When U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie announced a $311 million settlement to end a probe into kickbacks by leading manufacturers of knee and hip replacements, he touted the agreement as a groundbreaking development for consumers and the industry. The deal also proved to be lucrative for Christie’s old boss. Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft was one of five private attorneys whom Christie hand-picked to monitor the implant makers. Now Ashcroft’s D.C.-based firm is poised to collect more than $52 million in 18 months, among the biggest payouts reported for a federal monitor. Disclosed in SEC filings, the arrangement calls for Zimmer Holdings of Indiana to pay Ashcroft Group Consulting Services an average monthly fee between $1.5 million and $2.9 million. The figure includes a flat payment of $750,000 to the firm’s ‘senior leadership group,’ individual legal and consulting services billed at up to $895 an hour, and as much as $250,000 a month for expenses including private airfare, lodging and meals. A spokesman for Ashcroft said yesterday the former attorney general was ‘uniquely qualified’ for the role as monitor and more than 30 professionals at his firm were working on the matter. The spokesman, Mark Corallo, […]
During the week of Jan. 15, an innocuous-looking e-mail appeared in thousands of inboxes around the world. Its subject line read, ‘230 dead as storm batters Europe.’ The e-mail came with a file attached, bearing a plausible-sounding name like Full Story.exe or Read More.exe. Plenty of people clicked on it. After all, storms really were battering Europe at the time; that week high winds and rain had killed 14 in the U.K. alone. But all great cons have a grain of truth in them somewhere. The file that arrived with the e-mail was, of course, a computer virus, immediately christened the Storm Worm by the Finnish computer security firm F-Secure, which was among the first to spot it. Since then, the Storm Worm has proved remarkably hard to kill. Nine months later, it’s still out there, infecting something like a million computers worldwide. It’s not the most damaging virus in history, but it may be the most sophisticated. Whoever created it is to viruses what Michelangelo was to ceilings. The Storm Worm is a marvel of social engineering. Its subject line changes constantly. Whoever produced it–and its many later variants–has a lively feel for the seductive come-on and […]
RAMALLAH/GAZA CITY — Vowing yesterday to go on fighting the ‘Zionist enemy,’ Hamas called Mahmoud Abbas the worst leader in Palestinian history and said he had no right to make concessions to Israel at the Annapolis peace conference. Speaking at an ‘anti-Annapolis’ conference in Gaza, leaders of the Islamist group which seized the enclave from Abbas’ forces in June said the president did not represent the Palestinian people and vowed never to recognize Israel. ‘Let the whole world hear us - we will not cede an inch of Palestine and we will never recognize Israel,’ Hamas’ Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh told the meeting of about 1,000 people, including representatives from some other Palestinian factions. Hamas’ seizure of control of Gaza, prompted Abbas, whose rival Fatah faction holds sway in the West Bank, to sack Haniyeh as prime minister and open negotiations, with US sponsorship, that could lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas, shunned by the West for refusing to renounce violence, was not invited to today’s conference in Annapolis, Maryland. Israel, which views Gaza as an ‘enemy entity’ and launches regular raids into the territory to curb rocket attacks, killed a Hamas militant and […]
It’s just straws in the wind so far. India’s Ministry of Culture announces that foreign tourists can no longer pay in dollars when visiting the Taj Mahal and other heritage sites; they have to pay in good, hard rupees. Iran and Venezuela call for a joint OPEC statement on the weak US dollar. Rap star Jay-Z’s latest video shows our hero flashing a wad of euros, not dollars. Only straws in the wind, but all in the past couple of weeks. For the majority of Americans who do not travel abroad, the only visible effect so far of the dollar’s steep fall has been higher fuel prices at the pump. The Chinese imports that fill the big-box stores still cost the same, because the Chinese yuan is still pegged to the American dollar. But that may be about to change, along with many other things. At the beginning of 2003, one euro bought one US dollar. Eighteen months ago, it bought $1.20. Now it is pushing $1.50, and there is no reason to think that it will stop there. Three of the world’s biggest oil exporters, Iran, Venezuela and Russia, are demanding payment in euros rather than dollars. […]
The only known recordings of a brilliant physicist who predicted the existence of parallel universes have been found in the basement of his rock star son’s flat. The tapes document how Hugh Everett, a quantum physicist, developed his idea at the age of 24, while a graduate student at Princeton University in 1957. Everett’s theory gave rise to the concept of a multitude of universes, or a ‘multiverse’, where all life’s possibilities play out. It means that somewhere Elvis is still rocking, the Nazis won the second world war and England qualified for Euro 2008. The recordings are believed to have been made in 1977, after a physics conference at which Everett’s parallel worlds theory was resurrected after being shunned for two decades. The tapes were thought lost after his death at the age of 51 in 1982. They were found during the making of a TV documentary in which Mark Everett, the physicist’s son and lead singer of the US band Eels, attempts to understand the work that consumed his father. The programme, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, airs on BBC4 this evening. The tapes record a conversation between Everett and Charles Misner, a physics professor […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
