NEW YORK — Ashley Moore never planned on moving back in with her parents.
Nearly a year after graduating from college, Moore, 22, also never expected to still be waking up in her old twin bed every morning.
“It’s been difficult because not only was I on my own, I was really far away,” explains Moore, a St. Louis, Mo., native who graduated from Pace University in New York City. At one point, she spent an entire year away. “What I miss most is my freedom and having my own space.”
We spoke yesterday via Skype. You can see Moore describe what it’s been like to move back home:
Comments Off on No Arrests For Top Figures Who Caused The Financial Crisis of The Century
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and LOUISE STORY New York Time
It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?
Answering such a question – the equivalent of determining why a dog did not bark – is anything but simple. But a private meeting in mid-October 2008 between Timothy F. Geithner, then-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general at the time, illustrates the complexities of pursuing legal cases in a time of panic.
At the Fed, which oversees the nation’s largest banks, Mr. Geithner worked with the Treasury Department on a large bailout fund for the banks and led efforts to shore up the American International Group, the giant insurer. His focus: stabilizing world financial markets.
Mr. Cuomo, as a Wall Street enforcer, had been questioning banks and rating agencies aggressively for more than a year about their roles in the growing debacle, and also looking into bonuses at A.I.G.
The U.S. Attorney for New York has indicted the founders the three largest online poker companies in the U.S. and seized their websites in a major crackdown on internet gambling.
The indictment charges eleven defendants — including the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker — with bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling offenses.
In addition, the domains for FullTiltPoker.net and AbsolutePoker.com have been seized by the FBI and replaced by this pleasant reminder that gambling is illegal.
The indictment essentially spells out a scheme by the poker companies to set up phony bank accounts to process illegal gambling transactions, either by lying to the banks about the nature of the transactions or by targeting struggling banks to who need the money to stay afloat.
In addition to the criminal charges, the US Attorney filed a civil suit seeking $3 billion in damages. The FBI froze 75 bank accounts and seized five websites, in addition to the arrests that were made today.
The bank and wire fraud charges carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.
This will affect a lot of young online poker stars!
In an extraordinary intervention, the Justice Department has sought and won permission from a federal judge to seize control of a massive criminal botnet comprised of millions of private computers, and deliver a command to those computers to disable the malicious software.
The request, filed Tuesday under seal in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, sought a temporary restraining order to allow the non-profit Internet Systems Consortium to swap out command-and-control servers that were communicating with machines infected with Coreflood — malicious software used by computer criminals to loot victims’ bank accounts.
According to the filing, ISC, under law enforcement supervision, planned to replace the servers with servers that it controlled, then collect the IP addresses of all infected machines communicating with the criminal servers, and send a remote “stop” command to infected machines to disable the Coreflood malware operating on them.
A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed that the takeover occurred Tuesday evening, and the shutdown command was sent to infected computers based in the U.S.
“Under the authority granted by the court in the TRO, we have responded to requests from infected computers in the United States with a command that temporarily stops the malware from running on the infected computers,” wrote spokeswoman Laura Sweeney in an e-mail.
Programmer James Laird wanted to help his girlfriend stream her iTunes music in her new house, so he hacked away at Apple’s private key for streaming music, reverse-engineered the script, and made it available to the public.
Laird calls his open source Perl script Shairport, which lets hardware and software receive AirTunes music from iTunes.
Apple uses a public-key encryption scheme for AirTunes streaming. This lets anyone encrypt and stream audio to the AirPort Express (or other compatible device), but iTunes would only stream to Apple devices. Now, with Shairport, iTunes can be tricked into streaming audio to anything at all.
WASHINGTON — A deadline looming, the Congress’ top Democrat accused Republicans on Friday of risking a government shutdown because they want to make it harder “for women to get cancer screenings.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unleashed his attack as his main antagonist in long-running negotiations, Speaker John Boehner, said spending cuts — not social issues– were blocking agreement to prevent a shutdown at midnight.
In July 1999 Vice President Al Gore paddled down the Connecticut River in New Hampshire to spread what then–Rolling Stone reporter Eric Boehlert termed “his green theme of protecting the environment” while posing for the obvious photo-op. His hopes for making this message heard, however, went over the side when Bill Sammon, a reporter for the then-Moonie-owned Washington Times, wrote that local authorities had granted Gore a special favor when they released nearly 4 billion gallons of water from a nearby dam, at a cost of $7 million, in order to (literally) float Gore’s boat. As Boehlert noted in his masterful forensic audit of the story, Sammon’s point was clear: “In a clumsy abuse of power, Al Gore, a supposed friend of the environment, gladly wasted precious natural resources to stage-manage a political event.”
A few simple steps can put you on the path to creditworthiness — or prevent you from falling off.
A few simple steps can put you on the path to creditworthiness — or prevent you from falling off.
Five years ago Mikaal Bates was about to pool his money with some friends and make his first real estate investment. He didn’t expect any trouble on the credit score front, as he’d always paid all his bills in full and on time. But when Bates received the credit report he needed to get the loan and seal the deal, he found a nasty surprise: Thousands of dollars in unpaid phone bills racked up by someone who’d stolen his identity.
Millions of consumers have fallen out of favor with the credit scoring gods.
Some lost their jobs or were just overwhelmed by mounting debt. Others got caught up in the real estate bubble or had major medical bills. Whatever the reason, the rising number of foreclosures, short sales, late credit card payments and the ultimate credit sin — bankruptcies — have left black marks on credit reports most everywhere.
So what can these people do to repair their credit?
The simple answer is to focus on the information that is used to generate the all-powerful FICO score — the measure used most frequently by traditional lenders to determine creditworthiness. Its scale runs from 300 points to 850 points; the higher the score, the better your credit standing. “FICO is still the 500-pound gorilla,” said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com. “In 2011, the best way to get credit from the mainstream lenders is to have a good FICO score.”
Consumers can hope that the banks will eventually consider alternatives to the traditional FICO score, which was developed by Fair Isaac Corporation and has been in wide use for about two decades. After all, as banks regain their appetite for lending, they will be looking for ways to differentiate between borrowers with the same scores, some of whom are temporarily struggling and others who chronically have trouble with money.
For now, though, the FICO score reigns. The best antidote to a poor score is time. Still, there are a half dozen ways to speed the process, or, at the least, avoid even more credit trouble.
Worries about marine life in the Pacific Ocean outside of Japan’s failing Fukushima nuclear plant are escalating. Water samples taken 1,080 feet away from the plant show radioactive iodine-131 levels that are 4,000 times higher than normal and cesium-137 levels that are 527 times higher than normal. The ongoing nuclear crisis at Fukushima took another turn for the worse this past weekend. A crack was discovered next to seawater intake pipes at the plant’s No. 2 reactor that is causing approximately 1,800 gallons of water with 10,000 times the normal levels of radioactive iodine to gush into the Pacific Ocean per hour. After engineers attempted and failed to bond the crack with concrete, they are now trying to seal the leak using a mixture of 120 pounds of sawdust, three garbage bags of shredded newspaper and nine pounds of absorbent powder. So far, the mixture hasn’t worked. “There is still a steady stream of water from the pit,” said Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama.
