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The city council of San Antonio on the island of Ibiza has banned all drinking on the street. Council members say the move is aimed at deterring people from drinking alcohol and causing problems. But the ban applies to all liquids, since authorities say police can’t just look at a glass and tell what’s in it.
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Submitted by Mike “Mish” Shedlock
License To Steal: Italy’s Highest Court Rules “Theft Not A Crime If Hungry”
In a ruling sure to heighten migration tensions in the EU, Italy’s highest court rules “Theft Not a Crime if Hungry“.
Stealing small amounts of food to stave off hunger is not a crime, Italy’s highest court of appeal has ruled.
Judges overturned a theft conviction against Roman Ostriakov after he stole cheese and sausages worth €4.07 (£3; $4.50) from a supermarket.
Mr Ostriakov, a homeless man of Ukrainian background, had taken the food “in the face of the immediate and essential need for nourishment”, the court of cassation decided.
Therefore it was not a crime, it said.
In 2015, Mr Ostriakov was convicted of theft and sentenced to six months in jail and a €100 fine.
However, his case was sent to appeal on the grounds that the conviction should be reduced to attempted theft and the sentence cut, as Mr Ostriakov had not left the shop premises when he was caught.
Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation, which reviews only the application of the law and not the facts of the case, on Monday made a final and definitive ruling overturning the conviction entirely.
“The condition of the defendant and the circumstances in which the seizure of merchandise took place prove that he took possession of that small amount of food in the face of an immediate and essential need for nourishment, acting therefore in a state of necessity,” wrote the court.
Given that theft is no longer a crime, I expect an enormous outbreak of theft from Italian grocery stores.
via http://ift.tt/26S8RpZ Tyler Durden
Donald Trump crushed it in the Indiana GOP primary last night, winning more than 50 percent of the vote and causing Ted Cruz to drop out. Although John Kasich is still in the race, he has only won one state so far while Trump is less than 200 delegates from securing the nomination.
That led to a surge tonight in searches for “Libertarian Party,” as this chart from Google Trends showing searches for “Libertarian Party” over the last 24 hour period:
Libertarians will choose their candidate at their convention in Orlando over Memorial Day weekend. The top two polling candidates have been Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico and 2012 Libertarian presidential candidate, and John McAfee, a computer programmer and entrepreneur who was also a person of interest in a murder in Belize. Anyone who pays the $1,000 fee can be a delegate to the convention in Orlando, which entitles them to a vote on the nominee.
How many “Never Trump” Republicans look at the Libertarian Party instead of supporting Hillary Clinton remains to be seen. Mark Selter, a senior aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, has already indicated he’ll be supporting Clinton. Other Republican establishment types may do the same, providing a poignant illustration of how the Trump phenomenon became a thing in the first place.
Almost one in five Americans say they’d consider a third party candidate if the nominees were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
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By EconMatters
People don`t realize the magnitude of all the Oil Producing Countries with declining Production Rates, and trending the wrong direction compared with the consistent and steady rise in Global Oil Demand Growth.
The Oil Market is going to ‘unbalance’ in the opposite direction over the next 12 months, and start heading south fast over the next five years. The US probably needs to increase Oil Production to 12 Million Barrels per day in five years just to keep up with global oil demand, as the US is one of the few countries globally capable of increasing capacity given the resource requirements, political stability, and technological requirements necessary to invest in these capital intensive projects.
But it is going to take a much higher price for a sustained duration to get the US all the way to 12 Million Barrels per day, as much of the low hanging fruit has already been taken out of the ground so to speak.
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The ‘odd’ regime shift in the relationship between USDJPY and US equities continues overnight. Following some visible-handedness and follow-through momentum, Yen is weakening against the USD – normally a big flashing green sign for risk-on pajama traders but China’s biggest Yuan devaluation in 9 months (since the August turmoil) seems to have stolen the jam out of the bull’s donut as US equity futures extend losses, AsiaPac credit risk jumps, and USD strength is weighing on crude prices.
China sent another strong message tonight…
Weighing on US equities…
Despite Yen weakness…
As the Correlation regime has shifted in Yen Carry…
It seems the message is loud and clear – Stop with the hawkish tone or else August happens again!!
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Apparently, Europeans need to do ‘studies’ to show that markets are rigged. See the study here. Readers of Splitting Pennies understand Forex and how central banks control Forex markets, which is a superset of all other markets.
Although their conclusion is probably correct, their methodology is ridiculous. Their proof that there’s insider trading going on is based on ‘price drift’ which accounts for about 50% of the post-data move.
The European Central Bank published a working paper — which means it hasn’t been peer reviewed as yet — arguing that seven out of 21 market-moving announcements show evidence of “substantial informed trading” before the official release time.The paper identified seven indicators that they said showed “strong” evidence of pre-announcement drift: The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index; the National Association of Realtors’ existing-home sales report and pending-home sales report; the Commerce Department’s preliminary GDP report; the Federal Reserve’s industrial production report; and the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing and nonmanufacturing index.
The accused, has a more reasonable answer for ‘price drift’ – it’s because the market expects the numbers to be as expected:
A spokesman for the National Association of Realtors says they take any allegations seriously. He points out that the existing-home-sales report is released from a secure location, that reporters are instructed not to communicate outside of the room, and that the organization monitors the media to make sure data is not disseminated early. He’s said on occasion media organizations have accidentally released data early, apologized to the group and not done so subsequently. The spokesman also suggested, however, that traders may be making educated guesses. The pending-home-sales release tracks closely what the existing-home-sales report eventually shows. A Federal Reserve spokesman declined to comment. Messages left with the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis and The Conference Board weren’t returned.
Maybe these Eurodemics didn’t know that Reuters sells data front running as a service, it’s now called “Low Latency News” – See the brochure here.
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Only a handful of polling outfits were surveying voters ahead of the Indiana Democratic primary—but none of them saw a Bernie Sanders win coming.
The RealClearPolitics polling average for the state had former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton up by just under 7 percentage points as of this morning. But minutes ago, the TV networks began to call the race for the senator from Vermont.
It still looks mighty unlikely that Clinton will fail to accrue enough delegates to ensure a win on the first round of voting at July’s Democratic convention—and that’s if Sanders doesn’t drop out before then, which he may well do. But a state that was supposed to deal a major blow to his campaign is instead giving him a chance to remind people it ain’t over yet.
Ultimately, this should also be a reminder that primary polling is susceptible to major misses, in large part because a primary electorate is so hard to pin down. Far fewer people turn out at this stage than will for the presidential general, and figuring out who will actually cast a ballot on Election Day is, as I explained in my feature for the February issue of Reason (“Why Polls Don’t Work“), the most difficult part of conducting a good poll.
Modern survey takers know that, due to plummeting response rates (that is, people’s refusal to answer questions from a stranger), they probably aren’t getting a true random sample of voters. So they take pains to carefully adjust their data using statistical weights, trying to make their numbers approximate the demographic characteristics not of the group of people they managed to get on the phone but of the group that will actually show up.
But of course, this assumes that they can accurately guess what percentage of the future electorate will belong to various demographic groups, something we can’t possibly know for sure until after the election has happened.
Pollsters also generally try to “screen out” from their surveys people who they believe are unlikely to show up for the primary. One way to do that is by limiting yourself mostly to people who have a track record of voting in similar races in the past. But that assumes large numbers who didn’t vote in prior years won’t be motivated by an usually exciting candidate to “surge” to the polls this time around. Sanders—who likes to say the country is ripe for a political revolution—is arguably one such candidate, and indeed, he’s done significantly better over the last three months in “open primary” states where people not formally aligned with the Democratic Party can nonetheless participate.
The team over at FiveThirtyEight is pointing out that this is nowhere near the shock upset that Sanders’ win in the Michigan primary was. There, the pre-election polls were consistently finding Clinton up by close to 20 points. Here, they found her up by more like 7. “That was an historic upset for Sanders,” writes Nate Silver; “this would be a pretty normal primary miss.”
Still, it’s a miss that no one saw coming. Even in the best of times, the polls are going to be off-target once in a while, especially in a state like this where there are so few data points to look at. (All the polls in the RCP average finished fielding before the weekend, as well, meaning it’s also possible voters changed their minds in the final stretch.) But as I wrote the morning after the New Hampshire primary, it’s virtually impossible to know ahead of time which races are the ones pollsters are getting right and which are the ones they’re getting wrong.
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A month ago I was happy to take part in the premier of a new PBS late-night chat/debate show called Point Taken, in which two teams of two debaters get on either side of a single question, and a studio audience votes before and after to see whether the debaters changed their views. The first episode was about whether the American Dream was dead…and I lost!
Tonight’s episode, which airs at 11 p.m. in most media markets (check your local listings!), is about whether employers should divulge (or should be forced to divulge) all their employees’ salaries. I will be taking the “no” side. Here’s how they tee it up:
President Obama has taken action to increase pay transparency among federal contractors. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces laws prohibiting employment discrimination, recently issued a regulation requiring large companies to disclose aggregate salary information in their annual informational filing. And states have been taking action as well, with California and New York enacting legislation to support pay transparency efforts.
Their primary goal is to eliminate the gender wage gap. Currently, in the United States, women earn approximately 21 percent less than men.
You can imagine that I would have some opinions about this issue. I mentioned some of them in this Facebook preview from the control room:
Joining Team Libertarian is Patrice J. Lee of Generation Opportunity and the Independent Women’s Forum; on the let-them-eat-spreadsheets side is tech entrepreneur Dan Price, who made industry waves by establishing a minimum-wage salary at his company of $70,000; and GIFer extraordinnaire Ijeoma Oluo.
Tune in to see how I do! INC.com has a pre-write here.
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Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
The only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.
– Quotes by Mark Twain
Every time I hear from Edward Snowden I’m immediately reminded of how thoughtful, courageous and patriotic he is, and how fortunate we are that he followed his conscience and spilled the beans on a multitude of unaccountable and unconstitutional actions routinely committed by America’s deep state government.
Earlier today, The Intercept posted a piece written by Edward Snowden pulled from the recently published book Inside the Assassination Complex. It’s a short piece, but extremely powerful and to the point. I saw it as a whistleblower’s manifesto in which Mr. Snowden explains why he felt he had no other choice but to come forward, and why others in similar positions should consider doing the same should they find themselves in a position to defend the U.S. Constitution and inform the general public. We all know that the deep state will never voluntarily work to protect “we the people,” as such, leaking on behalf of the public interest is now a matter of national survival.
So without further ado, here are excerpts from Snowden’s latest piece, Whistleblowing is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance:
I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.
One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.
A single act of whistleblowing doesn’t change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society — if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that injustice — they might still be held to account. The thread by which good governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.
Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has existed for as long as our government.
Not all leaks are alike, nor are their makers. Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, provided his illicit lover and favorable biographer information so secret it defied classification, including the names of covert operatives and the president’s private thoughts on matters of strategic concern. Petraeus was not charged with a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but was instead permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Had an enlisted soldier of modest rank pulled out a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend to secure so much as a smile, he’d be looking at many decades in prison, not a pile of character references from a Who’s Who of the Deep State.
In the above paragraph, Snowden highlights the most corrosive aspect of modern American society, the institutionalization of a barbaric and un-American two-tierd justice system. For more on the Petraeus angle referenced, see: Some Leaks Are More Equal Than Others – Hypocritical D.C. Insiders Line up to Defend General Petraeus from Prosecution.
Now back to Snowden.
This dynamic can be seen quite clearly in the al Qaeda “conference call of doom” story, in which intelligence officials, likely seeking to inflate the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, revealed to a neoconservative website extraordinarily detailed accounts of specific communications they had intercepted, including locations of the participating parties and the precise contents of the discussions. If the officials’ claims were to be believed, they irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of learning the precise plans and intentions of terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a news cycle. Not a single person seems to have been so much as disciplined as a result of the story that cost us the ability to listen to the alleged al Qaeda hotline.
If harmfulness and authorization make no difference, what explains the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?
The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it’s not seen as a threat, as a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all of the disparate components of the institution — not just its head but its hands and feet, every part of its body — must be assumed to have the same power to discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern political monopoly of information control, particularly if we’re talking about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful activities. If you can’t guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world’s unmentionables — including your own — begins to look more like a liability than an asset.
At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior enlisted soldier, who was much nearer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the professional career path. I sat down at the table with the chief information officer of the CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief technology officer when they were publicly making statements like “We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” and everybody still thought that was a cute business slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems they would use to do precisely that. I wasn’t briefing the policy side, the secretary of defense, but I was briefing the operations side, the National Security Agency’s director of technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all levels of insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.
Reaching those individuals, helping them realize that their first allegiance as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the challenge. That’s a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government worker today.
At the heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing is a radicalizing event — and by “radical” I don’t mean “extreme”; I mean it in the traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue. At some point you recognize that you can’t just move a few letters around on a page and hope for the best. You can’t simply report this problem to your supervisor, as I tried to do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous. They think about the structural risk to their career. They’re concerned about rocking the boat and “getting a reputation.” The incentives aren’t there to produce meaningful reform. Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to flow from the bottom to the top.
And when you’re confronted with evidence — not in an edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program — that the government is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you’ve sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?
As a result we have arrived at this unmatched capability, unrestrained by policy. We have become reliant upon what was intended to be the limitation of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are suddenly charged with much greater political importance and impact than was originally intended, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of the executive in the national security context and setting restrictive precedents that, even if entirely proper, would impose limits on government for decades or more. That means the most powerful institution that humanity has ever witnessed has also become the least restrained. Yet that same institution was never designed to operate in such a manner, having instead been explicitly founded on the principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, “Though we are mighty, we are voluntarily restrained.”
For more on the judicial system as the “limitation of last resort,” see: Can You Say ‘Rubber Stamp?’ FBI and NSA Requests Never Denied by Secret Court.
When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.
By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it’s so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.
Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American. It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.
The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they have seen that they’re willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.
And there are more of us than there are of them.
Amen and perfectly said. We can only hope a handful of government employees and contractors with a conscience and a real dedication to the U.S. Constitution will read this and act accordingly.
via http://ift.tt/1pZJalI Tyler Durden
Based on the world risk index, which takes into account not only the frequency of natural disasters in each country (known as exposure) but also how well equipped the country is to cope with and recover from the effects of a disaster, The Guardian reports Vanuatu is the riskiest country to live in, with natural disasters on average affecting more than a third of the population each year. If you want to be safe from natural disasters, move to Qatar (the lowest disaster risk country in the world)…
More than one-third of Vanuatu’s population at risk every year
As a small Pacific island nation with a population of only 260,000 people, a disaster risk of 36.72% places almost 95,000 people at risk from natural disasters each year.
In 2015 Vanuatu was hit by an earthquake, volcanic eruption and Cyclone Pam in the space of a few weeks, but it’s not just the frequency of disasters that causes problems for the tiny nation. Unlike in larger countries such as the Philippines, a single storm can cause widespread destruction, including in the capital, Port Vila, meaning relief efforts have to be spread across the entire country. Cyclone Pam left 75,000 people in need of emergency shelter and destroyed 96% of food crops.
If you want to be safe from natural disasters, move to Qatar
With no reported disasters in EM-DAT, a database of more than 11,000 disasters since 1900, Qatar has the lowest disaster risk of any country, at only 0.08%. It enjoys this status mostly because of its location away from the disaster hotspots in Oceania, south-east Asia and Central America.
North America and Europe generally rank as significantly low on the list. The United States had a risk level of 3.87% while Canada had a level of 3.14%.
* * *
Of course – these are just the 'natural' disasters… this does not account for the potential for policy-maker-created catastrophe.
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