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Friday, February 14, 2020

Convicted Tax Protestor's Bid for Competency Hearing Fails on Appeal

Terry DiMartino appeals from a judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut (Thompson, J.) convicting him for his multi-year failure to pay taxes and for his deception and obstruction of the IRS—conduct inspired by the Sovereign Citizen movement, a loosely affiliated group who "`follow their own set of laws' and, accordingly, `do not recognize federal, state, or local laws, policies or regulations' as legitimate." United States v. McLaughlin, ___ F.3d ___, 2019 WL 7602324, at *1 n.1 (2d Cir. December 30, 2019) (quoting Sovereign Citizens: A growing Domestic Threat to Law Enforcement, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (2011)).
DiMartino, a successful insurance agent, represented himself at trial and was convicted.
After trial and before sentencing, DiMartino retained counsel, who moved for a hearing to determine whether DiMartino had been competent to stand trial. Counsel argued that DiMartino's bizarre conduct before and during trial raised a series of red flags impugning his mental fitness, and submitted a psychological report from Dr. Andrew Meisler, who had interviewed DiMartino and examined part of the trial record. Basically, on this point, the district court rejected the proffered expert testimony and sustained the denial of the request for a competency hearing based principally on a proffered expert report the district court found lacking.  The Second Circuit affirmed under an abuse of discretion standard.

Meet the man behind the cryptocurrency group trying to buy in to Australian soccer

Jim Aylward and his London Football Exchange have come to an agreement with Perth Glory - but not before his company was rejected by a French club.

U.S. Tax Attorney Denied Habeas Corpus in Extradition Proceeding Based on Netherlands Criminal Tax Conviction


Amber is a tool for blogs & websites to keep linked content accessible - The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society wants to keep linked content accessible. Whether links fail because of DDoS attacks, censorship, or just plain old link rot, reliably accessing linked content is a problem for Internet users everywhere. 
This isn’t a new problem.  Some centralized initiatives, such as the Internet Archive and Perma.cc, are attempting to snapshot and preserve certain web pages…
“Amber is an open source tool for websites to provide their visitors persistent routes to information. It automatically preserves a snapshot of every page linked to on a website, giving visitors a fallback option if links become inaccessible. If one of the pages linked to on this website were to ever go down, Amber can provide visitors with access to an alternate version. This safeguards the promise of the URL: that information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions.



NSW clubs breaking money laundering and terrorism finance laws


An internal document shows ClubsNSW board believed most of its members are failing to comply with anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing laws.



The Dismal Kingdom: Do Economists Have Too Much Power? Foreign Affairs. Throwing a flag on a clear violation of Betteridge’s Law.
Mutinous librarians help drive change at Elsevier FT. We need more mutinous librarians.

 An Algorithm That Grants Freedom, or Takes It Away





The New York Times – Across the United States and Europe, software is making probation decisions and predicting whether teens will commit crime. Opponents want more human oversight. “.. In Philadelphia, an algorithm created by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has helped dictate the experience of probationers for at least five years. The algorithm is one of many making decisions about people’s lives in the United States and Europe. Local authorities use so-called predictive algorithms to set police patrols, prison sentences and probation rules. In the Netherlands, an algorithm flagged welfare fraud risks. A British city rates which teenagers are most likely to become criminals. Nearly every state in America has turned to this new sort of governance algorithm, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit dedicated to digital rights. Algorithm Watch, a watchdog in Berlin, has identified similar programs in at least 16 European countries. As the practice spreads into new places and new parts of government, United Nations investigators, civil rights lawyers, labor unions and community organizers have been pushing back…”



Search Engine Journal – A Beginner’s Guide to Reddit: How to Get Started & Be Successful – “In this Reddit guide, you will learn what Reddit is, why it is such an important social platform, and what makes it different than all the other social platforms. You will also learn what you need to consider in order to successfully get started on Reddit. Reddit is a social media platform, that allows any individual to create and manage their own community, which Reddit calls a sub-reddit. The entire platform is a social aggregation site, where individuals curate content they either find around the web or create themselves. They then submit it to their sub-reddit to allow other Reddit users to ability to comment, discuss, and ultimately vote on the content, pushing the most popular content up to the top of the page and moving less popular content down and out of view…”






How Your Laptop Ruined Your Life



The Atlantic – Smartphones aren’t the only killers of work-life balance. “It’s a common existential crisis among American office workers that virtually nowhere is now safe from the pull of their jobs. This inescapability is usually attributed to the proliferation of smartphones, with their push notifications signaling the arrival of emails and other workplace messages. The first iPhone, released in 2007, helped make social media omnipresent and pave the way for hyper-connected professional lives. Now, on-call retail workers and law-firm partners alike often feel as though they never really clock out. But that blame is often applied solely to the wrong piece of take-home technology. If staying home with a cold still requires a full day of work or you can’t find a seat at your local coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon, iPhones are not responsible for ruining your life. The novelty and early popularity of smartphones seem to have distracted America from how quickly its laptops were also dissolving much of the boundary between work and home.
…As laptops have kept improving, and Wi-Fi has continued to reach ever further into the crevices of American life, however, the reality of laptops’ potential stopped looking quite so rosy. Instead of liberating white-collar and “knowledge” workers from their office, laptops turned many people’s whole life into an office. Smartphones might require you to read an after-hours email or check in on the office-communication platform Slack before you started your commute, but portable computers gave workers 24-hour access to the sophisticated, expensive applications—Salesforce CRM, Oracle ERP, Adobe Photoshop—that made their full range of duties possible. According to a recent study, Americans with college degrees and beyond—the ones most likely to start a new job and immediately be handed a laptop—spend 10 percent more time working now than they did in 1980..”

'Not guilty': Former ministers Ian Macdonald and Eddie Obeid face trial








ZDNet Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert's claim of "legal professional privilege" has been refused by the Senate Community Affairs References Committee, resulting in the committee asking the Minister responsible for Centrelink's Online Compliance Intervention (OCI) program to hand over the documentation that Robert refused to provide.
On 16 December 2019, the committee gave Services Australia the ability to provide further information on notice. The deadline for providing this information was January 24 before the committee decided to extend it to February 7, citing the department's involvement in helping those affected by the country's bushfire emergency.





Why Walking Helps Us Think - The New Yorker” – Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them…”
  

Coalition’s “miracle” election win claim under fire as more rorts surface

Do What You Love? There’s A Dark Side To That Idea

Nothing exemplifies the promises and perils of self-actualised work better than the culturalconversationsaround ‘do what you love’. The injunction to ‘do what you love’ has had no shortage of critics, who point out its classist nature, advocate for a clearer delineationbetween work and life, and remind us that burnout might just be the flipside of self-actualised work. Not all agree that work should be a calling or that we should devote ourselves wholly to work. – Aeon


PORTUGAL SEIZES

Portugal has followed in Angola’s footsteps, announcing it will seize the bank accounts of Isabel dos Santos. The prosecutor's office ordered the seizure of dozens of bank accounts belonging to the Angolan billionaire, and her husband Congolese businessman and art dealer Sindika Dokolo. The action is part of a "request for international judicial co-operation by the Angolan authorities," according to the prosecutor's office.

PANAMA PAPERS U.S. FIRST

Harald Joachim von der Goltz is the first U.S. taxpayer to plead guilty to charges of tax evasion and money laundering stemming from our 2016 investigation Panama Papers. Von der Goltz, one of four people facing charges in America, was a long-term client of the firm at the center of the Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca. Prosecutors say he was part of a “decades-long scheme to defraud the United States.

GETTING BACK $45M

Our 2017 investigation, Paradise Papers, has helped Lithuanian authorities investigate an alleged bank conspiracy that cost the country tens of millions of dollars. The former owner of Ukio Bankas, previously the country’s sixth-largest lender, is alleged to have stolen $45 million from the bank along with 12 accomplices. Now, authorities say they are confident of getting the money back.

‘IT WAS PERSONAL’


The murder of Maltese investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia was particularly poignant for our U.K. member Juliette Garside. “It was personal for me from the beginning. I had been watching what she was doing during the Panama Papers when she was really coming under pressure for her reporting,” she told us. We spoke with Juliette for our monthly Meet the Investigators’ series.



NSW police treated millions in damages for misconduct as ‘cost of doing business’

Internal memos from former watchdog commissioner accuse police of systematic failure and misinformation
 
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