SOCIOPATHS

How Goldman Sachs created the food crisis →

(Source: subashini)

motherjones:

Julia Whitty’s cover story for the September/October 2010 issue of Mother Jones has been chosen for inclusion in Best American Science Writing 2011. Read it again:

The BP Cover-Up

BP and the government say the spill is fast disappearing—but dramatic new science reveals that its worst effects may be yet to come.

Hickey told Gerry Spence, the notable Jackson attorney who prosecuted Hopkinson in the Vehar and Green murders, that he drunkenly cut the girl’s genitals out intending to make a purse out of them.

— Back in the 1970’s, a man named Mike Hickey went to prison for murdering a 15-year-old girl and participating in a house bombing that killed three more people. Today, thanks to a plea deal with prosecutors, Hickey is a free man, and this wrenching article by William Browning explores whether someone like Hickey can ever be redeemed, and if he even deserves to be.

-DM

[LongReads] (via the20s)

To recap: Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it’s betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

— Another month, another terrifying expose of Goldman Sachs from Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who chronicles how Goldman Sachs spent the better part of a decade selling off bad investments, betting that they would fail, and then taking your tax money to pay off the loans. And now I now exactly where SEAL Team Six ought to strike next. I’m told Goldman’s compound is somewhere in lower Manhattan.

-DM

[LongReads, Rolling Stone] (via the20s)

The People vs. Goldman Sachs →

They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

Blackwater Founder Forms Secret Army for Arab State - NYTimes.com →

Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

(Source: rubenfeld)

theatlantic:

Schwarzenegger Fathered Child with Household Staffer, Hid It as Governor

There are politicians who don’t cheat on their wives, movie stars whose marriages don’t end in divorce, and professional athletes who aren’t womanizers, but a pro bodybuilder turned Hollywood star turned governor?

Arnold Schwarzenegger never had a chance. 

His impending divorce has been the talk of Southern California drive time radio for at least the last week, and I’ve yet to encounter anyone surprised by the news. It’s because we remember. Eight years ago, on the eve of the special election that won him the statehouse, the Los Angeles Times published a scathing story about his groping problem. “The initial Times report told the story of six women who said that the star had touched them in a suggestive or aggressive manner without their consent,” James Rainey recalled this week. “Eventually, a total of 16 women, 11 of them giving their names, described physical humiliations suffered at the hands of the man who was running to replace Gray Davis as governor in the recall election.”  

Today the newspaper has finished what it started. 

Read more at The Atlantic

[Image: Reuters]

Most of the our days were spent listening to the sounds of young men being brutally interrogated – sometimes tied up in stress positions until it sounded like their bones were cracking, as we saw from our bathroom window (a bathroom with no running water, except for one tap in a sink filled with roughly 10 cm of sewage). One afternoon, the beating we heard was so severe that we could clearly hear the interrogator pummelling his boots and fists into his subject, almost in a trance, yelling questions or accusations rhythmically as the blows landed in what sounded like the prisoner’s midriff. My roommate shook and wept, reminding me (or perhaps herself) that they didn’t beat women here.

— Al Jazeera’s Dorothy Parvaz Describes Her Syrian Detainment (via theatlantic)

Sarah Lacy: The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment [via Longform.org] →

ladyjournos:

On the ground in Nigeria with the nation’s notorious scam artists, who share a remarkable number of qualities with America’s top entrepreneurs.

TechCrunch || May 15, 2011

(Source: addtoany.com)

ProPublica: Did Pakistan's intelligence service help kill Americans? We may find out soon: →

brooklynmutt:

Star Witness in Terror Trial Could Heighten U.S.-Pakistan Tension

The life of David Coleman Headley, a confessed American terrorist and Pakistani spy, has moved from a soap opera to a crime story to an espionage thriller embroiling the elites of India, Pakistan and the United States.

Monday begins the most revealing chapter yet: The courtroom drama.

Headley, a Pakistani-American businessman and former DEA informant, will be the star witness against Tahawwur Rana of Chicago, his boyhood friend and alleged accomplice in the 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai. Opening arguments are set for Monday in a trial that has drawn international attention because Headley’s testimony could reinforce allegations that Pakistan plays a double game in the fight against terrorism.

The prosecution will depend largely on how the jury views Headley, one of the most intriguing figures to surface in a U.S. terror case. The burly, smooth-talking 50-year-old has a swashbuckling personality and a knack for juggling relationships with multiple wives, terrorist groups and law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“Sometimes he’d tell my husband, ‘Oh, I want to be in movies,’ a movie star or something like that,” Rana’s wife, Samraz, told ProPublica and PBS FRONTLINE in her first-ever interview. “So it looks like he wants to be famous.”

Headley has gotten his wish. He pleaded guilty last year to conducting reconnaissance for the Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people, and for a plot against Denmark. His confessions painted a devastating portrait of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), because he says ISI officers helped the Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group plot the commando-style attacks on Mumbai.

(for more click above link)