Jerome Kerviel the former Societe General rouge trader who accrued nearly €5 billion, or $7.7 billion has been released from jail after just over one month. He is still under investigation and surely will be going back to jail for a long time, but he will probably be bringing some friends with him.
So far the prosecution believes Kerviel worked alone, but many think this is impossible due to significance of the fraud. They say he began creating fictitious trades in 2006 and early 2007 that were relatively small, but got a little power hungry and the trades increased drastically. He eventually made illegal trades totaling $63.5 billion!
Some have described him as a computer genius while others have said he was nothing special. He was a smart guy though. He had a salary of about $90,000 in 2006 and earned a bonus $76,000 and in 2007 he was expected to get bonuses of at least $381,000.
To cover up his early gains Kerviel created fictitious trades that actually showed losses to cover up the massive gains. Obviously this is bad for the company because it is illegal, but many traders say their bosses will look the other way if it’s not too outrageous. The fact that he was caught almost two years after he began the fraudulent trading when he hadlost money, rather than make money is suspicious. This is not something that could possibly go unnoticed unless soemone turned their heads. It seems to me that he started out well and they pretended they didn’t notice, but once he got out of control and the company got scared of being caught, they “caught” him. The business world can be hard, but it sure does look fun!
By the way, he was just hired after his release from prison by Lemaire Consultants and Associes, an information-technology consultancy specializing in IT networking and security. I don’t know if you want this guy to work on your security, but maybe they just wanna get a piece of that fraudulent trading!
Seven labrador retrievers were cloned in South Korea recently to snif out drugs and explosives. They were cloned from one of their top drug sniffing dogs because it is so hard to find good candidates for the job. The dogs so far have been a complete success, passing tests just as well as the original.
For all the people that think cloning is immoral, this should prove how useful it can be. These dogs will surely save lives and catch criminals, and every country should follow South Korea’s lead. Not experimenting with cloning and stem cells is what really should be called immoral. The possibilities are endless for cloning and stem cells, working to save possibly millions of lives. The possibilities of reproducing individual body parts, cures for diseases, and in vitro fertilization are huge and real. In vitro fertilization is a process where egg cells are fertilized outside the womb.
If you believe it is unethical because you are “playing God,” you might as well shut down every hospital and trow out all medicines. It’s called natural selection, and saving people’s lives with medicine isn’t something from God.
Today, the defendants in the Sean Bell case all got acquitted and now the black community is upset. If you don’t know already, Sean Bell was killed, on the night before his wedding, by three police officers, who were undercover. The officers tried to stop Bell from driving away, but Bell refused and drove until he hit a van. When Bell stepped out of his car, he was shot and killed.
The judge for this case ruled in favor of the three officers on trial, despite the prosecution providing around 50 witnesses. He stated that some of the witnesses contradicted themselves, and their demeanor were questionable; therefore, the prosecution couldn’t prove the officers were guilty, because there was doubt about the reliability of the witnesses.
The thing about criminal cases is that, there has to be proof without a reasonable doubt to prove the defendants are guilty. Convicting somebody because the prosecution’s story is sad, isn’t an ethical way to handle a trial. It’s really sad that he got killed the night before his wedding, but we still have to look at the facts. And frankly, the prosecution couldn’t muster enough reliable witnesses to win. The black community is extremely outraged and I don’t see why. First off, it wasn’t a hate crime. The guy just happened to be black, and two of the officers that shot him were also black. Al Sharpton, did a post trial interview and expressed his frustration with the verdict. He stated that the “justice system was aborted”, and they will prosecute the officers in the civil court. Al Sharpton, should read the trial transcript before coming to those conclusions. If the prosecution did have witnesses that contradicted themselves, it should be a no brainer that the officers can’t be proven guilty. You just can’t send somebody to jail, because it seems like the right thing to do.
After the verdict the black community was outraged. This video does an excellent job portraying the anger they felt. “These cops getting away with murder, and nobody gona say nothing” Those people feel really adamantly about sending the defendants to prison.
If I had sold Tibetan merchandise in San Francisco, London, or Paris, I would be extremely rich. It seems everybody and their mothers came out to support Tibet and the “human rights” issue. Below is a video that shows how informed these people really are.
If you can’t find Tibet on a map, why are you protesting? If you say for “human rights”, I’m going to ask where you find your sources; watching Seven Years in Tibet isn’t enough to call yourself an expert on Tibet. The only reason these people are protesting is because of the publicity the media is giving them. For all you Tibet supporters, why didn’t ya’ll feel so strongly Tibet last year? There are so many other issues today that the world should focus their attention on. For instance, the fighting in Somalia, Darfur, or the food crisis in Senegal, all have more precedence than human rights in Tibet; yet, human rights in Tibet seems to be the most worthy of the protesters’ voice.
http://www.savetibet.org/tibet/humanrights/index.php Here is a website that is campaigning for Tibet. If you look at the human rights section you see it’s a little over 200 words. Talk about Information overload on an issue those Tibet supports feel so adamantly about.
In conclusion, it’s really sad that these Tibetan protesters are trying to ruin China’s image. Rather than focusing on a more serious problem, they’re going all out to stop the Olympics for an issue they don’t know much about. They make it seem like Tibet is the new concentration camp that China built to suppress the Tibetans.
UT student Jason Liao was arrested last week for having a concealed handgun on campus, a third degree felony. He posted bail Saturday night after spending a week in jail and reporters at The Daily Texan, the official UT newspaper, tried to reach him for an interview. Liao could not be reached so they decided to interview his friends instead. Check out these quotes from the interview:
Liao sometimes lives in a fantasy world where he is a member of a Chinese crime syndicate
Anytime he likes a girl, he makes her worry. He’s like, “Hey I’m going to go on a mission involving a gun. In case something happens to me, here’s my bank account number so you can bail me out”
I’m Rambo, I carry a minigun every day
I’m really not making fun of Jason, I just think his friends are insanely funny
