Friday, October 04, 2019

Horace: "Quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulous odi.”

English (Latin) is weird


Judge blasts Cranston prosecutors over $100 million tax evasion case

The case against Adam and Lauren Cranston, the children of a former Tax Office deputy commissioner, is languishing in the Supreme Court without a trial date.


POGO – “In the swirl of the news cycle about revelations coming from an intelligence whistleblower and misguided but predictable attacks on them, we want to set some facts straight. The whistleblower’s complaint documented his urgent concern that President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate his political opponent Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The whistleblower’s allegations were largely corroborated witha summarized partial transcript of the phone call. Given the confusion—and perhaps deliberate disinformation—regarding whistleblower disclosures, and specifically the requirements for intelligence community whistleblowers to make disclosures to the inspector general, it’s particularly important for Congress, as well as the media covering this breaking news, to separate fact from fiction in this complicated area of the law. First, a federal government employee who blows the whistle only needs to have a “reasonable belief” of wrongdoing, as has been codified for decades in federal whistleblower law. Contrary to misinformation being spread by policymakers and pundits in the press, there is no whistleblower law that requires the whistleblower to have firsthand knowledge of the wrongdoing for them to be protected against retaliation for having made the disclosure.

In Caught Between Conscience and Career, the book we coauthored with the Government Accountability Project and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, we explain the burden of proof for a whistleblower who wants to disclose a prohibited activity, including a violation of a law, rule or regulation, or abuse of authority…”

Whistleblowing has been in the headlines a lot lately. Here at ICIJ we value the courage and power of whistleblowers. They’ve helped change laws and regulations around the world by sharing vital inside information – think John Doe (Panama Papers) and Antoine Deltour (Lux Leaks). If you’ve got questions about whistleblowing and what it all means, our director wrote this piece awhile ago. It’s handy! (Also, sorry we are a little late this week, we had a few technical issues yesterday!)
 

BLOW THE WHISTLE


Homo sapiens have a substance abuse problem, and the substance is corruption,” Steven Soderbergh told an audience in D.C. last week. He was speaking after the latest screening of The Laundromat, a Hollywood film inspired by the Panama Papers. 

The Q&A was aptly timed, as Democrats in the United States had just announced they would start impeachment proceedings related to President Donald Trump. Jake Bernstein, whose book Secrecy World provided the foundation for the script, said it would all be impossible without whistleblowers. “Whistleblowers can face real, serious repercussions, as can journalists and other people trying to bring this stuff to light,” he said. 

‘INHUMANE’

U.S. immigration authorities were warned back in May 2018 that detainees with mental health issues were being placed in solitary confinement for “shockingly” long periods in “alarming” numbers. An internal government document calls the use of isolation at the Adelanto Detention Center "inhumane." Adelanto featured in our Solitary Voices investigation, and had more reported use of solitary confinement than any other center in the U.S.

PRESS FREEDOM

If you missed the inaugural Press Freedom Week in L.A., we’ve wrapped it all up for you here. Our partners from Hungary and Ecuador, alongside our director for strategic initiatives and network, Marina Walker Guevera, took the stage with a host of other journalists. They talked about challenges including angry presidents, journalists being killed, and fighting for more diverse voices in newsrooms. We also have recordings of the sessions for you to watch too! 
 


ADDICTED TO LIT: The Vital Decadence of Great Books — Cassandra Csencsit

 Those of us here, however, know that rather than merely a luxury—let’s call it Great Booking—is a vital and necessary practice that life is so much emptier and scarier without. One that calls to mind the William Carlos Williams quote,
"It is difficult/to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack/of what is found there."
… In Search of an Honest Man | by Gary Saul Morson | The New York Review of Books
Although it can be read on its own, Life and Fate is actually the second part of a “dilogy.” It continues the story of Grossman’s earlier novel, Stalingrad, which he was forced to publish under the title For a Just Cause, a phrase that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had used to describe the Soviet war effort when he announced the German invasion. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s new translation of Stalingrad allows us to trace the earlier trajectory of Life and Fate’s many real and fictional characters. First published when Stalin was still alive, Stalingrad is considerably less explicit than Life and Fate about its ethical and political themes. Even so, it was, by Soviet standards, remarkably bold.
“The world’s 500 largest companies generated $32.7 trillion in revenues and $2.15 trillion in profits in 2018. Together, this year’s Fortune Global 500 companies employ 69.3 million people worldwide and are represented by 34 countries. Click here to view past years’ lists: 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010

“Each year a whole host of factors – the global economy, trade policies, mergers and acquisitions and corporate upheaval among them – push and pull at the Global 500 rankings. To help you quickly see how each country is represented on the list, we put the Global 500 on a world map. Now you can see each company’s location, revenue and profit at a glance. We also invite you to take a look at how each Global 500 company has moved around in the ranks over the past two decades.”

" Ostendis mihi sic, incredulous odi.”

“Whatever you thus show me, I discredit and abhor”


'He failed as a human being': Former NSW cop jailed for 20 years
For a decade, Vaughan Mark Hildebrand blackmailed women into having sex and sending him explicit photos.


Why Vinyl, Books and Magazines Will Never Go Away - Bloomberg: “Vinyl records, paper books, glossy magazines – all should be long dead, but they’re refusing to go away and even showing some surprising growth. It’s probably safe to assume that people will always consume content in some kind of physical shell – not just because we instinctively attach more value to physical goods than to digital ones, but because there’ll always be demand for independence from the huge corporations that push digital content on us.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, vinyl album sales grew 12.9% in dollar terms to $224 million and 6% in unit terms to 8.6 million in the first half of 2019, compared with the first six months of 2018. Compact disc sales held steady, and if the current dynamic holds, old-fashioned records will overtake CDs soon, offsetting the decline in other physical music sales. Streaming revenue grew faster for obvious reasons: It’s cheaper and more convenient. But people are clearly not about to give up a technology that hasn’t changed much since the 1960s…” 





Ten Applications of Financial Machine Learning

López de Prado, Marcos, Ten Applications of Financial Machine Learning (September 22, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3365271 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3365271
“This article reviews ten notable financial applications where ML has moved beyond hype and proven its usefulness. This success does not mean that the use of ML in finance does not face important challenges. The main conclusion is that there is a strong case for applying ML to current financial problems, and that financial ML has a promising future ahead.”
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