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Jon Corzine will not face criminal charges over MF Global: report

Corzine
© MarketWatch
There will be no criminal charges for former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine over the use of customer funds leading up to collapse of MF Global.

The criminal probe into whether there was wrongdoing on the part of Corzine by the Department of Justice will now be dropped due to lack of evidence, said a report in The New York Post, citing a person with knowledge of the matter.

But the former CEO of Goldman Sachs is not out of the woods.

Corzine is facing civil charges by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission for illegally using customer funds in the last few days of MF Global to help keep the company afloat. The firm's former assistant treasurer Edith O'Brien is also caught up in the scandal and charged by the CFTC for making the transfers.

Ultimately Corzine was charged by the regulator for failure to segregate and misuse of customer funds and failure to supervise diligently. O'Brien was charged with one count failure to segregate and misuse of customer funds.

To support the allegations, the CFTC used a recorded telephone conversations to support their charges that Corzine was fully aware of the transfers.

Both Corzine and O'Brien have denied any wrongdoing.

Bullseye

Research shows that Monsanto's big claims for GMO food are probably wrong

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It's going to be a tough row to hoe, from here on out for Monsanto.

Oops. The World Food Prize committee's got a bit of egg on its face - genetically engineered egg. They just awarded the World Food Prize to three scientists, including one from Syngenta and one from Monsanto, who invented genetic engineering because, they say, the technology increases crop yields and decreases pesticide use. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Monsanto and Syngenta are major sponsors of the World Food Prize, along with a third biotech giant, Dupont Pioneer.)

Monsanto makes the same case on its website, saying, "Since the advent of biotechnology, there have been a number of claims from anti-biotechnology activists that genetically modified (GM) crops don't increase yields. Some have claimed that GM crops actually have lower yields than non-GM crops... GM crops generally have higher yields due to both breeding and biotechnology."

USA

Best of the Web: Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) force-fed under standard Guantánamo Bay procedure - video

As Ramadan begins, more than 100 hunger-strikers in Guantánamo Bay continue their protest. More than 40 of them are being force-fed. A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees. In this four-minute film made by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), experiences the procedure


Headphones

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Meteor fireballs, mass demonstrations, and the science of crowds

Sott Talk Radio logo
This week on SOTT Talk Radio we looked back through world events in the last few weeks. With the US celebrating 237 years of 'independence', what is the state of the nation? With meteor fireballs appearing at the mass demonstrations in Egypt and Brazil, we discussed the 'human-cosmic' relationship and the likely connection between global suffering and our increasingly strange climate. What global suffering? Well, if it isn't wars or economic austerity, it's cops out-of-control cops abusing - killing even - people.

Running Time: 02:13:00

Download: MP3


Bad Guys

Flashback Ex-official: CIA helped jail Mandela

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For nearly 28 years the U.S. government has harbored an increasingly embarrassing secret: A CIA tip to South African intelligence agents led to the arrest that put black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela in prison for most of his adult life.

But now, with Mandela en route to the U.S. to a hero's welcome, a former U.S. official has revealed that he has known of the CIA role since Mandela was seized by agents of the South African police special branch on Aug. 5, 1962.

The former official, now retired, said that within hours after Mandela's arrest Paul Eckel, then a senior CIA operative, walked into his office and said approximately these words: ''We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.''

With Mandela out of prison, the retired official decided there is no longer a valid reason for secrecy. He called the American role in the affair

Stormtrooper

These are supposedly the words that make the NSA think you're a terrorist

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This is an (admittedly huge) list of words that supposedly cause the NSA to flag you as a potential terrorist if you over-use them in an email.

We found this on Reddit, where James Bamford, a veteran reporter with 30 years experience covering the NSA, is answering questions from the community. He just wrote a big profile for Wired on NSA director Keith Alexander that's really good and well worth a read.

This list comes from Reddit user GloriousDawn, who found it on Attrition.org, a site that purports to follow the security industry, but the page was last updated in 1998. Take it with a grain of salt.

You may want to peruse this entire list yourself, but here are some of our favorites that stick out:
dictionary
sweeping
ionosphere
military intelligence
Steve Case
Scully

Eye 1

Ecuador embassy bug unlikely to be work of security services, say experts


Expert in covert techniques says off-the-shelf plug socket device is unlikely to have been planted by state agency

Surveillance experts have described the bugging device that Ecuador says was hidden behind a plug socket in its London embassy as rudimentary and unlikely to have been the work of the British police or security services.

Photographs of the device were revealed late on Wednesday in Quito by Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, who claimed it had been installed by a Worcester surveillance and security firm, The Surveillance Group Limited.

The firm's chief executive, Timothy Youngs, said on Thursday that the allegation was "completely untrue".

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lives and works in a different room in the embassy in Knightsbridge where he has been granted diplomatic asylum.

After analysing the images, one expert in covert techniques who has worked for UK law enforcement agencies told the Guardian: "We do not do plug sockets, that's old hat. It's the first place people look. The bug is one you can buy off the shelf. If we do something, most likely we would custom build it. My first thought [is] it would not be a state agency."

Comment: Another possibility is that, while the embassy bug could be considered rudimentary, certain intelligence services could have planted the bug there knowing it would be found in order to send a message to Ecuador that they are being watched. They also likely have far more advanced surveillance technology in use not only in the Ecuadorean embassy but for every other countries' embassies.


Pills

Flashback Biological warfare? Mystery disease linked to vanished Israeli scientist

The new Cryptococcus gatti fungus strain
© UnknownThe new Cryptococcus gatti fungus strain, magnified.
The recent outbreak of a life-threatening disease in the United States, caused by a new and exotic strain of a hyper-virulent fungus, is baffling the US media and the scientific community. Speculations point to climate change as a possible explanation. However, according to journalist Hank P. Albarelli Jr., famous for having uncovered the 1951 CIA experiments with LSD in Pont St. Esprit (France), the answer is more likely to be found inside the Fort Detrick biological warfare center and in Israeli laboratories. A key element of the enigma is apparently a dubious Israeli scientist allegedly connected to the Mossad.
Late last month, on April 24, media outlets across the Northwest United States began reporting that a strange, previously unknown strain of virulent airborne fungi that has already killed at least 6 people in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, is spreading throughout the region. The fungus, according to expert microbiologists, who have expressed alarm about the strain's emergence, is a new genotype of Cryptococcus gatti fungi or C gatti. Cryptococcus gatti is normally found in tropical and subtropical locations in India, South America, Africa, and Australia. Microbiologists in the United States maintain that the strain found here, for reasons not yet fully understood, is far deadlier than any found overseas.

Physicians in the Pacific Northwest are reporting that an undetermined number of people in the region are ill from the effects of the strange strain. Physicians also say that the virulent strain can infect domestic animals as well as humans, and symptoms do not appear until anywhere from two to four months after exposure. Symptoms in humans include a lingering cough, sharp chest pains, fever, night-sweats, weight-loss, headaches, and shortness of breath. The strain can be treated successfully, if detected early enough, with oral doses of antifungal medication, but it cannot be prevented, and there is no preventative vaccine. Undiagnosed, the fungus works its way into the spinal fluid and central nervous system and causes fatal meningitis.

Vader

Best of the Web: NSA/GCHQ - The New Praetorians and the New Cold War

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© After Banksy
In a democracy rule is by consent. In a dictatorship it is by control.

Which do we have in the West? It seems to me, it is no longer clear. We certainly still have the rituals of rule by consent. But behind the elected front men and women is a shadow state. It's people ritually swear allegiance to those we elect. They declare themselves there to serve and protect. But when it is us they spend their time spying on, whose interests are they protecting? Can you really serve those you do not trust?

In 2008 we discovered that behind the banking system we knew about, there was a vast shadow banking system whose size most of us never suspected. In 2013 we have glimpsed not only the scale of the shadow state but the degree to which it, like the shadow banking system, is out of control and not working for us at all.

Of course Mr Obama and the 'security chiefs', brought blinking into the unwelcome light, justify themselves by telling us that all those things they never saw fit to mention to us, or even to the people we spend so much time electing, have been saving us from un-named terrors. Are we to take such unverifiable assurances at face value from people who we know do not trust us and who make a profession of lying to us? I remember when Treasury Secretary Paulson told the US Congress that unless they stopped asking questions and simply handed him $600 billion to bail out the shadow banking system, there would be anarchy and tanks on the streets. Am I wrong to see a parallel?

Star of David

Earth's alpha predator: Zionist Mafia

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Actions trump lies. Evidence does not lie . . . so how has the American public been so brainwashed by lies, in light of so much evidence? Are Zionists that intelligent, or is the American public that unintelligent - and how did even that obvious question become a "third-rail issue"?

Totally uncool, our tradition of being outsmarted by Zionists even to the point of "Rothschilding" our descendants' future.

Is it possible for the American public to think their way out of Zionist enslavement . . . or is Gaza a preview of our future?

There certainly is genius behind creation of the terms, "conspiracy theory," and, "anti-Semitism." Mere concepts, these two seem among the highest human inventions in terms of neutralizing independent thought. Both terms are amazingly popular and effective; a function, perhaps, of both being technically meaningless - a reliable Zionist mind-control touch, confusion.
  • "conspiracy theory" was born to describe anything that questions official, establishment positions. Problem is, in the realm of establishment positioning, by definition, everything is conspiracy, putting the term conspiracy theory in the same league as "wet water"
  • "anti-Semitism" refers to Semites, "A member of any of a number of peoples including Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs" (Merriam-Webster). "Anti-Zionist" is a meaningful substitute for anti-Semitic - but watch that "third rail".