XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Wednesday 28 December 2011

Grenada seeks probe into death of Toronto man - mistook plainclothes female police officer for a friend and hugged her -

Grenada seeks probe into death of Toronto man - mistook plainclothes female police officer for a friend and hugged her - 



The death of a Toronto carpenter who clashed with police while visiting his homeland of Grenada for Christmas has drawn the attention of that country's government and touched off an official investigation.
Oscar Bartholomew, 39, died in hospital on the eastern Caribbean island on Tuesday, 24 hours after being taken into custody in the town of St. David's.
Family members have accused officers of beating Bartholomew after he mistook a plainclothes female police officer for a friend and hugged her, lifting her off the ground while in front of a police station.
Bartholomew, along with his wife and a cousin, had stopped at the St. David’s police station on Monday afternoon because his wife needed to use the bathroom, his aunt Josephine de Souza said in a telephone interview.
Police dispute that account, however, saying Bartholomew was arrested after assaulting an officer.
Dunbar Belfon, superintendent of the Royal Grenada Police Force, said the female officer was in uniform at the time she came into contact with Bartholomew.
Belfon said Bartholomew was taken into custody after the altercation and eventually transferred to hospital.
De Souza and one of Bartholomew’s cousins, Shem Pierre, accused police of leaving Bartholomew bleeding in his cell for at least three hours before calling an ambulance at the insistence of his wife.
Read more -
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1107899--grenada-seeks-probe-into-death-of-toronto-man?bn=1

BBC criticised for naming panda as a woman of the year -

BBC criticised for naming panda as a woman of the year - 




The broadcaster's Faces of the year 2011 – the women featured the women who made the headlines for each month and included Gabrielle Giffords, the US Congresswoman who recovered after she was shot in the head, as well as Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
Pippa Middleton is named as the female face of April after she caught the nation's attention as maid of honour at the wedding of her sister Kate to Prince William.
But for December, the BBC picked Sweetie the panda, who arrived along with Sunshine in Edinburgh from China. The pandas are on loan to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland for £600,000 a year.
The list sparked a mock-frenzy on Twitter with users labelling the episode "panda gate".


Read more -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8980607/BBC-criticised-for-naming-panda-as-a-woman-of-the-year.html

Former Fed VP Accuses Bernanke Of Bailing Out Europe Via Currency Swaps -

Former Fed VP Accuses Bernanke Of Bailing Out Europe Via Currency Swaps - 




First it was Zero Hedge. Then Ron Paul joined in. Now it is the turn of a former Dallas Fed Vice President, Gerald ODriscoll, to outright accuse the Fed of bailing out Europe courtesy of "incomprehensible" currency swaps, and implicitly accusing Bernanke of lying that he would not bail out Europe even as he has done precisely that. And not only that: by cutting the USD swap spread from OIS+100 to OIS+50, the Fed has made sure it gets paid less than ever for extended Europe the courtesy of bailing it out all over again. Incidentally, O'Driscoll says, "America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is engaged in a bailout of
European banks. Surprisingly, its operation is largely unnoticed here.
" One thing we can say proudly - it has been noticed loud and clear here...
From the WSJ:
The Federal Reserve's Covert Bailout of Europe 
When is a loan between central banks not a loan? When it is a dollars-for-euros currency swap.
America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is engaged in a bailout of European banks. Surprisingly, its operation is largely unnoticed here.
The Fed is using what is termed a "temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement" with the European Central Bank (ECB). There are similar arrangements with the central banks of Canada, England, Switzerland and Japan. Simply put, the Fed trades or "swaps" dollars for euros. The Fed is compensated by payment of an interest rate (currently 50 basis points, or one-half of 1%) above the overnight index swap rate. The ECB, which guarantees to return the dollars at an exchange rate fixed at the time the original swap is made, then lends the dollars to European banks of its choosing.
Why are the Fed and the ECB doing this? The Fed could, after all, lend directly to U.S. branches of foreign banks. It did a great deal of lending to foreign banks under various special credit facilities in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse in the fall of 2008. Or, the ECB could lend euros to banks and they could purchase dollars in foreign-exchange markets. The world is, after all, awash in dollars.
The two central banks are engaging in this roundabout procedure because each needs a fig leaf. The Fed was embarrassed by the revelations of its prior largess with foreign banks. It does not want the debt of foreign banks on its books. A currency swap with the ECB is not technically a loan.
The ECB is entangled in an even bigger legal and political mess. What the heads of many European governments want is for the ECB to bail them out. The central bank and some European governments say that it cannot constitutionally do that. The ECB would also prefer not to create boatloads of new euros, since it wants to keep its reputation as an inflation-fighter intact. To mitigate its euro lending, it borrows dollars to lend them to its banks. That keeps the supply of new euros down. This lending replaces dollar funding from U.S. banks and money-market institutions that are curtailing their lending to European banks—which need the dollars to finance trade, among other activities. Meanwhile, European governments pressure the banks to purchase still more sovereign debt.
This Byzantine financial arrangement could hardly be better designed to confuse observers, and it has largely succeeded on this side of the Atlantic, where press coverage has been light. Reporting in Europe is on the mark. On Dec. 21 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted on its website that European banks took three-month credits worth $33 billion, which was financed by a swap between the ECB and the Fed. When it first came out in 2009 that the Greek government was much more heavily indebted than previously known, currency swaps reportedly arranged by Goldman Sachs were one subterfuge employed to hide its debts.
The Fed had more than $600 billion of currency swaps on its books in the fall of 2008. Those draws were largely paid down by January 2010. As recently as a few weeks ago, the amount under the swap renewal agreement announced last summer was $2.4 billion. For the week ending Dec. 14, however, the amount jumped to $54 billion. For the week ending Dec. 21, the total went up by a little more than $8 billion. The aforementioned $33 billion three-month loan was not picked up because it was only booked by the ECB on Dec. 22, falling outside the Fed's reporting week. Notably, the Bank of Japan drew almost $5 billion in the most recent week. Could a bailout of Japanese banks be afoot? (All data come from the Federal Reserve Board H.4.1. release, the New York Fed's Swap Operations report, and the ECB website.)

NASA's twin moon probes to land this weekend - Grail-A and Grail-B to study Moon from crust to core -

NASA's twin moon probes to land this weekend - Grail-A and Grail-B to study Moon from crust to core - 
Image: Artist's drawing, Grail mission



A pair of NASA spacecraft is getting set to orbit the moon this weekend, a move that will kick off the probes' effort to study Earth's nearest neighbor from crust to core.
NASA's twin Grail spacecraft are slated to start circling the moon one day apart, with Grail-A arriving on Saturday and Grail-B following on Sunday. The two probes will then fly around the moon in tandem, mapping the lunar gravity field in unprecedented detail and helping scientists better understand how the moon formed and evolved.
"This mission will rewrite the textbooks on the evolution of the moon," Grail principal investigator Maria Zuber, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement.
More space news from msnbc.com

IKI
Where will Russian probe fall? Too early to say
Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: Will Russia's doomed Phobos-Grunt spacecraft fall in Afghanistan? Experts say it's way too early to be that precise about a prediction.
Rare slow-spinning star reveals space oddity
Sun storms may super-charge northern lights
Christmas Eve fireball sparked by falling rocket debris
The $496 million Grail mission (short for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) launched on Sept. 10 from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The two washing-machine-size probes have taken their sweet time since, charting circuitous, energy-efficient courses that will get them to the moon after more than three months of flying. Contrast that with NASA's manned Apollo 11 mission, which prioritized speed and got there in three days back in 1969.
Grail-A and Grail-B won't be ready to start their science campaign immediately upon arriving at the moon. Rather, they'll spend another two months circling lower and lower, eventually settling into orbits just 34 miles above the lunar surface, researchers said.
The twin probes will begin taking measurements in March. They'll chase each other around the moon for 82 days, staying 75 to 225 miles apart.


Read more -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45809905/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.Tvu-8dQV2-U

Tweeting the word 'drill' or 'virus' could mean your Twitter account is read by U.S. government spies -

Tweeting the word 'drill' or 'virus' could mean your Twitter account is read by U.S. government spies - 




The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for 'sensitive' words - and tracking people who use them. 
Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS's 'watch' list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.
The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as 'human to animal' and 'outbreak' to other, more obscure words such as 'drill' and 'strain'.
The DHS also watches for words such as 'illegal immigrant'. 
The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as 'illegal immigrant', 'outbreak', 'drill', 'strain', 'virus', 'recovery', 'deaths', 'collapse', 'human to animal' and 'trojan', according to an 'impact asssessment' document filed by the agency.
When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information.
It's still not clear how this information is used - and who the DHS shares it with.



An online privacy group, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre has requested information on the DHS's scans, which it says the agency announced in February. 
The privacy group has requested information on the DHS, and contractors it claims are working with the agency to scan social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The group says that the government has used scans of social media before to analyse specific events - such as the 2010 BP oil spill - but this general 'watching' of social media using fake profiles is new.
'The initiatives were designed to gather information from 'online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,' to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to 'disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners,' the group said in a court filing.




Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2079283/Tweeting-word-drill-mean-Twitter-account-read-government-spies.html