Defiant until the end, Troy Davis was executed Wednesday night for the murder of an off-duty police officer. He convinced hundreds of thousands of people around the world, but not a single court, that he was innocent. (Sept. 21)
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UBS trader charged with fraud relating to activities between 2008 and 2010, in addition to two allegations of false accounting and one of fraud in 2011 Kweku Adoboli , the 31-year-old charged with fraud and false accounting at UBS, was remanded in custody until 20 October on Thursday after learning he also faced a second fraud charge. Lawyers for Adoboli, who holds a Ghanaian passport, did not make an application for bail at the hearing in the City of London magistrates’ court that followed the three charges police brought against him on Friday . The alleged “unauthorised trading” announced by the Swiss bank has caused turmoil at the bank, which has raised the estimate of losses from the incident to $2.3bn from $2bn. The trader spoke only to confirm his name, birth date and address at the hearing. He did not enter a plea. He originally faced three charges. Two claim that Adoboli falsified records of exchange traded funds – complex financial instruments – between October 2008 and December 2009 and then in January 2010 and September 2011. The third charge alleges that he committed fraud between January 2011 and September 2011 while senior trader in global synthetic equities. The fourth charge, of fraud, was made on Thursday, relating to activity between 1 October 2008 and 31 December 2010. Adoboli is represented by the law firm Kingsley Napley, which also advised Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who brought down Barings in 1995. A committal hearing originally set for 22 October will now take place on 20 October. The Swiss bank is now under intense pressure to restore confidence in its investment banking arm. The Zurich-based bank’s board is meeting on Thursday and Friday in Singapore where chief executive Oswald Grübel, parachuted in to the bank in 2009 when UBS was on the brink of collapse, is determined to secure his future. The head of UBS’s investment banking arm, Carsten Kengeter, has urged staff to work hard to repair the “financial damage” caused by the alleged incident, which the bank has admitted will tip it to a loss in the third quarter. An update on the bank’s strategy is expected on 17 November at a previously arranged investor meeting in New York. Kweku Adoboli UBS Banking European banks Sam Jones Jill Treanor guardian.co.uk
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National Association of Head Teachers to hold ballot on whether to take industrial action over cuts to pensions Teachers stepped closer to mounting their biggest strike in a generation this autumn after a headteachers’ union decided it would ballot members to take industrial action over pension reforms. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) , which represents more than 28,000 heads and their deputies, will hold its first strike ballot of its 114-year history from 29 September. If members vote in favour of industrial action, a co-ordinated strike with several other classroom unions could take place on 30 November and would be likely to shut the majority of schools in England and Wales. The National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers have already voted to carry out rolling strikes, while another teachers’ union, the NASUWT, has proposed industrial action. The Public and Commercial Services Union has already said it is planning a strike in November. A government-commissioned report in March by the former Labour minister Lord Hutton called for final salary pension schemes to be scrapped and replaced with career averages for public sector workers. He recommended that public sector staff should pay higher monthly contributions and called for a rise in the retirement age to 68 – most headteachers now retire aged 60 to 65. The government has said changes are needed because the cost of teachers’ pensions will rise from about £5bn in 2005 to almost £10bn by 2015 as more staff retire and life expectancy increases. Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT, said the decision to ballot members was taken with “great reluctance”. “Faced with a refusal by the government to negotiate on the basis of a proper valuation of the scheme, we feel we have no option but to demonstrate our anger at this attack on the teaching profession,” he said. “We fear for the future of a system with a demoralised and devalued profession. We fear that we will not be able to attract people to become heads at a time when targets and workloads are rising.” He said many headteachers believed an attack on pensions was a threat to the future of education itself. “Teaching is a vocation and no one entered the profession to get rich. However, we do need to ensure that teaching is an attractive career choice for the most talented graduates. Future pupils deserve nothing less.” In June, teachers staged the biggest school strikes since the 1980s over the pension reforms. More than 2 million pupils missed classes and thousands of parents were forced to take a day off work with nearly 6,000 schools closed and 5,000 partially closed. In total, half of schools were affected. A Cabinet Office spokesman said there was “genuine engagement” with trade unions over pensions. “We have a lot to talk about and there are proposals on the table for discussion.” Schools Public sector pay Teaching Trade unions Pensions Public sector cuts Public sector pensions Jessica Shepherd guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Troy Davis was executed by lethal injection shortly after 11pm last night. In his last moments, he continued to proclaim his innocence. “I am innocent,” Davis said. “All I can ask … is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth. I ask my family and friends
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Anna Faris, Chris Evans and fellow cast members in ‘What’s Your Number’ discuss whether it matters how many sexual partners a person has had. (Sep. 22)
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REM are calling it quits after nearly three decades; Jane Lynch not sure she wants to host Emmys again; ‘New Girl’ soars but ‘Glee’ tanks in ratings for Fox. (Sept. 22)
Continue reading …Sarah Palin is leaving the door open for a presidential run —but most Republican voters want that door slammed shut, according to the latest McClatchy-Marist poll . More than 70% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters don’t want Palin to run for the presidency, the poll found. If Palin and Rudy Giuliani…
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Click here to view this media Wednesday Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum attempted to illustrate the problem with Medicare by comparing it to “food insurance.” “How many people in this room can tell me what their latest health care procedure cost?” the candidate asked a group of supporters in Aiken, South Carolina. “How many can tell me what a gallon of milk costs? You all can, right? Why? Because you pay for it. But medical procedures you don’t pay for. Even going to the doctor, even basic ordinary care, you don’t pay for.” “Imagine if we had another necessity: food. Anybody believe that food is not as important as health care or even more important, right? What if we had food insurance? And then everybody instead of — because of course if you hear all these people, ‘Everybody should have a right to health care.’ Well, I’m going to stand up and say, ‘Everybody should have a right to food. We’re going to provide everybody food insurance because people shouldn’t have to make decisions about whether to feed themselves or have cable television. They should have food as a right.’” He continued: “So we’re going to have food insurance. So what’s going to happen? You’re going to go and you’re going to pay the grocery store 500 bucks. Then you go to the grocery story and there are no prices on anything, shelves are full, no prices on anything. You just go and get whatever you want. And you check out and they have a scanner and you check out and there’s prices on there but they’ll say, ‘Well, this bill is $435 and your bill is $42.10.’” “And you come home and you say, ‘Well, I’ve got a lot of food.’ But then tomorrow comes around and you say, ‘You know, maybe I’ll go shopping again.’ Right, because it’s pretty cheap. How many people think we’ll have an obesity problem in this country? How many think we’ll waste food? That’s what happens in health care, folks. We waste health care. Why? Because you don’t pay for it. And until you start paying for it and take responsibility for how you’re going to shop for health care, we will never change the problem that we have.”
Continue reading …A 2.5 pound shipment of high-grade pot from Northern California was traced to the Kentucky home of a Cincinatti Bengals football player, according to investigators. Wide receiver Jerome Simpson and teammate offensive lineman Anthony Collins were both at Simpson’s home during the special delivery, said federal narcotics agents, who…
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Okay, we’ll totally admit that we’ve got something of a phone crush on LG’s successor to the Optimus One lineup. Sure, it hasn’t debuted in the States, and its specs already look a bit tired, but there’s tons of goodwill attached to this family of devices. Should LG properly execute, the handset promises to be an iterative improvement for all smartphone buyers that need to save some coin. Now this sexy creation is making its way though the FCC, and while it’s difficult to tell whether this is an international model or is bound for our domestic shores, it’s easy to realize that we’re one step closer to its much anticipated release. After a bit of digging, we can tell you the phone supports the 1900 and 850MHz bands, which is common to networks such as AT&T, Bell, Telus and Rogers. With all the names being tossed around , it’ll be interesting to see how the individual carriers choose to brand these devices, but it seems that we won’t have to wait much longer for those details. LG Optimus Hub (aka Univa / Optimus Two) earns its stripes at the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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