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With heavy hearts, Butler will take on St. John's
Andrew Smith's influence – the way he lived, the way he died – extends beyond Indianapolis and the Butler University community.
National college basketball reporters, many of whom covered the Bulldogs' 2010 and 2011 Final Four runs, have been posting on Twitter about Smith. There was a moment of silence in Smith's memory Wednesday at the Boston Celtics' home game against the Indiana Pacers. All Big East men's basketball games through Sunday will observe similar moments.
Fox Sports 1 plans to air a video tribute to open Saturday's national broadcast of Butler's noon game against St. John's at Hinkle Fieldhouse.
Matt Norlander, who chronicled Smith's cancer fight for CBSsports.com, wrote that Smith's death has "become one of the most impactful and powerful tragedies in sports in recent memory." Norlander has proposed Butler make Smith's number, 44, the first ever to be retired by the university.
"Premature death endears us all the more to those who've died because they've been robbed of a future they richly deserve," he wrote. "Thousands in this country alone will die this year from evil cancers and other vexing diseases.
"Andrew is emblematic of those tragedies and at the same time a symbol of strength. To me, that's what makes it worth putting his name and number high in Hinkle. So future generations can see the name, find the story and discover that Butler basketball in so many ways was defined by a man taken too soon but eternally tied to this program at its proudest."
Butler has begun honoring Smith, announcing Friday the creation of an Andrew Smith Scholarship Fund. His widow, Samantha, posted on Twitter:
"Andrew LOVED Butler. I am so honored and proud that this will be established in his name; it's a wonderful tribute."
Players from Covenant Christian, where Smith played in high school, were to wear jerseys from his senior season in Friday's game against Plainfield – including No. 33, which had not been worn since Smith graduated.
It has been the delicate task of Chris Holtmann, who did not coach Smith, to honor Smith's memory while at the same time managing emotions of Butler players and preparing them for a Big East schedule. Players, who will wear "AS44" patches for the rest of the season, gathered after practice Wednesday to share and hear stories of the former Bulldog center.
The Butler coach has an ally in Curt Smith, father of Andrew. Holtmann said the father told him: "If your players start feeling sorry for themselves, just give me two minutes in the locker room."
Smith family members, including Samantha Smith and Andrew's parents, are scheduled to attend Saturday's game. Holtmann said tributes pouring in about Smith "made all of us certainly feel really good to be part of this program."
Senior guard Kellen Dunham, a freshman in 2012-13, roomed with Smith for road games. He shares Smith's Christian faith and said he became emotional when hearing the stories.
"He was a total window," Dunham said. "People saw him, they saw Jesus."
Doyel: Andrew Smith, like Lauren Hill, showed us how to live
Dunham said Smith would have encouraged the Bulldogs to win because "that's all he cared about as a player." The Bulldogs are ranked No. 23, but have started 1-3 in the Big East. They face Providence and Creighton next week on the road.
St. John's is 0-5 in the Big East and has lost eight in a row. The Bulldogs are 19-point favorites, but it's impossible to project how they might be affected.
"We really try to just take the day that's in front of us, be genuine in our approach, care for our players the best that we can, keep their needs at the forefront of our program," Holtmann said. "Take it one day at a time, and hopefully improve and grow. And out of this, become a closer team."
Call IndyStar reporter David Woods at (317) 444-6195. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.
Honoring Andrew Smith
- A memorial service will be at 5 p.m. Sunday at Traders Point Christian Church, Whitestown. Doors open at 4. The service will be live streamed at TPCC.org. Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens, the former Butler coach, is scheduled to deliver the eulogy.
- Butler has introduced the Andrew Smith Scholarship Fund. Contributions may be made online at Bulldognation.butler.edu/andrewsmith or by check to Butler University Advancement, 4600 Sunset Ave., Indianapolis, IN 46208. (Reference "Andrew Smith Scholarship Fund" in check memo.)
- Flowers may be sent to Traders Point Christian Church. Donations may be made in Smith's honor to Be The Match. The family will have tables at Traders Point to help people join the bone marrow registry.
- >> Proceeds from Butler's "Stay Positive Day" go to the Smith family. The organization is run by Butler graduate Eric Day, a two-time cancer survivor. Items for sale will be "Stay Positive" wristbands for $1, posters and bookmarks for $5, and 1,000 T-shirts for $10 each.
ST. JOHN'S at NO. 23 BUTLER
Tipoff: Noon Saturday.
Radio: WFNI-1070 and 93.5 FM.
Coach: Chris Mullin
Pos;Player;PPG;Key stat;
F;Kassoum Yakwe;6.1;4.3 rpg;
F;Christian Jones;7.4;5.5 rpg;
F;Ron Mvouika;9.2;41% 3FG;
G;Felix Baalamou;7.7;3.9 rpg;
G;Federico Mussini;12.8;41 3s;
Coach: Chris Holtmann
Pos;Player;PPG;Key stat
F;Andrew Chrabascz;11.8;4.7 rpg;
F;Roosevelt Jones;14.6;4.6 apg;
C;Tyler Wideman;9.3;65.5 % FG;
G;Kellen Dunham;15.3;35 3s;
G;Tyler Lewis;7.8;4.1 apg;
Doyel: Andrew Chrabascz's dad, Carl, gained a lot as a professional loser
>> The Red Storm are in their first year under coach Chris Mullin, a former Pacers guard. St. John's will be without 6-11 center Yankuba Sima, who is sidelined by injury.
>> Since joining the Big East, Butler is 8-12 in conference home games. The Bulldogs have lost their past three Big East games at Hinkle Fieldhouse.
>> Dunham is 9-of-15 on 3s over past three games. Before that, he missed 23 consecutive 3-point attempts.
— David Woods


text:
Letting Engineers Choose Their Own Teams: How It Works
As part what they call Project Upscale, New Relic recently decided to let engineers choose their own teams. Did it work out?
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.Join For Free
New Relic recently put its thoughts about innovative engineering into practice by letting engineers choose their own teams and make their own rules in what we call Project Upscale. At FutureStack16 in San Francisco, attendees will get a rare behind-the-scenes look at our software teams, the way they work, and how we ended up building a stronger organization. Who knows? You might pick up some best practices for your own software development organization.
We Let Our Engineers Choose Their Own Teams
In a special session titled, "Inversion of Control: How New Relic's Engineers Picked Their Own Teams and Built a Faster Org," New Relic Chief Architect Nic Benders and Senior Software Engineer Cory Johannsen will take you behind the scenes of Project Upscale, sharing what it was really like to let our engineers select their own teams and make their own rules, how we nearly chickened out, and why we think this is the future of engineering.
To convey what really went down, the session will combine a high-level perspective from an engineering leader with the personal experience of an individual contributor who ended up thriving on a team he would never have expected to join.
As Nic explains it:
"Building great products means dedicating your engineering organization to innovation. But success brings new challenges and organizations can become frustrated by the feeling that innovation is getting harder, not easier, as they grow. At New Relic, we went back to our roots to solve this problem and ended up giving our engineers far more control than anyone thought possible, and it worked out great!"
Common Problems for Growing Teams of Engineers
A key issue, Nic says, was increasing dependencies on other teams. Small delays on one team can ripple out to all the teams that depended on them, rapidly becoming big delays and big problems. Cory felt this first-hand as an engineer, for example, when a project he was working on was stalled by upstream delays.
The result was Project Upscale, an organizational redesign that put our engineers, designers, and product managers at the center of the solution through crowd-sourced analysis, self-selection of team members, and group chartering, with the goal that every individual on every team fully understands their purpose and has the tools and authority to get the job done.
If you see these kinds of issues in your organization, we hope that learning about how we addressed them can be helpful. We are interested not just in creating great software, Nic says, but in pushing the state of the art in how software is made. We wanted to ensure our engineering process matched our culture, he adds, and we found a way to help engineers have a say in how they choose to do their work, have a blast, and ship great software. Based on the results, we think other companies should be doing it too!
Published at DZone with permission of Fredric Paul, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
From On-Prem to SaaS
Breaking Down the Monolith
Cucumber Selenium Tutorial: A Comprehensive Guide With Examples and Best Practices
Adding Mermaid Diagrams to Markdown Documents

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Between work deadlines, family commitments and ever-increasing to-do lists, it can often seem like there isn't enough time in the day to get everything accomplished.
An upcoming online group coaching session led by certified life and wellness coach Kimberly Anderson will help Brock University employees evaluate and prioritize tasks.
Not Enough Time in the Day will take place Thursday, Jan. 20 from noon to 1 p.m. via Microsoft Teams.
The free online employee wellness event is a highlight of the January Wellness Calendar prepared by Brock's Health Management and Wellness Team.
Other initiatives featured in the calendar include a link to a video recording of a recent webinar that outlined resources and perks of Brock's Employee and Family Assistance Program provider Lifeworks; the University's participation in a year-long initiative to make kindness the norm; a teaser about a 'reset' initiative kicking off within the next several weeks; and a SharePoint link to find additional employee wellness resources.
Additional wellness and professional development events available to employees can be found on Focus on Learning and ExperienceBU. (For the latter, select categories such as 'Faculty/Staff welcome', 'Health & Wellness' and 'Workshops & Skill Development' to help narrow the search.)
Questions about employee wellness initiatives can be directed to firstname.lastname@example.com


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Sheraton Krabi Beach Resort
This luxurious hotel is wonderfully located, close to the city centre and right by Khlon-Moung beach. Ao Nang is around 10 km away and Ao Nang's beach is 20 minutes from the hotel. Phang-Nga bay is approximately 39 km from the hotel and the airport is easily reached in 30 minutes with public transport.


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ASI_SI_Evo_WirelessNetInfo 2022 : Special Issue on Evolution of Wireless Networks and Information Processing, Applied System Innovation journal, MDPI
|Link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/asi/special_issues/wireless_networks_information_processing#editors
Call For Papers
Call for Papers
Special Issue "Evolution of Wireless Networks and Information Processing"
Applied System Innovation journal, MDPI
URL: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/asi/special_issues/wireless_networks_information_processing#editors
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2022.
Special Issue Editors
Dr. Muhammad Mostafa Monowar
Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computing & Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Dr. Al-Sakib Khan Pathan
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, United International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Dr. Zubair Fadlullah
Thunder Bay Regional Health Research Institute (TBRHRI), Department of Computer Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We are delighted to announce a Special Issue of Applied System Innovation, entitled, "Evolution of Wireless Networks and Information Processing".
Recently, the unprecedented growth of miniaturization technologies, the development and deployment of mobile networks beyond 5G, and the rapid proliferation of mobile applications created new opportunities for the future development of wireless communications and networking. The recent progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools and technologies are also demonstrating their enormous potential and profound impact on the design of intelligent wireless networks in the data collection, communication, and computing analytics layers. AI technologies appeared as an effective way to promote edge computing to save precious bandwidth and time, in order to communicate with the centralized, cloud-based servers to locally solve various problems and offer task-specific solutions close to the edge of the network. Moreover, the 21st century is witnessing a huge influx in so-called Big Data, which requires seamless information processing within emerging network systems, both with and without embedded intelligence. Such information needs to be processed by billions of mobile/edge devices and millions of software applications in a distributed manner, in order to reduce the burden on centralized clouds. These evolutionary trends in mobile networks and information processing requirements are pushing for the development of a new computing paradigm, including neurocomputing and quantum computing, as well as new methods for Big Data processing. This Special Issue welcomes recent research on wireless networks and information processing techniques, ranging from abstract, theoretical aspects to practical issues.
In particular, the topics of interest for the Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:
Machine-learning-assisted communications and networking;
Massive connectivity schemes for the future Internet of Things (IoT);
Space/air/ground communications and networking;
Low-power communications and networking;
Heterogeneous coexistence in wireless networks;
Resource allocation and mobility management;
Reinforcement learning for networks and information processing;
Deep-learning-based big data mining;
Deep learning for intelligent control and decision making;
Graph-based deep neural information processing;
Quantum information processing;
Quantum networks;
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drone-assisted communication networks;
Quantum communications;
Smart IoT sensor design with native AI technology;
Biomedical data processing.
Dr. Muhammad Mostafa Monowar
Dr. Al-Sakib Khan Pathan
Dr. Zubair Fadlullah
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering (https://www.mdpi.com/user/register/) and logging (https://www.mdpi.com/user/login/) in to this website. Once you are registered, go to the submission form ( https://susy.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload/?journal=asi ) .
Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/asi/instructions). Applied System Innovation is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/asi/instructions) page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
heterogeneous networks
machine learning
deep learning
quantum computing
big data processing
data mining
This special issue is now open for submission.


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Organisers of the upcoming Crowley Clan Gathering in Macroom are calling on more Irish Crowleys to come and participate in this year's event.
ORGANISERS of the upcoming Crowley Clan Gathering in Macroom are calling on more Irish Crowleys to come and participate in this year's event.
Running every three years in West Cork, this year's event will be based at the Riverside Hotel in Macroom from September 13th to 15th and was recently launched at the same venue.
Speaking to The Southern Star, tánaiste of the Crowley Clan Council, James Crowley, said that while they have a lot of overseas interest in the gathering, they would love to see more Irish Crowleys attend and get involved.
'At the moment we have about 100 people registered for this year's event with mostly coming from America, Canada, France and Australia. We would love to have more Irish Crowleys come to this event and it would give them a chance to meet their American cousins,' said James.
'It promises to be a great weekend and one particular highlight will be a DNA information session that will take place on Sunday morning. It will be chaired by the clan DNA specialist, Cathy Budd from the USA, and she will help people trace their ancestry.'
Other events taking place over the weekend will include music, road bowling, Irish dancing demonstration as well as bus trips to historical sites like Kilmichael and Gougane Barra. The customary clan mass will also take place on the preserved Crowley Castle ruins at Ahakeera Saturday and later that night a Clan Banquet with special guests will take place at the Riverside Hotel.
The last Crowley Clan Gathering was held in Bantry in 2016 where 155 attended with the majority coming from the United States.
Speaking at the launch, Clan Taoiseach, Dr Pat Crowley from Kilkenny said that the Clan Gathering is an opportune time for all those associated with the Clan name to come along to this event.
Contact Liam on 087-22099139 or James on 086-3831474 for more information or see www.crowleyclan.com.


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Welcome to Dandy Liquor! We are a locally owned and operated liquor store, curating an unbeatable drink selection.
As you walk through our aisles, you'll find shelves packed with beers, wines, and spirits. Best of all? We provide selections from all over the world — fine wines from Italy and Spain, and liquor from Ireland and Mexico. We also offer many different types of beer, including IPAs, porters, stouts, lagers, and much more!
We have not one, not two, but three liquor stores in Texas. Find us in Sealy, Katy, and Richmond. We offer the same great selection no matter which location you visit!
Stop by to grab what you need for the evening. Questions? You can call us at (281) 232-6655.


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Vivino is a popular wine app used by wine lovers and novices around the world to look for their favourite drops. Unlike other ratings given by professional publications like Robert Parker (Wine Advocate), Wine Spectator, James Suckling, Stephen Tanzer, Vivino ratings are given by consumers for other consumers to reference.
For the convenience of Vivino fans, we have highlighted wines from our Wines Online portfolio that have a score of 4.0 points and above on Vivino. A Vivino rating of 4.0 is roughly equivalent to 90 points on the professional wine rating scale. We are highlighting those wines that have an average score of 4.0 and above from multiple vintages and have received more than 100 ratings from Vivino users. Wines Online looks at a wine's average score instead of a particular vintage's because we want to feature wines that receive consistently positive feedback from Vivino users across vintages. We have also removed those wines that have less than 100 Vivino ratings as the smaller Vivino contributor size can unfairly skew the scores of these wines.
Wines Online is not sponsored by, affiliated or associated with the above publications. All ratings shown in this website are meant solely for reference by our customers.


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C-Ration Pizza
1943 series C-Rations were our staple fare from August 1968 to March 1969 when the 1968 series replaced them. At times we had meals from our Battery Mess and often we did not. We operated 24 hours per day as did hunger, so if you got the munchies outside the meal periods your options were few. CARE PACKAGES from family, friends and womens social organizations (THANK YOU! You know who you are.) provided food with taste variation but Cs made up 90% of snack food. The Vietnamese were so poor they had little food to sell or donate to the allied cause.
13 basic meals were the total menu choices in the 1943 version. Each package had one, and other items from the list below and an accessory package. All meals and items are listed below the pizza recipe. All ingredients for C-Ration pizza except the Mc.Iihenny Tabasco Sauce are taken from C-Ration boxes. The maker of tabasco sauce sold a C-Ration cookbook and a bottle of sauce, delivered in Vietnam for $5. They made me a lifelong user of Tabasco.
I am sure the recipe below is partly theirs and partly our adapting.
3 full biscuit cans
1 spiced beef/sauce
1 semi-soft cheese
1 empty C-Ration box
1 toilet paper pack
1 book of matches
1 plastic spoon
1 P-38 can opener
Open all 5 cans with the P-38 leaving the lids slightly attached on 2 biscuit cans. Use the removed lid to cut 4 thin slices from the biscuit, toss the unused biscuits. Put 1 slice on the bottom of the 2 cans with attached lids. Use the plastic spoon to remove the beef and cheese to the third biscuit can, add Tabasco and mix briskly. Put half of the mix on each biscuit slice, add the other slice on top and fold the lid to the closed position.
Crumple the toilet paper and stuff it inside the C-Ration box, put the pizza cans on the toilet paper, close the lid and light it. Daring cooks used 2 toilet paper packs for a crisper crust. Shortly you enjoy hot pizza. It was decent given the circumstances.
1943 C-Ration Main Course
Boned Chicken
Chicken & Noodles
Meat Loaf
Spiced Beef/Sauce
Beans & Wieners
Spaghetti & Meatballs
Beef, Potato & Gravy
Ham & Lima Beans
Meatballs & Beans
Ham & Eggs
Beef Steak
Ham Slices
Turkey Loaf
Other Food Included
Apple Sauce
Fruit Cocktail
Peanut Butter
Processed Cheese Spread Caraway or Pimento
Fruit Cake
Pound Cake
Pecan Roll
White Bread (biscuit)
Cocoa Powder
Various Jams
Accessory Pack Came with every meal choice.
Gum 2 Chiclets
Toilet Paper
4-pack Cigarettes (various brands)
Non-dairy Creamer
Instant Coffee
Plastic Spoon
Click the image above to view full size.
Dust »


text:
NEW DELHI: India has terminated a probe into alleged jump in imports of phenol, used in laminates and plywood industry, following withdrawal of the complaint by domestic players.
The Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR), under the commerce ministry, had started the probe in August 2019, following a complaint filed by Hindustan Organic Chemicals Ltd and Deepak Phenolics Ltd.
They had filed an application before the directorate for initiation of 'safeguard' investigation and imposition of 'safeguard duties' concerning imports of phenol into India.
The complainants had alleged that increase in the imports was impacting the companies.
"Since the applicants have withdrawn the application, it is considered appropriate not to continue with the present investigation. Accordingly, …the director general, hereby, terminates the present safeguard investigation concerning imports of phenol into India," DGTR has said in a notification.
It said that, while the directorate was in the process of examining all the issues raised by various interested parties, and making a conclusion on the basis of analysis, the applicants in their letters dated March 20 this year and March 23 withdrew the application for imposition of the duty.
They had stated that the current jurisprudence and interpretation of safeguard law does not remedy the increased import of phenol into India and the applicants are, therefore, seeking remedy under the anti-dumping laws.
In a safeguard probe, the directorate sees whether the import has increased significantly and has caused or threaten to cause serious injury to domestic producers of like and/or directly competing products.
If found that the jump in imports has impacted domestic players, the directorate recommends safeguard duty on the imports. The Finance Ministry takes the final call to impose the duty.
Source: indiatimes.com


text:
Hello, and Happy Tuesday, friends! I hope you had a wonderful Easter, if you celebrate the holiday! Otherwise I hope you had a wonderful weekend! This past week did not turn out as expected. Mid-week a table base showed up that my husband ordered for me. He noticed my back giving me problems after the… Continue reading To-Do Tuesday 4-3-18 | Nevermore Raven Pillow Finish
Tag: Nevermore
To Do Tuesday 3-27-18 | Spring Break and Prep Work
Hello, and Happy Tuesday, friends! Last week I had on my list to work on the Project Bags I decided to make for sale. It was also Spring Break, so while I did get all of the bags cut and prepped to sew, I didn't get to the sewing. The kids were with their dad… Continue reading To Do Tuesday 3-27-18 | Spring Break and Prep Work
Finished Friday | The Rockstar Bag
I'm so excited to share this finish! I have been wanting to make The Rockstar Bag for a while, so I made sure it was one of the first few bags on my list to make in 2016. My daughter, Callie, wanted a bag so I told her this one was for her. I had… Continue reading Finished Friday | The Rockstar Bag
To-Do Tuesday 2-23-16 | Starting the Rockstar Bag
Hello, friends and Happy Tuesday! I'd like to say I have a bag finish this week, but I am waiting on some hardware to complete The Window Shopper Tote. I purchased everything I needed last December, but it turns out that a lot of other members of the Bag Of The Month club are finding… Continue reading To-Do Tuesday 2-23-16 | Starting the Rockstar Bag


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Fortune favors the bold, except when you go for two for a win in overtime.
At least that was the lesson that Super 25 No. 11 John Curtis learned the hard way in an upset loss to Archbishop Rummel on Friday night. The setback certainly ended John Curtis' hopes of a national top-10 finish as the Patriots fell 21-20, their first loss and the first time they scored fewer than 35 points this season. Here's what we learned from one of the most eventful upsets in recent weeks:
1) Patriots went for glory … and got gut punched
John Curtis was in position to force overtime with an extra point. Instead they went for two and the win … and came up short. The play call may have left something to be desired, with quarterback Collin Guggenheim appearing to try a fake handoff on an option that Archbishop Rummel immediately sniffed out. Credit for the gumption to go, not the execution.
2) Rummel refused to roll over
Other teams would roll over when falling down 14-0 to the likes of John Curtis. Not Archbishop Rummel. The Raiders first scratched back a touchdown to pull within seven just after the start of the second half, then knotted the score in the third with a Logan Diggs touchdown run. From there the defenses took control until overtime, and John Curtis' fateful two-point attempt.
Every major upset has an under-the-radar hero, and Rummel's upset was Donovan Kaufman. A 5-foot-9 safety who hits far bigger than his size, the blitzing defensive back was a constant disruptive factor in Rummel's win, foiling multiple John Curtis drives. The Vanderbilt star hasn't received nearly as much attention as some of his teammates and opponents from Friday. Maybe that will change now.


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As I continue to work on researching the syllabic poetry forms for my new book, I'm captivated by the amount of quality poetry that appears in the challenges weekly. It makes me proud of all your hard work and determination. You guys are amazing!
Yet, I always worry someone will get bored with the challenge and quit writing poetry. I'm always open to unique ways to make this challenge more fun. Do you have any ideas? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Don't forget, many of the poets add their poetry in the comments section of the challenge post HERE. While you're at it, please pop over to their blogs and say hello. Just follow the links in the comments. Comments from our peers help us become better writers.
There was so much great poetry this week. I've only selected a few links for you to read so you will visit the challenge post.
Persecution in the Garden: Sally Cronin
Poetry Friday Gratitude: Vashti Q. Vega
Ever more: Kitty's Verses
Solitude: A Multitude of Musings
Tanka: Getting Lost
Breathing Space: Jules
Unpardonable: Padre's Ramblings
Annette Rochelle Aben's double Etheree resonated strongly with me this week. I've highlighted her poem below.
Vulnerability is Strength
Are not
Always what
We seem to be
Especially when
We are vulnerable
And the side of us we show
Might present the wrong impression
In reality we're seeking help
But don't know quite how to express ourselves
That is when we need to trust that others
Understand more than we think they do
That they're holding us in their hearts
Being our strength when we can't
Allowing us our space
Where we know we're safe
To find some strength
From within
And we
©2020 Annette Rochelle Aben
source: Vulnerability is Strength | Annette Rochelle Aben
I know it's a day late, but we should say some things more than once.


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Two weeks ago, REDBROWARD exposed the sordid history of Florida Justice Center (FLJC) founder Jonathan Bleiweiss. Last week, Tamarac residents urged Vice Mayor Elberg Mike Gelin to cancel a sealing and expungement event at the Tamarac Community Center because of the FLCJ. Instead, Gelin was all smiles when he stood shoulder to shoulder with Bleiweiss on Saturdayin a photograph Gelin posted on his social media.
As REDBROWARD reported, Jonathan Bleiweiss joined the Broward Sheriffs Office (BSO) in 2002. According to the Sun-Sentinel, reports of Bleiweiss' misconduct began in August 2008. "Bleiweiss' picture was posted in an Oakland Park soup kitchen, with a warning to stay away from him. The Sheriff's Office removed him from road patrol in July 2009." Bleiweiss was arrested in August 2009 after twenty men accused Bleweiss of sexual misconduct. Most of the men were illegal immigrants. Bleiweiss "faced more than 70 charges, many accusing him of sexual battery," the Sun-Sentinel reported.
The New Times detailed the case against Jonathan Bleiweiss. "Bleiweiss preyed upon illegal immigrants, asking them to show identification. If they didn't have it, say investigators, Bleiweiss would offer to let them walk in exchange for sex acts. He's accused of fondling one such immigrant in April. Another victim claims he was pulled over by Bleiweiss, who ordered the man into the back seat, then performed oral sex on him."
In 2019, The Florida Bulldog interviewed Neva Rainford-Smith, the prosecutor who took over the Bleiweiss case in 2013. Rainford-Smith said the details were "horrific."
"Witnesses to Bleiweiss' activities in his Oakland Park district said he would target and stalk young men who were especially vulnerable because they knew they could be deported. Then he would pounce, force them to give him sexual gratification, walk away and repeat the offense over and over again. Some of his victims attended the same church, Rainford-Smith said. 'The priest would warn them to be aware of this police officer. They all knew to run when they saw him coming.'"
In February 2015, Jonathan Bleiweiss accepted a plea deal from the Broward State Attorney's Office. Bleiweiss "pleaded guilty to 14 counts of armed false imprisonment, 15 counts of battery and four counts of stalking. He will also serve 10 years of probation and have to undergo a psycho-sexual evaluation, Broward Circuit Judge Michael Robinson ordered." As part of the plea deal, Bleiweiss did not have to register as a sexual offender. The move drew a strong rebuke from then Broward Public Defender "Help Me" Howard Finklestein.
"Finkelstein, whose office defends the indigent but didn't handle Bleiweiss' case, said he 'was scratching his head' when he learned Bleiweiss avoided 'sex offender' status, an outcome he called 'shocking and shameful to the whole county.'"
In the same 2019 Florida Bulldog article, Help Me Howard questioned the quality of Bleiweiss' Florida Justice Center.
"It sounds like 'I've got a website, send me money and I'll spend it,'" Finklestein said. "I have no idea what he's bringing to the table that he wants money for…I'm not aware that he has a stellar reputation in the legal community, that you would think he'd have the right contacts to match defendants with lawyers."
"He's a bad cop who should have nothing to do with justice," Finkelstein said.
Jonathan Bleiweiss told the Florida Bulldog, "he accepted a deal to avoid trial even though he knew he was innocent, and took a plea that doesn't admit guilt."
"I wouldn't admit to something that I never did," Bleiweiss said. "I've always believed in doing what's right and I'm trying to keep pursuing that."
Then, just three months ago, Jonathan Bleiweiss was arrested for violating the terms of his probation. His parole officer reported that Bleiweiss failed to complete his required sex offender treatment program.
Despite all this information, Elberg Mike Gelin did nothing to keep Jonathan Bleiweiss away from Tamarac residents.
Gelin gained notoriety in 2019 when he interrupted a commission awards ceremony for BSO Deputy Joshua Gallardo. Gelin recognized Gallardo as the man who arrested him in 2015. Gelin called Gallardo a "bad cop," a "rogue police officer and accused Gallardo of lying on police report.
So why is Gelin snapping pics with a guy like Bleiweiss in a city building?
Doesn't Gelin care about the hispanic men victimized by Bleiweiss?
Gelin regularly attacks fellow Commissioner Elvin Villalobos, a Hispanic male.
Or does Gelin only care about "rogue" BSO deputies that arrest him?
And this guy wants to be Mayor of Tamarac?


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The creative director of the Parisian fashion house presented a revisited monogram, while respecting the design of the founder
Make changes in the Balmain house. After eight years at the creative direction of the Parisian fashion house, the designer Olivier Rousteing has revisited the logo and the monogram to better adapt to the rapid growth on a global level that the brand is going to meet.
The goal is to better meet the challenges of the current market, whose communication is increasingly oriented towards digital. "I firmly believe that in order to move forward, you first have to be clear where you're coming from. That's why, at every stage of this restyling process, I stressed the need to respect our roots and refer to the design that Pierre Balmain designed for his atelier seventy years ago ", explained the designer.
"I am quite satisfied with what we have achieved: a contemporary, clean and audacious logo that manages to preserve the heritage of the original while making it clear to everyone that it represents a contemporary French luxury brand." Our new monogram refers to two of the fundamental ingredients that have distinguished this fashion house since its inception, for our founder, Pierre Balmain, but also for Paris, because this city is inextricably linked to our history ", concluded Rousteing.


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Argentum: Contemporary Silverpoint
April 24, 2017
| Twenty-eight artists, including ARC Living Master Dan Thompson, will be featured in this show of silverpoint artworks which will take place at Marbury, NYC - 26 Gramercy Park South, Suite 9G, New York, NY 10003 from April 28 - May 12, 2017.
Marbury NYC is open by appointment only or during drawing sessions.
To learn more about this and other exhibitions, please click here.
San Soldado by Lauren Redding


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Almost every weekday between the fall of 2011 and early 2015, a Russian broker named Igor Volkov called the equities desk of Deutsche Bank's Moscow headquarters. Volkov would speak to a sales trader—often, a young woman named Dina Maksutova—and ask her to place two trades simultaneously. In one, he would use Russian rubles to buy a blue-chip Russian stock, such as Lukoil, for a Russian company that he represented. Usually, the order was for about ten million dollars' worth of the stock. In the second trade, Volkov—acting on behalf of a different company, which typically was registered in an offshore territory, such as the British Virgin Islands—would sell the same Russian stock, in the same quantity, in London, in exchange for dollars, pounds, or euros. Both the Russian company and the offshore company had the same owner. Deutsche Bank was helping the client to buy and sell to himself.
At first glance, the trades appeared banal, even pointless. Deutsche Bank earned a small commission for executing the buy and sell orders, but in financial terms the clients finished roughly where they began. To inspect the trades individually, however, was like standing too close to an Impressionist painting—you saw the brushstrokes and missed the lilies. These transactions had nothing to do with pursuing profit. They were a way to expatriate money. Because the Russian company and the offshore company both belonged to the same owner, these ordinary-seeming trades had an alchemical purpose: to turn rubles that were stuck in Russia into dollars stashed outside Russia. On the Moscow markets, this sleight of hand had a nickname: konvert, which means "envelope" and echoes the English verb "convert." In the English-language media, the scheme has become known as "mirror trading."
Mirror trades are not inherently illegal. The purpose of an equities desk at an investment bank is to help approved clients buy and sell stock, and there could be legitimate reasons for making a simultaneous trade. A client might want to benefit, say, from the difference between the local and the foreign price of a stock. Indeed, because the individual transactions involved in mirror trades did not directly contravene any regulations, some employees who worked at Deutsche Bank's Russian headquarters at the time deny that such activity was improper. (Fourteen former and current employees of Deutsche Bank in Moscow spoke to me about the mirror trades, as did several people involved with the clients. Most of them asked not to be named, either because they had signed nondisclosure agreements or because they still work in banking.)
Viewed with detachment, however, repeated mirror trades suggest a sustained plot to shift and hide money of possibly dubious origin. Deutsche Bank's actions are now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, the New York State Department of Financial Services, and financial regulators in the U.K. and in Germany. In an internal report, Deutsche Bank has admitted that, until April, 2015, when three members of its Russian equities desk were suspended for their role in the mirror trades, about ten billion dollars was spirited out of Russia through the scheme. The lingering question is whose money was moved, and why.
Deutsche Bank is an unwieldy institution with headquarters in Frankfurt and about a hundred thousand employees in seventy countries. When it was founded, in 1870, its stated purpose was to facilitate trade between Germany and other countries. It soon established footholds in Shanghai, London, and Buenos Aires. In 1881, the bank arrived in Russia, financing railways commissioned by Alexander III. It has operated there ever since.
During the Nazi era, Deutsche Bank sullied its reputation by financing Hitler's regime and purchasing stolen Jewish gold. After the war, the bank concentrated on its domestic market, playing a significant role in Germany's so-called economic miracle, in which the country regained its position as the most potent state in Europe. After the deregulation of the U.S. and U.K. financial markets, in the nineteen-eighties, Deutsche Bank refreshed its overseas ambitions, acquiring prominent investment banks: the London firm Morgan Grenfell, in 1989, and the American firm Bankers Trust, in 1998. By the new millennium, Deutsche Bank had become one of the world's ten largest banks. In October, 2001, it débuted on the New York Stock Exchange.
Although the bank's headquarters remained in Germany, power migrated from conservative Frankfurt to London, the investment-banking hub where the most lavish profits were generated. The assimilation of different banking cultures was not always successful. In the nineties, when hundreds of Americans went to work for Deutsche Bank in London, German managers had to place a sign in the entrance hall spelling out "Deutsche" phonetically, because many Americans called their employer "Douche Bank."
In 2007, the bank's share price hit an all-time peak: a hundred and fifty-nine dollars. But as it grew fast it also grew loose. Before the housing market collapsed in the United States, in 2008, sparking a global financial crisis, Deutsche Bank created about thirty-two billion dollars' worth of collateralized debt obligations, which helped to inflate the housing bubble. In 2010, Deutsche Bank's own staff accused it of having masked twelve billion dollars' worth of losses. Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst, was one of three whistle-blowers. He told the Securities and Exchange Commission that, had the bank's true financial health been known in 2008, it might have folded, as Lehman Brothers had. Last year, Deutsche Bank paid the S.E.C. a fifty-five-million-dollar fine but admitted no wrongdoing. Ben-Artzi told me that bank executives had incurred a tiny penalty for a huge crime. "There was cultural criminality," he said. "Deutsche Bank was structurally designed by management to allow corrupt individuals to commit fraud."
Scandals have proliferated at Deutsche Bank. Since 2008, it has paid more than nine billion dollars in fines and settlements for such improprieties as conspiring to manipulate the price of gold and silver, defrauding mortgage companies, and violating U.S. sanctions by trading in Iran, Syria, Libya, Myanmar, and Sudan. Last year, Deutsche Bank was ordered to pay regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. two and a half billion dollars, and to dismiss seven employees, for its role in manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, or libor, which is the interest rate banks charge one another. The Financial Conduct Authority, in Britain, chastised Deutsche Bank not only for its manipulation of libor but also for its subsequent lack of candor. "Deutsche Bank's failings were compounded by them repeatedly misleading us," Georgina Philippou, of the F.C.A., declared. "The bank took far too long to produce vital documents and it moved far too slowly to fix relevant systems."
In April, 2015, the mirror-trades scheme unravelled. After a two-month internal investigation, the three Deutsche Bank employees were suspended. One was Tim Wiswell, a thirty-seven-year-old American who was then the head of Russian equities at the bank. The others were Russian sales traders on the equities desk: Dina Maksutova and Georgiy Buznik. Afterward, Bloomberg News suggested that some of the money diverted through mirror trades belonged to Igor Putin, a cousin of the Russian President, and to Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. The Rotenberg brothers own Russia's largest construction company, S.G.M., and are old friends of Vladimir Putin. They are on the U.S. government's list of sanctioned Russians, which was compiled in response to Putin's aggression in Ukraine. According to the U.S. Treasury, the Rotenbergs have "made billions of dollars in contracts" that were awarded to their company by the Russian state, often without a transparent bidding process. (Last year, S.G.M. was awarded a contract worth $5.8 billion to build a twelve-mile bridge between Russia and Crimea.)
In June, 2015, with pressure from shareholders intensifying over the mirror trades and other scandals, the co-C.E.O.s of Deutsche Bank, Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, announced that they would resign. They were replaced by John Cryan, whose remit was to clean up the bank. That September, he announced the impending close of all investment-banking activity in Russia. When the Moscow investment bank shut down, in March, the remaining employees threw a "going out of business" dinner at a restaurant near the office. By the end of the evening, bankers were dancing on the bar.
Many current and former employees of Deutsche Bank cannot quite comprehend how the equities desk in a minor financial outpost came to taint the entire institution. The ostensible function of the Moscow desk was straightforward: it bought and sold stock for approved corporate clients—mutual funds, brokerages, hedge funds, and the like. The desk had about twenty employees, and included researchers, who analyzed financial data; sales traders, who took calls from clients about buy and sell orders; and traders, who executed the orders.
According to a former employee, before the crash of 2008 the desk's yearly profit was nearly three hundred million dollars. In the years after the crash, profits plunged by more than half. In this environment of diminishing returns on normal stock-market activity, the Moscow equities desk was looking to find fresh revenue streams.
Many businesses in the Russian Federation avoid taxes by using offshore jurisdictions, such as Cyprus, for their headquarters. Rich Russians, meanwhile, often funnel their private fortunes offshore, in an effort to hide their assets from the capricious and predatory Russian state. Frequently, this fugitive money is invested in assets such as property: on Park Lane in London, or Park Avenue in New York. (Boris Rotenberg's wife, Karina, told the Russian edition of Tatler that the family has three main houses: one in Moscow, one in Monaco, and a "dacha" in Provence, where she keeps her horses.)
The impact of this capital flight is felt at both ends of its journey. Research published last year by Deutsche Bank's own analysts suggested that unrecorded capital inflows from Russia into the U.K. correlated strongly with increases in U.K. house prices and, to a lesser extent, with a strengthening of the pound sterling. Capital flight also has weakened Russia's tax base and its currency. In 2012, Putin began a "de-offshorization" program, urging businesses and oligarchs to keep their headquarters and their fortunes at home. Two years later, after Russia's incursion into Crimea led to sanctions from the European Union and the U.S., Putin declared that offshorization was illegal. But as the ruble and the economy foundered many Russians felt even more eager to remove their money. Mirror trading was an ideal escape tunnel.
According to people with knowledge of how mirror trades worked at Deutsche Bank, the main clients who were engaged in the scheme came to the bank in 2011 through Sergey Suverov, a sales researcher. Suverov left the bank soon afterward. (He has not been charged with wrongdoing.) Igor Volkov, the Russian broker, became the clients' primary representative. Initially, the accounts that Volkov handled—funds based in Russia and overseas, with such bland names as Westminster, Chadborg, Cherryfield, Financial Bridge, and Lotus—placed conventional stock-market orders. But Volkov soon made it clear to his contacts at Deutsche Bank that he wanted to make a large volume of simultaneous trades. (He could not be reached for comment.)
What did Deutsche Bank know about the companies that Volkov represented? Each new fund that wished to trade with Deutsche Bank, known as a "counterparty," was subjected to a "double check" by compliance departments in London and Moscow, to insure that papers were in order. Evidently, all the counterparties passed both internal reviews. The bank was also required to complete a "know your client," or "K.Y.C.," assessment, and determine if the client had any taint of criminality. Deutsche Bank did little to interrogate the source of funds—including those behind Westminster and other Volkov clients. According to people who worked on the desk in 2011, the K.Y.C. procedure consisted of not much more than sales traders asking counterparties to fill in a paragraph stating the source of their funds. "Nobody asked any further questions," a former employee recalls.
The Russian equities desk generally had four sales traders who took calls from clients. Two were American, and two—Maksutova and Buznik—were Russian. The sales traders reported to Tim Wiswell, the American in charge of the Russian equities team, and to Carl Hayes, an executive in London. Two other managers—Batubay Ozkan, in Moscow, and Max Koep, in London—oversaw the desk.
Maksutova and Buznik were allocated the equities desk's Russian clients. Maksutova was assigned the clients represented by Volkov. Colleagues say that she knew few personal details about Volkov. (A former trading colleague of Volkov's said that Volkov is about forty years old and heavyset, adding, "He likes beer." Another former colleague said that Volkov "wasn't a great trader, but he was a good fisherman.") Volkov previously had worked at Antanta Kapital, a brokerage owned by Arcadi Gaydamak, a Russian-Israeli billionaire. Antanta Kapital ceased trading in 2008, and Gaydamak was later indicted in Israel for fraud and money laundering. (He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received probation. But he recently spent three months in prison, in France, for tax fraud.)
In 2009, top managers at Antanta Kapital formed Westminster Capital Management, which became one of the first major mirror-trade clients. As a Deutsche Bank employee put it, Volkov was Westminster's "execution guy." Volkov also began executing mirror trades for several other companies.
Four employees at Deutsche Bank in Moscow recall that nobody tried to hide the scheme. Wiswell, Buznik, and Maksutova all met with Volkov, and his orders were discussed openly on the desk. Colleagues also remember that Hayes asked both Buznik and Wiswell about the mirror trades. Few conversations relating to the trades, however, were likely retained by Deutsche Bank's internal monitoring systems. Within the office, conversations about the trades typically occurred face to face, and videoconferences with colleagues in London were not recorded.
Several Deutsche Bank employees in London knew about the mirror trades, even though the orders were taken in Moscow. The London office executed half the transactions. The trades were also documented by a computer system, called DB Cat, which catalogued every trade made by the bank. Hayes and Koep, the supervisors in London, could call up trading receipts on their computers.
Although many people at Deutsche Bank knew about the mirror trades, not everybody was happy about them. In late 2012, Maksutova, the sales trader, went on maternity leave, and Buznik temporarily worked with Volkov. Buznik became uneasy that Volkov was executing identical buy and sell orders, and twice asked to meet with Wiswell to discuss the propriety of mirror trading. Wiswell, colleagues say, looked after Volkov's accounts personally. Wiswell assured Buznik that the trades were legitimate, and Buznik did not share his concerns with other managers. (Neither Wiswell nor his attorney responded to dozens of requests for comment.)
One day in 2011, the Russian side of a mirror trade, for about ten million dollars, could not be completed: the counterparty, Westminster Capital Management, had just lost its trading license. The Federal Financial Markets Service in Russia had barred two mirror-trade counterparties, Westminster and Financial Bridge, for improperly using the stock market to send money overseas. The failed trade was a problem for Deutsche Bank. It had paid several million dollars for stock without receiving a cent from Westminster. Employees at all levels of a financial institution notice when a trading desk abruptly falls short by a few million dollars. The episode should have raised serious suspicions—especially given the revoking of Westminster's license—but apparently it did not.
Employees recall that the failed trade was resolved in November, 2012, when Westminster repaid Deutsche Bank. Volkov resumed calling in mirror trades, on behalf of other counterparties. These companies were supposedly subjected to a rigorous "client review" process, and all of them were deemed satisfactory by a Deutsche Bank compliance team. But there was a pattern suggesting malfeasance. Clients of the scheme consistently lost small amounts of money: the differences between Moscow and London prices of a stock often worked against them, and clients had to pay Deutsche Bank a commission for every transaction—between ten hundredths and fifteen hundredths of a percentage point per trade. The apparent willingness of counterparties to lose money again and again, a former manager at Deutsche Bank told me, should have "sounded an air-raid alarm" that the true purpose of the mirror trades was to facilitate capital flight.
Wiswell, Buznik, and Maksutova also knew that there was a common interest among the counterparties, because many of them were represented by Volkov. But even Deutsche Bank employees who did not work on the desk could have concluded, after a cursory examination, how closely aligned the funds were. According to public documents, Chadborg Trade LLP, which was based in the U.K., wholly owned Lotus Capital, which was based in Russia. Another British mirror-trades entity, ErgoInvest, was registered in the same office in Hertfordshire where Chadborg was registered. Westminster Capital Management, meanwhile, was bought in 2010 by a man named Andrey Gorbatov. In 2014, Gorbatov bought another Russian brokerage implicated in mirror trades: Rye, Man & Gor. Clients of mirror trades told me that the same people who established Westminster also established one of the other counterparties: Cherryfield Management, in the British Virgin Islands.
The counterparties were not owned by Russian oligarchs. They were brokerages run by Russian middlemen who took commissions for initiating mirror trades on behalf of rich people and businesses eager to send their money offshore. A businessman who wanted to expatriate money in this way would invest in a Russian fund like Westminster, which would then use mirror trades to move that money into an offshore fund like Cherryfield. The offshore fund then wired the money, in dollars, into the businessman's private offshore account. A middleman who formed one of the Russian counterparty funds told me that the cost of his services depended upon the Russian authorities' desire to stop the export of capital. In 2011, when controls were lax, the fee was 0.2 per cent. In 2015, when sanctions were strong, and Putin was determined to retain as much wealth as he could in Russia, the fee rose to more than five per cent.
Crucially, the footprint of individual mirror trades was small. One Deutsche Bank employee recalls that, in 2014, the Moscow equities desk traded seventy to ninety million dollars' worth of stock daily. Mirror trades never exceeded twenty million dollars a day, and were normally in the region of ten million dollars. (Deutsche Bank claims that some of the suspicious trades were "one-way," meaning that another bank picked up the mirror order—a more laborious but less traceable transaction.)
Whose fortunes were being hidden? In April, I met a broker in Moscow who had worked with clients of the Deutsche Bank mirror trades. He told me that mirror trading was not a new scheme. It was invented, in the late aughts, by other banks in Russia, to help importers avoid heavy taxes on their products. The scam was ingeniously simple. A Russian importer would claim on his invoices that he had bought, say, ten rubber ducks rather than the true figure of ten thousand rubber ducks, in order to pay tax on only ten rubber ducks. Of course, the importer still needed to pay his supplier overseas for the remaining rubber ducks. He did this by expatriating money using mirror trades. Instead of paying a large tax to the Russian treasury, the importer paid a much smaller fee to money launderers.
The broker found it hard to believe that the wealthiest Russians, such as the Rotenberg brothers, would have used mirror trades. After all, there were so many ways for Putin's friends to send their money offshore, including through Russian government-owned banks, like Gazprombank, which have branches overseas. Other people I spoke with disputed the broker's assessment: U.S. and E.U. sanctions have made it increasingly difficult for Russian billionaires to expatriate money, and mirror trades had the advantage of being a quiet method, because of the relatively small amounts involved in each transaction.
Another Russian banker, who helped to set up the mirror-trade scheme, told me that much of the money belonged to Chechens with connections to the Kremlin. Chechnya, the semi-autonomous region in the North Caucasus, is ruled by the exuberantly barbarous Ramzan Kadyrov, who is close with Putin. Chechnya receives huge subsidies from Russia, and much of the money has ended up in the pockets of figures close to Kadyrov.
The Deutsche Bank mirror-trades operation appears to be linked to an even bigger attempt to expatriate money: the so-called Moldovan scheme. Starting in 2010, fake loans and debt agreements involving U.K. companies helped funnel about twenty billion dollars out of Russia to a Latvian bank, by way of Moldova. When the Moldovan scheme unravelled, in late 2015, several people were arrested. One was Alexander Grigoriev, a Russian financier who controlled Promsberbank—a now defunct institution, based in a Russian backwater called Podolsk, which counted Igor Putin as a board member. Two of Promsberbank's major shareholders—including Financial Bridge—have been accused of making mirror trades. The Russian news agency RBC has reported that "the criminal dealings of Promsberbank" and the mirror trades at Deutsche Bank are connected.
Deutsche Bank has not commented on whose money was expatriated through the mirror trades, although John Cryan, the C.E.O., has said that the bank has not knowingly assisted Russians on the sanctions list. In the deadening argot of finance, Deutsche Bank's Russian fiasco has frequently been called a "failure of controls." In an interview in March, 2016, Cryan said, "To our knowledge, the individual transaction steps in themselves were innocuous. However, the case raises questions about how effective our systems and controls were, especially with regard to the onboarding of new clients, an area where we experienced difficulties in collecting sufficient information."
This passive language is hard to square with the blatant nature of the scheme. Roman Borisovich, a former investment banker at Deutsche Bank in London, who focussed on Russian businesses, told me, " 'Fucking Obvious' is the middle name of Russian corruption."
Deutsche Bank's myopia has been noticed by regulators. In March, the Financial Conduct Authority of the U.K. sent a letter to Deutsche Bank, saying that the company's U.K. branch had "serious A.M.L. (anti-money laundering), terrorist financing and sanctions failings which were systemic in nature." A month later, Georg Thoma, a lawyer who sat on Deutsche Bank's integrity committee, and who was brought to the bank specifically to improve controls and analyze the bank's former misconduct, was forced out. He had just argued with executives at a board meeting. The deputy chairman of the board, Alfred Herling, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that Thoma had been "overzealous" in probing links between senior executives and misconduct at the bank.
Reports of Deutsche Bank's internal investigation into mirror trades do not inspire confidence. Mirror trades occurred for at least two years before anyone raised any concerns, and when red flags appeared it was months before anyone acted on them. According to Bloomberg News, the internal report notes that, in early 2014, a series of inquiries about the propriety of mirror trades had been logged by multiple parties, including Hellenic Bank, in Cyprus, the Russian Central Bank, and back-office staff members at Deutsche Bank itself. When Hellenic Bank executives contacted Deutsche Bank and asked about the unusual trades, they did not hear back from the compliance department. Instead, their inquiry was fielded by the equities desk that was performing the mirror trades. Deutsche Bank in Moscow reassured Hellenic Bank that everything was in order.
Tim Wiswell, the head of the equities desk, was known to his colleagues as Wiz. He grew up in Essex, Connecticut. He has strong connections to Russia. His father, George C. Wiswell III, worked for many years in the oil-and-gas sector in Moscow. Tim spent a year of high school there.
Wiswell graduated from Colby College, in Maine, in 2001. In his mid-twenties, he arrived in Moscow. He already spoke Russian. His first job was at Alfa-Bank, the private bank of Mikhail Fridman, the second-wealthiest man in Russia. When a salaried position did not materialize, he moved to a junior position in equities at United Financial Group, the Russian investment bank co-founded by Charlie Ryan, an American pioneer in post-Soviet Russian finance. In 2006, U.F.G. was bought by Deutsche Bank. Within a few years, Wiswell had become the head of the Russian equities desk.
Colleagues at U.F.G. remember Wiswell as an all-American type who loved sailing and skiing. His boss there, Martin Skelly, told me that Wiswell was an industrious, well-liked employee, and compared him to Matt Damon's character in the Jason Bourne films—"the same kind of rugged, good-looking, composed, thoughtful guy." In 2010, Wiswell and Natalia Makosiy, an art historian from Moscow, got married in Newport, Rhode Island; photographs of the event, which featured a samovar filled with Russian moonshine, appeared in a wedding magazine.
Many young Americans were drawn to Moscow banks in the aughts. Will Hammond, an American who worked with Wiswell at U.F.G., has been writing a memoir of his time on the trading floors—and dance floors—of Moscow. He remembers Russia at the time as "the wild, wild East": "If you wanted to be competitive, you had to do a lot of things that were not done in the developed world, because it was Russia. It was a very aggressive sales mentality, which was going on across the board across all the Russian banks." Others recall that it was common to engage in "front running"—using knowledge of a pending trade from a client to make money on a personal account. In America, the tactic would be considered insider trading. (Insider trading did not become illegal in Russia until 2011.)
A former colleague of Wiswell's at Deutsche Bank says that, even before the mirror trades, some of Wiswell's activity as head of the equities desk was questionable. In the late aughts, a fund called Lanturno sometimes traded with Deutsche Bank "over the counter." Such trades do not pass through a stock exchange; a broker sets the price based on the market value. (Many mirror trades were also over-the-counter.) The former colleague recalls occasions in which Lanturno lost money on a trade, either by buying too high or selling too low. The next morning, however, bank records would indicate that Lanturno had not lost money on the trade. When challenged by colleagues, Wiswell would say that he had altered the entries for Lanturno to rectify an error made on his part. The sums involved were small and easily ignored—the reversed losses were between ten and twenty thousand dollars. The former colleague, however, noted that Wiswell was later flown to Mauritius on a private jet by Lanturno's owner, Dmitry Perevalov, to celebrate Perevalov's fortieth birthday. Two photographs on Facebook show that the men also went skiing together. (Perevalov denied that any trades were amended on his behalf, and said that it was "impossible" to change an order once it had been entered into Deutsche Bank's systems. Former employees recall trades being amended regularly.)
Recently, I received a photocopied trade blotter from a source within Deutsche Bank. It showed that, between October 13, 2009, and October 27, 2009, Wiswell made a series of curious over-the-counter trades on behalf of a counterparty called Gigalogic Holdings, which, according to former Deutsche Bank employees, was the personal investment fund of Stephen Lynch, an American investor in Russia—and a friend of Wiswell's. Because a trader sets the price for over-the-counter trades based on a spread of a few decimal points around a stock's market value, there is scope to create a margin. The blotter showed that Wiswell had repeatedly bought low and sold high on Gigalogic's behalf, effectively paying Lynch nearly half a million dollars of Deutsche Bank's money. According to colleagues, when Wiswell was confronted about the transactions he said that they had been approved by superiors. Lynch, Wiswell said, had been helpful in a bankruptcy auction that Deutsche Bank had participated in, and paying him through over-the-counter trades was "easier than writing him a check." (A lawyer representing Lynch denied that Lynch had been paid by Wiswell, and also denied any connection between Lynch and Gigalogic. When presented with company documents from Cyprus showing that Lynch owned all the shares in Gigalogic between 2007 and 2012, the representative declined further comment.)
When the mirror trades began at Deutsche Bank, in 2011, revenues on Wiswell's desk were falling sharply, and Wiswell likely felt pressure to improve performance. For Maksutova and Buznik, at least, there was no obvious financial benefit to performing mirror trades: the extra volume did not affect their bonuses. Many at Deutsche Bank, however, believe that Wiswell profited personally from the scheme.
In August, 2015, shortly after Wiswell was suspended from Deutsche Bank, he was fired. He initiated a wrongful-dismissal suit. The court hearings, in Moscow, were open to the press. On February 1, 2016, a lawyer for Deutsche Bank called Wiswell "the mastermind of the scheme for the withdrawal of billions of dollars from the country." The lawyer also said that Wiswell's wife had received a quarter-million-dollar payment, for "financial services," into the bank account of a corporation that is registered under her name. Wiswell lost the suit.
Deutsche Bank refused to say whether it believes that Wiswell took bribes, and declined to discuss the case further for this article, perhaps because of the ongoing investigations into its Moscow office. According to people within Deutsche Bank, however, senior executives have told colleagues that Wiswell received bribes far in excess of the quarter-million-dollar payment cited by the company's lawyer.
Will Hammond, Wiswell's colleague at U.F.G., suggested to me that the bribery allegations were part of an effort to place the blame solely on Wiswell and save the jobs of Deutsche Bank supervisors. One of the executives who oversaw the desk, Batubay Ozkan, plans to leave the bank this year, by mutual agreement; Hayes and Koep—the supervisors who could monitor the trades made by Wiswell's desk—still work for Deutsche Bank in London. (None of the three have been charged with wrongdoing.) "Someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to make Wiz look guilty," Hammond said.
On an April evening in Moscow, I met with a broker who had intimate knowledge of the structure of the mirror trades. The city was emerging from the choking cold of winter, and young people flirted outside Paveletskaya Station as if it were high summer. As the broker and I walked across the square, he characterized mirror trades as just one of a thousand ruses employed by smart businessmen. But why, I asked him, would somebody with a prominent position at a major bank get involved in such a scheme? Wiswell's annual compensation was in the region of a million and a half dollars. The broker laughed. He said that Wiswell had been paid handsomely by clients of the mirror trades. For the architects of the scheme, the broker explained, it was worth it to bribe someone inside the bank: "Guys always pay something. They think it will hook you, so you are not going to do unexpected things." In the estimation of the broker, Wiswell was a useful functionary but hardly a criminal genius. Sometimes, the broker said, money was transferred into an offshore account maintained by Wiswell's wife, and sometimes cash was delivered to Wiswell in a bag.
Wiswell's current whereabouts are unclear. He recently launched a craft-beer business, Barbell Brewery, in Moscow, but some months ago he left the country with his wife and their two children for a trip to Southeast Asia. In March, his wife posted a request on Facebook for a nanny, noting that her family was on an extended stay in Bali, in the resort town of Seminyak. She later told a Balinese dance instructor that the family planned to remain on the island for a year. (Wiswell's wife declined, through a lawyer, requests for an interview.)
Former colleagues expect Wiswell to return to Moscow, where he owns an apartment. Russia is likely to be a friendly jurisdiction to him. When Moscow regulators looked into the mirror trades, they found little to trouble them. They said simply that Deutsche Bank had fallen victim to an illegal scheme, and levied a token punishment—about five thousand dollars. American and European regulators are likely to be much more punitive. Indeed, Wiswell probably will not return to America anytime soon, given the Department of Justice's investigation of Deutsche Bank. One of Wiswell's friends, now in America, called him "finance's Edward Snowden."
On March 9, 2015, less than a month before the mirror-trades scandal became public, Oliver Harvey and Robin Winkler, two strategists in the research department of Deutsche Bank in London, published a report, "Dark Matter," which described the vast unrecorded transfer of money among nations. Most economic papers are politely ignored by the world at large, but "Dark Matter" attracted wide interest. Several newspapers ran articles about it, and Harvey appeared on both CNN and the BBC to discuss his research.
The report's conclusions confirmed long-held suspicions. In any national economy, the authors explained, there are capital flows that do not appear on what is called "the balance of payments." Errors and accidental omissions should be random, and therefore reveal no pattern. The authors found that in the United Kingdom the pattern was anything but random. Britain had "large positive net errors" that suggested significant "unrecorded capital inflows." Analyzing data from other countries, Harvey and Winkler deduced where the vast majority of unrecorded capital flowing into the U.K. was coming from. Since 2010, they wrote, about a billion and a half dollars had arrived, unrecorded, in London every month; "a good chunk" of it was from Russia. "At its most extreme," the authors explained, the unrecorded capital flight from Moscow included "criminal activity such as tax evasion and money laundering."
In a connected and digitized financial system, how could such capital flight happen? Bank transfers leave a footprint. Imports and exports are accounted for. How could money disappear in one place and show up in another? The two strategists did not have to wait long, or look far, to learn the shameful answer: of the eighteen billion dollars that the researchers had estimated was flowing into the U.K. each year, about twenty per cent had arrived there as the result of trades made at their own bank. Half the trades were settled at Deutsche Bank's City of London headquarters, which is a short walk from the office, in Pinners Hall, where Harvey and Winkler worked.
John Cryan, the Deutsche Bank C.E.O., has little time to think about such embarrassments. Whatever the outcome of the various investigations into mirror trades, the bank is in trouble. It lost seven and a half billion dollars last year. Cryan has called the 2015 result "sobering." Britain's recent decision to leave the E.U. has imperilled Deutsche Bank even further. So far in 2016, the bank has lost half its market valuation, and in early August its stock price dipped to an all-time low, of $12.58. The only investors who now like the bank are short-sellers. The financier George Soros took a short position in Deutsche Bank before the Brexit referendum, effectively betting against the share price, and is estimated to have made more than a hundred million dollars as the stock nose-dived. Meanwhile, unlike many other Wall Street lenders, Deutsche Bank continues to loan millions of dollars to businesses associated with Donald Trump. When the Times questioned Trump recently about his credentials on Wall Street, he said that a private wealth manager at Deutsche Bank, Rosemary Vrablic, could vouch for him.
The mood within the bank is bleak, not least because Cryan has announced that job cuts are forthcoming. A recent survey found that less than half of Deutsche Bank employees are proud to work there. (Cryan also called this news "sobering.") The mood among shareholders is, if anything, worse. Ingo Speich, a fund manager at Union Investment, a German company that is one of Deutsche Bank's biggest shareholders, told me that in 2015 there were catcalls at the bank's annual general meeting. This year, Speich stood up and inveighed against "a decade of mismanagement." Meanwhile, the market capitalization of Deutsche Bank has become a grim Wall Street joke. This summer, Deutsche Bank, which is a hundred and forty-six years old, has been valued at about eighteen billion dollars—the same as Snapchat.
Since 2011, the Federal Reserve has performed a yearly "stress test" of U.S. lenders, assessing whether banks would have enough capital to withstand the shock of an economic downturn. Deutsche Bank failed the test in 2015, and failed again this June, when "broad and substantial weaknesses" were uncovered. Soon after the Federal Reserve's latest report was released, the International Monetary Fund issued a dire warning. Deutsche Bank, it said, was not only "one of the most important net contributors to systemic risks in the global banking system"; it was also a contagious agent, because of heavy financial "spillover" between Deutsche Bank and other lenders and insurers. Any kind of failure at Deutsche Bank, the I.M.F. suggested, would be extremely bad news for everybody.
Given Deutsche Bank's fragility, the mirror-trading scandal could not have come at a worse time. Cryan has promised to settle the Russian case by the end of this year, and the bank recently set aside about a billion dollars for legal costs. This may not be enough. Last year, Deutsche Bank was fined the relatively small sum of two hundred and fifty-eight million dollars for its circumvention of sanctions against Iran, Sudan, and elsewhere. In 2014, however, BNP Paribas agreed to pay nearly nine billion dollars to settle with regulators over sanctions violations. And the mirror trades may exact a heavy fine from U.S. regulators, who take a dim view of activity that looks like money laundering. A payment as vast as the one levied at BNP Paribas could require Deutsche Bank to raise capital to survive. A German government bailout might become a necessity. A capital shortfall at Germany's largest bank might provoke a banking crisis across Europe. The shock to the global economy would be profound.
Deutsche Bank's Web site includes a statement of values. The document was written in 2013, when Deutsche Bank created a new code of ethics to help it "conduct business with the utmost integrity." In the wake of the mirror-trades scandal, one section of the text stands out. "We enable our clients' success by constantly seeking suitable solutions to their problems," it reads. "We will do what is right—not just what is allowed." ♦
An earlier version of this story omitted details of a plea agreement related to Arcadi Gaydamak's indictment in Israel. It further incorrectly described a conviction in France. Gaydamak's conviction for illegal arms trading was overturned after an appeal in 2011. His prison sentence was served for tax fraud.


text:
This Changes EverythingPublication details: United Kingdom; Penguin Books; 2015Description: 566 Pages; PaperbackISBN:
- 9780241956182
- 363.73
|Item type
|Current library
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|Item holds
|Book Adult and Young Adult 15-17
|Karachi Science
|363.73 (Browse shelf(Opens below))
|Book Adult and Young Adult 15-17
|Lahore Science
|363.73 (Browse shelf(Opens below))
Browsing Lahore shelves, Shelving location: Science Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)
"We seem to have given up on any serious effort to prevent catastrophic climate change. Despite mounting scientific evidence, denialism is surging in many wealthy countries, and extreme fossil-fuel extraction gathers pace. Exposing the work of ideologues on the right who know the challenge this poses to the free market all too well, Naomi Klein also challenges the failing strategies of environmental groups. This Changes Everything argues that the deep changes required should not be viewed as punishments to fear, but as a kind of gift. It's time to stop running from the full implications of the crisis and begin to embrace them."--Amazon.co.uk.
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text: Sri Venkateshwaraa Group of Educational Institutions located in Puducherry, is a hub of learning and an edifice dedicated for education. The group was founded in 2005 by Ramachandra Educational Trust, when they established a multi-specialty hospital. The Medical College was founded later in 2007. Now, the group has several institutions under its banner with several thousand students learning to change their lives.


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How do I repair these power supplies
There was a know issue on these power supplies but I cannot find what it was. Here was the Apple recall which has expired: http://www.apple.com/support/powermac/po...
I have several units I would like to repair. I know they can be sent off for repair. Any ideas?
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text:
meeting shame in a back alley
I decide to rename it
good teacher
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, renaming, shame on December 11, 2020| 1 Comment »
meeting shame in a back alley
I decide to rename it
good teacher
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bliss, joy ride, poem, poetry, shame on January 24, 2018| Leave a Comment »
No, this time Shame suggests
you take the driver's seat,
and though you're nervous at first,
it's so fun—your hands
on the wheel, your foot
heavy with bliss—you split
the scene so fast
that Shame begs you to pull over,
leaps from the car, then tries
to hitch a ride home.
Meanwhile you speed
toward the sunrise as it
crooks its long pink fingers
at you, tugging on the hood,
making the whole world
blush. Yeah, you think,
it's nice this way.
Out the window, the birds
are just beginning to sing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, shame, teacher on October 11, 2015| 2 Comments »
It's not shame itself we want to lose
but the shame about our shame.
Shame itself is as innocent
as bliss or love or joy, only
we seldom want it to linger.
A woman walks through rows of corn
and knows her own shadow.
She does not lament its shape,
but uses it to guide her.
There is teacher in everything,
even the corn dried on the stalk. Even
the wanting to push shame away.
Even the arm that rises up
to embrace our own shadow,
impossible as it is.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, shame on January 16, 2014| 1 Comment »
Dressed in a hat I knit him, shame
invites himself on my morning walk.
I do not attempt to ditch him.
Don't exactly encourage him
to stroll along, either.
He is limping. He catches
me noticing, reminds me
that I kicked him in the shins. I don't remind him
it was an accident. He had tripped me.
"I'm sure you didn't mean to," he says,
reading my mind as he always does.
He curls his hand around my shoulders.
Pulls me closer. Says, "You know I'm
the only one who will always be with you.
I'm the only one who really knows you."
Now I do pick up the pace.
"You can't outrun me, doll," he says.
He knows I hate it when he calls me doll.
I stumble on a patch of ice and start to fall.
He hustles to catch me before I hit
the ground. I can't help but notice
the limp is gone. Part of me wishes
he'd let me fall. I don't want him around.
But the other part surrenders
as he holds me in his strong, familiar arms.
"Doesn't it feel good," he says. "You know
you want it, doll."
I sputter, "Don't …" and he kisses me
long and slow. I can taste the curl
in his lips. Shit. He knows how
I love it when he does that little
kissy hum, and he does it, and then
he lets me fall.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blank verse, ego, forgiveness, garden, poem, poetry, shame, sonnet, weeds on July 22, 2012| 7 Comments »
I am not fit to tend that garden yet.
Though I walk by it every day. Though it
is on my property. Though there's a thriving
patch of shoulds sprung up around the fence.
The gate is twined in bindweed, green and dense.
The rows are long-since overgrown with grass,
oregano gone viral, clover, spears
of mullein, dandelion rosettes. I've grown
familiar with neglect, at times forget
it's mine to cultivate. But there it is.
Last week, I stepped inside the disarray,
took one long look at shamed disorder, tried
to see a place to start, and quickly left.
I am not ready for that garden yet.


text:
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