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Whoops! PR disaster ahoy!
CnetNews.com
Citigroup denies it, but its Citibank unit was reportedly robbed of tens of millions of dollars, the victim of a cyberattack by members of a Russian criminal gang, says Tuesday’s Wall Steet Journal.
The attack was discovered this past summer, says the Journal, but investigators for the FBI and National Security Agency believe it could have happened months or a year prior. The two agencies have reportedly shared information with the Department of Homeland Security and Citigroup to defend against the attack. The investigation is supposedly ongoing, with no word on whether or not any of the stolen money has been found.
Investigators initially became suspicious after spotting traffic coming from IP addresses once used by the Russian Business Network, a Russian gang of cybercriminals who went off the radar back in 2007, notes the Journal. But reports have surfaced that members of the gang have since regrouped to launch a wave of new attacks.
Well, naturally Citigroup doesn’t want to admit that the Russians were able to do this.
Head of IPCC Poised to Make a Fortune for Himself — Wow, this guy is really something. Exactly how all the facts in this article were ignored by the media until now is astonishing. He will be the first Carbon billionaire, not Gore. Gore is small potatoes compared to this genius.
No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
related story:
Carbon traders already making millions. And they are not who you think they are.
The oil companies, given huge amounts of permits, found it easy to trim their emissions a little and so make huge profits. Expanding businesses and public services, on the other hand, were forced to buy more permits. In its first year of operation Shell made a profit from carbon-trading of £49.9million and BP a profit of £43.1million.
How much detail will the public and “warmists” need to read and hear about before it dawns on them that this is one huge scam and the money is coming out of their pockets in the form of increased prices and taxation? Dumbing down the educational system and subverting the media has indeed paid off.
Found by Tom Diggle and Stuart001 via Twitter.
Just saw an AT&T commercial saying that on Verizon you can’t surf the web and talk at the same time but on AT&T you can. HUH?
I’m a Droid user and I can surf the web, check email, and use GPS navigation at the same time as well as running any other app I want and it all works. So isn’t this clearly false advertising? I’ve never owned an iPhone but I thought it was the one that couldn’t multitask. Have they fixed that?
UPDATE: Whoops! I swear I remember it did work – but I just tried it and it didn’t work. I wonder if the last “upgrade” screwed it up. I’m going to do more testing.
UPDATE2: Further investigation. The reason I thought it worked was that I had a WIFI connection to the Internet. You can surf and talk at the same time if you have WIFI. So – it appears that AT&T is correct and I’m now disappointed in Verizon.
Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.
[…]
“The Catellus lands were purchased with nearly $45 million in private funds and $18 million in federal funds and donated to the federal government for the purpose of conservation, and that commitment must be upheld. Period,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement.
[…]
Her intervention in the Mojave means it will be more difficult for California utilities to achieve a goal, set by the state, of obtaining a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020; projects in the monument area could have supplied a substantial portion of that power.“This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and a partner with a venture capital firm that invested in a solar developer called BrightSource Energy. In September, BrightSource canceled a large project in the monument area.
Union officials, power industry executives, regulators and some environmentalists have also expressed concern about the impact of the monument legislation, but few would speak publicly for fear of antagonizing one of California’s most powerful politicians.
It’s all a rigged shell game. They made money going broke, they made money getting help and now they’re making money repaying that help. And we just pay and pay and…
More than $50 billion of new capital was raised as part of the effort by the biggest banks to repay the money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and get out from under the thumb — and pay caps — of Washington.
All told, December was the biggest month in history for offerings, according to Thomson Reuters.
Here’s what the post-bailout bonanza means for all the banks that helped find investors for the new shares: Bank of America’s $19.3 billion offering generated $482 million in fees; Citigroup’s $17 billion offering resulted in $425 million in fees; and Wells Fargo’s $12.2 billion offering led to $275.6 million in fees. (The banks paid themselves roughly 2.5 percent of the offering price.)
[…]
On the fees from the post-bailout offerings, there is an element in all of this of just moving money from one pocket to another.After all, paying yourself a fee just means the cost of the offering is lower than if you had used an outside bank to do the work. It’s not real revenue.
But when bonus time comes, and when employees tally up the work they did for the year, they will be compensated for their work on these offerings as if they had worked for an outside client.
[…]
While many on Wall Street may hold a dim view of the Treasury, one banker I spoke with said he had a message for Timothy F. Geithner: “Thank you.”
If we can catch Santa, we can get Bin Laden!
- New Atom chip already showing up in Netbooks.
- Barnes and Noble getting $100 for the Nook e-reader shipments.
- Today is the shortest most miserable day of the year.
- Verizon fees a rip-off.
- Steve Ballmer in the news.
- Texting drivers more likely to crash. Duh!
- Yelp and Google not happening.
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Found by Brother Uncle Don
Most Cocaine cut with de-worming drug
Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, and even more so when laced with another drug that’s commonly used to deworm opossums. Federal agents have found that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized entering the United States contain levamisole, a veterinary drug linked to serious weakening of the immune system in humans. Here’s the real funny part: no one knows why.
This comes from a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the immune system condition, known as agranulocytosis. The paper tracks 21 cases from New Mexico and Washington State linked to cocaine, including one death, but cautions that many more cases have probably gone under the radar of public health officials.
Found by Kerry Lutz.
A fire broke out at the Guinness factory in Dublin shortly after noon local time. Over nine fire brigades and three rigs with aerial ladder platforms were able to contain the blaze before it spread to the ammonia plant at the site.
An official from Guinness was able to confirm that no one was hurt in the incident.
“There were no injuries to any personnel and the fire has been extinguished,” the spokeswoman said.
Maybe I better stock up right away.
CnetNews.com
Intel is launching the biggest makeover of the Atom processor since the seminal chip debuted in the spring of 2008, and consumers can expect a crush of new Netbooks to follow.
Intel said there will be more than 80 new Netbook designs–typically priced around $350–on the way, with systems coming available by January 4.
The Pine Trail design squeezes the graphics function, previously on a separate chip, onto the central processing unit, or CPU, a first for Intel. The result–by decreasing the number of chips from three to two–is a reduction in the overall chip package size by 60 percent.
AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) – The now-ubiquitous devices carry such warnings in some countries, though no U.S. states require them, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. A similar effort is afoot in San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom wants his city to be the nation’s first to require the warnings. Maine Rep. Andrea Boland, D-Sanford, said numerous studies point to the cancer risk, and she has persuaded legislative leaders to allow her proposal to come up for discussion during the 2010 session that begins in January, a session usually reserved for emergency and governors’ bills.
Boland herself uses a cell phone, but with a speaker to keep the phone away from her head. She also leaves the phone off unless she’s expecting a call. At issue is radiation emitted by all cell phones. Under Boland’s bill, manufacturers would have to put labels on phones and packaging warning of the potential for brain cancer associated with electromagnetic radiation. The warnings would recommend that users, especially children and pregnant women, keep the devices away from their head and body.
The incident at Dish began in the men’s room when Herbers became annoyed because the urinal and stalls were occupied. Herbers says two men were together inside the same stall. He says Lambert carried on a conversation with the pair while he used the urinal.
Herbers says he asked the men to vacate the stall because they were not using the toilet. He said the pair refused, at which time Lambert began yelling obscenities and showing aggression towards Herbers. Herbers says Lambert then pushed and grabbed him and bit off part of his nose. According to Herbers, Lambert and the other two men fled the scene.
Herbers says he called police and was transported to an area hospital. In the complaint, Herbers claims he suffered permanent disfigurement to his nose and face and will need plastic surgery and possibly a prosthetic nose. The police report says Herbers entire left nostril was missing.
I think someone needs some anger management counseling… hmmmm?
An historical look at the reasons behind muslin hate for Americans and infidels in general.
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