A very good interview, informative.
Friday, April 5, 2013
BP to Ask Judge Today to Halt Spill Settlement Payments
BP Plc (BP/) is seeking to block the administrator handling its $8.5 billion settlement over the 2010 oil spill from paying certain claims, contending his decisions may cost the company billions more than expected.
The company is scheduled to ask U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans for an injunction halting certain payments at a hearing today. Settlement administrator Patrick Juneau’s decisions have already exposed BP “to hundreds of millions of dollars in fictitious ‘losses’ that were never contemplated by the agreement,” the London-based oil company said in court papers last month.
“Although the ultimate exposure is at this time inestimable, it grows daily and could cost BP billions,” BP said in the filing.
The blowout of BP’s deep-water Macondo well off the coast of Louisiana sent more than 4 million barrels of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and killed 11 people. The accident sparked hundreds of lawsuits against London-based BP, Transocean (RIG) Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and Halliburton Co. (HAL), which provided cement services.
BP reached a settlement last year resolving most economic and medical-injury claims by private parties. The company estimated at the time that the settlement would cost $7.8 billion. BP raised the estimate to $8.5 billion in February, citing the dispute with Juneau.
Similar Request
Today’s hearing comes exactly one month after Barbier rejected a similar request from BP to halt payments by the administrator. The judge ruled March 5 that the settlement agreement required the interpretation of claims that Juneau has been using.
“BP’s interpretation injects a subjective notion of alternative causation and a degree of complexity that are contrary to the settlement’s terms,” Barbier said in his ruling last month.
BP was aware that the terms of the settlement agreement could produce “false positives,” Barbier said, citing a letter from a company executive to Juneau in September.
Such results are an “inevitable concomitant of an objective, quantitative, data-based test,” BP lawyer Mark Holstein said in the letter, according to Barbier.
BP has appealed that decision and filed a separate lawsuit against Juneau and the Deepwater Horizon Court Supervised Settlement Program over payments. Today’s hearing considers both the injunction request and the new lawsuit.
BP last night asked Barbier to put a hold on payments until its appeal of his order is heard.
‘Not Harmed’
“Granting a stay pending appeal will inflict little or no harm on claimants as they are not harmed by forgoing undeserved payments,” company lawyers said in a filing.
A nonjury trial over liability for the spill and explosion began before Barbier Feb. 25 in federal court in New Orleans. Barbier will determine responsibility for the disaster and whether any of the companies acted with willful or wanton misconduct or reckless indifference -- the legal requirement for establishing gross negligence.
Last year’s settlement didn’t include damage claims by financial institutions, casinos and companies claiming harm from the Obama administration’s deep-water drilling moratorium, which was imposed after the spill. It also didn’t include claims by the U.S. government and the states of Louisiana and Alabama.
Lawyers suing the company claim BP underestimated the cost of the settlement.
‘Uncapped Nature’
“The uncapped nature of the potential payments was a seminal feature of the settlement agreement,” victims’ lawyers said in an April 1 filing. “Simply because the value of the overall payments in certain industries exceeds what BP estimated does not make the individual claims ‘fictitious,’” they said.
Juneau ruled that he would measure revenue when it was received rather than when it was earned, BP complained last month. This meant that a contractor filing a claim could show a “fictitious” decline in revenue, “even though it earned the same amount for the same job performed one year earlier,” the company said.
BP said Juneau’s “rewriting” stretched the settlement accord to include claims the oil company never contemplated paying. The company said the “non-existent losses are most prevalent” in the agriculture, construction, professional services, real estate, manufacturing, wholesale trade and retail industries.
BP said two-thirds of all business economic-loss payments larger than $75,000 have been based on “flawed data.” The company also contends that more than 1,200 payments have been made to claimants in the agriculture, construction and professional services industries that are too remote from the area impacted by the spill to qualify for compensation.
Economic Loss
BP is protesting a structure for payments of economic loss that it knew about and accepted, victims’ lawyers said in court papers. Claimants are using comparable months to determine losses, as per the settlement, and counting revenue when they receive it, the lawyers contend.
“The injunction BP seeks would itself violate the express terms of the settlement and trust agreements that BP negotiated, agreed to, and supported,” the victims’ lawyers said in the April 1 filing. “BP is effectively asking the court to enjoin itself.”
The case is In re Oil Spill by the Oil Rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, 10-md-02179, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans).
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Scientists find treatment to kill every kind of cancer tumor
Researchers might have found the Holy Grail in the war against cancer, a miracle drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with, the New York Post reported.
The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a "do not eat" signal to the body's immune system, according to Science Magazine.
This protein is produced in healthy blood cells, but researchers at Stanford University found that cancer cells produced an inordinate amount of the protein thus tricking the immune system into not destroying the harmful cells.
With this observation in mind, the researchers built an antibody that blocked cancer's CD47 so that the body's immune system attacked the dangerous cells.
So far, researchers have used the antibody in mice with human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver and prostate tumors transplanted into them. In each of the cases the antibody forced the mice's immune system to kill the cancer cells.
Geoengineering, Runaway Climate Change, And The Poisoning Of Life On Earth
More major publications are trying to “condition” the population to the idea of “geoengineering” as a cure for the increasingly extreme climate. It is ever more shocking that publications like Foreign Affairs can still pretend they don’t know SRM (stratospheric aerosol geoengineering) has been a lethal reality for decades. They say “SRM could cool the planet in a few months”, really? A mountain of data to date says otherwise.
The ongoing atmospheric spraying (and jet stream manipulation with HAARP facilities ) can and does cool large regions of the planet for limited periods, but at what cost? The ongoing global geoengineering programs are making climate change far worse and quite literally are tearing the planet's life support systems apart.
As Go The Bees, So Goes Man
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “if the bees disappear from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live…no bees..no pollination…no man”.
Bee populations are collapsing everywhere at an extremely alarming rate (as are countless species). Nearly all media and science sources are trying to blame the very rapid die-off on farm/crop chemicals, but how does one then explain the fact that the die-off is also occurring in extremely remote regions hundreds of miles from any farms?
There is only one spray program that encompasses the entire planet, aerosol geoengineering. The highly toxic bio-available heavy metal nano particles used in the ongoing geoengineering programs are being inhaled and absorbed by all life on our planet. Now add the constant bombardment of HAARP radio frequency signals and the bees have little chance. How long will the rest of us last when the bees are gone? Will not all of us eventually succumb to the geoengineering assault if it continues, just like the bees?
Runaway Climate Change is Now
Still don’t believe it?
Many still refuse to accept that our climate has been completely decimated. True, Al Gore is a hypocrite and disaster capitalist, but that fact does not change the reality unfolding around us all. Even mainstream media is no longer able to ignore the imploding climate which is now in a runaway state thanks to “feedback loops” like mass methane release.
Human activity has done great damage to the planet, but there is one factor that stands out far above all others as the single greatest causal factor for extreme climate disruption and the die-off of global species now occurring at mass extinction rates: geoengineering.
The planet we all have known is changing by the day and will soon be very different from the one we have known; this is now inevitable. If geoengineering is not stopped, our biosphere may eventually not support life at all.
Help Us Bring Geoengineering To Light While It Still Matters
It's up to all of us to get up off our backsides, get into the trenches, and start helping. We don’t have tomorrow. Get educated on the dire issue of geoengineering, put together credible data to share with others in the form of flyers and DVDs like Why In The World Are They Spraying, make copies, and pass it out. Use the Internet to locate contacts for groups, organizations, journalists, and individuals that would care if they knew and send them links to articles. In this way countless “spot fires” of awareness can be created which will soon enough merge into a giant blaze of consciousness that cannot be extinguished. Once enough of those carrying out these programs realize they are killing themselves along with the rest of us, the spraying can realistically be stopped.
Source: Activist Post
Scientists find antibody ‘roadmap’ to AIDS vaccine in African patient
Scientists on a quest for an antibody-based AIDS vaccine said Wednesday they found promising clues in the uncommonly “robust” natural immune response of a patient in Africa.
Studying blood samples over a three-year period after the person was infected, researchers were witness to a microscopic battle between the virus and antibodies — both evolving as they sought to gain the upper hand.
For the first time, scientists were able to follow the full chain of events leading to the patient naturally producing broadly neutralising antibodies (BnAbs)– so called because they attack different strains of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
“The current research… fills gaps in knowledge that have impeded development of an effective vaccine for a virus that has killed more than 30 million people worldwide,” said a statement from Duke Medicine, which participated in the study by a team of researchers in the United States and Malawi.
“We learned from this individual how the antibodies get induced with the hope that this information can be a map for how to induce these antibodies as a preventive vaccine,” added team leader Barton Haynes, director of Duke University’s Human Vaccine Institute.
Antibodies are the foot soldiers of the immune system, latching onto viruses or microbial intruders and tagging them for destruction by specialised “killer” cells.
Most antiviral vaccines are made by priming antibodies to recognise germs, but the method has not yet been successful in AIDS control.
One of vaccine developers’ fiercest foes, the HIV virus typically evolves too fast to ever be left open to antibody attack.
The individual in the study, from an African country that is not specified, is one of about 20 percent of HIV-infected people whose immune systems naturally produce BnAbs.
Unfortunately, this generally only happens two to four years after infection and is of no help to the host who will still develop AIDS if not treated with anti-retroviral drugs.
“When broad neutralising antibodies are made they are no help to the person already infected. The notion is however; if they are present before infection, then they can prevent infection and prevent insertion of the virus genetic material into the host genetic material,” Haynes told AFP of the research published in the journal Nature.
In monkeys, BnAbs have shown to prevent infection.
A BnAbs-based vaccine is being keenly pursued in the battle against AIDS, an immune system-wrecking disease first recognised in 1981.
Almost one percent of the world’s population today is infected with HIV, according to the United Nations.
In this study, researchers isolated an antibody named CH103, and found that it was triggered by a specific protein envelope found on an early, little-mutated form of the HIV virus.
This meant the antibodies may only be stimulated to respond in the presence of this protein or other similar ones on the virus.
While most antibodies require about 10 to 15 mutations to be able to attack their target, potent BnAbs show 40 to 100, said a comment on the study also published by Nature, which described the findings as a possible “roadmap” to an HIV vaccine.
The CH103 antibody had a much lower number of mutations, which may explain how it developed so quickly in this patient.
The scientists said they had gained a “critical insight” for developing a potential vaccine.
“We are now making recombinant forms of the (protein) envelopes from this patient as a vaccine to immunise animals to recreate the induction of a similar type of antibody,” said Haynes.
A Nature statement said it remained to be seen whether or not the finding could be used to develop an effective vaccine.
“But it presents a strong and testable rationale that can be used to address the major challenges of creating an antibody-based HIV-1 vaccine,” it said.
Google faces EU state fines over privacy policy merger
Summary: Google faces a string of fines in EU member states after the U.K., France, Italy and Germany prepare to launch investigations into the search giant's privacy policy.
Google's 'new' privacy policy, launched a little over a year ago, is still causing headaches in Europe. But a new pan-European investigation into the policy may cause greater troubles for the search giant.
The French data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), said today that the search giant has failed to respond to its requests to make changes to its controversial privacy policy and has handed the case to European member states to deal with the matter locally.
The U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands were first involved in the examination of the new privacy policy — which merged around 60 different policies for Google's various products and services into one single policy.
In doing so, it could open Google to multiple fines at a local level in the coming months and quarters, once each authority has concluded its own investigation into its privacy practices.
Speaking to ZDNet, the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office said that an investigation had been launched and was in its early days. An ICO spokesperson said the organization would determine whether or not Google's year-old policy breaches the U.K. Data Protection Act.
Due to the ongoing investigation, the ICO declined to comment further.
The ICO can serve a maximum £500,000 ($758,000) fine against a company that breaches U.K. data and privacy laws. Each data protection authority would have to enact their own fines separately and maximum fines vary by region.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
ALERT: All Of The Money In Your Bank Account Could Disappear In A Single Moment
What would you do if you logged in to your bank account someday and it showed that you had a zero balance and your bank had no record that you ever had any money in your account? What would you do if all of the money in your bank account suddenly disappeared in a single moment? If you had not kept any paper records, which most Americans do not, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove to the bank that you actually had any money in the bank. If you don’t think that something like this could ever happen in the United States, you might want to think again. Cyber attacks against major banks in the United States are becoming more powerful and more sophisticated with each passing month. In fact, major U.S. bank websites have been offline for a total of 249 hours over the past six weeks. And just last month, thousands upon thousands of Chase customers logged into their bank accounts only to discover that their balances had all been reset to zero. Anyone that would want to cause complete and total economic chaos in the United States could accomplish it very easily by wiping out all of our bank account records. So please do not keep all of your money in a single bank, and from now on please keep a paper copy of all of your bank account statements. At some point it is likely that one of these cyber attacks will cause permanent damage to our banking system, and you want to be protected.
The mainstream media has generally been very quiet about the massive cyber attacks against our major banks, but behind the scenes authorities are truly alarmed. They don’t know how to stop these attacks, and they just keep getting more intense and more sophisticated.
Could you imagine how you would feel if you logged in to your bank account and all of your money was gone? That is exactly what happened to some Chase customers last month. The following is from a recent CNET article…
JP Morgan Chase denied this evening that it had suffered a hack that many customers claimed had suddenly reduced their checking account balances to zero.
After discovering the apparently empty accounts via the Internet or mobile devices, many Chase banking customers turned to Twitter to express their frustration and show screen shots of zero balances. Other users were greeted with messages that their bank account balances were unavailable.
But this was most definitely not an isolated incident. That same article noted that Chase and many of our other large banks have had their websites taken down for extended periods of time lately…
Customers’ suspicions about a possible security breach are natural, with the zero balances appearing less than a week after a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack rendered Chase’s Web sites useless for many hours. Customers trying to use the site’s tools were instead greeted with a note that the site was “temporarily down.”
Hackers have ratcheted up their assaults on financial institutions in recent months, using DDoS attacks to take down Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup, HSBC, and others.
In fact, as I mentioned above, major U.S. bank websites have been offline for an astounding 249 hours over the last six weeks alone. The attacks just keep getting larger and bank officials are becoming very alarmed about the power of these cyber attacks. The following is from an article that was posted on CNBC this week…
Major U.S. bank websites have been offline a total of 249 hours in the past six weeks, perhaps the clearest indication yet that American companies are prime targets in an unrelenting, global cyber conflict.
The heavier-than-usual outages are the result of a remarkable, sustained attack that began seven months ago and repeatedly knocks banks offline for hours at a time, frustrating consumers and bank security professionals alike.
“Literally, these banks are just in war rooms, sitting at controls trying to stop (the attacks),” said Avivah Litan, a bank security analyst with Gartner Group, a consulting firm. “The frightening thing is (the attackers) are not using as much resources as they have on call. The attacks could be bigger.”
So who is behind these attacks?
Some are blaming Chinese hackers, others believe that Iran is behind the attacks, and yet others are convinced that it is the work of Islamic terrorists.
It is kind of frightening that they cannot positively identify who is behind these attacks. Whoever it is, they sure do seem to have a tremendous amount of resources and they are very sophisticated.
And in the future, it may not be hackers on the other side of the globe that are attacking our banks. In fact, if someone wanted to “recapitalize the banks”, all they would have to do is wipe out all of our bank account records (including all backup records). Suddenly trillions of dollars of “unsecured liabilities” (that is what our bank accounts are) would be wiped out and the banks would suddenly be solvent again. Anyone that could not produce evidence that they actually had money in the banks would be in a lot of trouble. It would be the largest single wealth transfer in the history of the world, and it would throw the U.S. economy into utter chaos. This is a scenario that I am exploring in my new novel which will be coming out later this month.
And of course another way that your bank account could be wiped out in a single moment is if the government decides to “legally” steal it. We just witnessed this happen in Cyprus. In February, the Central Bank of Cyprus swore that such a thing could never possibly happen, but then one month later it did happen. The politicians will lie to your face until the very day comes when they steal your money.
Sadly, a very similar thing could easily happen in the United States someday. As I wrote about yesterday, the big banks are making incredibly reckless bets with our money. When those bets go bad, our money could very well be used to cover those bets.
One way this could be accomplished is by using a practice known as “rehypothecation”. It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. Basically, the banks use money that clients have entrusted to them to cover their own gambling debts. This is how rehypothecaton is defined by Investopedia…
“The practice by banks and brokers of using, for their own purposes, assets that have been posted as collateral by their clients.”
An excellent article by Jeff Nielson detailed how this could result in the big banks grabbing our money when their trillions of dollars of reckless bets go bad…
1) Our banking regulators knowingly allow financial institutions to engage in recklessly misleading (if not outright fraudulent) contracts with their clients, through the use of complex “small print” in their account contracts with clients.
2) The three largest U.S. “banks” by deposit (JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup) have made bets in their own rigged casino, which total well in excess of $100 trillion, an amount which completely dwarfs their total, combined deposits (and assets).
3) A large portion of those bets occur in the $60+ trillion credit default swap market. Pay-outs in these markets can (and do) exceed 300 times the amount of the original bet. It is bets in this market which “blew up” AIG, requiring more than $150 billion in immediate government aid.
4) Following the Crash of ’08; these same banks mooched a package of hand-outs, tax-breaks and “guarantees” (i.e. future hand-outs) from the Bush regime in excess of $15 trillion, the last time their gambling debts went bad on them – and all of these banks have been allowed to dramatically increase the total amount of their gambling since then.
5) It would take only a minor change in the gambling contracts in which these bankers engage to allow their creditors to seize funds out of ordinary bank accounts.
6) The existing language for the bank accounts of these U.S. banks is possibly already so vague (and prejudicial to clients) that it would allow these banks to reinterpret the terms of these bank accounts – and allow rehypothecation to be used to rob the holders of ordinary bank accounts, people who themselves make no “bets” in markets whatsoever. Alternately, customers could be blitzed with an offer for “new and improved” bank accounts, where terms allowing rehypothecation are slipped into the contract, with the banks knowing that the “regulators” will do nothing to warn account-holders of the gigantic risk they are taking.
But we are all covered by deposit insurance, right?
That is what the people of Cyprus thought too.
As we just saw in Cyprus, when there is a “banking crisis” sometimes government steps in and suddenly changes all of the rules overnight even though the vast majority of the population is against it.
Hopefully you can see that no bank account will ever truly be “safe” ever again.
Your money may be safe today, and your money may be there next week, but someday it could disappear in a single moment.
And the general public is definitely starting to lose faith in the banking system. Google searches for the term “bank run” have been absolutely spiking recently. Just check out this chart which shows that searches for “bank run” are now the highest that they have ever been.
So what should we all do to protect ourselves?
As I mentioned earlier, it is important to not have all of your money in one bank, and from now on you will want to permanently keep paper copies of all of your bank account statements.
Someday you may need those statements in order to prove that you actually had money in the bank.
Our world is becoming increasingly unstable, and at some point financial disaster is going to strike.
By taking prudent precautions now, hopefully you will be able to minimize the damage to your family.
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