Nightowl Newswrap

By@KYYellowDog

• Seriously, there is no crime these finance fuckers won't aid and abet. "HSBC had routinely acted as a financier to clients routing funds from the world's most dangerous corners, including Mexico, Iran and Syria. Lax controls at the bank allowed Mexican drug cartels to launder billions of dollars through its US operations, the investigation found."

• And we have a new competitor for Most Vicious Fucker in the Middle East "An Omani court has sentenced six people to jail terms of 12 to 18 months for comments posted on social media that it said amounted to slander against the ruling sultan."

• Five billion is pocket change for Big Oil. You want them to pay attention, add three zeros. "Nigerian regulators have told parliament that Royal Dutch Shell, the Netherlands-based oil and gas company, should be fined $5bn for environmental damage caused by an oil spill at its offshore Bonga field last December."

• The real humiliating shambles is the inexcusable treatment of Olympic cleaning staff as slave labor. "The head of private security giant G4S has agreed under questioning by British lawmakers that the firm's failure to provide enough security guards for the Olympics was "a humiliating shambles"."

• If this does not convince you we need national voting standards, nothing will. "The project says that less than 20 percent of 2.5 million military voters were able to request and return their absentee ballots in 2008 elections, and that in 2010 only 5 percent of military voters were able to successfully vote by absentee ballot. Those states making the list of 15 "all-stars" include Alaska, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. Eric Eversole, executive director of the military voter project, identified the states doing the worst job at helping military voters as Alabama, California, Illinois, New York and Wisconsin."

• Jim DeMint is an anti-military, anti-family, unAmerican piece of shit "Thousands of sick Marine veterans and their families may be on the verge of taking a giant leap toward receiving health care for illnesses they suffered from decades of water contamination at Marines Base Camp Lejeune, N.C. Legislation that has languished for years was expected to be voted on in the full Senate this week under an across-the-aisle deal between the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. But a South Carolina senator has blocked the bill, saying he worries about fraud."

• Could Libya achieve democratic pluralism before Egypt does? "Results from Libya's first elections after the overthrow of Col Gaddafi have shown gains for an alliance of parties seen as broadly liberal."

• All other polls to the contrary; this looks like an outlier to us. "The poll found 52 percent of registered voters saying they want all the tax cuts extended, including the tax cuts for incomes above $250,000, while 43 percent want the cuts extended just for incomes below that threshhold."

And finally...

• What part of "self-destructive stupidity" do you not understand? "The Solomon Islands has become a hub for "laundering" wild birds into the global captive-bred bird trade, says the wildlife trade watchdog Traffic. Thousands of parrots, cockatoos and other exotic birds have been exported over the last 10 years, they report. But officials say there are no major captive breeding units in the islands. The Solomons recently joined CITES, the global wildlife trade convention, which sets different conditions for trading captive-bred and wild animals. "Declaring exported birds as being captive-bred has all the hallmarks of a scam to get around international trade regulations," said Chris Shepherd, Traffic's deputy director for Southeast Asia. Some of the 35 bird species exported from the Solomons are on the internationally recognised Red List of Threatened Species. They include the Critically Endangered yellow-crested cockatoo (Cacatua sulphurea), and the chattering lory (Lorius garrulus) and blue bird of paradise (Paradisaea rudolphi), which are both categorised as Vulnerable."

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