Bloomberg – Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Merrill Lynch & Co. employees discussed helping naked short-sales by market-maker clients in e-mails the banks sought to keep secret, including one in which a Merrill official told another to ignore compliance rules, Overstock.com Inc. (OSTK) said in a court filing. The online retailer accused Merrill, now part of Bank of America Corp., and Goldman Sachs of manipulating its stock from 2005 to 2007, causing its shares to fall. Read Article
Nature – About one-quarter of seafood sold as ‘sustainable’ is not meeting that goal, according to an analysis taking aim at the two leading bodies that grant this valuable label to fisheries. In an online paper in Marine Policy1 and at a conference this week in Edinburgh, UK, fisheries biologist Rainer Froese of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, launched a stinging attack on the schemes by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the marine-conservation organization Friend of the Sea (FOS) to certify fisheries as sustainable. Read article
The Australian – Most of the scientists advising the federal government on coal-seam gas pollution have financial links with the mining industry. Four of the six members of the interim independent expert scientific committee on coal-seam gas and coalmining have a financial connection with mining companies, the Environment Department has revealed. Read Article
Independent – A red-faced Pentagon has conceded that an instructor at its Joint Forces College in Virginia for military officers was until recently teaching a course advocating “total war” with Islam that could require obliterating the holy cities of Mecca and Medina without concern for civilian deaths. The material in the course, which officers could elect to take but was not obligatory, flew in the face of repeated assertions by the Obama administration that the war on terrorism is just that and should under no circumstances be read as an assault on a religion observed by 1.4 billion people around the world. Read Article
Guardian – Lord Mandelson has been recruited to advise a multinational company accused of illegally chopping down endangered rainforest. The Labour peer and his staff in the political consultancy that he set up after leaving government have been meeting officials on behalf of Asia Pulp and Paper. For more than a decade, APP, one of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies, has been accused by environmental groups such as Greenpeace of destroying thousands of hectares of Indonesian rainforest and endangering some of the world’s rarest animals. A growing number of firms have boycotted APP. The disclosure comes as Mandelson and other peers are expected to face pressure from the House of Lords authorities to declare their clients. Read article
AP — A deadly lead poisoning outbreak that began two years ago in northern Nigeria continues to claim young victims even today, an aid agency official said Thursday, while calling on the government to do more to protect those at risk. Ivan Gayton of Doctors Without Borders also criticized the government of oil-rich Nigeria for not taking the threat seriously, despite 4,000 children already being sickened by the outbreak linked to gold mining. Foreign aid groups have done much of the work to clean the villages affected in rural Zamfara state and provide care to the children, who likely will suffer long-term brain damage from their exposure to the lead. Read article
Bloomberg – Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and Merck & Co. (MRK) are being pulled into an expanding congressional investigation about the agreement drugmakers reached with the Obama administration to support the Democrats’ overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, according to three people familiar with the talks. The probe began last year, with Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee seeking documents from an industry trade group, said the people, who aren’t authorized to speak publicly. Read article
Jakarta Post – Several protected areas across the archipelago remain under threat of deforestation apparently due to the ineffective moratorium program launched by the government last year, environmental groups say. The environmental groups have witnessed continuing forest destruction by several companies despite the moratorium. On Thursday, Greenpeace, a member of the environmental groups’ coalition, published its findings on the current situation of Indonesian forests in Riau and Central Kalimantan provinces. Read article
Huffington Post – A Seattle-based immigrant advocacy nonprofit filed a formal civil rights complaint against the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, challenging the practice of local police departments calling in border patrol agents to act as interpreters in routine matters. As part of the complaint, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) also released a damning video which they claim was recorded last February. It allegedly depicts border patrol agents calling undocumented immigrants “all wet,” (at the 2:25 mark in the below video) a derogatory term used to describe those who have crossed the border illegally, according to NWIRP. A Washington State Patrol officer brought the border patrol agents captured in the video to the scene for “interpretation assistance,” according to the complaint. Read article
NY Times – In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers. It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.” Read article
The New York Times – By his own telling, Rupert Murdoch has portrayed himself as a man with Britain’s most power-packed Rolodex: gossiping with Margaret Thatcher about Ronald Reagan, drinking too much after his backing secured an improbable victory for John Major, joshing that he and Tony Blair were like two porcupines mating, fielding barbed threats from Gordon Brown and slipping in the back door of 10 Downing Street as David Cameron’s first visitor after his election. Read Article
KTBS – It is the second time this year a Romanian government has crashed. This time it fell less than three months after Prime Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu took office. The censure motion passed with 235 votes, four more than the minimum required by the Romanian Constitution. There are 460 legislators. The motion was filed by the opposition Social Democrats and Liberals, who accused the Cabinet of lack of transparency in the selling of natural resources and in approving money transfers to local authorities belonging to the ruling parties. Read article
BBC – Influential Japanese politician Ichiro Ozawa has been found not guilty in a funding scandal. Mr Ozawa, dubbed Japan’s “shadow shogun” because of the backroom power he wields, had been accused of violating political fundraising laws. But he had argued it was a technical mistake of which he had been unaware. Read article
BBC – They say 120,000 people packed the capital Prague, protesting against austerity measures and corruption. Police put the numbers at 90,000. Echoing 1989, people jangled their keys – a signal to the centre-right coalition cabinet to lock up and leave. Read article
The Guardian – Energy minister Charles Hendry will today set out the government’s support for new nuclear power, in the face of opposition from the Tories’ coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. Hendry will tell the Nuclear Industry Forum that there is a role for new nuclear plants, provided they do not require public subsidies. In one of the key differences between the two coalition parties, the Tories back a new generation of private sector-funded nuclear power stations while the Lib Dems have long opposed new nuclear build. Read Article
New York Times – Confronted with evidence of widespread corruption in Mexico, top Wal-Mart executives focused more on damage control than on rooting out wrongdoing, an examination by The New York Times found. In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country. The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico. Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. Read Article
Reuters – Federal prosecutors in California are investigating a Goldman Sachs employee for insider trading, according to prosecutors and defense lawyers who attended a hearing in U.S. federal court in New York on Thursday. The employee is suspected of giving inside information on two public companies to former Galleon Group co-founder Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted last year in one of the largest insider trading cases in Wall Street history. Read Article
Independent – The former British prime minister’s consultancy firm was paid a reported £27million in 2009 to advise Kuwait’s rulers on “political and economic trends and governmental reform.” A number of Kuwaiti MPs are now in the process of gathering information about the appointment, and plan to question the country’s finance minister Mustafa Jassem later this month. Read article
MJ – Between 2008 and 2011, 26 major American corporations paid no net federal income taxes despite bringing in billions in profits, according to a new report (PDF) from the nonprofit research group Citizens for Tax Justice. CTJ calculates that if the companies had paid the full 35 percent corporate tax rate, they would have put more than $78 billion into government coffers. Here’s a look at the 10 most profitable tax evaders and the politicians their CEOs, employees, and PACs give the most money to. Read article
Reuters – The British businessman whose murder has sparked political upheaval in China was poisoned after he threatened to expose a plan by a Chinese leader’s wife to move money abroad, two sources with knowledge of the police investigation said. Read article
Wall Street Journal – Authorities in the U.S. and Libya are investigating oil giants such as Italy’s Eni SpA E and France’s Total SA over their past relations with the fallen Libyan regime, potentially casting a cloud on the companies’ ambitions to expand their foothold in the country with the largest oil reserves in Africa. Last year, a civil war that toppled Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi nearly shut down the country’s crude production, stressing global oil markets. But as oil-company operations return to normal, the probes may complicate the oil companies’ business in the country. The Libyan general prosecutor’s office is investigating “Libyan and foreign operators in Libya” for possible “financial irregularities,” its deputy head, Abdelmajeed Saad, said in an interview.In a March letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the prosecutor’s office formally asked the head of audit at Libya’s National Oil Co. to supply oil-company documents. The letter mentions oil transactions between NOC and international traders Vitol Group and Glencore International PLC as examples of documents it is seeking. Though the Libyan probe focuses mostly on the Gadhafi era, the letter indicates that the request involving the traders includes the period of the country’s civil war through the present. Read Article
Guardian – Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has handed out cash gifts worth more than €100,000 to young women due to testify in his trial on charges of paying an underage prostitute. Berlusconi has reportedly paid €127,000 (£105,000) to three witnesses since his trial began last April. The trial centres on Moroccan runaway Karima el-Mahroug, known as Ruby the Heart Stealer, who attended so-called “bunga bunga” parties at Berlusconi’s mansion outside Milan in 2010. Read article
The Inquisitr – Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan of the Court of Common Pleas in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, plead guilty in open court that they sentenced children to juvenile detention because they were paid off to do it by the PA Childcare and a sister company, Western PA Childcare corporation that ran the private facilities. Read Article
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