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Friday, April 30, 2021

*Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis*

Mike was a public servant and a podcaster. The government warned he couldn’t do both



Media coverage of President Biden’s first speech to Congress

 

 

We saw something that we have never seen before in the history of the United States. Two women — serving as vice president and speaker of the house — next to the president during a speech in the House chamber.

ABC News’ David Muir said, “History already being made this evening … the moment that the vice president, Kamala Harris, arrived there in the chamber, being brought up to the dais. And the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, who made history herself, the first woman speaker, and, of course, all the history … that Kamala Harris has made. And the two of them now stand there together.”

Biden even opened his speech by saying, “Madam Speaker and Madam Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium. It’s about time.”

 

Why can’t auditors understand that they are meant to change behaviour?

Posted on April 26 2021

The FT has reported this morning that: 

Big accounting firms have asked the UK industry regulator to pause quality inspections of their work for a year if they agree to audit high-risk companies listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Accountants said their work for new clients should be exempt from scrutiny because of the difficulty of auditing a company for the first time and fears of being censured for mistakes, according to people who attended talks between the regulator and the firms.

The plea came as accountants said increased public scrutiny and fines for audit failures meant high-risk companies would struggle to find auditors with the experience needed to sign off on their accounts.

Sports Direct and Boohoo both turned to midsized firms with little experience of auditing big listed companies after leading auditors refused to review their accounts amid concerns over the retailers’ governance.

Senior auditors from large accounting firms asked for leniency on a call with the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), people who attended said.

The call was attended by representatives of the Big Four accountants — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — and their main challengers BDO, Grant Thornton and Mazars.

The FRC rejected an initial proposal from one firm that audits of new clients should be completely exempt from annual quality inspections, one senior auditor said.

“There’s got to be some safe harbour,” the auditor said, adding that unless the FRC gave firms leeway after they took on difficult audits, “the best thing for us to do is to swerve it”.

Another auditor who attended the talks said that if the supervision of audits was too strict in the first year “you put people off higher-risk audits, and that’s not a good outcome”.

An alternative suggestion was that the FRC could inspect the audits of new or potentially high-risk companies but that the results would be excluded from the audit firms’ published grades, people on the call said. This would allow the watchdog to identify areas for improvement while shielding auditors from public censure for shortcomings.

One person described the talks, which took place in January, as “exploratory” and “brainstorming”. The discussions were expected to resume after the FRC asked firms to formulate more concrete proposals, attendees said.

Last year’s annual quality review by the FRC found that one in three audits by the top firms fell short of expected standards, which the regulator called “unacceptable”. The UK government is consulting on a shake-up of corporate governance and audit rules in an effort to improve trust in companies. 

The FRC, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, BDO, Grant Thornton and Mazars all declined to comment.

LSE rules require companies to file audited annual accounts or face having their shares suspended or delisted. Companies that cannot persuade a major auditor to check their accounts because of governance concerns will be forced to turn to smaller firms with less experience of auditing big companies, auditors at large firms said.

FTSE 250 miners Ferrexpo and Petropavlovsk called on midsized accountant MHA MacIntyre Hudson after Deloitte and PwC resigned from the audits respectively in the past two years. 

Accountants have been fined £75m for shortcomings in the three years to March 2020, FRC figures show. The tally for 2020-21 is yet to be published but will include a record £15m fine handed to Deloitte for failings in its audit of Autonomy, the former FTSE 100 software company.

KPMG is awaiting the outcome of the FRC’s investigation into its audits of Carillion, the collapsed outsourcer.

Read the full article…


Economic news reporting suffers from bias toward richest Americans Academic Times. Underlying study: Whose News? Class-Biased Economic Reporting in the United StatesAmerican Political Science Review (HJR)



Former Coca-Cola Employee Convicted of Stealing $120 Million Worth of Trade Secrets to Sell in China. “A Chinese-born American chemist was found guilty on April 22 for her role in a scheme to steal trade secrets worth an estimated $120 million from American companies for the purpose of setting up a Chinese company that would manufacture the product for the global market.”


*Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis*

Although they did not know it at the time, the seamen of the USS Cony and other ships of the Randolph group were moments away from being killed or shipwrecked by the tremendous waves that a nuclear explosion would produce. Savitsky’s torpedo carried a warhead with 10 kilotons of explosive power.  If dropped on a city, that would suffice to kill everyone with a half-mile radius. Moreover, the torpedoes’ nuclear warheads were designed to create shock waves that would topple or incapacitate ships. The 20-kiloton load tried by the US Navy in the Baker underwater test in 1946 produced waves up to 94 feet high. The Soviets tested their T-5 torpedoes near Novala Zemlia in the Arctic in 1957 but never released the results. Any ship hit by the torpedo would almost certainly have been destroyed, while the rest of the Randolph group would have suffered significant damage.

That is from the new book on this topic by Serhii Plokhy.  An excellent book, with much more on the Soviet side than any other source I am aware of.


The Postal Service is running a running a ‘covert operations program’ that monitors Americans’ social media posts Yahoo 

 

How a Chinese Surveillance Broker Became Oracle’s “Partner of the Year” Intercept

 

In epic hack, Signal developer turns the tables on forensics firm Cellebrite ars technica. Bill B clears his throat:

The difference is that Cellebrite isn’t painting themselves as the ironclad defender of personal privacy.

With very few exceptions software is buggy, hence hackable.

Signal marketing promises “secure messaging.” It’s a promise they simply cannot keep. It doesn’t matter how many personal endorsements they get.

 

EU outlines ambitious AI regulations focused on risky uses Associated Press 

 

CISA gives federal agencies until Friday to patch Exchange servers Bleeping do


Tyrannosaurus rex walked surprisingly slowly, new study finds CNN


Global chip shortage spreads to toasters and washing machines FT. That’s a damn shame


Junk Just Keeps Notching Records Heisenberg Report


Lego Heirs’ $20 Billion Fund Says Future of Offices Is Unclear Bloomberg


The internet is breaking. Here’s how to save it. Dan Kaminksy, Cyberscoop. RIP Dan Kaminsky.