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Spiderman Spider/Man :spiderman:

7mo ago (dailymail.co.uk) 1,109 thread views #204063

Biden's White House will send letter to CNN, NY Times and other top outlets demanding them to probe 'lies' behind GOP's plan to impeach president | Daily Mail Online

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johannesalthusius they/them '); DROP TABLE Users;-- 2mo ago (twitter.com) Edited 2mo ago 1,107 thread views #249687 spent 75 currency on pings

California's new $20 minimum wage rule will exempt restaurants that sell bread, handing a lucrative break on wages to the Panera chain and one of Governor Gavin Newsom's longtime allies

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Redactor0 naori/oppa The Rachel Dolezal of Filipinos 3d ago (nypost.com) 1,096 thread views #267094

Mexico actually extradited a cartel boss. You'll never guess which gang he's from

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Emoji Award given by @S: "marseywholesome"

SN mayo/cide :marseymayo:

2yr ago (aljazeera.com) Edited 2yr ago 1,092 thread views #51782

Saudi Arabia executes 81 people in a single day

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lmao lmao/rofl 1yr ago (twitter.com) Edited 1yr ago 1,089 thread views #117893

Ukkkraine blows up russian fleet again. This time with an epic call of duty kill cam.

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ABC ayy/beesi Always Be Chudding 29d ago (bbc.com) 1,083 thread views #260422

Vietnam just sentenced a strong, independent woman to death for #girlbossing too hard

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Truong My Lan: Vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death for $44bn fraud

^{Truong My Lan is accused of looting one of Vietnam's largest banks over a period of 11 years}

It was the most spectacular trial ever held in Vietnam, befitting one of the greatest bank frauds the world has ever seen.

Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country's largest banks over a period of 11 years.

It's a rare verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.

The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.

The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five defendants were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges.

"There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era," says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. "There has certainly been nothing on this scale."

The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the "Blazing Furnaces" anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.

A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.

^{Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong is leading an anti-corruption campaign}

The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women has joined their ranks.

Truong My Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It has long been the commercial engine of the Vietnamese economy, dating well back to its days as the anti-communist capital of South Vietnam, with a large, ethnic Chinese community.

She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as Doi Moi, in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants.

Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.

All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.

By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.

Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.

They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.

The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.

According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

She was also accused of bribing generously to ensure her loans were never scrutinised. One of those who was tried used to be a chief inspector at the central bank, who was accused of accepting a $5m bribe.

The mass of officially sanctioned publicity about the case channelled public anger over corruption against Truong My Lan, whose fatigued, unmade-up appearance in court was in stark contrast to the glamorous publicity photos people had seen of her in the past.

But questions are also being asked about why she was able to keep on with the alleged fraud for so long.

^{The trial took place in Ho Chi Minh City, where Saigon Commercial Bank was based}

"I am puzzled," says Le Hong Hiep who runs the Vietnam Studies Programme at the ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

"Because it wasn't a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations.

"It was obvious that she had to get the money from somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. SCB is not the only bank that is used like this. So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market."

David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.

"What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.

"Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there."

At 79 years old, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong is in shaky health, and will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be chosen.

He has been one of the longest-serving and most consequential secretary-generals, restoring the authority of the party's conservative wing to a level not seen since the reforms of the 1980s. He clearly does not want to risk permitting enough openness to undermine the party's hold on political power.

But he is trapped in a contradiction. Under his leadership the party has set an ambitious goal of reaching rich country status by 2045, with a technology and knowledge-based economy. This is what is driving the ever-closer partnership with the United States.

Yet faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption. Fight corruption too much, and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity. Already there are complaints that bureaucracy has slowed down, as officials shy away from decisions which might implicate them in a corruption case.

"That's the paradox," says Le Hong Hiep. "Their growth model has been reliant on corrupt practices for so long. Corruption has been the grease that that kept the machinery working. If they stop the grease, things may not work any more."

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ABC ayy/beesi Always Be Chudding 1yr ago (bbc.com) 1,082 thread views #131056

Breakthrough in nuclear fusion energy announced

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A major breakthrough has been announced by US scientists in the race to recreate nuclear fusion.

Physicists have pursued the technology for decades as it promises a potential source of near-limitless clean energy.

On Tuesday researchers confirmed they have overcome a major barrier - producing more energy from a fusion experiment than was put in.

But experts say there is still some way to go before fusion powers homes.

The experiment took place at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.

Nuclear fusion is described as the "holy grail" of energy production. It is the process that powers the Sun and other stars.

It works by taking pairs of light atoms and forcing them together - this "fusion" releases a lot of energy.

It is the opposite of nuclear fission, where heavy atoms are split apart. Fission is the technology currently used in nuclear power stations, but the process also produces a lot of waste that continues to give out radiation for a long time. It can be dangerous and must be stored safely.

Nuclear fusion produces far more energy, and only small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste. And importantly, the process produces no greenhouse gas emissions and therefore does not contribute to climate change.

But one of the challenges is that forcing and keeping the elements together in fusion requires very large amounts of temperature and pressure. Until now, no experiment has managed to produce more energy than the amount put in to make it work.

The National Ignition Facility in California is a $3.5bn (£2.85bn) experiment.

It puts a tiny amount of hydrogen into a capsule the size of a peppercorn.

Then a powerful 192-beam laser is used to heat and compress the hydrogen fuel.

The laser is so strong it can heat the capsule to 100 million degrees Celsius - hotter than the centre of the Sun, and compress it to more than 100 billion times that of Earth's atmosphere.

Under these forces the capsule begins to implode on itself, forcing the hydrogen atoms to fuse and release energy.

On announcing the breakthrough Dr. Marvin Adams deputy administrator for defense programs at the US National Nuclear Security Administration said that the laboratory's lasers had input 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, which had then produced 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output.

Dr Melanie Windridge, CEO of Fusion Energy Insights, told the BBC: "Fusion has been exciting scientists since they first figured out what was causing the Sun to shine. These results today really put us on the path to the commercialization of the technology."

Prof Jeremy P. Chittenden, professor of plasma physics and co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London called it "a true breakthrough moment" which proves 'the 'holy grail' of fusion, can indeed be achieved".

This has been the sentiment echoed by physicists globally, who praised the work of the international science community.

Prof Gianluca Gregori, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford said: "Today's success rests upon the work done by many scientists in the US, UK and around the world. With ignition now achieved, not only fusion energy is unlocked, but also a door is opening to new science."

On the question of how long before we could see fusion being used in power stations, LLNL Director Dr. Kim Budil said there were still significant hurdles but that: "with concerted efforts and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant".

This is progress from when scientists used to say 50 - 60 years in answer to that question.

One of the main hurdles is getting cost down and scaling up the energy output.

The experiment was only able to produce enough energy to boil about 15-20 kettles and required billions of dollars of investment. And although the experiment got more energy out than the laser put in, this did not include the energy needed to make the lasers work - which was far greater that the amount of energy the hydrogen produced.

The amount of energy they've generated in this experiment is tiny - just enough to boil a few kettles. But what it represents is huge for the scientists who've spent so long working on this technology - and for all of us.

The promise of a fusion-powered future is one step closer. But - and there always is a but with these breakthroughs - there's still a long way to go before this becomes a reality.

This experiment shows that the science works. Now it needs to be repeated, perfected, and the amount of energy it generates will have to be significantly boosted.

This is before scientists can even think about scaling the process up.

The other issue is the cost - this experiment has cost billions of dollars - fusion does not come cheap.

But the promise of a source of clean energy will certainly be a big incentive for overcoming these challenges.

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lmao lmao/rofl 1yr ago (twitter.com) 1,073 thread views #134616

Bank Run Ocurring in Russia

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SN mayo/cide :marseymayo:

1yr ago (theguardian.com) Edited 1yr ago 1,066 thread views #107814

Putin grants Russian citizenship to US whistleblower Edward Snowden

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Spiderman Spider/Man :spiderman:

2mo ago (yahoo.com) 1,061 thread views #251474

NASA Concerned as Voyager 1 Sending Back Incomprehensible Code

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Aba here/there 5mo ago (text post) Edited 5mo ago 1,041 thread views #227592

Youtuber Breadtuber gets fricking shot (censored, no gore, 1 death)

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SN mayo/cide :marseymayo:

1yr ago (businessinsider.com) 1,039 thread views #108798

Number of Russians Fleeing Draft Bigger Than 1st Invasion Force: UK

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poopdick poop/dick :marseydramautist:

1yr ago (dailystar.co.uk) 1,036 thread views #109525

Soccer riots leave at least 100 fans dead in Indonesia with children among those killed - Daily Star

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AutisticOnTheStreets GOKU/BLACK R-slurred in the Sheets :marseywink:

1yr ago (usatoday.com) 1,031 thread views #159532

FBI: Mandalay Bay shooter who killed 58 angered by how casinos treated him

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A trove of documents recently released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that the shooter who killed 58 people at a Las Vegas concert in 2017 was "very upset" about how casinos were treating him.

The documents provide the strongest indication yet of a motive for the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

Stephen Paddock, 64, a regular gambler who had a penchant for video poker, killed himself at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino before he could be apprehended. The documents provide the most detailed look to date into Paddock's possible motive and gambling habits, delving into the weeks and years before he fired from his 32nd-floor windows into a crowd of 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

A fellow gambler told the FBI that "Paddock was very upset at the way casinos were treating him and other high rollers," noting that roughly three years earlier casinos had started banning high rollers from certain events, hotels and even casinos.

The gambler described Paddock as a high roller with a bankroll of approximately $2 million to $3 million who preferred playing video poker. The report states that the acquaintance believed the stress about how high rollers were being treated could "easily be what caused Paddock to 'snap.'"

The Mandalay Bay hotel, Paddock's acquaintance told the FBI, "was not treating Paddock well because a player of his status should have been in a higher floor in a penthouse suite."

The collection of FBI documents were released last week in response to a public records request by The Wall Street Journal.

Who was Stephen Paddock?

Paddock gambled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Las Vegas, Reno and other Nevada properties over roughly a decade prior to the shooting, according to records provided to the FBI by the Nevada Gaming Authority that were among the newly released documents.

In 2006, for example, Paddock gambled more than $945,000 and came out with roughly $4,300 in winnings. During September, the month prior to the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting, Paddock had four reservations at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino.

Paddock considered himself a professional gambler, according to the documents, and told one person interviewed by the FBI that it had become his main source of income roughly three years prior to the shooting.

"Paddock purchased handgun out of concern that he had been earning a lot of cash and wanted it as a means of protection," the person, whose identity was not disclosed, told the FBI. The individual told the FBI Paddock had mentioned that he was banned from several casinos because he had "made too much money from them."

An FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit brought together a panel of experts for a yearlong look at what motivated Paddock to fire over 1,000 rounds at the crowd over 11 minutes. The panel concluded that there was "no single or clear motivating factor" that drove him to the rampage.

Another woman interviewed by the FBI at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas noted that Paddock would visit once every three months or so, usually during the week to play casino games.

"Paddock only wanted to discuss gambling," she said, recalling that during one stay from Sept. 12 to 14, just a few weeks before the shooting, Paddock lost $38,000.

'No evidence of a conspiracy'

In 2018, Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo said that a 10-month investigation by the department resulted in "no evidence of conspiracy or a second gunman" and no definitive motive for the shooter.

Investigators determined that Paddock spent $1.5 million over two years, including debts paid to casinos; meanwhile, a look at 14 of his bank accounts showed he had $2.1 million in September 2015 but only about $530,000 two years later.

Let it be known to all you conspiracy nuts: He was just mad about shitty comps. Which is why he shot up a random concert going on outside.

:#marseysmug3: