Google has said that their investment in AOL has eroded by an amount that “may be material”. They paid $1bn for a 5% stake in the company, due in large part to the bidding war between Google and Microsoft when a stake in AOL was up for grabs. This investment is worth less than 50% now.
To be fair, Google must have made a lot of money serving ads on AOL properties. But $500 million worth?
The IHT has this fascinating article about Swiss double agents – Friedrich Tinner and his sons, Urs and Marco, who were part of A Q Khan’s nuclear proliferation network. The article suggests that the US government recruited them as double agents and – get this -used them
in a clandestine U.S. operation to funnel sabotaged nuclear equipment to Libya and Iran, a major but little-known element of the efforts to slow their nuclear progress.
When the Swiss authorities tried to prosecute the Tinners, the US government got them to destroy all the evidence against them. Another way to look at it is that the Swiss got so scared of having to safeguard all the nuclear designs from falling into the wrong hands that they destroyed the files:
Couchepin [the Swiss president] said keeping the documents “was incompatible with Switzerland’s obligations” under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and “posed a formidable security risk to Switzerland and the community of states.”
Perhaps Couchepin is right. Perhaps it is too dangerous. But it’s funny how they realized the “formidable security risk” immediately after the Swiss Justice minister met with the US state department, FBI and CIA. It is also possible that someone somewhere in Switzerland made copies before destroying all the files.
Police recovered almost 3,000 stolen bicycles from Igor Kenk, an ex-K.G.B agent in Toronto. From the article:
Mr. Kenk was something of an informal social worker, Mr. Jansen explained, giving work to street people and outpatients from a nearby mental health institution. Of course, the police say some of that work involved stealing bicycles.
When the police subsequently raided the Bicycle Clinic, the Fire Department at first blocked them from entering for safety reasons. The building was so crammed with bicycles and bike parts that a Fire Department rescue squad had to remove the upper-floor windows and lower the bicycles by rope.
That was just the beginning. An additional 200 bikes were seized in Mr. Kenk’s home. Ten landlords around the city reported that their garages had been rented by Mr. Kenk and were bulging with bicycles. As the police gathered the mounds of bikes, they also found cocaine, crack cocaine, about 15 pounds of marijuana and a stolen bronze sculpture of a centaur and a snake in battle.
Mr. Kenk shared a rented house in Yorkville, a fashionable and expensive neighborhood, with his partner, Jeanie Chung. An accomplished pianist, Ms. Chung, who also faces charges for drugs and possession of stolen goods.
theories about his hoarding have proliferated. Because Mr. Kenk held a scrap metal dealer’s license, Inspector Evans speculates that he was playing the commodities markets, waiting for another spike in metals prices before melting down the bicycles.
In the past, Mr. Kenk has said that he was accumulating bicycles in preparation for a severe oil shortage. But in a somewhat disjointed interview in July for a radio documentary, portions of which were published by The Globe and Mail, a Toronto daily newspaper, Mr. Kenk portrayed himself as a crusader against theft and a protector of cast-off bicycles.
Mr. Kenk holds a passport from Slovenia and has claimed he was a police officer and a former K.G.B. agent. After one court session, he told reporters, “I’m a dead man.”
Yahoo is carrying this Reuters story about a hedge fund manager who misled his customers via fake account statements.
Paul Eustace, the founder of Philadelphia Alternative Asset Management Company, must return more than $279 million to clients and pay about $12 million in civil penalties.
Prosecutors accused Eustace, who lives in Canada, of having fabricated false trading account statements that hid mounting losses between October 2002 and May 2005. While he told clients that he would trade commodity futures or options and said the portfolios were valued at over $230 million in May 2005, prosecutors alleged that he fraudulently operated the funds and lost millions of dollars.
So John McCain is not sure how many houses he and Cindy own. And guys get a hard time if they forget an anniversary.
I wonder if it was extraordinary wealth or plain old old age that got him to forget.
Another update from the 2008 Beijing Olympics in China. Apparently the real singer girl, Yang Peiyi, has crooked teeth so they got a stand-in, Lin Miaoke, to lip synch. The girls are nine years old.
China’s Organization Committee for the 2008 Beijing Olympics says their censorship of the Internet is for the good of China’s youth.
…Wang Wei, the vice-president of organising committee BOCOG, said: “We (BOCOG) promised free access except for a few websites that jeopardise our security and the healthy growth of our youth. That’s an assessment made by the authorities of which sites are good and which are not good for our youth. It’s like what any other country does.”
So what about the country’s adults?
Quick poll – What do you think is worse: Guantanamo Bay, rendition or China’s censorship of the Internet?
84 year old Nigerian Mohammed Bello Abubakar has advised other men not to follow his example and marry 86 women. Who needs a wise old man to advise him to not marry 86 women? Who couldn’t figure that one out on his own?
One of his wives rationalized her decision like so
When you marry a man with 86 wives you know he knows how to look after them
I have never seen a more striking example of social proof.
Godmen have always fascinated me. Mr. Abubakar claims that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) speaks to him personally. The problem that Ustaz Abubakar Siddique, an imam at one of the region’s mosques, has with this whole thing is – guess what – that it’s heresy.
According to this story in The Register,
The Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France.
I wonder if Algeria can sue France, India can sue Britain, Peru can sue Spain, Congo can sue Belgium and so on. How would you go about calculating how much money these ex-colonial powers owe in restitution to their erstwhile colonies?
India has known this for 2 decades. Pakistan’s intelligence agency – ISI – is not only “involved” in terrorist attacks on Indian soil, they actively plan and carry them out. For years I have read newspaper reports in the Indian media talk about the Indian government providing proof of ISI’s “involvement” to the Americans.
How many deaths will it take till he knows…? Finally, the New York Times reports that the CIA has directly obtained proof that ISI was “involved” in the attacks on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008.
“It confirmed some suspicions that I think were widely held,” one State Department official with knowledge of Afghanistan issues said of the intercepted communications. “It was sort of this ‘aha’ moment. There was a sense that there was finally direct proof.”
The nation of Pakistan is, as the Brits might say, rummy. They have had serious political stability issues. Coups – bloodless or otherwise – have been commonplace. The liberals (or moderates, or sane people, or whatever you want to call them) in Pakistan are struggling with growing religious fanaticism that was, in its infancy, nurtured for targeting India. While they have certainly exported terrorism to India (in addition to exporting nuclear weapons technology to god knows who) over the years, the U.S. is now starting to get concerned because the terrorist network is interconnected globally. And Pakistan is a pretty big hub in that network.
Pakistan’s new civilian government is wrestling with these very issues, and there is concern in Washington that the civilian leaders will be unable to end a longstanding relationship between members of the ISI and militants associated with Al Qaeda.
One can only hope that the Pakistani government, military and ISI can rein in the fanatics, bring more peace and stability internally to Pakistan first and insha-Allah prosperity to that part of the world. But one’s optimism would be misplaced if one did.
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