Continuous Productivity

Loose Lending Leads to Jail

During the high times, you couldn't go to a party or event where you didn't run into the wealthy "mortgage guy" or "condo-flipping doctor". It's amazing how loose lending standards will make anyone believe he was a real estate maven. There will be many more of these cases coming to light:

Eve Mazzarella was a Las Vegas success story. The high-school dropout and former housemaid moved to the Nevada city in 2000 from Seattle, got a certificate from the ABC Real Estate School and started selling houses in what would become the hottest market in the country.

In 2006, Mazzarella recorded sales of $13.8 million and made the National Association of Realtors' ``30 Under 30'' list, which names the best young agents in the nation. Mazzarella started her own company, Distinctive Real Estate & Investments Inc., in December 2003. She whipped around town in a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle. She planned to build a three-story office building in Vegas's shabby downtown north of the Strip and preserve a historic house on the site by lifting it onto the roof.

Her competitors were impressed. ``She was an up and comer with a brilliant future,'' says Forrest Barbee, a broker at Prudential Americana Group, a Las Vegas agency where Mazzarella once worked.

The dream ended at about 5 a.m. on March 13, when federal agents smashed through the door of a stucco home on a quiet, grassy cul-de-sac looking for Mazzarella, 31, and her husband, Steven Grimm, 45, an erstwhile mortgage broker.

The day before, the U.S. Attorney for Nevada had indicted the couple on 6 counts of bank fraud, later revised to 13. Prosecutors say the pair recruited fake -- or ``straw'' -- buyers to apply for loans to purchase 227 properties worth $107 million. They told the straw buyers they would pay the mortgages. Then they skimmed thousands of dollars from each of more than 432 transactions, the indictment says, stashing the cash in 80 bank accounts.

And Yet Again, Out of the Movies

Police on the Greek island of Santorini have shot and injured a knifeman who decapitated his girlfriend and walked around the streets with her head.

This is the second decapitation crime reported in less than a week.

Straight Out of the Movies

"All of a sudden, we all heard this scream, this bloodcurdling scream," passenger Garnet Caton told CBC television.

"The attacker was standing up right over the top of the guy with a large hunting knife - a survival, Rambo knife - holding the guy and continually stabbing him... in the chest area," Mr Caton added.

The attack continued as passengers fled the bus and waited for police on a desolate stretch of the TransCanada Highway near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.

Mr Caton, the bus driver and a trucker who had stopped at the scene boarded the vehicle to see if the victim was still alive.

"When we came back on the bus... he was cutting the guy's head off and pretty much gutting him up," Mr Caton said.

The attacker ran at them, Mr Caton said, and they ran out of the bus, holding the door shut to prevent him getting out.

"He calmly walks up to the front [of the bus] with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," Mr Caton said.

I haven't read something this disturbing in a while.

Very Sad Update

Kaushik Patel, the man who burned his two children has pled not guilty, while the prosecutors will seek the death penalty:

The 34-year-old man is charged with causing the fatal injuries Nov. 18 after luring his sons with new toy cars into a bathroom of their home on the 1800 block of Harvest Lane and setting them on fire, police said. The boys' mother, Nishaben, was not home when the fire broke out. Afterward, Kaushik Patel buckled his children into the back seat of his car and drove them to his older brother's house about five miles away in Hanover Park. A relative called 911. The boys weren't expected to survive that first night, but they fought for months inside Loyola Medical Center's burn unit in Maywood. The youngest child, Om, 4, was the first to die, on Jan. 17. Vishv, 7, survived several surgeries but took a sudden turn for the worse and died Feb. 19.

Albino Body Parts

The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others. Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin. “I feel like I am being hunted,” he said. Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

A very interesting article outlining the plight of Albinos in Africa. It is absolutely appalling to think that this is happening:

But the killings go on. They have even spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late May, with her eyes, tongue and breasts gouged out. Advocates for albinos have also said that witch doctors are selling albino skin in Congo.

The young are often the targets. In early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives Vumilia was like many other Africans with albinism. She had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a common problem for albinos, whose eyes develop abnormally and who often have to hold things like books or cellphones two inches away to see them. She could not find a job because no one would hire her. She sold peanuts in the market, making $2 a week while her delicate skin was seared by the sun.

When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men overpowered her and burst in.

“They cut my daughter quickly,” she said, making hacking motions with her hands.

The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.

Roger Clemens and Teenagers

The more we learn about Roger Clemens, the more we realize how much of a lowlife he is:

Roger Clemens carried on a decade-long affair with country star Mindy McCready, a romance that began when McCready was a 15-year-old aspiring singer performing in a karaoke bar and Clemens was a 28-year-old Red Sox ace and married father of two, several sources have told the Daily News.

Roger Clemens has some serious delusional issues about his infallibility. He is clearly grasping at straws instead of letting this situation just go away. He has made a fool of himself, has opened himself up to perjury charges, and now:

"The issue in Roger's suit against McNamee is Roger's reputation and how it has been damaged," said Richard Emery, one of McNamee's lawyers who is handling the defamation suit. "If it's proved that he's a philanderer, his reputation is already damaged. When you sue for defamation, you put your whole reputation in the community at issue. Anything is fair game, including his claim of sanctimonious purity. We would cross-examine him and other witnesses who might impact on his alleged behavior. We would probably subpoena her and witnesses who knew [of the relationship]. He's a 'family man' - he implies that. It's about what his damages are. All is fair game."

Wow

It is perhaps the biggest drug scandal of recent years. Before Merck withdrew Vioxx in 2004, the popular painkiller was linked to heart attacks in tens of thousands of people. Now researchers have alleged that Merck knew of the dangers years earlier, but tweaked statistics and hid data so that regulators remained in the dark.

Numbers don't lie, but apparently, numbers can be easily manipulated to justify death for profit:

But an analysis of documents released during the litigation process that led to that settlement, carried out by Richard Kronmal, a statistician at the University of Washington, Seattle, who acted as an expert witness in the Merck lawsuits, suggests that company scientists were aware of the problems well before 2004.

Kronmal's study, co-authored with colleague Bruce Psaty, focuses on a 2001 internal company report. In it, Merck staff describe two recently completed trials involving around 1000 patients on Vioxx and a roughly equal number taking a placebo. Thirty-four people taking the drug died, compared with just 12 on the placebo.                                                                                
But when Merck submitted the results to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the same year, the company analysed the data in a different way. Deaths that occurred after patients completed their course of Vioxx appear to have been removed from the results, even though the drug can cause problems after patients stop taking it. Removing the deaths reduced the risk attributed to Vioxx.

The studies still prompted the FDA to ask whether the risk associated with the drug was enough to warrant stopping another ongoing trial, but Merck replied that it wasn't. According to documents cited by Psaty and Kronmal, the company described the increase in mortality – which its own report revealed to be threefold – as "small numeric differences… most consistent with chance fluctuations".

Chance fluctuations?  Unbelievable.  Let's end this post with a quote:

"It completely clouds your ethical responsibility," says Merrill Goozner, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.

You think?

The Contrast That is India

We all know about India's economic growth and the amazing engineering and business talent.  But, what often gets overlooked is that India is still a third-world country with deep and, oftentimes, very backward beliefs and traditions:

In villages and cities across India, parents are aborting girls more often than at any time in history, doctors and children's rights groups say. In some rural areas, girls are also being killed after they are born. It all adds up to a dramatically skewed national ratio of females to males: 954 girls are born for every 1,000 boys, according to the government's 2001 census. In the United States, there are 1,050 newborn girls for every 1,000 newborn boys.

Due to this amazing disparity, the government is incorporating an incentive system that pays families to raise a girl:

Give birth to a daughter, and the family gets cash. Vaccinate her, more cash. Send her to school, feed her, delay her marriage, cash payment for each step.

The staggered payments will be handed out in seven, mostly rural states, beginning at $400 and extending up to an additional $2,500. They will "force the families to look upon the girl as an asset rather than a liability, since her very existence would lead to cash inflow to the family," Renuka Chowdhury, women and children development minister, told reporters earlier this week.

I love how they have reversed the traditional economic model of child as labor and turned a "liability" into an "asset."  Go on and read the entire article- it details the economics of the doctors that perform these abortions, whether this plan will work, and other cultural implications.

Bank Mole

I was unaware of this, but apparently the current international investigation into the Liechtenstein tax haven fiasco was initiated by a mole that used to work at the LGT Bank:

Authorities in Liechtenstein have condemned the purchase of what it says is confidential bank data.   

LGT Treuhand, part controlled by the principality's royal family, claims the list of 1,400 customer names are contained on DVDs that were copied by Mr Kieber in 2002.

So, it seems that countries such as Germany and the UK paid upwards of $7.7M to the mole for confidential bank data that he had copied onto DVD's while he was an employee at the Liechtenstein bank.  I am sure this has sent a shudder up and down the spines of not only many wealthy folks that use international banks, but also entire countries that market these banks as the utmost in financial privacy. 

Finally, the interesting and downright scary part about paying a mole that illegally (or at least unethically) copied client data onto a disk is that these countries are (un)intentionally creating a market for similar transgressions.  That is, any bank employee that wants to make a quick million (or five) can just copy data, offer it to countries, and get a new identity.  It's a nice gig with limited downside.