Rich states told to stop poaching doctors

The recruitment of doctors from poor countries by the developed world is like rape, says BMA chief. "The leader of Britain's 120,000 doctors called on Tony Blair and George Bush yesterday to end their countries' "obscene exploitation" of the developing world through the poaching of scarce medical staff."

Man, I am glad to see this story. I had a similar conversation with a senior colleague a few years ago, and of course he blew me off. I thouhgt I was the only person getting worked up yet again over nothing. There is absolutely nothing more offensive. South Africa, Ghana and a number of "developing" produce some fine doctors and nurses who are poached to serve in developing countries. They are traded like commodities.

What irritates me even more is that the discussion on aid conveniently ignores the pillaging of precious resources by developed countries. The hypocrisy is astounding.

"It is completely pointless for the UK to give $300m in aid to Africa if we then systematically rob them of their most precious resource: the skilled people who have the practical ability to prevent and treat disease," said Mr Johnson. I work with neurosurgeons trained everywhere but the US.

And don't fucking tell me these developing countries must pay these people enough or create conditions to lure to keep them. these countries spend scarce money and resources educating these people. The developing world must train enough of its own bloody people. It's fucking immoral.

Supreme Court Expands Government's Right to Seize Homes

Amen.

This story should make ordinary people, rise up and throw stones at somebody.

This is the end of private property ownership as we have known it; happening anywhere else in the world, the american would scream socialist/ communist. But not here. courtesy of WaPo.
More interesting of course is that Day O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Clarence Thomas were the minority votes: Rehnquist we can rely on, Day O' Connor not so much; Scalia and Thomas? WTF happened?
==============================================
Supreme Court Expands Government's Right to Seize Homes

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005; 3:02 PM

The Supreme Court today effectively expanded the right of local governments to seize private property under eminent domain, ruling that people's homes and businesses -- even those not considered blighted -- can be taken against their will for private development if the seizure serves a broadly defined "public use."

In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld the ability of New London, Conn., to seize people's homes to make way for an office, residential and retail complex supporting a new $300 million research facility of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The city had argued that the project served a public use within the meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution because it would increase tax revenues, create jobs and improve the local economy.

A group of homeowners in New London's Fort Trumbull area had fought the city's attempt to impose eminent domain, arguing that their property could be seized only to serve a clear public use such as building roads or schools or to eliminate blight. The homeowners, some of whom had lived in their house for decades, also argued that the public would benefit from the proposed project only if it turned out to be successful, making the "public use" requirement subject to the eventual performance of the private business venture.

The Fifth Amendment also requires "just compensation" for the owners, but that was not an issue in the case decided today because the homeowners did not want to give up their property at any price.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said the case turned on the question of whether New London's development plan served a "public purpose." He added, "Without exception, our cases have defined that concept broadly, reflecting our longstanding policy of deference to legislative judgments in this field."

The majority endorsed the view that local governments are better placed than federal courts to decide whether development projects serve a public purpose and will benefit the community, justifying the acquisition of land through eminent domain. In his opinion, Stevens wrote that "for more than a century," the high court has favored "affording legislatures broad latitude in determining what public needs justify the use of the takings power."

New London officials "were not confronted with the need to remove blight in the Fort Trumbull area, but their determination that the area was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to our deference," Stevens wrote. "The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including--but by no means limited to--new jobs and increased tax revenue."

Stevens added that "because that plan unquestionably serves a public purpose, the takings challenged here satisfy the public use requirement of the Fifth Amendment."

He was joined in that view by justices Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Dissenting were justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as well as Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

In a strongly worded dissenting opinion, O'Connor wrote that the majority's decision overturns a long-held principle that eminent domain cannot be used simply to transfer property from one private owner to another.

"Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power," she wrote. "Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded -- i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public -- in the process."

The effect of the decision, O'Connor said, "is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property -- and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."

The ruling has broad potential implications nationwide, giving cities wider authority to condemn homes and businesses to make way for more lucrative developments.

According to the Institute for Justice, a Washington-based property rights group that represented the Fort Trumbull homeowners, local governments have used or threatened to use eminent domain to transfer property to private parties in more than 10,000 instances between 1998 and 2002.

Over the years, the power of local governments to take private property through eminent domain has gradually grown. Although that authority historically had been used to acquire land needed for roads, bridges or other infrastructure fitting the "public use" requirement, the Supreme Court in 1954 broadened the definition of the term to allow local governments to condemn slums or other blighted areas for the purpose of redevelopment.

The court's ruling today upheld the Connecticut Supreme Court, which had ruled 4-3 that New London's property condemnations were constitutional.

The case had been brought by nine holdout owners of 15 homes in the Fort Trumbull area, which sits on a peninsula jutting into the Thames River and includes a total of about 115 privately owned properties.

Among the holdouts was Susette Kelo, who moved into Fort Trumbull in 1997 and made major improvements to her house, which she prized for its water view. Another petitioner was Wilhelmina Dery, who was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived in it with her husband for the past 60 years. In fact, the home, originally purchased by her grandmother, has been in her family for more than a century.

Although the area is described as a working-class neighborhood, the majority opinion written by Stevens noted that "there is no allegation that any of these properties is blighted or otherwise in poor condition; rather, they were condemned only because they happen to be located in the development area."

New London adopted its redevelopment plan in January 2000, two years after Pfizer announced plans to build a new research facility nearby. The plan called for a waterfront hotel and conference center surrounded by restaurants and stores, marinas for recreational and commercial use, 80 new residences in an urban neighborhood, office space for research and development, parking lots and other retail services. The site also includes an existing state park and space reserved for a new U.S. Coast Guard Museum.

During oral arguments before the court, it emerged that the land parcels at issue were earmarked for office space and "support" for the park or marina, possibly meaning a parking lot.

In a separate decision, the Supreme Court today rejected a bid by Exxon Mobil Corp. for a new trial in a class-action lawsuit filed by gas station owners. The 5-4 ruling means the world's largest publicly traded oil company will have to pay the station owners up to $1.3 billion in damages for failing to make good on discounts it promised them on fuel purchases over several years.

Exxon, based in Irving, Tex., had sought a new trial and asked the court to overturn a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on grounds that some of the station owners were improperly included in the class-action suit. The suit was originally filed in 1991 on behalf of more than 10,000 station owners in 34 states and Washington, D.C.

Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the court's majority, which also included Rehnquist, Scalia, Souter and Thomas. Dissenting were Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg and O'Connor.

GRAFTOCRACY

The Huffington Post | Latest News: "The 'lobbying' of elected officials and other public servants is called bribery & corruption in developing countries.

I don't care who is doing it, left or right:

The bribery of the representatives by the bribe-pimps for the bribery-meisters is a GRAFTOCRACY."

bubba's barber

Where are all the Black Men?

For those you who like to pretend the issue of race is dead and buried.....

This chronicles a dire reality in American social/racial landscape. Black American men are missing, either dead, locked up or in the military. Nationwide, black women outnumber black men by 2 million with another million in prison.

This growing gender gap has enormously negative implications for the future of black America. And there are nuances in the statistics that make the prognosis even bleaker. For example, among well-educated, professional black women -- a group that is growing rapidly -- the gap is a chasm. Surely, that progress for black women is good news that shouldn't be overlooked. However, as black women advance, black men are falling even further behind.

In fact, the more successful a black woman becomes, the more likely she will end up alone, Walter Farrell, a University of North Carolina professor, said in a March 2002 Washington Monthly article. As a result, professional black women are having fewer children, meaning that a growing percentage of black children are being born into less educated, less affluent families.

Unless we make some dramatic changes in the way our society tracks black men, all of these conditions will worsen, with increasingly nightmarish consequences. The primary culprit is the tracking of black men into a criminal justice system that a growing number of critics have dubbed the "prison-industrial complex." Many are there because of the so-called war on drugs and its accompanying mandatory minimum sentences.

The tracking process begins in elementary school, where African-American males routinely are assumed to be academically deficient and then demonized for their angry reactions to those biased assumptions. Resentful of a system that blithely dismisses their potential, many black boys eventually become alienated from scholastic activity. A recent study found that only 38 percent of Chicago's black males have graduated from high school since 1995.

These uneducated youth are the raw material of the prison-industrial complex. Lacking marketable skills, they flock to the ruthless underground economy of drug commerce where they are easily siphoned into the "injustice" system--victims of the drug war.

It's ironic that black political leadership is probably the weakest it has ever been in the united States. Actually, may be it is not that ironic. Where are the black young lions taking on the establishment on issues that important to the survival of the race? What the fuck does Jesse Jackson do these days, fucking run around pontificating about some white woman who through bulimia rendered herself a seemingly debatable vegetable. That the debate is a personal and private matter is not the point, Jackson saw it as an opportunity to score political kudos at a National level.

The Black Congressional Caucas, what the fuck do those people do? Why aren't fucking doing things that matter to black people. I bet you they are all in the pockets of some bribe-meisters (aka lobbyists to you).

Who the fuck is Ed Klein?

I ain't no Hillary fan, but god has forsaken us now, surely.
Why this guy has not been struck by lightning out of the wild blue yonder, I will never fucking know.

Basically,
(1)I am sick of men (and women) pretending/wishing that women who seek to excel in their professions must be dykes.
(2) I am sick of people making a big deal about Bill Clinton's overcharged sex drive. We fucking get it, he's a horny motherfucker. He gets laid more than you in your wildest wet dreams . Now get over it, and write about something useful:

• lies, damned lies and the Iraq war (see post below).
• damned fucking environment.
  

Cartoonist flames own WaPo...

You gotta love cartoonists:

Black Market in Stolen Credit Card Data

Story from the NYT.

I am not sure what to make of this community of buyers and sellers of credit card or personal data; clearly it's a problem for the "establishment" i.e. banks, people with credit cards, et al. But there is a certain guerrilla-dom to this which I won't go into, but is interesting nevertheless. It's the more than just the data/information/privacy chickens-coming-home-to-roost.

What surprises me is nobody, absolutely nobody is asking the right question(s) about this problem. Every solution that is being looked at is ridiculously reactive, and technology centered. But I won't go into what I mean just yet, because clearly I am alone here.

The NYT requires a log on - I am just going C&P the entire article:
Here's the full link
================================================
June 21, 2005
Black Market in Stolen Credit Card Data Thrives on Internet
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

"Want drive fast cars?" asks an advertisement, in broken English, atop the Web site iaaca.com. "Want live in premium hotels? Want own beautiful girls? It's possible with dumps from Zo0mer." A "dump," in the blunt vernacular of a relentlessly flourishing online black market, is a credit card number. And what Zo0mer is peddling is stolen account information - name, billing address, phone - for Gold Visa cards and MasterCards at $100 apiece.

It is not clear whether any data stolen from CardSystems Solutions, the payment processor reported on Friday to have exposed 40 million credit card accounts to possible theft, has entered this black market. But law enforcement officials and security experts say it is a safe bet that the data will eventually be peddled at sites like iaaca.com - its very name a swaggering shorthand for International Association for the Advancement of Criminal Activity.

For despite years of security improvements and tougher, more coordinated law enforcement efforts, the information that criminals siphon - credit card and bank account numbers, and whole buckets of raw consumer information - is boldly hawked on the Internet. The data's value arises from its ready conversion into online purchases, counterfeit card manufacture, or more elaborate identity-theft schemes.

The online trade in credit card and bank account numbers, as well as other raw consumer information, is highly structured. There are buyers and sellers, intermediaries and even service industries. The players come from all over the world, but most of the Web sites where they meet are run from computer servers in the former Soviet Union, making them difficult to police.

Traders quickly earn titles, ratings and reputations for the quality of the goods they deliver - quality that also determines prices. And a wealth of institutional knowledge and shared wisdom is doled out to newcomers seeking entry into the market, like how to move payments and the best time of month to crack an account.

The Federal Trade Commission estimates that roughly 10 million Americans have their personal information pilfered and misused in some way or another every year, costing consumers $5 billion and businesses $48 billion annually.

"There's so much to this," said Jim Melnick, a former Russian affairs analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency who is now the director of threat development at iDefense, a company in Reston, Va., that tracks cybercrime. "The story that needs to be told is the larger, long-term threat to the American financial industry. It's a cancer. It's not going to kill you now, but slowly, over time."

No one is willing to estimate how many cards and account numbers actually make it to the Internet auction block, but law enforcement agents consistently describe the market as huge. Every day, at sites like iaaca.com and carderportal.org, pseudonymous vendors do business in an arcane slurry of acronyms.

"Cobs," or changes of billings, are a hot commodity. Typically, a peddler of cobs is offering fresh bank or credit card accounts, along with the ability to change the billing address through a pilfered PIN. In other cases, a vendor selling cobs is offering to change billing addresses himself, as a service. Sometimes the address is changed to a safe "drop," which might be an empty apartment in a local building, or some other scouted locale where goods can be delivered. (Information on reliable drops is also bought and sold.)

Lengthy tutorials posted at online "carding" forums indicate that the cob art form is highly developed. A patient criminal will wait until the day a victim receives a billing statement. "That way you have a full 30 days" before the victim is likely to look over his account again, explained one frank tutorial collected by the F.B.I.

A user going by the name "mindtrip" had cobs for sale recently: "I'm selling cobs from at this time only banks Discover and American Express t'ill further notice," he wrote in brusque English. "The cobs come with full info including MMN" (mother's maiden name). Discover Card cobs with any balance were on special: $50. American Express, a more exclusive and potentially more lucrative account, commanded $85.

Alongside advertisements for cobs are pitches from malicious-code writers, who sell their services to the con artists, known as phishers, who contract with spammers to send out millions of increasingly sophisticated phony e-mails designed to lure victims into revealing their account information.

A successful phishing operation might bring in thousands of fresh account numbers, along with other identifying details: names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, PIN's, and mothers' maiden names. The richer the detail (and the higher the account balance), the better the asking price.

A user by the nickname Sirota is peddling account information so detailed, and so formatted, that it clearly came from a credit report. He is asking $200 per dump on accounts with available balances above $10,000, with a minimum order of five if the buyer wants accounts associated with a particular bank. "Also, I can provide dumps with online access," he wrote. "The price of such dumps is 5% of available credit."

Every day brings more. "These things have a short shelf life," said Dan Larkin, the unit chief at the F.B.I.'s Internet Crime Complaint Center in West Virginia. "The criminal value of a compromised credit card is very short term, so there's a constant need to keep backfilling their resources."

A Full-Service Black Market

Those buying fresh batches of account numbers may try to make purchases online, having goods delivered to a drop and then fencing them through online auctions.

More sophisticated thieves will seek out a vendor of encoding devices, and others who sell "plastic," or blank credit cards, and "algos," algorithms that are needed to properly encode the magnetic strip and produce a usable card. And "cash out" services can be arranged with those offering to take the encoded plastic to a cash machine and make daily withdrawals until the account is depleted. (The cash-out risk commands a premium - often 50 percent or more of the total balance.)

Traders - whether they deal in plastic, algos, cobs or other booty - build reputations first by earning the right to advertise, and then, in a black-market version of eBay buyer feedback, augment their status by receiving published kudos from other members. No one is permitted to post product or service offers at most of these Web sites without first having their wares vetted by site administrators, or by those who have been selected as trusted "reviewers."

At iaaca.com, for example, those wishing to sell cobs or cob services "will be required to provide ten (10) change of addresses, to be distributed to two reviewers," who "will test this service by either phone or Internet." New vendors of credit card numbers "will be required to furnish 20 VALID dumps (5 Classics, 5 business, 5 platinums, 5 corporate; 50 percent Visa, 50 percent MasterCard)," according to the site administrators. "The testers will determine the quality, in a percentage of valid numbers."

Once the wares are vetted, a vendor might then pay a fee to peddle them on a site's message boards. Banner ads can also be purchased.

Contacts among deal makers almost always move off the boards and onto ICQ, the instant-messaging program of choice among cyberthieves because of its easy anonymity (no names, no registration, no e-mail required). Payments often change hands in relative anonymity (and with little regulation) by e-gold, an electronic currency that purports to be backed by gold bullion and issued by e-gold Ltd., a company incorporated on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. (Secret Service agents have expressed skepticism over the gold backing.)

Transactions might also be made in WMZ's, electronic monetary units equivalent to American dollars and issued by WebMoney Transfer, a company based in Moscow.

Plenty of noncriminal entities use such services to move money, Secret Service analysts said - although they added that the agency had conversations with some of the e-currency issuers to discuss ways to address the problem.

Thefts at Data Aggregators

Mark Rasch, the former head of cyberinvestigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company, said the numbers taken in the CardSystems breach - at least 200,000 are said to have been in stolen files - are almost certain to end up in one of these trading posts.

CardSystems represented a vital hub through which millions of account numbers passed. ChoicePoint, a data aggregator, was another gold mine; it announced in February that thousands of records had been downloaded from its databases by thieves posing as legitimate business clients (no hacking required).

"The pattern in the last six months is going after aggregators," Mr. Rasch said. "It used to be you'd get a few numbers from a few merchants and aggregate them yourself - a few numbers from a lot of people. But at some point they said, 'Wait a minute, there are other people who aggregate this stuff.' "

And, Mr. Rasch pointed out, it is nearly impossible to stop. For all the information that law enforcement and security experts can glean from sites like iaaca.com, "there are whole marketplaces of bulletin board systems and chats that are invisible," he said.

Still, law enforcement has made inroads. In October, the Justice Department and the Secret Service announced the internationally coordinated arrest of 28 individuals in eight states and several countries, including Sweden, Britain, Poland, Belarus and Bulgaria.

Among those arrested were Andrew Mantovani of Scottsdale, Ariz., David Appleyard of Linwood, N.J., and Anatoly Tyukanov of Moscow. The Justice Department says they are the ringleaders of Shadowcrew.com, the largest English-language Web bazaar trading in everything from stolen credit card, debit card and bank account numbers to counterfeit drivers' licenses, passports and Social Security cards.

The investigation, called Operation Firewall, broke up a 4,000-member underground that, according to the Justice Department, bought and sold nearly two million credit card account numbers in two years and caused over $4 million in losses to merchants, banks and individuals.

But eight months later, the traders have adapted and resumed business. They are a bit more skittish now, said John Watters, the chief executive of iDefense, which generates cybercrime intelligence for government and financial industry clients. Operation Firewall did take out some of the "low-hanging fruit," Mr. Watters said. But that has only caused the pricing models to become more refined, and the characters in this black-market economy to become more sophisticated.

A New Market for New Identities

Mr. Watters said there was also a small but growing market for the type of raw consumer information that has been pilfered from ChoicePoint, LexisNexis and other general data aggregators.

"We've observed people paying for identities," Mr. Watters said, describing Web forms where criminals could tick off the fields they had to sell or wanted to buy: address, date of birth, Social Security number, driver's license number, mother's maiden name. And as the traders slip deeper underground - or onto servers in regions with lax laws, overburdened or uninterested law enforcement and no real working relationship with American authorities - the odds of pulling off another Operation Firewall get worse.

"The next battle will be substantially harder," Mr. Watters said. "It's getting harder for us to do our job."

Asked at a symposium on cybercrime late last month if law enforcement was losing the battle against cybercriminals, Brian Nagel, assistant director for investigations at the Secret Service, said no, according to published reports.

But another panel member, Jody Westby, the managing director of security and privacy practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, disagreed, insisting that based on Federal Trade Commission statistics on identity and credit card theft, only about 5 percent of cybercriminals are ever caught.

In an interview, Ms. Westby offered an assessment no less bleak. "We're not making an impact," she said. "The criminals are too hard to track and trace, too hard to prosecute, and the information they steal is too easy to use."

At one Russian-language site over the weekend, a user called Lexus celebrated the CardSystems breach, saying that "judgment day has come for the bourgeoisie." Another, Zer0, suggested on the site that the hacked numbers might represent new opportunities in the underground.

"It is a good occasion for us," Zer0 said. "Happy hunting."

Yale grades portray Kerry as a lackluster student - The Boston Globe

This story has more to do with grading than the actual abilities of these two.

True. Today, Kerry's grades would be worth more, grade inflation (aka curving)

I suspect, nobody with money and influence was failed anyway. Even if GWB were a worse student he couldn't register worse grades, that would have constituted a Fail.

Be that as it may, PLEASE. Should we be judging Kerry and GWB on their college grades? I know GWB likes it because it makes him feel more like the peoples, less intellectual, as it were. But isn't the difference that the one is a fucking liar who - if god lives - is going to hell in a basket. The other couldn't fucking organize a blowjob in a brothel. Isn't that the point?

Grades.... Schmamades.....