cryptogon.com

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

U.S. mortgage delinquency rates and the percentage of loans that entered the foreclosure process also jumped to records from July to September, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Thursday.

Rising job losses were behind the increasingly bleak portrait of the housing market in a trend that will continue into next year, the group said in data that adds to recent evidence of a still-struggling housing market.

Housing and related business account for about 20 percent of the economy and recovery is essential to bring unemployment down from a 26-1/2-year high and kick-start economic growth.

Yet record foreclosures will add to the growing supply of unsold homes, sapping the housing market as it attempts to recover from the worst slump since the Great Depression.

The MBA said the percentage of loans in foreclosure rose to 1.42 percent, from 1.36 percent in the second quarter and 1.07 percent in the third quarter of 2008.

“Foreclosures remain the biggest hurdle to the housing recovery,” said Michelle Meyer, economist at Barclays Capital in New York.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.

And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

The question was a plausible one Monday when it was announced that the Pontiac Silverdome — once home to the NFL’s Detroit Lions — was sold for $583,000, or about 1 percent of the $55.7 million it took to build in 1975.

The confirmation of the NSA’s role, which began during the development of the software, is a sign of the agency’s deepening involvement with the private sector when it comes to building defenses against cyberattacks.

“Working in partnership with Microsoft and (the Department of Defense), NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to enhance Microsoft’s operating system security guide without constraining the user’s ability to perform their everyday tasks,” Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s Information Assurance Director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a statement prepared for a hearing held this morning in Washington. “All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later in the product cycle.”

The partnership between the NSA and Microsoft is not new.

In 2007, NSA officials acknowledged working with Microsoft during the development of Windows Vista to help boost its defenses against computer viruses, worms and other attacks. In fact, the cooperation dates back to at least 2005, when the NSA and other government agencies worked with Microsoft on its Windows XP system and other programs.

The NSA, which is best known for its electronic eavesdropping operations, is charged with protecting the nation’s national security computing infrastructure from online assaults.

As these systems become increasingly dependent on private-sector computing products, the NSA has reached out to a growing number of software companies.

“More and more, we find that protecting national security systems demands teaming with public and private institutions to raise the information assurance level of products and services more broadly,” Schaeffer said.

Schaeffer said that the NSA is also working to engage other companies, including Apple, Sun, and RedHat, on security standards for their products. The agency also works with computer security firms such as Symantec, McAfee, and Intel.

A growing array of law enforcement authorities, intelligence officials, and private computer experts has been warning about the rising threat of cyberattacks.

“The FBI considers the cyber threat against our nation to be one of the greatest concerns of the 21st century,” Steven Chabinksy, the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, told the same congressional committee.

The Department of Agriculture report, which has been released annually since 1995, said the number of Americans that were hungry rose to 14.6%. In 2007, 13 million households or 11.1% of Americans had trouble getting enough food.

The one-year jump is all the more significant, given the number of hungry Americans had never been higher than 11.9% since these surveys began.

Of the near-15% of the nation that couldn’t secure enough food last year, the USDA said one-third of them had “very low food security,” meaning they reduced the amount that they ate or disrupted their eating patterns during the year. That group made up 5.7% of all U.S. households, which was also a record high.

More than 500,000 households that scaled back the amount that they ate were households with children, making up 1.3% of all U.S. homes with children.

The USDA said the main cause of hunger and food insecurity in the country is poverty.

The lawsuit, filed by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, is based on federal and state antitrust claims. It alleges Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America and more than a dozen other banks conspired to pre-select winners of municipal derivative auctions, coordinated their pricing, and accepted kickbacks disguised as fees from co-conspirators.

The allegations resemble those made by a U.S. grand jury in New York last month, according to the lawsuit filed Nov. 12 in federal court in Sacramento. CDR Financial Products Inc. founder David Rubin and two employees of the Beverly Hills, California- based company were indicted for allegedly accepting kickbacks on investments sold to local governments. CDR is also named as a defendant in the Sacramento case.

The banks engaged in “allocating customers and markets for municipal derivatives, rigging the bidding process by which municipal bond issuers acquire municipal derivatives, and conspiring to manipulate the terms that issuers received,” according to the lawsuit.

The charges against Rubin and the CDR employees were the first to result from a more than three-year investigation into bid-rigging in the municipal bond market. The probe is continuing and has already drawn in some two dozen banks, insurers and local government advisers.

Non-investment use accounts for well over three-quarters of demand each year, and a big chunk of that is met in the form of Good Delivery bars. Yet there are no reports from jewelers, chip fabricators, dental suppliers or any other end users of the bullshit currently trying to pass as “insider news” on the web.

Bottom line? Good Delivery does what it says on the tin. The wholesale market is liquid and cost-efficient precisely because it’s warranted by the chain of integrity. The question of full re-assay is redundant. And on top of that, we guarantee every gram of BullionVault gold.

“Satisfied” – what does that mean? Did they actually properly assay any of these bars? As in “drill a hole in it and test the material thereby extracted”. What he is actually saying is that they go through the vault and check the serial numbers. From then on Mr Ash is surprisingly short on actual details in his answer to your question – a question from a concerned client. It may also be that they physically check the bar densities, by measuring the mass (on some scales) and the volume (e.g. through measuring the displaced volume of water according to Archimedes principle). At least that’s how I’d do it. We can rest easy, he says – this assay would detect the difference between Tungsten at 19.25 g/cm3 and Gold at 19.30 g/cm3. Now, call me a geek, but it took me about 30 seconds to discover that there are at least two metallic elements with densities considerably higher than Gold – Osmium and Iridium weigh in at about 22g/cm3 and can each currently be bought for about $400/ounce. Here is a recipe to consider: Melt some tungsten. Add about 2% Osmium so as to bring the room temperature density of the resulting alloy to exactly 19.30 g/cm3. Now coat it with gold to a total mass of 400 oz and stamp a serial number on it. Hey presto – an object that is indistinguishable from the equivalent gold bar, unless you melt it down or drill a hole in it. How often does that happen? Let me hypothesise that not one gold bar has ever been assayed in this way within the good delivery system. I stand hopeful of being corrected by Mr Ash here. Perhaps he has some data, such as the serial numbers of those bars properly assayed by BullionVault? Or perhaps I am just missing some important fact?

Mr Ash also made the point, “We only ever accept bars from accredited vaults and refiners, and anyone who delivered us a gold bar which later turned out to be bad would be liable for the loss.”

What if I’m correct and these bars are never properly assayed? They wouldn’t ever found to be bad, at least until such time as the fan blades are straining to chop a whole lot of other manure. What if it is then found to have originated from a sovereign government which is busy defaulting on all its debts?

Life is all about risk/reward. For anyone thinking of swapping good delivery bars for tungsten clones with the same markings and weight and then recycling the real gold as scrap (say) the risk of detection could be very small and the reward is currently $450,000/bar

He concludes with a disturbingly vague, “it’s unlikely (my emphasis) that any such metal could ever make it into accredited storage”. Would he care to quantify the risk associated with his phrase “unlikely”?

And how about those thousands of tons of “gold compounds” being exported from the US annually, according to the US Geological Survey report. Were they actually bars of gold? Was there a corresponding drop in gold at Fort Knox or could some Tungsten alloy bars have been used to keep the numbers up? OK, maybe that’s a bit out on the conspiratorial fringe but the whole system does look terribly opaque to a concerned client who just wants to know that the bar of gold that BullionVault is holding for him isn’t actually a tungsten brick.

Thank you for your email, which Paul’s asked me to answer.

As you may know, we send independent assayers into the vaults every year to check all the gold bars, and they send their report to our auditors who publish it – on their website – with the full financial audit.

To read the Assayer’s Report
http://www.albertgoodman.co.uk/bullionvault/

Last year, the assayers were 100% satisfied with every bar. They are now due to return to the vaults later this month, coinciding with our 2009 financial audit. Meanwhile, we only ever accept bars from accredited vaults and refiners, and anyone who delivered us a gold bar which later turned out to be bad would be liable for the loss.

On top of that, we guarantee every gram of BullionVault gold ourselves:
http://bullionvault.com/help/terms_and_conditions.html#Warranted%20gold%20content

With regards to the alleged tungsten fraud, such fakes could perhaps circulate outside the Good Delivery circuit. But it’s unlikely that any such metal could ever make it into accredited storage.

Accredited custodians only take in bars from other accredited vaults, and metal only enters the system from accredited refiners. Even when they bear the correct bar stamps, large gold bars are not usually accepted from people outside the Good Delivery circuit, which is why taking a Good Delivery bar into private possession seriously dents its value. Any potential buyer, lacking the accredited storage history which ensures integrity, would rather deal accredited metal from an accredited source. It’s this warranty — that delivery is good — which makes the professional wholesale market cost-efficient and liquid.

You can learn more about Good Delivery at the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA)’s website. You’ll note just how exacting the criteria for refining and assaying are:
http://www.lbma.org.uk/delivery

The Physical Committee’s detailed work on weighing scales is also worth reviewing. Because at these tolerances, the difference in density between gold and tungsten would show in a 400-ounce bar. Their very different melting points (1064°C for gold, 3422°C for tungsten) also make the alleged fakes unlikely, as do their physical states when cooled (gold is soft, tungsten brittle). Following back along the chain of integrity – the formal history of who held the bars, when, and in which approved facility – would ultimately lead to the producing refiner, and no amount of “tungsten” fakes would be worth the law suits, let alone the loss of LBMA accreditation.

As regards the rumours and stories themselves, “Impeccably reliable sources” would never tell an internet blogger that “a number of well-heeled market participants bought…gold futures on the London Bullion Market (LBMA)”. Not because they wouldn’t want to share such information, but for the simple reason that London dealers don’t offer gold futures. Spot, forwards and options, yes. But futures, no.

Nor can anyone trade gold “on” the LBMA, because it is a trade association, not an exchange or the market itself. Nor is gold dealt at the London Metals Exchange (LME) as some authors state. It offers base-metal contracts.

Reliable sources of information would know this. They’d at least look it up before publishing.

Kind regards,
Adrian

New guidance drawn up at the request of the Department of Health urges councils and other public sector bodies to “collect data” on properties where children are thought to be at “greatest risk of unintentional injury”.

Council staff will then be tasked with overseeing the installation of safety devices in homes, including smoke alarms, stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, oven guards and window and door locks.