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The court approved the judicial equivalent of an extreme makeover, paying $125 a day for the services of a cosmetologist to cover up the tattoos that Mr. Ditullio has gotten since his arrest.
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An official familiar with the situation told CNBC that 1.1 billion of the new bills have been printed, but they are unusable because of a creasing problem in which paper folds over during production, revealing a blank unlinked portion of the bill face.
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✰ Cut & paste child porn conviction overturnedA former Western New York elementary school principal who has served 18 months in prison for possession of child pornography will be released after an appeals court in Florida overturned his conviction. A three-judge panel of the Second District Court of Appeal in Lakeland, Fla., ruled Friday that the photos held by John R. Stelmack aren’t child pornography because they showed the nude bodies of adults. Photos of children’s faces, including two students from schools where Stelmack had served, had been superimposed on the bodies, but none of the altered pictures showed naked children, according to the Lakeland Ledger. “Unseemly as the images in this case may be, their possession is not [outlawed in Florida] because the only sexual conduct in the images is that of an adult,“ Judge Morris Silberman wrote in the opinion, which was joined by the two other judges.
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It all sounded quite important, and the program’s slogan is pretty catchy. But after you get past the pandering sound bites, a question comes to mind: is anyone in the corner offices of Wall Street’s biggest firms or corporate America’s biggest companies paying any attention to Mr. Holder’s “strong message”? Of course not. (I actually called some chief executives after Mr. Holder’s news conference, and not one had heard of Operation Broken Trust.) That’s because in the two years since the peak of the financial crisis, the government has not brought one criminal case against a big-time corporate official of any sort. Instead, inexplicably, prosecutors are busy chasing small-timers: penny-stock frauds, a husband-and-wife team charged in an insider trading case and mini-Ponzi schemes.
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✰ Twitter is censoring the discussion of #Wikileaks
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The initial attacks against PayPal were substantially ineffective; the PayPal blog was taken offline, but the main PayPal site wasn’t harmed. The attacks against PostFinance, however, have resulted in the bank’s website being unavailable for more than 16 hours. It remains unavailable at the time of writing. The latest target is the site of the Swedish prosecutors in Assange’s sexual misconduct trial. This too appears to be offline. Twitter has also been named as a future attack target, due to its claimed censorship of the #wikileaks hashtag.
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(Low Orbit Ion Cannon) is a network stress testing application, written in C# and developed by “praetox”. It attempts a Denial-of-Service attack on the target site by flooding the server with TCP packets, UDP packets, or HTTP requests with the intention of disrupting the service of a particular host. The program was exploited during Project Chanology to attack Scientology websites, and is currently being used by Operation Avenge Assange (Earlier known as Operation Payback) to attack the websites of companies and organizations that have opposed WikiLeaks.
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The users, who collectively call themselves “anonymous,” are public enemy number one of the entertainment industry, which accuses the vast majority of them of piracy and lending support to the groups that host pirated content online. As the rhetoric has increased in recent months, though, the entertainment industry has learned that poking the hornet’s nest can be painful. Vigilante users of the site have taken it upon themselves recently to launch a flurry of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on a number of Websites with ties to all corners of the entertainment industry.
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✰ Explosive-laden Calif. home to be destroyedNeighbors gasped when authorities showed them photos of the inside of the Southern California ranch-style home: Crates of grenades, mason jars of white, explosive powder and jugs of volatile chemicals that are normally the domain of suicide bombers. Prosecutors say Serbian-born George Jakubec quietly packed the home with the largest amount of homemade explosives ever found in one location in the U.S. and was running a virtual bomb-making factory in his suburban neighborhood. How the alleged bank robber obtained the chemicals and what he planned to do with them remain mysteries. Now authorities face the risky task of getting rid of the explosives. The property is so dangerous and volatile that that they have no choice but to burn the home to the ground this week in a highly controlled operation involving dozens of firefighters, scientists and hazardous material and pollution experts.
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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a public speech in January 2010 championing Internet freedom as a vital tool to open governments and promote transparency, while criticizing “dictatorships” who seek to target those who use technology to expose their transgressions.
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The “this” that I’m talking about in the title of today’s post is the way in which the fetuses pictured in this atlas of activity were made to be in motion: the fetuses experienced needle stimulations to theirl faces, and hands, and arms, and so on. Needles inserted, movie images made, experiments undertaken on the development of human fetal activity. 42 fetuses subjected to experimentation, physiological and morphological, poked with needles to determine how they would respond during the integral period of development of motility (from the 8th to 14th weeks, in regard to reflexes). The fetuses float in front of the camera unencumbered, and then the long and very pointed needle comes into view, finding its target, then a series of stills from the film made to show how the fetus moved in reaction to having been touched or abraised.
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A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.
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Just when I thought the banksters couldn’t possibly shock me anymore… they did. We were finally granted the honor and privilege of finding out the specifics, a limited one-time Federal Reserve view, of a secret taxpayer funded “backdoor bailout” by a small group of unelected bankers. This data release reveals “emergency lending programs” that doled out $12.3 TRILLION in taxpayer money – $3.3 trillion in liquidity, $9 trillion in “other financial arrangements.” Wait, what? Did you say $12.3 TRILLION tax dollars were thrown around in secrecy by unelected bankers… and Congress didn’t know any of the details?
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Google’s monopoly, algorithms, and privacy policies
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One of the women that is accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of sex crimes appears to have worked with a group that has connections to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). James D. Catlin, a lawyer who recently represented Assange, said the sex assault investigation into the WikiLeaks founder is based on claims he didn’t use condoms during sex with two Swedish women. Swedish prosecutors told AOL News last week that Assange was not wanted for rape as has been reported, but for something called “sex by surprise” or “unexpected sex.”
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What have we learned so far from the disclosure of more than 21,000 transactions?We have learned that the $700 billion Wall Street bailout signed into law by President George W. Bush turned out to be pocket change compared to the trillions and trillions of dollars in near-zero interest loans and other financial arrangements the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution in this country. Among those are Goldman Sachs, which received nearly $600 billion; Morgan Stanley, which received nearly $2 trillion; Citigroup, which received $1.8 trillion; Bear Stearns, which received nearly $1 trillion, and Merrill Lynch, which received some $1.5 trillion in short term loans from the Fed. We also learned that the Fed’s multi-trillion bailout was not limited to Wall Street and big banks, but that some of the largest corporations in this country also received a very substantial bailout. Among those are General Electric, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Harley Davidson, Toyota and Verizon.
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