.
  • the presiding judge issued a preliminary ruling that, for the first time, declared cum-ex a felony, calling it a “collective grab in the treasury.”
  • German prosecutors say they will now pursue 400 other suspects, unearthed in 56 investigations. Banks large and small will be ordered to hand over cum-ex profits, which could have serious consequences for some. Two have already gone bust.
  • officials in Germany say the trade was a form of theft, one so obviously illicit that forbidding it — which was tried twice, with ineffectively worded laws — was hardly necessary.
  • Precisely who invented cum-ex trading, and when, are mysteries, but ground zero for this scandal may have been the London branch of Merrill Lynch.
  • At Merrill, Mr. Shields’s job was to identify “tax-attractive trades,” as he put it in his testimony. He had joined one of the least visible sectors of the financial world, which pokes at the seams of international finance law, looking for ways to reduce clients’ tax bills.
  • When he pointed this out to management, the policy was tweaked.“They said, ‘You can answer a call on your mobile, but you need to immediately move off the floor,’” he recalled. “So these guys would get up from their desks, start walking toward the edge of the floor, send a text message and then walk back. It was a joke.”
  • The trade was pure theater and required a huge cast: stock lenders, prime brokers, custodians, accounting firms, asset managers and inter-dealer brokers. It also required vast quantities of stock, most of which was sourced from American shareholders.
  • A lawyer who worked at the firm Dr. Berger founded in 2010, and who under German law can’t be identified by the media, described for the Bonn court a memorable meeting at the office.
  • Sensitive types, Dr. Berger told his underlings that day, should find other jobs.“Whoever has a problem with the fact that because of our work there are fewer kindergartens being built,” Dr. Berger reportedly said, “here’s the door.”
  • Seemingly risk-free profits poured in, and over the years a mini-industry thrived, one that a former participant labeled “the devil’s machine.”
  • When Mr. Tibo tried to signal his concern to executives at UniCredit, the bank’s Italian owner, they didn’t seem to care, he said
  • “There were big profits coming out of HypoVereinsbank, and most of it was from the investment banking section,” Mr. Tibo said. “The Italians quickly made up their minds: ‘We want to make money.’ No one gave us any internal support, because they didn’t want us to learn anything.”
  • By then, Mr. Mora and Mr. Shields were long gone from the London branch. Tired of niggling questions and feeling underpaid, they had left in 2008 to open Ballance Capital, one of the first full-service, one-stop cum-ex trading shops.
  • Dozens of German banks participated in cum-ex deals, too, gobbling up German taxpayer money at the same time they received a rescue package worth more than $500 billion.
  • Last year, the lawyer who testified anonymously at the Bonn trial described the culture of the cum-ex world to Oliver Schröm and Christian Salewski, two reporters on the German television show “Panorama,” under disguising makeup. It was a realm beyond morality, he said: all male, supremely arrogant, and guided by the conviction that the German state is an enemy and German taxpayers are suckers.
  • “That was the normal world to which we no longer belonged,” he told the reporters. “We looked out the window from up there, and we thought, ‘We’re the cleverest of all, geniuses, and you’re all stupid.’”
  • a former Merrill Lynch investment banker sat in a London restaurant near the Thames and described what had turned him into a whistle-blower. In the years after the financial crisis, he said, he noticed that a handful of colleagues on the company’s trading floor were using their personal mobile phones, a breach of company policy. All communication was supposed to be tracked and recorded. These guys were sending self-deleting texts on Snapchat.“Obviously, they were circumventing controls,”
  • Worried about the growing pileup of tax-withholding credits on the books, Frank Tibo, the bank’s chief tax officer, flew to London in May 2007. He spent the day grilling Mr. Mora
  • The complaint lays out, in painstaking detail, how the trades were confected, who executed them and which questions should be asked by investigators to uncover the “sham.” It states that Merrill Lynch earned hundreds of millions of dollars over the previous seven years from cum-ex trades.
  • “Anyone who stood in the way of this trade was swept aside, and those who enabled it were promoted,” the whistle-blower said in a follow-up phone call. “But it was widely regarded as insanity inside the bank for it to be extracting money from sovereign treasuries, particularly after the entire sector had been supported by the public purse.
  • American banks conducted their cum-ex trades overseas, rather than at home, out of fear, the whistle-blower said. Specifically, he mentioned a 2008 Senate investigation into “dividend tax abuse” that found it was depriving the Treasury of $100 billion every year. The report led to a ban on dividend arbitrage tied to stock in United States corporations.
  • But nothing prevented American bankers from conducting such trades with foreign companies on foreign soil.
  • German efforts to stamp out cum-ex with legislation, in 2007 and 2009, left holes through which certain types of financial players could still crawl. This included private pension plans in the United States, a niche financial product for wealthy people who want the kind of privacy, and exotic investment options, that Fidelity doesn’t offer.
  • Investors will have problems of their own. Many have said they had no idea how cum-ex traders returned such dazzling profits. That defense became less plausible in 2012, after the German government spent millions of dollars to buy 11 hard drives from industry insiders. The hard drives were filled with marketing fliers, written by bankers, who sold cum-ex with an antigovernment pitch.
  • “We learned that it was very common for these bankers to have conversations over coffee with clients about cum-ex,” said Norbert Walter-Borjans, a former minister of finance for North Rhine-Westphalia. “They would say, ‘If you have a problem with how your hard-earned money is being spent in taxes, we’ve got an idea for you.’”
  • Authorities across Europe are said to be waiting for a resolution of the Bonn trial to move ahead with their own. Many are livid that Germany didn’t alert them sooner about the perils of cum-ex. The failure, say lawyers, stems from a Europe-wide hypersensitivity about privacy, which is especially acute when it comes to taxes.
  • In 2012, soon after Germany shut down its cum-ex problem, a London trader began a cum-ex scheme that fleeced the Danish tax authority of $2 billion, officials there say. The trader, Sanjay Shah, who now lives in Dubai, denies wrongdoing but has never been shy about the source of his wealth.When he bought a $1.3 million yacht a few years ago, he found the perfect name: Cum-Ex.
aidenborst

Pandemic lockdowns tied to lower crime in many cities, study finds - CNN - 0 views

  • Stay-at-home policies put into effect to help control the spread of Covid-19 were linked with a 37% average reduction in crime in 27 cities across 23 countries, an international team of researchers reported Wednesday.
  • Robberies and thefts fell the most -- by 46% -- perhaps as people stayed at home instead of going to work. Homicides fell 14%, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
  • "On average, the overall reduction in crime levels across all included cities was around 37%."
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  • "The smaller decrease in homicide cases may be due to a number of factors. First, in many societies, a substantial proportion of homicides are committed in domestic contexts and are hence not affected by the reduction in the density of daily encounters in cities. Second, a varying proportion of homicide is associated with organized crime, conflicts between gangs or conflicts related to drug trafficking," the team wrote.
  • "As most people stayed at home throughout the day, fewer houses were left unsupervised and residential burglary may have become much more difficult, while commercial buildings likely became less supervised and hence an easier target," they added. Also, fewer bar fights were reported, but the potential for domestic violence rose.
  • Burglaries fell by 84% in Lima and rose by 38% in San Francisco, the researchers found. Police in many US cities have reported significant increases in violent crime with the pandemic.
  • The strictness of lockdown laws did not seem to directly correlate with changes in crime, the researchers found.
  • "The results show that more severe restrictions on school opening, working from home, public events, private gatherings and internal movement are not significantly related to the size of effects, with one exception: More stringent reductions or closures of public transportation are associated with more negative effect sizes for robbery and vehicle theft only," they wrote.
anonymous

Canadian Police Handling of Colten Boushie's Death Denounced in Report - The New York T... - 0 views

  • When seven police officers arrived at the home of Debbie Baptiste in August 2016, encircling the house and carrying rifles, they informed her that her son was dead. Then, instead of comforting the grieving mother, they asked if she had been drinking and told her to “get it together.”
  • The scathing report by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found that the officers treated Ms. Baptiste “with such insensitivity that her treatment amounted to a prima facie case of discrimination.”
  • “It felt like I was forever fighting a battle that could never be won,” Ms. Baptiste told a news conference on Monday. “The injustices of racism in the courtroom, the discrimination needs to stop. Things need to change. We need a change for the future generation.”
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  • Mr. Stanley was acquitted in 2018 after testifying that he had unintentionally shot Mr. Boushie in the back of the head when his semiautomatic pistol experienced a rare mechanical malfunction. The verdict shocked many Indigenous Canadians.
  • On Monday Mr. Trudeau told reporters that the treatment of Mr. Boushie’s family and friends “was unacceptable,” adding, “We have seen, unfortunately, examples of systemic racism within the R.C.M.P., within many of our institutions, and we need to do better.”
  • The National Police Federation, a union representing the mounted police, countered the report’s findings, saying it “advances a perspective that disrespects our members and brings their impartiality, dedication and professionalism into question.”
  • The killing and the acquittal remain sources of anger for many Indigenous Canadians who have argued the case exposed significant flaws in Canada’s legal system.
  • The two men came out with guns and also attacked the Escape with a hammer. After Mr. Boushie was killed, the others fled.
  • As a result, the commission found, police descended on Ms. Baptiste’s house on the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, her Indigenous community, with two goals: to inform her of Mr. Boushie’s death and to search for a member of Mr. Boushie's group of friends as part of a related investigation into theft and attempted theft.
  • “Ms. Baptiste displayed distress at the news they had just given her, one member told her to ‘get it together,’” the report found. “One or more RCMP members smelled her breath” apparently for signs of alcohol.
  • The report also noted that the police destroyed recordings and transcripts of their communications from the time of the killing, which did follow standard retention protocols, but occurred knowing that Mr. Boushie’s family and the commission had initiated complaints for which these files would have been relevant.
blairca

United States Patents, Biopiracy, and Cultural Imperialism: The Theft of India's Tradit... - 0 views

  • For centuries, indigenous countries have traditionally used many products that have been recently patented by companies in the United States. Biopiracy of traditional knowledge from India by the United States has occurred directly through the use of patent law, and indirectly, through economic power and cultural imperialism. Through this paper, I contend that the United States uses cultural and economic power in order to warrant acts of biopiracy of traditional knowledge through patents and western research.
  • Other corporations have also economically benefited from the use of stolen traditional knowledge, but pharmaceutical corporations have had the largest impact as seen through the lens of economic power.
  • Other Western countries have stolen and continue to steal traditional knowledge from India. However, this specific case study can demonstrate how U.S cultural hegemony has led to controversial patent law cases and the U.S value of economic power has negatively influenced India.
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  • Cultural imperialism is the “economic, technological, and cultural hegemony of the industrialized nations, which determines the direction of both economic and social progress, defines cultural values, and standardizes the civilization and cultural environment throughout the world.”
  • western culture dominates indigenous culture by stealing information through a process of cultural imperialism
  • India developed its own legislative policy and administrative techniques in order to protect its traditional knowledge.
  • Through use of cultural imperialism and economic power, the United States warranted the biopiracy of traditional knowledge in India through patent laws. Through the economic power of large pharmaceutical corporations and their desire for more consolidation of economic power, India was forced to change their own patent law at the expense of their citizen’s health.
Javier E

Opinion | The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft - The N... - 0 views

  • taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.
  • the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.
  • The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitan
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  • Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht.
  • France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.
  • Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Irelan
  • Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.
  • this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallie
  • In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?
  • making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.
  • “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.
  • When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.
Javier E

Fareed Zakaria: The solution to gun violence is clear - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is blindingly obvious.
  • What we should be trying to understand is not one single event but why we have so many of them. The number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around 11,000 were gun homicides.
  • To understand how staggeringly high this number is, compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year — 3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people.
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  • Many people believe that America is simply a more violent, individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes — theft, burglary, robbery, assault — the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.
  • The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.
  • So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t.
  • Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries.
  • The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.
  • There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide
  • There will always be evil or disturbed people. And they might be influenced by popular culture. But how is government going to identify the darkest thoughts in people’s minds before they have taken any action? Certainly those who urge that government be modest in its reach would not want government to monitor thoughts, curb free expression, and ban the sale of information and entertainment.
  • Instead, why not have government do something much simpler and that has proven successful: limit access to guns.
  • A few hours before the Newtown murders last week, a man entered a school in China’s Henan province. Obviously mentally disturbed, he tried to kill children. But the only weapon he was able to get was a knife. Although 23 children were injured, not one child died.
Megan Flanagan

WikiLeaks hack collateral damage can be deeply personal - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • type your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.
  • ype your name into WikiLeaks to see what damage the day's hacked emails might hold for you.
  • the emails include the private information of a large number of bystanders, ranging from email addresses to financial data.
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  • Because you say that to your friends, you confide in your friends, and who knows what's in there of your personal life and your professional life."
  • The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of any of the emails
  • The website has faced criticism in the past for its tendency not to screen releases for personally identifiable information or security sensitivities,
  • Podesta emails -- which go back to the 2008 race -- have contained personal email addresses and even cellphone numbers for a wide range of DC personalities,
  • including personal security and financial fraud.
  • information introduces these peripheral individuals to a range of risks.
  • sensitive financial information was contained in the emails published online.
  • the possibility that they may be targeted by phishing or scams to try to lure them into further traps.
  • the dangers can increase to identity theft and the risk extended to family, friends and professional contacts.
  • I've got all kinds of new security provisions, new computers, and I'm changing how I use email.
  • "I hired a cybersecurity firm and I'm not rich," he added. "I've spent for me what's an enormous amount of money."
  • I figured out that a new batch of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, had been released, including a note I wrote to Podesta with my cell number.
  • all the contents of your emails for 10 years dumped out into public, think about how that feels.
  • saying the First Amendment freedom trumps personal privac
  • 'It's like somebody robbed a bank and as they're running away the money is spilling out of the backpack and instead of catching the criminal everyone is stopping to chase the money.'
Javier E

Vladimir Putin may have done us a big favor - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • it’s just possible that Vladimir Putin has done us a great favor. He has alerted us to the true threat of cyberwarfare in a way that — again, just possibly — might prompt us to view it as a serious national danger and begin to take effective countermeasures.
  • So far, cyberattacks have not endangered our economy or way of life. The breaches mainly represent a new form of crime whose costs are exasperating but manageable. The truth is that most cyberattacks fail.
  • A 2014 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies puts the worldwide cost of cybercrime at more than $400 billion. Although that’s a lot of money, it’s only about one-half of 1 percent of global output, estimated at $78 trillion in 2014
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  • Until now, the Internet has mainly created new avenues for old behaviors. Roughly nine of 10 computer breaches involve theft or business espionage,
  • You cannot do a cost-benefit analysis of something that imperils society’s economic and political foundations. The plausible cost is infinite
  • It does jeopardize our way of life. It undermines the integrity of our political institutions and popular faith in them.
  • More than this, it warns us that our physical safety and security are at risk. Hostile hackers can hijack power grids, communication networks, transportation systems and much more.
  • What Putin and Russian hackers allegedly did shatters this pattern. Their hacking — as interpreted by both the CIA and the FBI — qualifies as state-sponsored aggression
  • The rise of cyberattacks, says a recent report from the American Enterprise Institute, ranks with three great strategic shifts in military history — first, the rise of sea power; next, the advent of air power; and most recently, the opening of space.
  • The emergence of cyberspace “poses the most daunting challenge yet . . . [because] its implications are more sweeping,” AEI asserts. It touches almost every aspect of society and alters the nature of global conflict.
  • We could move some vital data networks offline — that is, we could build systems independent of the Internet.
  • Another possibility is to impose security standards on the “Internet of things
  • It’s also possible to streamline agencies overseeing cyberspace.
  • Americans are of two minds about the Internet. They love social media and gadgets, such as smartphones. Meanwhile, they hate its threat to privacy and the dangers of hacking. Putin’s gift to America is that he is forcing us to face the contradictions.
  • The problem is not just Russia’s bad behavior. It’s the nature of the Internet. If we don’t acknowledge that, we will increasingly become its victim.
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