23 May 2013
Industrial accidents
Rico says the recent building collapse in Bangladesh is reminiscent of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on this country, which led to improvements in workplace safety. Hopefully, this disaster will do the same for overseas factories making goods for the American market...
Fwd: Best captain's speech
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Dave Kitterman" <davek@cbcarriagehouse.com>
Date: May 23, 2013, 14:26:11 EDT
To: "Mike Shippee" <pmshippee@aol.com>
Subject: FW: Best captain's speech
Laser killer for tornados?
Laser killer for tornados?
Or just pay everyone to move out of Oklahoma... (Probably cheaper.)
Sent from my iPhone
Mark Seymour
215.866.6184
mseymour@proofmark.com
Or just pay everyone to move out of Oklahoma... (Probably cheaper.)
Sent from my iPhone
Mark Seymour
215.866.6184
mseymour@proofmark.com
Yitang Zhang, twin primes conjecture: A huge discovery about prime numbers—and what it means for the future of math.
22 May 2013
Oops is, yet again, an FBI term
Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about a little premature justice by an FBI agent:
Rico says that 'Chechens hostile to Russia' doesn't cut down the numbers much; it'd be hard to find one that isn't...
Update: ABC News brings us the latest unconfirmed news from Florida, where an FBI agent shot and killed a man with ties to Tamerlan Tsarnaev this morning after an interview turned violent:The man shot dead by an FBI agent in Orlando, Florida early today was "about to sign a statement" admitting to a role, along with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in an unsolved triple murder in Massachusetts in 2011, two people with direct knowledge of the case told ABC News.Original post: A man with ties to Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shot and killed by an FBI agent early this morning when an interview turned violent inside the man's apartment in Orlando, Florida, according to the FBI. In a statement, the Bureau said that they were still reviewing the incident but, based on preliminary information, the shooting occurred "when a violent confrontation was initiated by the subject". During the incident, the agent sustained "non-life threatening injuries" and the interviewee was killed, according to the FBI.
Ibragim Todashev "just went crazy" and pulled a knife during his interview with the FBI, according to state and federal law enforcement officials briefed on the latest strange twist in the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing. The FBI has, so far, provided only broad details of this morning's confrontation and shooting, so for now it's best to treat these loosely sourced reports with at least some skepticism. Still, law enforcement officials had previously speculated that Tsarnaev may have been responsible for the triple murder, which occurred on or around 11 September 2011. According to ABC's sources, Tsarnaev and Todashev trained at the same mixed martial arts gym in Boston that one of the murder victims also frequented. Earlier this month, Massachusetts investigators reportedly found what they called "mounting evidence" that suggested Tsarnaev— along with his younger brother, Dzhokhar— were involved in the gruesome homicide.
The dead man has been identified as Ibragim Todashev by a number of law enforcement officials who have spoken to the media on background.
CBS News' John Miller reports that FBI agents went to Todashev's apartment complex after midnight to question him about his connection with Tsarnaev, the deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect. The reason for the late-night visit, according to Miller, was that there were indications that Todashev had canceled a planned trip to Chechnya at the last minute. "In the encounter in the apartment, something went wrong," Miller said, during an appearance on CBS This Morning.
NBC News' sources offer a little more detail, saying that Todashev was cooperative at first but, as the interview dragged on, later turned aggressive and attacked the agent. The network also reports that Todashev, 27, had previously spent some time in the Boston area, where he was a cage fighter, and knew Tsarnaev there. Todashev is believed to have some connection to Chechen rebels, but he is not suspected of having played any role in the marathon bombings, according to NBC's law enforcement sources.
In the wake of the Marathon bombings, the FBI has interviewed a number of people who knew the Tsarnaev brothers in a bid to learn how the two were radicalized. As part of those effort, The New York Times explains, agents have put a special focus on speaking to members of the small community of ethnic Chechens in the United States. Some advocates within the community, however, have expressed concern that Moscow might be steering the FBI to target Chechens living in the United States who are hostile to Russia.
Rico says that 'Chechens hostile to Russia' doesn't cut down the numbers much; it'd be hard to find one that isn't...
Ibragim Todashev: FBI agent shoots, kills man with ties to Tsarnaev during interview.
http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/05/22/ibragim_todashev_fbi_agent_shoots_kills_man_with_ties_to_tsarnaev_during.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content
Sent from my iPhone
Mark Seymour
215.866.6184
mseymour@proofmark.com
Sent from my iPhone
Mark Seymour
215.866.6184
mseymour@proofmark.com
mseymour@proofmark.com has shared Octogenarians race to be oldest Everest climber
Octogenarians race to be oldest Everest climber
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/20130522_ap_octogenariansracetobeoldesteverestclimber.html#52b9gsZqfkXUtJTt.03
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mseymour@proofmark.com shared this using Po.st
History for the day
On 22 May 1947, the Truman Doctrine was enacted, as Congress appropriated military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey.
21 May 2013
Movie review for the day
It stars Sean Penn (not one of Rico's favorites, but he did well in this) and Benecio Del Toro (photo) (definitely one of Rico's favorites), and Naomi Watts, in an intricately interwoven story of 'how a freak accident brings together a critically ill mathematician, a grieving mother, and a born-again ex-con'.
Replacing banking as the bad guy
Rana Foroohar has a Time article about people we all love to hate:
Rico says there's a lot more to this story, of course...
Landon Thomas, Jr. and Eric Pfanner have an article in The New York Times about Ireland and its taxes:
Nelson Schwartz and Brian Chen have an article in The New York Times about Apple:
US senators have accused Apple, the world’s most valuable company, of also being the world’s biggest tax avoider, as congressional investigators yesterday laid out how the technology giant has jumped through tax loophole after loophole in order to save some $44 billion of otherwise taxable income. Today they’ll follow up by grilling Apple CEO Tim Cook on Capitol Hill.
Aside from the fact that Apple clearly has amazing tax lawyers, what does all this mean? Here are the four key things you need to know:1. Corporate tax reform will be the big issue in Washington, now that the deficit is off the front burner. As I wrote in back in January, American firms have some two trillion dollars in cash on their balance sheets stashed abroad, in large part because they don’t want to bring that money home and pay America’s 35% corporate tax rate. (Ireland, where Apple apparently stashed much of its cash, has a 12.5% rate— though it appears Apple was able to negotiate an even lower one than that.) With unemployment still high, and wages still flat, the government wants companies to bring that cash back to the US and put it work creating jobs at home, and the investigation into Apple’s finances is clearly a warning shot to other major US multinationals. Tax reform is coming, not just in the US, but also in other major developed countries (more about that below).
2. Cash rich tech firms are replacing bankers as the new corporate bad guys. A year ago, I wrote a column called Learning To Hate Big Tech, which led with the investigation into Apple’s tax avoidance, but also laid out other Big Tech v. Government battles, like the push to get Amazon to pay local sales tax (which the government won) and the FTC’s anti-trust investigations into Google. The bottom line is that, when you have a lot of cash and can move much of it abroad easily, as the biggest tech companies do, everyone is going to start paying closer attention to what you are doing. As I wrote at the time, “Steve Jobs was once quoted as asking: ‘Why join the Navy if you can be a pirate?’ But when you are the most valuable company in the world, it’s harder to play the rebel.” The truth is that Big Tech is as corporate as it comes and, since Big Tech is also where most of the new growth and income creation in this country is right now, there’s little doubt that these companies will draw more and more attention from regulators, tax collectors, and social activists.
How well the industry defends itself may depend on how many new jobs it can account for. After coming under fire for outsourcing, Apple published a study showing that it had “created or supported” 514,000 US jobs, far more than the 47,000 Americans currently on its payroll. The study’s methodology can be interpreted and spun many ways, but the bottom line is that this is going to become a more heated political issue in the years ahead. Technology has historically created more jobs than it has destroyed. But the periods in which the creative destruction happens aren’t pretty, and they tend to be characterized by high levels of inequality or social discontent; think Victorian England, or the decades preceding the 1929 stock market crash in the US.
A number of academics, including folks at tech-friendly places like MIT and Stanford, believe we’re entering one of those periods. That’s why it will become crucial for Big Tech to prove that it’s enriching the 99% as well as the 1%. As the folks on Wall Street know, social issues can very quickly become just as important as your social network.
3. Large government debts and shrinking public budgets means all rich countries will be looking more closely at corporate tax avoidance. At Davos in January of 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country is leading the G8 at the moment, announced his desire to take on corporate tax avoiders internationally, telling multinational tax avoiders to “wake up and smell the coffee”, in a pointed reference to Starbucks, which recently “volunteered” to pay more tax in the UK in response to an investigation into its tax avoidance in Britain. And just yesterday, he announced he’d written to leaders in tax havens asking for their help with this initiative. Bottom line: all rich countries are looking to clamp down on multinational tax avoiders. Look for this to be a big topic at the G8 summit in a month.
4. The heat is being turned up high on major corporations to do their part. In an economically bifurcated world, where companies are flush but workers are not, and where the historic relationship between corporate profits and local economic growth has been broken, big companies are going to be under a lot more pressure to do more for the countries in which they operate. The push-back against tax avoiders like Apple is one example of this. Wal-Mart’s response to the garment factory fire and devastating factory collapse in Bangladesh recently is another; as I noted recently, the US retailer is now funding Bangladeshi government efforts to improve labor standards. The bottom line is that companies that have been flying 35,000 feet over the economic troubles of their headquarter nations or the countries in which they operate are going to be force to come back down to earth. Apple’s tax troubles are just the beginning of a very big fight between the world’s richest companies and its governments.
Rico says there's a lot more to this story, of course...
Landon Thomas, Jr. and Eric Pfanner have an article in The New York Times about Ireland and its taxes:
The secrets of how Apple avoided billions of dollars in taxes lie in a low-slung building of glass and brick in the hills of County Cork.Rico says he used to work for Apple, and went to the Cork facility several times; if Apple has a good deal on taxes, it's not like tons of money doesn't go into the Irish economy other ways...
There, in the Hollyhill Industrial Estate, and elsewhere in Ireland, Apple employs a mere four percent of its global work force. But there, too, Apple recorded a staggering 65 percent of its worldwide income— $26 billion last year— enabling the company, according to Senate investigators, to markedly reduce its tax bill in the United States and the rest of the world.
Such arrangements are not uncommon in Ireland, where for years authorities have not only tolerated, but encouraged, multinational companies like Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Citigroup to set up shop and provide good jobs, in return for helping those companies pay less tax around the world.
But as Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, found himself on Capitol Hill being questioned about Apple’s tax practices, Ireland came under sharp criticism for its attractiveness as a pied-à-terre for American companies doing business in Europe. At the eye of that storm: a special corporate tax rate of only two percent that Senate investigators say Apple worked out with Irish tax authorities.
Carl Levin, the Michigan senator who heads the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said Apple was “exploiting an absurdity” by using three Irish subsidiaries to legally avoid taxes.
The United States Senate is hardly Ireland’s only critic on tax matters. Britain, France, and other European Union countries have long been annoyed by Irish policies. During hearings in the British Parliament last week, Margaret Hodge, a member of the opposition Labour Party and chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, which oversees taxation, upbraided Matt Brittin, Google’s vice president for North and Central Europe, that the company’s tax practices were “devious, calculated and, in my view, unethical”.
Even before the Senate subcommittee invited Cook to testify, the British prime minister, David Cameron, declared that the topic would be a focus of the meeting of the Group of 8 richest countries he plans to convene next month at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland.
“We need a truly global solution,” Cameron wrote in a letter to Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, in April of 2013. “As I am sure you will agree, the path to reform starts with the basic recognition that current global tax rules do not reflect the modern and globalized economy that our citizens live and trade in.”
Ireland, with an economy that ranks 47th in the world, is not a member of the Group of 8.
Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Eamon Gilmore, has disputed the Senate report’s contention that Apple paid a special rate, saying “Ireland doesn’t negotiate special tax rate deals with any companies.” He said that if Apple was not paying its fair share elsewhere in Europe, the fault lay in “loopholes” in other European countries that make it too easy for companies to avoid taxation. “That’s an issue that has to be addressed first of all in those jurisdictions,” Gilmore told reporters in Brussels.
The charge by the Senate subcommittee that Apple avoided paying $44 billion in taxes in the United States by keeping the bulk of its $102 billion cash hoard offshore has struck a nerve here in a recession-racked country where unemployment is fifteen percent and the government is looking for ways to repay an eighty billion euro bailout, now equivalent to $103 billion, that it received from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in 2010.
“There is something wrong with this picture— the revenues of these companies keep increasing while our workers are getting crushed,” said Peter Mathews, a chartered accountant who is also a member of the Irish Parliament for the governing Fine Gael party. “Apple’s cash pile is about the size of our national income. Why not have them pay a four percent levy to contribute to our national recovery?”
Apple, which set up its first overseas headquarters in 1980 in Cork to assemble Macintosh computers, has a long history with the Irish. Its four thousand workers— the largest Apple labor force in Europe— is significant in a country of only 4.6 million people. Apple’s employees assemble iMacs and Mac Pros, and are also engaged in research, customer service, and other support functions. “Our tax system may be lax, but in exchange we get jobs and more foreign investment,” said Stephen Kinsella, an economist at the University of Limerick who contributes to the influential Irish Economy blog. “No doubt about it, the benefits outweigh the costs.”
Irish politicians through the years have stood behind the country’s official 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, so much so that, three years ago, when the previous government negotiated the international bailout, it refused to budge when European negotiators wanted to make a higher tax rate a condition for a deal.
Government figures show that in 2010 the effective rate on the gross income of companies here was only six percent, and economists say that in some cases— as with Apple— it can go lower than that. That stands in contrast to the effective corporate tax rate in other countries: 29 percent in the United States, 22 percent in Britain, 27 percent for France, and 24 percent for Germany.
More than six hundred American companies have set up in Ireland, employing a hundred thousand Irish workers and enjoying the advantages of an English-speaking work force and low taxes. Representatives of several American companies, including Amazon and Starbucks, have, like Google and Apple, insisted that they comply with the law. “Apple does not use tax gimmicks,” Cook told the Senate subcommittee.
Under European Union law, companies based in one European country are permitted to do business across the 27-nation bloc, and Internet companies, in particular, use that rule to book their European revenue in the country offering the greatest tax benefits. For many, that is Ireland. But, if Ireland were to change its approach to taxation, other low-tax European countries like Luxembourg and Slovakia would simply take its place.
“Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, when Ireland was a poor state desperately trying to attract investment, tax was a weapon that others weren’t using,” said Richard Murphy, founder of the Tax Justice Network, a group in London that campaigns against tax havens. “So Ireland developed a twofold strategy: low rates and not too many questions. It became the conduit state of choice.”
Timothy Cook (photo, center) came to the lion’s den on Capitol Hill, prepared to face down lawmakers furious over evidence that Apple, the famous company he runs, had avoided paying billions in taxes. By the time Cook walked out, the big cats on a Senate committee were practically eating out of his hand. Even the panel’s fiery chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, after blasting Apple for creating “ghost companies” that diverted billions of tax dollars from American coffers and caused needy seniors to go without meals, had some kind words for Cook and his company. “We love the iPhone and the iPad,” Levin said, going on to commend Cook and two other executives for voluntarily appearing before the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations. “I know it’s not easy to come in front of a spotlight but it’s important for us.”Rico says it's funny that not a single Congressperson (not even the one from Washington state) said: "Hey, I love my Windows POS"...
Other senators seemed even more mollified by Cook’s low-key performance. Senator John McCain, the senior Republican on the panel, who had earlier criticized Apple “as among America’s largest tax avoiders,” took pains to modulate his message. “You managed to change the world, which is an incredible legacy for Apple,”he told Cook. “You have to be a pretty smart guy and a pretty tough guy, too, and I say that in a complimentary way,” he added.
Cook was especially disarming. “It’s important to tell our story, and I’d like people to hear directly from me,” he told McCain and the other senators. Apple, he testified, pays “all the taxes we owe, every single dollar.”
Cook joined Apple in 1998 as an expert in sales and operations, creating the efficient supply chain that helped catapult the company into the top ranks of the technology industry. He became chief executive in 2011. While his predecessor, Steven P. Jobs, was famous for his creative vision and flamboyant performances at introductions of the company’s products, Cook was known for his behind-the-scenes work, particularly for his shrewd negotiating tactics with suppliers. These skills seemed to stand him in good stead on Tuesday. Apple, Cook said, was a victim of an outdated tax system. “Unfortunately, the tax code has not kept up with the digital age,” he said. “The tax system handicaps American corporations in relation to our foreign competitors who don’t have such constraints on the free movement of capital.”
Apple is hardly unique in seeking to legally shield tens of billions in profits from tax collectors in the United States and overseas, even if its tactics may have been unusually aggressive. According to one study cited by Levin, thirty of the largest American multinationals, with more than $160 billion in profits, “paid nothing in federal income taxes over a recent three-year period. Zero.” Corporate tax loopholes, Levin said, need to be closed “whether or not we reform the overall tax code.”
Congressional investigators recently unveiled a detailed report showing how Apple subsidiaries— based in Ireland but spanning other regions around the world— had helped the company pay as little as one-twentieth of one percent in taxes on billions of dollars in income.
Cook sought to draw a sharp distinction between sales in the United States and those abroad, arguing that the company had complied with local laws everywhere. “The way I look at this is that Apple pays 30.5 percent of its profits in taxes in the United States,” he said. “We do have a low tax rate outside the US, but this is for products we sell outside the US.” Again and again, Cook said Apple was proud to be an American company, even if the majority of its sales took place outside the United States and were taxed at lower rates. “We are an American company, whether we are selling in China or Egypt or Saudi Arabia.”
In the most spirited exchange of the hearing, Levin bore down on the fact that Apple’s Irish subsidiaries manage to shelter much of the company’s income in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, while it pays a higher rate on sales in North and South America.
“Of course you can bring the profits home,” Levin said during a back-and-forth with Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer. “You bring them home from Canada, Mexico, and South America.”
Before Cook and two other top Apple executives testified, other witnesses suggested Apple had indeed pushed hard to take advantage of loopholes in the tax code. J. Richard Harvey Jr., a professor at Villanova Law School, estimated that Apple’s legal maneuvering had saved the company $7.7 billion in potential American taxes in 2011. “Apple is an iconic US multinational corporation that has enjoyed extraordinary financial success,” Harvey said. “In addition to demonstrating excellence in designing, building and selling consumer products, Apple has been very successful at minimizing its global income tax burden.” For example, he noted, about two-thirds of Apple’s global pretax income in 2011 was recorded in Ireland, yet only four percent of its employees and one percent of its customers were located there. While Apple has repeatedly insisted it does not engage in “tax gimmicks,” Harvey was unswayed. “Apple does not use tax gimmicks?” he said rhetorically. “I about fell off my chair when I read that.”
Despite the evidence gathered by investigators and prominently displayed on easels— like the web of affiliates Apple used to help lower its tax burden— several committee members joined in the chorus of praise for Apple’s products.
“I love Apple,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat. “I harassed my husband until he converted to a MacBook. It’s a huge part of my life.”
The most ardent defender of Cook and Apple was Senator Rand Paul, a free-market Republican from Kentucky. “I’m offended by the spectacle of dragging in Apple executives,” he said. “What we need to do is apologize to Apple and compliment them for the job creation they’re doing.”
Instead of “bullying” Apple executives, Paul said, “we should have brought in a giant mirror to look at the reflection of Congress. If you want to assign blame, look in the mirror and see who created this mess. Apple hasn’t broken any laws, yet Apple is forced to sit through a show trial,” he said. That was too much for Levin, who organized the investigation and the hearing. “Apple is a great company,” Levin said. “But they don’t have a right to decide in my book how much in taxes they are going to pay and to whom they are going to pay them.”
Cook’s testimony before Congress was hardly his first public appearance since becoming Apple’s chief upon the death of Jobs in October of 2011. But it was a coming out of sorts.
Apple faces different challenges from the ones Jobs faced when he led the company. For one, Apple is larger, and under more pressure than ever.
Laurence Isaac Balter, chief market strategist at Oracle Investment Research, said he thought the Apple chief did a good job of treating the hearing as a constructive conversation about the problems with the business tax code and how it could be improved. And he gave Cook high marks for his performance. “You could see Cook lean back in his chair and smile,” said Balter, whose company has clients that own Apple shares. “He was totally relieved with some of the commentary.”
Oops is, yet again, a police term
A 21-year-old Hofstra University student who was killed in a home invasion was mistakenly shot in the head by an officer who fired eight times at a man who was holding a gun to the student’s head and then pointed it at him, the police said. Seven of the bullets hit the man, who was also killed.Rico says he's happy never to have been in this situation, and feels sorry for the cop who was...
The student, Andrea Rebello (photo), and her twin sister, Jessica, who also lived at the home, just blocks from the university, were among several people taken hostage in an apparent robbery attempt.
The Nassau County police identified the gunman as Dalton Smith, 30, a Hempstead, New York resident with an extensive criminal record, who was wanted for violating parole on a robbery conviction.
About fifteen or twenty minutes elapsed from the time Smith burst into the home until the last shot was fired, the police said.
Several hostages had already escaped when police officers arrived and surrounded the house at about 2:30 am, Detective Lieutenant John Azzata said at a news conference. The police, who had been alerted to the invasion by one of the people who had escaped, initially thought that only Smith remained in the house, he said.
At least one officer had entered the home as Smith, clutching Rebello in a headlock with a gun to her head, tried to get to the back door, Detective Azzata said. After noticing the officer in the hallway, Smith brought Rebello closer to his body, Detective Azzata said. Smith then pointed his gun at the officer.
“At that point, the police officer fires several rounds,” Detective Azzata said. “Seven of those rounds struck our subject; one of those rounds struck the victim.”
Rebello was taken to the hospital, where she died. Smith’s weapon, a 9-millimeter handgun, had one bullet in the chamber and another in the magazine, Detective Azzata said. He never fired a shot.
Detective Azzata said the officer who fired the shots was a twelve-year veteran of the force, but would not identify him or say whether the officer had acted according to protocol. He said the authorities were still investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
At the news conference, Thomas V. Dale, the Nassau County police commissioner, said he had gone to Rebello’s parents’ home in Tarrytown, New York to personally inform them that it had been a police officer’s bullet that killed their daughter. Telephone calls made to Rebello’s parents went unanswered.
Given Smith’s criminal past, questions are likely to be raised about how he was being monitored. The authorities issued a warrant for his arrest on 25 April, after he failed to check in with a parole officer. He had served multiple sentences in prison, mostly for robbery convictions, and was released on parole in February after serving a nine-year sentence. It is unclear why Smith chose the house on California Avenue where Rebello lived to break into, the police said. At the time of the invasion, Detective Azzata said, the front door of the home had been left open by another resident, who had gone upstairs to get his keys with the intention of moving his car.
While the authorities said Smith lived in Hempstead, there is no address for anyone by his name in public records.
The invasion left residents near the university fearful at a time when many would be preparing for graduation. Hofstra officials said commencement ceremonies on Sunday would go ahead.
On Saturday, many students were preparing to leave for summer vacation. While many said they felt secure on campus, some expressed concern about security in the neighborhoods surrounding it, where some students prefer to rent houses. Rebello and her sister lived on a typically quiet block in Uniondale that some said was uncomfortable to walk through after dark.
“Walking after class after 7 pm or 9 pm, it feels really unsafe to walk outside of campus across Hempstead Turnpike,” said Jack Qiu, twenty, a sophomore who said he preferred to live in the dorms because they are safer. “If you walk around California Avenue and the streets around them, there are streets there that don’t have street lamps.”
Oops is now an FBI term
The Associated Press has an article about an ugly accident:
Two FBI special agents on the agency’s elite Hostage Rescue Team have been killed in a training accident in Virginia, officials said.
The accident happened off the coast of Virginia Beach, the FBI’s national press office announced in a statement. No other details were given and the cause is under investigation.
The special agents were identified as Christopher Lorek, 41, and Stephen Shaw, 40. Lorek joined the FBI in 1996 and is survived by a wife and two daughters, eleven and eight. Shaw joined in 2005 and is survived by a daughter, three, and son who is one.
“We mourn the loss of two brave and courageous men,” Director Robert Mueller said in the statement. “Like all who serve on the Hostage Rescue Team, they accept the highest risk each and every day, when training and on operational missions, to keep our nation safe. Our hearts are with their wives, children, and other loved ones who feel their loss most deeply. And they will always be part of the FBI family.”
The Hostage Rescue Team is part of the Critical Incident Response Group based at Quantico, in northern Virginia. Most recently, members of the team successfully rescued a five-year-old boy from a small underground bunker where he was being held hostage by a 65-year-old man. The man was killed by agents.
Trained in military tactics and outfitted with combat-style gear and weapons, the group was formed thirty years ago in preparation for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The team is deployed quickly to trouble spots and provides assistance to local FBI offices during hostage situations. It has participated in hostage situations more than eight hundred times, in the US and elsewhere, since 1983.
Rico says noble men who are heroes...
20 May 2013
Moore is less
Rico says it's not nice to make fun of disasters like tornadoes, but that pun was too obvious to pass up...
Another international scam for the day
From: "Gillian and Adrian Bayford's" <gbilge@uludag.edu.tr>
Date: May 20, 2013, 18:05:23 EDT
To: Recipients <gbilge@uludag.edu.tr>
Subject: We are making donation of 1.5 Million Pounds each to five people around the world, and lucky for you, you are one of the 5 lucky people. Reply with your personal information for details.
Reply-To: gillianandadrian1001@rogers.com
Open the below link and See our interview for details: http://news.sky.com/story/972395/148-6m-euromillions-jackpot-winners-named
Israel's technology
The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners. It's an armored booth you step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on your person.
Israel sees this as a win-win situation for everyone, with none of this crap about racial profiling. It will also eliminate the costs of long and expensive trials. You're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion; shortly thereafter, an announcement:"Attention to all standby passengers, El Al is proud to announce a seat available on flight 670 to London. Shalom!"
International scam for the day
From: Marie Siggelin <marie.siggelin@lundby.goteborg.se>
Date: May 20, 2013, 14:05:42 EDT
Subject: UKNL sent you £1,000,000 Pounds and you are to inform Barrister Larry William with his email: larry.uknl@gmail.com
A billion-dollar bet
What’s the price of “cool”?
For Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (photo), the number appears to be $1.1 billion. That’s how much cash Yahoo plans to pay for New York City–based social-blogging platform Tumblr, according to multiple reports. Yahoo’s board approved the transaction, and an announcement is expected soon, according to AllThingsD. Although $1.1 billion seems like a massive amount to pay for a company that generated only $13 million in revenue last year, it’s not hard to see Mayer’s logic: Tumblr has become a cultural phenomenon with over a hundred million intensely loyal users reading and posting on over a hundred million blogs each month.
That said, the deal carries risks for both companies. Tumblr is extremely popular with the highly coveted 18-to-24-year-old demographic. The question is whether Tumblr can burnish Yahoo’s image with younger users, some of whom weren’t even born when Jerry Yang and David Filo founded the company in 1994.
For many users, Tumblr’s independence and casual approach to generating revenue have been part of what made the site popular. For years, Tumblr founder David Karp resisted plastering ads on the site. But Yahoo, a public company, will face pressure to “monetize” Tumblr and, if Mayer acts too aggressively, she could alienate the site’s users, who feel a deep sense of community and ownership in the network. Already, many Tumblr users are less than thrilled about the Yahoo deal: when Time wrote about the impending offer recently, hundreds of Tumblr users took to the comments section to voice their objections.
In short, for many users, the question is not whether Tumblr will make Yahoo cool, but whether Yahoo will suck the coolness out of Tumblr, as my colleague Harry McCracken observed. That sentiment was captured by TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis, who told one of her colleagues that, if Yahoo buys Tumblr, she will “seriously consider” moving her blog to another platform. “I don’t know exactly why, but my Tumblr is a part of my identity,” Tsotsis said. “And, for whatever reason, I don’t want to identify with Yahoo.”
Tumblr users have good reason to be apprehensive, because Yahoo’s track record with acquisitions has been decidedly mixed. Remember GeoCities or del.icio.us? Even Flickr, the photo-sharing site Yahoo purchased in 2005, has languished in the shadow of upstarts like Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook last year for a billion in cash and stock.
Mayer would be wise to follow the example of that deal, in which Facebook took a very hands-off approach to Instagram. And it sounds like she’s gotten the message, according to AllThingsD, which reported that the Tumblr brand will remain intact and Karp will continue running the platform. As one Tumblr source told the website: “This will be a very delicate dance, since so much could go wrong if done without care.”
The truth is that it’s going to take a lot more than a splashy acquisition to reverse Yahoo’s multiyear slide. For nearly a decade, Yahoo has been adrift, lacking a clear vision and strategy, as it’s been eclipsed by Google as well as social-media giants like Facebook and Twitter. For years, Yahoo seemed intent on becoming a new media-and-entertainment behemoth, particularly under former CEO Terry Semel, who spent over two decades working in Hollywood for Warner Bros. before joining Yahoo. He left the company in 2007.
Since then, the Internet giant has had a series of chief executives who failed to reverse the company’s slide. The situation reached a nadir earlier last year during a bizarre episode involving former CEO Scott Thompson, who admitted he didn’t have the computer-science degree he listed on his résumé when he got the Yahoo job. Thompson, who had replaced the outspoken Carol Bartz as CEO, was soon jettisoned. Veteran media executive Ross Levinsohn was named interim CEO, but Yahoo’s board clearly felt that more drastic change was needed and hired Mayer, an accomplished engineer with computer-science degrees from Stanford, who was Google’s twentieth employee.
Since assuming command of Yahoo in July of 2012, Mayer has made clear that she wants to incorporate Yahoo’s products— like Yahoo Mail, Flickr, and its popular home page— into the “daily habits” of its users. In order to achieve that goal, Mayer is trying to refocus Yahoo on the “user experience”, her specialty at Google, where she played a major role in developing Google’s famously minimalist search-box layout, and would eventually spearhead Google’s most successful products, including Gmail, Google News, and Google Maps. Tumblr’s focus on design clearly dovetails with Mayer’s aesthetic sensibility.
Yahoo’s $1.1 billion deal to buy Tumblr is Mayer’s largest acquisition to date, and represents something of a high-stakes gamble, because the purchase price constitutes over one-quarter of the cash and short-term investments on Yahoo’s balance sheet. It’s hard to imagine Yahoo undertaking another billion-dollar acquisition anytime soon, and it will likely be years before it will be possible to assess whether the deal is successful.
Mayer’s challenge now is to begin leveraging Tumblr’s massive user base to boost Yahoo’s bottom line. But she needs to act carefully. Internet users are fickle, and teenagers doubly so. If Tumblr’s loyal users feel Yahoo is “messing” with their beloved community, the site could face an exodus. And that wouldn’t be cool.
Rico says the headline may read Gambling on Tumblr: Marissa Mayer’s Billion-Dollar Bet to Make Yahoo Cool, but nothing's gonna make Yahoo cool again...
19 May 2013
Not Rico, alas
One ticket sold in Florida (photo) has won the Powerball jackpot, with a final annuity value of $590.5 million, short of the advertised estimate of $600 million. It failed to break the all-time record of $656 million set in March of 2012 by Mega Millions. It did set a record, however, for the biggest jackpot with a single winner. The numbers drawn Saturday night were 10, 13, 14, 22 and 52, with a Powerball of 11. Pennsylvania had two $1 million winners, and New Jersey had at least one as well.
A Mega Millions jackpot advertised at $190 million has been won by two tickets, one sold in New Jersey, the other in Virginia.
They matched all the numbers drawn Friday night: 11, 15, 35, 43 and 49, with a Mega Ball of 41.
Rico says he doubts the million-dollar winner in Pennsylvania was himself, but he'll let you know...
History for the day
18 May 2013
Ablative and alliterative
Rico says ablative is not only a mellifluous word in its own right, it's true of so many important things: skin (else we'd never get rid of it), sand (else no sand dunes), snow (else no snowdrifts), and some other 's' word Rico can't think of right now...
Idiot for the day
A self-described "homefree" hitchhiker, who became a viral sensation on the Internet in February and was wanted for the bludgeoning death of a New Jersey attorney he allegedly met in Times Square this week, was arrested at a Center City bus depot Thursday evening.Rico says some people should get the death penalty just to remove them from the planet...
Philadelphia police said someone in the Starbucks at 10th and Chestnut recognized the man and alerted them. Center City District officers went to the Starbucks, but he had already left. They later tracked him down at the Greyhound bus terminal near 11th and Filbert streets around 6 pm and arrested him, according to a source.
YouTube viewers know him as "Kai, the hatchet-wielding hitchhiker." He became an instant star after he said he saved the life of a woman from a homicidal man who believed he was Jesus. His interview with with a Fresno television reporter turned him into a celebrity.
Union County prosecutor Theodore Romankow said he would be processed and sent to New Jersey in the coming days. A judge has already set bail in Union County at three million dollars. "I believe that everyone is a little safer with this person off the streets," Romankow said in a statement.
DRPA spokesman Tim Ireland said that Kai, whose real name is Caleb Lawrence McGillvary (photo), had spent Wednesday night with either close friends or family in Glassboro, and this morning asked his hosts for $250, a Greyhound bus ticket, and a ride to the train station in Woodcrest.
After seeing McGillvary off at the station, his hosts called the Cherry Hill police, who contacted the Delaware River Port Authority, Ireland said. DRPA police checked surveillance video from the Woodcrest station, saw a figure resembling the celebrated hitchhiker, and contacted Philadelphia police with the info that McGillvary would likely be heading for the Greyhound station.
Earlier in the week, a surveillance camera captured images of the encounter between Kai and attorney Joseph Galfy, of Clark, New Jersey. The men later went back to the older man's house, officials said.
In a post made to his Facebook page, Kai claims he was raped: "What would you do if you woke up with a groggy head, metallic taste in your mouth, in a strangers house... walked to the mirror and seen semen dripping from the side of your face from your mouth, and started wretching, realizing that someone had drugged, raped you? What would you do?"
At a press conference, New Jersey officials said Kai had reached out to some fans in South Jersey. Those fans dropped him off at the train station. He told them he was first heading to Philadelphia and then going to see a girlfriend in Georgia.
PATCO officials said they had no knowledge of the suspect at one of their stations.
In an effort to avoid detection, officials said, Kai has cut his hair. He also sports a recently acquired facial tattoo.
Galfy was found unresponsive in his Clark, New Jersey, home. An autopsy revealed he died of blunt force trauma, according to the Union County Prosecutor’s office.
In early February, Kai told KMPH-TV in Fresno, California, that he was a passenger riding in an Oldsmobile when the driver snapped and drove into an electric company worker “because he was black”. According to Kai, the man said: “I come to realize I’m Jesus Christ and I can do anything if I want.” When bystanders rushed to the worker's aid, the man, who Kai described as a "fat, rich white guy" to Jimmy Kimmel, began to crush one of them. Kai said he feared he would snap the woman’s neck. “So I ran up behind him with a hatchet and Smash! Smash! SUH-MASH!,” he told KMPH. “That woman was in danger. He had just finished what looked like at the time, killing somebody and if I hadn’t done that he would have killed more people.”
Here is Kai on Jimmy Kimmel Live:
Locking horns in the Indian Ocean
Ishaan Tharoor has a Time article about an old war in a new location:
Rico says nobody believed that an assassination in Serbia would start World War One, or the invasion of Poland start World War Two, either...
In mid-April, a platoon of Chinese soldiers trooped some twenty kilometers into territory considered part of India and pitched tents and unfurled banners. When detected by Indian forces, the Chinese refused to leave, triggering a tense three-week standoff between the two Asian giants that ended only after both sides backed down from their windswept Himalayan posts and returned to the pre-existing status quo. The incident was the most dramatic flare-up between India and China in recent years, the latest reminder of how things can heat up along a vast, snowbound border that has for decades remained in dispute.
Top officials in both New Delhi and Beijing tried to play down what happened. Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid described the border tensions as “acne” on the otherwise “beautiful face” of Sino-Indian relations. On a recent trip to Beijing, Khurshid insisted both countries “were on the same page” and “don’t have prickly issues of significant difference” regarding the unsettled border. Ahead of newly installed Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s 19 May 2013 visit to India— his maiden foreign mission— the two countries have made conciliatory noises over resolving the thorny issue of the border, even though over a dozen rounds of talks have failed to achieve any real progress. In a measure to build trust, the two countries laid plans during the standoff to hold joint military exercises for the first time in five years.
The Indian government described the incident as “localized”, which suggests that it was the fault of an errant Chinese official or local military commander, and not that of Beijing. Official talking points in both capitals tend to emphasize shared economic interests— annual bilateral trade is expected to reach a hundred billion dollars by 2015. Why should colonial-era quibbles over glaciers and desolate mountain passes get in the way?
But while the Indian and Chinese governments have grown accustomed to managing a conflict frozen on the roof of the world, a whole new terrain of contest is emerging, far away from the Himalayas: the Indian Ocean. An Indian Defense Ministry report published last month warned of the “grave threat” posed by an emboldened Chinese navy in India’s maritime backyard. China’s rapidly expanding submarine fleet— it counts 45 such vessels to India’s fourteen— has widened its orbit of patrols beyond Chinese territorial waters. The “implicit focus” of China’s Navy, the report suggests, is to jockey for control of “highly sensitive sea lines of communication” in the Indian Ocean. Last year alone, the Indian Defense Ministry documented 22 “contacts” in the Indian Ocean with vessels suspected to be Chinese attack submarines on extended patrol.
These concerns add to an existing paranoia in the Indian media of China’s “string of pearls”— an array of ports, listening posts, and naval bases that Beijing is supposedly setting up in countries around the Indian Ocean, ostensibly in a bid to encircle India. China has a stake in naval facilities in Burma, Bangladesh, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and most notably in India’s old foe, Pakistan, where the Chinese-built port at Gwadar has furrowed many a brow in New Delhi. Chinese state companies are also developing key strategic ports in East Africa, including Lamu in Kenya and Bagamoyo in Tanzania. The day may not be too far off when a Chinese aircraft carrier makes routine pit stops at cities along the Indian Ocean littoral.
China’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean began in earnest in 2006, when Chinese vessels joined the international task force aimed at curbing Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden and securing pivotal global shipping routes. Much of China’s booming economy is fueled by oil shipped from the Persian Gulf, through the Indian Ocean, and Beijing policymakers see the necessity of securing sea-lanes and access beyond the Strait of Malacca. It’s a typically realist posture, one which can be gleaned from the first ever Chinese Blue Book on India— a semiofficial policy document— published this month. It says New Delhi is preparing for the eventuality of a “two-front war” with China and Pakistan, and notes the developing strength of India’s blue-water Navy. It warns, as the Chinese often do, of the inherent instabilities of India’s democracy, which could lead to further tensions.
Many Indian strategists do seem to accept that China’s widening naval scope is a natural consequence of its growing global presence; its expanding operations are that of any budding power seeking to safeguard far-flung economic interests. “There’s a maturation of Indian thought on the string of pearls,” says Jeff Smith, an expert on Sino-Indian relations at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington. “Many recognize now that these are genuine Chinese commercial interests. The biggest reason India is also looking seaward is its own growth.”
But the parallel rise of China and India is still taking the world into uncharted waters. Theorists and analysts squint back at the era of Great Game rivalries, pointing to the now in-vogue writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a nineteenth century American naval officer and geostrategist who has become popular in both New Delhi and Beijing. Mahan championed the need for a state to protect its merchant fleets with robust naval power— the blueprint for global domination used by the British Empire and later the US. But if China and India follow that same path, they’ll surely bump up against each other. Away from China’s expansion into the Indian Ocean, India has caused alarm in Beijing by stepping up its economic interests in the South China Sea and military ties with Vietnam, the main rival claimant to a body of water Beijing considers its sovereign territory. “Neither India nor China is really capable yet of operating in each other’s backyards,” says Smith. But the current course of action suggests further tensions may lie ahead.
In Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific, a book published in late 2012 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, veteran Indian geopolitical analyst C. Raja Mohan deploys a parable from ancient Hindu mythology to explain the current strategic conundrum between China and India. Rival gods and demons churn the oceans in search of heavenly ambrosia, but the process yields poison. It takes the subtle interventions of the Lord Vishnu to first deal with the poison and then help manage the discovery of ambrosia.
In Raja Mohan’s metaphor, Vishnu ought to be interpreted as the US, still the dominant power in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans. But it remains unclear to what extent Washington, burdened with shrinking defense budgets and complex relationships with both China and India, could or would want to smooth out the hard edges of Sino-Indian competition. It’s certain that such a role would be unwelcome, not just in Beijing, but also New Delhi, where policymakers have no desire to be drawn into the orbit of a Western superpower. And American ambivalence was on display last month as well. “Through the whole border dispute, there was not one word mentioned out of Washington,” says Smith. It’ll be up to Indian and Chinese politicos to make sure the geopolitical churn of the Indian Ocean doesn’t become poisonous.
Rico says nobody believed that an assassination in Serbia would start World War One, or the invasion of Poland start World War Two, either...
Argentina’s Disappearer-in-Chief
He would never have been cast to play the role of a bloody South American dictator in a Hollywood film. Soft-spoken, deeply religious, rake thin and awkward, his lean face cut horizontally by an incongruously thick walrus mustache, his fellow Army officers nicknamed him affectionately The Pink Panther. The name stuck, and was picked up by the press after General Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew Argentina‘s democratically-elected government in 1976 as head of a military junta that imposed a seven-year reign of terror in which some twenty thousand Argentines were brutally murdered.
“Videla belongs to that class of people who reveal the mediocrity of evil and who prove that the devil can incarnate in just anyone,” Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez once wrote.
But behind the gentlemanly mask lurked a mind poisoned with the abhorrent idea that thousands of young people— Argentina’s revolutionaries of the late 1960s and early 70s— had to “disappear” to prevent Argentina from falling into the hands of godless communism. “Argentina is by history Western and Christian,” Videla once told a group of British journalists. “A terrorist is defined not only by killing with a gun or planting a bomb, but also by activating with ideas contrary to our civilization.”
These Western and Christian values, Videla believed, were threatened by modern math, a “subversive” subject that was struck from school curricula, and the Uncle Scrooge character in Donald Duck cartoons, banned from television because Disney’s creation, the “richest duck in the world”, was believed to be a sly satire on capitalism that favored Communist sympathies.
Yet Videla was seen by some a dove among the hawks within the military junta, one who kept in line even more bloodthirsty generals such as Iberico Saint-Jean who, in 1977, declared: “First we will kill the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then their sympathizers, followed by the indifferent, and finally the timid.”
Before British journalist Robert Cox was forced to leave Argentina in 1979 because of his brave reporting on human rights crimes committed by Videla’s government, Videla described himself to Cox as the man holding back the demons: “He told me that he would like to go home but that he feared that if he left office his place would be taken by a general who would be so ruthless that Argentina would be drowned in blood,” wrote Cox in the Buenos Aires Herald last year.
Whether other generals would have been worse is something for the historians to decide, but under mild-mannered Videla some twenty thousand people were made to “disappear”. Most gruesome of all, the military decided to keep alive captured pregnant women until they gave birth, after which they were also murdered and the babies handed over to military families to be raised according to the “Western and Christian” values Videla claimed to defend.
Cox, who met with Videla on a number of occasions back then, believed for a time that the general was serious about his claim to be keeping the hawks under control. But after testifying against Videla last year in a trial in which Videla was sentenced to fifty years for the cases of the babies, Cox pondered: “How could any man decide in cold blood to order that pregnant women should be allowed to have their babies and then be killed, usually by being dumped, naked and unconscious, from military aircraft into the freezing waters of the Atlantic?”
Videla remained in power until March of 1981, when he retired as Army Commander-in-Chief. One of his succesors, General Leopoldo Galtieri, presiding over an economic debacle, decided to take Argentina to war against the UK in an effort to regain the Falkland Islands, three hundred miles off Argentina’s Atlantic coast, long claimed by Argentina as Las Malvinas. Galtieri’s plan failed when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched a Royal Navy fleet over the equator and swept Argentina’s troops off the islands. The dictatorship collapsed a year later and, since 1983, Argentina has been a democracy.
Videla’s death still leaves many questions unanswered, especially because Videla refused in court to give details of the crimes committed by his dictatorship. “I do not celebrate his death, because they die and they take with them the most important secrets in history,” said Nora Cortiñas, whose son, Carlos Cortiñas, “disappeared”, never to be seen again, in 1977. The mothers of the “disappeared,” including Cortiñas, have, for almost four decades ,struggled tenaciously for truth and justice.
Among the secrets Videla takes with him to the grave is exactly how the Condor Plan— the network through which autocrats from other South American dictatorships, such as that of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, collaborated with Argentina to persecute leftist opponents throughout the continent— worked. With some twenty thousand disappeared under his rule, Videla has a higher body count to his name than Pinochet and other South American contemporaries such as General Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, although he lags far behind the former de facto ruler of Guatemala, Efrain Rios Montt, who was recently convicted in his own country of crimes against humanity and genocide.
Videla was condemned for his crimes in the immediate aftermath of democracy’s return to Argentina, along with other military leaders of the dictatorship, but was released amid a general amnesty in 1990. Further trials were blocked by amnesty laws passed by Argentina’s Congress. It was only recently, with the amnesty laws overturned and a new round of trials under way, that Videla was taken back to jail, where he died in the morning of 17 May, of natural causes, in his cell at Marcos Paz prison.
Rico says that 'Disappearer-in-Chief' is a title, but not a nice one... (And why is it that the really bad guys get to die of natural causes?)
History for the day
17 May 2013
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Mark Seymour
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mseymour@proofmark.com
Sent from my iPhone
Mark Seymour
215.866.6184
mseymour@proofmark.com
Apple for the day
The Associated Press has a Time article about a milestone at the App Store:
Rico says there apparently is not an app called Milestone, but he's sure there will be...
Apple says its customers have downloaded more than fifty billon applications from its App Store since its launch in 2008.
Apple Inc. said that the 50 billionth download was a game called Say the Same Thing by Space Inch.
The App Store had five hundred apps when it first opened. It now has more than 850,000 individual apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. The store hit the ten billion downloads mark in early 2011 and 25 billion in March of 2012. The fifty billion milestone does not include updates or re-downloads. Apps range from newspapers and magazines to games, business tools and travel applications.
Rico says there apparently is not an app called Milestone, but he's sure there will be...
Toronto's mayor smoking crack?
Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about a Canadian idiot:
Rob Ford, Toronto's conservative mayor, has been caught on camera smoking what appears by all accounts to be crack cocaine, according to a Gawker editor and two Toronto Star reporters who claim to have seen the cellphone footage. Neither outlet has published the video for one simple reason: the man who took it is hoping to secure himself a six-figure payday for its release, a total that neither the American website nor the Canadian newspaper say they are willing to pony up. Regardless, both outlets make it clear they have no doubt about what they saw on the tape. Gawker's John Cook went live with his story first, so we'll give him the honors:Rico says the guy probably won't get reelected...
Here is what the video shows: Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, is the only person visible in the frame. Prior to the trip, I spent a lot of time looking at photographs of Rob Ford. The man in the video is Rob Ford. It is well-lit, clear. Ford is seated, in a room in a house. In one hand is a a clear, glass pipe. The kind with a big globe and two glass cylinders sticking out of it. In the other hand is a lighter. A slurred voice off-camera is ranting about Canadian politics in what sounds like an attempt to goad Ford. ...Ford, pipe in one hand and lighter in the other, is laughing, and mildly protesting at the sacrilege. He seems to keep trying to light the pipe, but keeps stopping to laugh. He is red-faced and sweaty, heaving with each breath. Finally, he finds his moment and lights up. He inhales. ...In one move, the owner stops the video and draws the device back into his pocket.The Star's Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan, meanwhile, say they got to watch the full video to the end multiple times, something that allowed them to offer a more complete picture (along with a little more Canadian color):
Two Toronto Star reporters have viewed the video three times. It appears to show Ford in a room, sitting in a chair, wearing a white shirt, top buttons open, inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. Ford is incoherent, trading jibes with an off-camera speaker who goads the clearly impaired mayor by raising topics including Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and the Don Bosco high school football team that Ford coaches.The video, according to the Star, ends abruptly with the ringing of a cellphone, perhaps from the very one being used to record the scene. According to the paper, the ring tone startled the mayor, who opened his eyes slightly and said: "That phone better not be on."
"I’m fucking right-wing," Ford appears to mutter at one point. "Everyone expects me to be right-wing. I’m just supposed to be this great.…" and his voice trails off. At another point he is heard calling Trudeau a "fag". Later in the ninety-second video he is asked about the football team and he appears to say (though he is mumbling), "they are just fucking minorities."
Gawker refers to those who recorded the video and who are shopping it around as "a crew of Toronto drug dealers that service a veritable who's who of A-list" Torontonians. The Star, meanwhile, calls them "a group of Somali men involved in the drug trade."
In case allegations that the mayor of the fourth-largest city in North America smokes crack with drug dealers weren't enough to get everyone's attention, this story also has the secondary plot line of how the reporters went about gaining access to the smartphone video. Both Cook and the Star reporters say they worked with a middleman who is acting as a broker of sorts for the owner(s) of the video who want cash to leave town and head west. (Cook makes it sound like there is only one man; the Star suggests there are two.)
The asking price is currently in the six figures. Cook suggests that's a total that Gawker can't reach on its own, although he does make it clear that his organization would be willing to pay a lower price for the video, partly to prevent it from being sold back to Ford (and unsaid, but let's be honest, partly for the obvious page-view bounty it would bring with it). The Star, meanwhile, says only that it "did not pay money and did not obtain a copy of the video".
Ford denied the allegations, according to the Globe & Mail. "It's just ridiculous," he said as he left his home, according to the newspaper. "It's another Toronto Star...", he added before trailing off, referring to Canada's largest daily newspaper and an outlet that has previously written about allegations that the mayor has a substance abuse problem.
Ford's lawyer, meanwhile, told Gawker that its report was "false and defamatory". He also later told Canadian radio: "I don't know whether or not such a video exists, but I think it would be fair for the public to see such a video and make their own conclusions."
Police, meanwhile, say they're "monitoring the situation closely."
From the way Cook tells it, the video would still be a secret if it weren't for a mixup with CNN, which he had approached through back channels to see if it wanted to help purchase the video. After a CNN reporter in Canada contacted Ford's office, Cook decided it would be best to pull the trigger last night. The Star, which was working on its own story, quickly followed suit.
Dumb criminal of the week
Justin Peters has a Slate article about another case of felony-stupid:
Rico says the guy will have a long time to regret his nap...
Name: Christopher White
Crime: Burglary.
Fatal mistake: Failing to caffeinate before a break-in.
The circumstances: At the end of April, a man named Christopher White allegedly broke into a local real estate office in Burlington, Wisconsin. (Their motto: “The town with tall tales.” Seriously.) Real estate offices are not usually great burglary targets, unless you are looking to steal photographs of other people’s houses. Nevertheless, White did the best he could, grabbing three computers and hauling them outside before heading back in to see if there was anything he had missed. Sure enough, a large bear skin was mounted on a basement wall. (A bear skin in a real estate office? If you’d ever been to Racine County, you’d understand.) White took the skin off the wall, presumably for the purposes of stealing it. Then he promptly fell asleep on top of it. Sounds dumb, but put yourself in his position: it’s late, you’re tired, and bear skins are hard to carry. A quick power nap might be just what you’d need to finish a burglary off in style.
If that was White’s plan, well, it was a bad one. When the office staff arrived the next morning, they noticed the break-in and called police, who arrived to find White sound asleep on top of the bear skin. Screams were uttered, the police were called, and White was roused from his slumber and carted off to jail. Luckily, once the initial surprise wore off, the real estate employees seemed to find the incident pretty funny. “You can’t fix stupid. You can just arrest it,” one of the real estate agents told WTMJ-TV. Words to live by...
A brief note: the WTMJ video about White’s sleepy misadventure repeatedly asserted that this story “was one for the dumb criminal file”. I love the enthusiasm. In fact, I love it so much that I’m adding a brand-new segment to this feature, at least for this week: “local newscast promo line”, which is what I imagine a hypothetical local newscast might use to hype the story. Say it in your best anchorman voice to get the full effect.Local newscast promo line: “The only thing this would-be burglar stole was a few Zs!”Ultimate Dumbness Ranking: falling asleep during a burglary is one of the dumbest things that a burglar can do. And, as you might imagine, alcohol played a part in White’s bad decisions; court documents indicate that he had gone out drinking before the burglary, and that “he was just cold and tired”. Now I sort of feel bad for this guy. But not bad enough to stop me from giving him a 9.5 out of 10, which I believe is the highest score I’ve given so far.
How he could have been a lot smarter: he should have brought an alarm clock.
How he could have been a little smarter: if you are interrupted during a burglary, and you happen to be wrapped in a bear skin, think quickly and pretend you are a bear. Then, as the police flee in terror, you can make your escape. It’s the perfect crime!
How he could have been a little dumber: I guess he could have taken the bear skin outside and fallen asleep on top of the computers. That would’ve been dumb and uncomfortable.
How he could have been a lot dumber: “Arrest me? Haven’t you ever heard of a thing called squatter’s rights?”
Rico says the guy will have a long time to regret his nap...
Google Glass might replace the smartphone
I’ve spent the last few weeks lowering my expectations for Google Glass. When I put on Google’s smart glasses a year ago— Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, let the press try on his pair at the company’s developer conference— I found it exhilarating. But many of my tech journalist colleagues have panned the device recently, calling it disorienting, buggy, and hobbled by terrible battery life. Google, too, has worked to lower the bar. The company describes Glass as an early beta product— it has thus far sent out units to hundreds of people who ponied up $1,500 for an early device— and it says that today’s model needs lots of work before it becomes a mass-market gadget.
So as I put on a pair this week, I was expecting to experience the digital equivalent of a machine hacked together with duct tape and construction paper. It wasn’t that. True, the unit I got my hand on at Google’s developer conference in San Francisco this week did have some obvious flaws, among them poor battery life and limited functionality. It also didn’t feel very comfortable on top of my prescription eyeglasses.
Yet I was surprised by how quickly I fell into using Glass, and how, within a few minutes of putting it on, this new thing began to feel like an intuitive way to experience the digital world. After my eye got used to the screen poised at the top right corner of my peripheral vision, and after my fingers got used to the way you control the device by sliding back and forth alongside the frame, Glass stopped feeling like someone’s bizarre, wishful prediction for the future of eyewear.
Instead, the more I used Google’s goggles, the more familiar they began to feel. This was a gadget I’d used before. It’s a gadget you’ve used before. That device is called a smartphone. And when Glass or something like it is finally released as a mainstream product, you’ll use it for the same reason you use headphones— because it’s a natural extension of your phone. It’s like headphones for your eyes. In a good way.
As I’ve written before, my thoughts about Glass are heavily informed by Thad Starner, a computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is also a technical lead on the Glass project. Starner has been wearing various kinds of digital goggles since the early 1990s— he built his own devices— and is thus one of the world’s leading authorities on what it’s like to live as a cyborg. He argues, counterintuitively, that the chief advantage of digital goggles is that they allow you to interact with technology in a way that does not interfere with your real-world life. In other words, they make smartphones less distracting than they are today. They achieve this, Starner says, because a tiny, voice-activated screen above your eye is much faster to access— and much less socially awkward— than a big screen you fish out of your pocket and hold far away from your eyes, forming a barrier between you and the rest of the world.
Once I put them on, I saw exactly what Starner meant. To turn on Glass, you tap the frame of your specs, or you nod your head up. When you do so, you see a big, digital clock just off to the side of your central field of vision, and a prompt to say Okay Glass when you’re ready to ask it something. Even this main screen is useful: I don’t wear a wristwatch— I’ve never found them comfortable— and, when I’m not at my PC, I usually check the time on my phone. Glass offers me a quicker, less socially awkward way to access a clock.
I know what you’re thinking: a normal person would just wear a wristwatch. Yes, but even if you do wear a watch, there’s a good chance you look at your phone for dozens of other tiny bits of information during the day— texts, email, directions, photos, and especially Google searches. Starner calls these “microinteractions”— moments when you consult your phone or computer for ephemeral, important information that you need immediately. Glass is made for these moments. Once you say Okay Glass, you’re presented with a menu of possible commands, including performing a Google search, asking for directions, and taking a picture. You can also access Google Now, the company’s predictive personal assistant, by swiping your finger along the frame. This shows you contextual information that you’d usually find on your phone: the weather, sports scores, directions to your hotel.
It took me a minute or so to figure out how to access all this information. Google has built a vocabulary of taps and swipes into the device, and you’ve got to learn the gestures— that swiping forward and back is the equivalent of scrolling, that swiping down is a universal “back” button, and that tapping once is the equivalent of clicking. But once I got the controls, and once I’d positioned the device correctly in front of my glasses, I understood exactly how to use it— it’s just like my phone, but faster. (Google is working on a way to have Glass attach to prescription glasses, by the way.)
For instance, I could see using Glass when I’m cooking. Today, when I’m ready for the next step in a recipe or need to look up, say, the internal temperature of a medium-rare steak, I have to break away from what I’m doing and look at a book or my iPad. With Glass, any information I need is right there, always. Okay Glass, I asked it in one of my first tests. “How many cups in a quart?” In half a second, it spat back the answer on screen and by voice: “There are four cups in a quart.” (Glass uses a “bone conduction” speaker located right around you ear; this means that you can hear it while still keeping your ears free to hear the outside world, even though it isn’t audible to anyone else.)
When I met him, Starner told me that this is how he uses Glass— to search for queries that come up in social situations. At dinner with his wife recently, the conversation turned to cats, and Starner wondered how far they can fall without getting hurt. He asked Glass. Unlike my quarts-to-cups question, Starner’s question— like most Google queries— didn’t bring up a direct answer. Instead, it showed him a snippet of the first link in the search results. You can see additional links by scrolling, but Google’s search is so good that you can often get enough information without doing so. (Cats usually get injured on falls shorter than seven stories; at greater heights they have time to right their bodies and land on their feet.)
These examples might strike you as intrusive and disruptive—exactly the sort of thing you’d feared would come of a digital device attached to your face. It’s true, too, that when someone is accessing information from Glass, his eyes shift up into the corner of his sockets. Depending on the situation— you’re checking sports scores while your friend is confiding in you about his marital troubles—this could be perceived as rude.
On the other hand, shifting your eyes is way, way less distracting than checking your smartphone. Indeed, after using it, I’d argue that pretty much any time you look something up on Glass rather than a phone, you’re choosing a less intrusive way of accessing the digital world. If you want to rid the world of digital interruptions, you’d start by eradicating phones. And if you’ve been hoping that your friends and family would get their heads out of their phones already, you ought to be celebrating Glass.
Still, I don’t want to overpraise the device. Because it’s so new, Glass’s capabilities are still quite limited, and it’s nowhere close to serving as a replacement for a phone in most situations. This week Google announced a program for developers to add new services to Glass; among the companies pitching in are Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Evernote, and I’m hoping many more firms follow their lead.
Even before that happens, though, Glass is off to a great start. Once I had it on my face, I was addicted to the power it gave me, and I couldn’t stop ordering it around: “Show me pictures of dinosaurs.” “Take a picture.” “What time is my flight?” “How long will it take me to get home?” At some point I had to take Glass off. I really, really didn’t want to.
Rico says WHAT
Global warming is caused by humans
Phil Plait has a Slate article about global warming:
Rico says okay, it's our fault, greedy and selfish bastards that we are as a species. So, get used to it. Even if we started really fixing it today, it'll take thousands of years to turn around, so Rico (like you) won't be here to see it...
A new study has just come out that looked at nearly twelve thousand professional scientific journal papers about global warming, and found that, of the papers expressing a stance on global warming, 97 percent endorse both the reality of global warming and the fact that humans are causing it.
Ninety-seven percent. That’s what we call a “consensus”, folks.
The study was clever. They found the papers by searching on the terms “global warming” and “global climate change”. Once they compiled the list of papers, they looked at the abstracts (a short summary of the results scientists put at the top of their papers) to see if the paper itself talked about the causes of global warming. About four thousand of the papers did so. That may seem like a smallish fraction, but most papers analyze measurements and climate effects, not the cause of global warming (like most astronomical papers on, say, galaxies don’t discuss how galaxies form, but focus on their structure, content, and so on— also, because there is such a strong consensus on warming, scientists don't generally feel the need to state the obvious in their abstracts).
Examining those four thosuand papers, the study authors determined that 97.1 percent of them endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global warming. And here’s where they did the clever bit: they contacted the authors of the papers in question and asked them to self-rate those papers. They got responses from twelve hundred authors (a nice fraction), and, using the same criteria as the study, it turns out 97.2 percent of the authors endorse the consensus.
That’s a remarkable agreement! And it’s no surprise. There have been several studies showing almost exactly the same thing. This new one is interesting due to the methodology, and the fact that it’s so robust.
So, the bottom line is that the vast majority of scientists who conduct climatological research and publish their results in professional journals say humans are the cause of global warming. There is essentially no controversy among actual climate scientists about this.
Of course, if you read The Wall Street Journal or the contrarian blogs, you might think the controversy among scientists is bigger. But you’ll find that the vast majority of people writing those articles, or who are quoted in them, are not climatologists. You’ll also find many, including politicians so vocally denying global warming, are heavily funded by fossil fuel interests, or lead institutes funded that way.
Because deniers tend to go to the OpEd pages and television, rather than science journals, the public perception is skewed in their favor; people think this is a bigger controversy than it is. The only controversy here is a manufactured one; made up by people who are basing it on ideology, not facts, evidence, and science. That’s not just my opinion; that statement itself is backed up by facts, evidence, and science.
Global warming is real. Climate change is happening. Carbon dioxide in the air is increasing, and is at a higher level than it has been for the past three million years. That carbon dioxide is increasingly heating us up: we are warming at a rate faster than in the past eleven thousand years, and most likely far longer than that.
And it’s our fault. It’s well past time we do something about it, and we need to get past this false controversy.
Rico says okay, it's our fault, greedy and selfish bastards that we are as a species. So, get used to it. Even if we started really fixing it today, it'll take thousands of years to turn around, so Rico (like you) won't be here to see it...
Safest year ever
I was looking at local crime statistics over the weekend, and was surprised to see that D.C. is experiencing a sixteen percent year-to-date decline in aggregate murders, despite a rapidly rising population. Rick Nevin has looked at similar numbers from other large American cities that have reported statistics, and it turns out that D.C. is typical. It's not completely clear that you should extrapolate too much from the data that's already in but, according to Nevin, if you do extrapolate you get the result that 2013 will have the lowest murder rate in a century (chart, above). In other words, we'll not only have reversed the great crime surge of the 1960s and 1970s, but actually exceeded the postwar peace and basically gotten back down to the murder rate of a largely pre-urbanized United States.
But, more broadly, the good news about crime levels needs to inform more of our public policy debates ranging from gun regulation to drug prohibition to just general talk of declining living standards. Personal safety is hard to purchase on the open market, but it's extremely valuable and we appear to be doing a much better job of delivering it than we did forty years ago.
Rico says that that's lead abatement...
Paper isn't just a commodity any more
Victor Luckerson has a Time article about life imitating art:
It sounds like the plot of an unaired episode of The Office— Staples, the archnemesis of regional paper company Dunder Mifflin, licenses the smaller business’s name and starts selling paper and other office products under its banner. You can easily envision Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute flying to the office supply giant’s headquarters to win their company’s name and honor back. Maybe there’d be a gift basket bribe involved.
Thanks to some clever branding, fiction has become reality. Though Jim, Dwight, and the rest of the quirky characters on NBC’s long-running sitcom will have their final cringeworthy moments together tonight in the show’s series finale, Dunder Mifflin’s paper will fill the copy machines and supply closets of real offices around the country for years to come. A Staples subsidiary, Quill.com, has been selling Dunder Mifflin office products for a year and a half, and not just as mementos or gag gifts. It’s become one of the company’s most successful brands, generating millions of dollars in revenue annually.
“Paper is a race to the bottom, as paper usage is going down,” says Paul Bessinger, the director of innovation at Quill.com. “We’re looking for different pop culture phenomena and external brands that we can tie to these mundane product categories to differentiate. That’s really how initially pairing copy paper and Dunder Mifflin came about.”
The franchise, which began with paper, has now extended to sticky notes, Sharpie-like markers, and notepads. Bessinger says all the items in the product line follow the guiding philosophy of What Would Dunder Mifflin Do? So the sticky notes are actually multicolored Diversity Notes, perfect for overcoming stereotypes. Storage boxes can be adapted to be part of a bean-bag toss game suitable for your next office olympics. And legal pads include checkboxes to note if your officemates are alert, asleep or maybe doing crosswords during a meeting. Most of the Quill.com products are sold in bulk to supply entire offices instead of individual fans. Some of the products are also available in Staples stores and on the NBC website as merchandise.
Appropriately, paper is the most popular product. It’s been a top-five seller for Quill.com each month since January of 2012. Though Bessinger wouldn’t disclose specific financials, he says the Dunder Mifflin line has experienced double-digit growth year-over-year, even as the show’s ratings have sagged. “It’s one of the best-performing product launches that I can remember of anything we’ve done,” he says. NBC keeps about six percent of the revenue from Dunder Mifflin sales, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Dunder Mifflin is not the first brand to undergo “reverse product placement,” the marketing term for bringing a fictional brand into the real world. Duff Beer, the preferred beverage of Homer Simpson, has been produced by a variety of companies without the consent of The Simpsons’ creators. The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant, named for the culinary expert from the film Forrest Gump, now has more than thirty locations worldwide. The original Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory movie was conceived from the start as a tie-in to promote a new candy bar; forty years later, Nestle is still producing sweets under the name.
When approached properly, these branding initiatives can elicit an entirely different reaction from consumers than traditional product placement. “Imagine if it had been Staples or Office Depot. People would have felt like this was highly commercialized,” says Cristel Russell, a professor of marketing at American University’s Kogod School of Business. “Now it’s kind of synergistic with the story, and hasn’t been pushed down people’s throats because it was created for the show. It’s actually a very clever way to escape the negative associations that sometimes real product placements bring.”
Earlier efforts by NBC to market the show off the television screen have also helped Dunder Mifflin resonate in the real world. The show’s creators have maintained dundermifflin.com for years, featuring monthly newsletters from the various company branches and company press releases that coincide with the plot developments of the show. “The worlds have really blurred,” Russell says. “We’re so connected to them that we no longer really think of them as in a different world.”
Though the show is ending, Quill is betting that Dunder Mifflin can continue to sell paper. A series of Dunder Mifflin commercials that are hammy enough to have sprung from the mind of Michael Scott were broadcast in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the setting for The Office, during the Superbowl and the Academy Awards. During tonight’s finale a new commercial will air in the various northeastern cities where Dunder Mifflin has branches on the show. Marketing is also extending to Chicago and to airline flights this summer. Bessinger hopes that Dunder Mifflin will become an “evergreen brand” that is not directly dependent on its source material to succeed.
So far, with the show acting as a constant promotional tool, Quill seems to be succeeding at a task that eluded Michael Scott, David Wallace, and a host of other Dunder Mifflin CEOs and branch managers: turning the constantly beleaguered company into a profitable venture.
“It creates an emotional connection with a lot of people,” Bessinger says. “You can probably look at a marker on your desk, and I’m sure you don’t have an emotional connection to it. But if you look at the marker on your desk, and it’s a Dunder Mifflin marker and it says ‘That’s what she wrote’, you’re going to chuckle a little bit about it.”
Rico says just when you think the world couldn't get any weirder...
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