Maddening Scam
I keep getting these. It is so annoying. While it says it is from AOL Services, it is really from chuckdeez@aol.com. I never click on the hypertext, but I am willing to bet that he wants my personal information, like my credit card number, etc. These e-mails just frost me.
Dear Customer,
Your E-mail account has exceeded its limit and needs to be verified, If not verified within 24hrs, we shall terminate your account.
Click Here
Thanks,
AOL Mail Privacy Policy | AOL Privacy Policy | Web Beacons in Email
Please do not reply to this message. This is a service email related to your use of aol Mail.
AOL is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089
FaceBook and Iran TV Media
When I get something like this, my immediate reaction is concern: “when did I indicate a ‘like’ for Iran TV Media? When did I sign up for this service?”
Oh wait. I didn’t!
Aha! There is a little barely noticeable option here, “This is SPAM”
Click.
Gone!
Rape Victim Spends Seven Months in Jail, Framed by her Rapist
This is from the New York Times City Blog:
Man Is Sentenced for Raping Ex-Girlfriend and Then Framing Her
By DAN BILEFSKY
Updated 5:42 p.m. | The Queens private detective who raped his ex-girlfriend and then framed her for a series of fictional crimeswas sentenced to the maximum of 32 years in prison on Wednesday, bringing to a close one of the most bizarre cases to grace a courtroom.
Using knowledge he acquired partly from watching crime dramas like “C.S.I.,” the private detective, Jerry Ramrattan, 39, orchestrated what prosecutors in Queens called one of the most elaborate frame-ups in recent history.
Mr. Ramrattan’s ex-girlfriend, Seemona Sumasar, 36, had accused him of raping her. After she refused to drop the rape charges, he concocted a schemethat landed her in jail for seven months, making it seem as though Ms. Sumasar was the likely perpetrator of a series of brazen armed robberies, for which she was accused of impersonating a police officer.
At his trial in State Supreme Court in Queens, prosecutors produced evidence that Mr. Ramrattan cajoled and extorted witnesses to falsely testify that she had robbed them. He even staged fake crime scenes, prosecutors said, in which he planted evidence, handcuffing one of Ms. Sumasar’s supposed victims to a pole and planting several bullets at the scene of one of the imaginary crimes.
Before Mr. Ramrattan was sentenced on Wednesday, Ms. Sumasar delivered a stinging victim impact statement, noting that he showed no remorse and was so intent on revenge that he would have stopped at nothing to destroy her. “I don’t have words for you,” she said as as he stared ahead, stone-faced, while she spoke. “You are pure evil. You are a sociopath. You need help.”
“Someone needs to put a stop to your madness,” she added.
During her seven months in jail, awaiting a robbery trial, Ms. Sumasar, a former Morgan Stanley analyst, was separated from her young daughter. She lost her business, and her house went into foreclosure. Her bail was set at $1 million, which she could not afford. Mr. Ramrattan, meanwhile, was free until an informant came forward in late 2010 and exposed his plot.
Mr. Ramrattan was convicted in November of a series of charges, including rape, conspiracy and perjury. The nearly monthlong trial offered two opposing plot lines that were seemingly irreconcilable. Prosecutors portrayed Ms. Sumasar as a single mother duped by a wily confidence man intent on malicious vengeance. But the defense characterized her as a dejected lover who had turned on Mr. Ramrattan after he said he was leaving her to return to his wife and family.
Members of the jury said the guilty verdict was predicated on their acceptance of Ms. Sumasar’s account of being bound with duct tape and viciously raped by Mr. Ramrattan, which apparently gave him a motive to create his ruse.
In his plea for leniency, Mr. Ramrattan insisted that he was innocent, saying that he had spent years helping the police solve cases as an informant. “I stand before you with no choice but to accept what is going to happen,” he said. “Think about all the cases I made over the years, the rape victims I assisted. I maintain my innocence.”
Before he was escorted away by police, he added: “There is more to come.” As he spoke, his mother, Shirley Ramrattan, began wailing and was escorted from the courtroom.
His lawyer, Frank Kelly, told the judge that Mr. Ramrattan was not the “monster” he had been made out to be.
But Justice Richard Buchter said Mr. Ramrattan deserved no mercy, calling him a “diabolical conniver and sinister manipulator” who had “shamelessly exploited the criminal justice system.”
The Queens district attorney’s office and the Nassau County district attorney’s office had insisted on Ms. Sumasar’s guilt up until she was freed just weeks before her own robbery trial was set to begin. Ms. Sumasar filed a civil suit in December against the New York City Police Department and the Nassau County Police Department for negligence leading to her wrongful imprisonment..
Justice Buchter railed against the Nassau County police, who had wrongly imprisoned Ms. Sumasar, saying that it did not take “a Sherlock Holmes” to deduce that a 5-foot-2 former Wall Street analyst with no criminal record would not have held people up at gunpoint.
He chastised the police for their egregious handling of the case, saying detectives had “turned a blind eye” to Ms. Sumasar’s protestations that she was innocent and had too easily been taken in by Mr. Ramrattan.
“The police were duped by liars by whom they had a right to be suspicious, and as a result a rape victim was framed by her rapist,” the judge said. “She was victimized by the rapist and then again by the criminal justice system.”
He added: “The defendant is the architect of his own ruin. He deserves no mercy from me, and he won’t get any.”
Korean Air Pilots Mistakenly Identified in TV News Prank: Sum Ting Wong
Someone will lose their job, if it is ever discovered who pranked this totally politically incorrect news broadcast. This from Reuters via Huffington Post on AOL:
NTSB Intern Mistakenly Confirmed To KTVU Wrong Asiana Names, Statement Says
(Please note offensive language in paragraph 6)
July 12 (Reuters) – The National Transportation Safety Board apologized on Friday after an intern mistakenly confirmed to a local television station racially offensive fake names for the pilots of an Asiana flight that crashed in San Francisco.
“The National Transportation Safety Board apologizes for inaccurate and offensive names that were mistakenly confirmed as those of the pilots of Asiana flight 214, which crashed at San Francisco International Airport on July 6,” the NTSB said in a statement.
“Earlier today, in response to an inquiry from a media outlet, a summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft,” the NTSB said.
The crash of the Boeing 777 plane resulted in the deaths of three teenage girls in a group of students from eastern China who were visiting the United States for a summer camp, one of whom died on Friday in the hospital. Over 180 passengers and crew members were injured.
On Friday, an anchor for Oakland, California, station KTVU read a list of the supposed names of the pilots of the South Korean carrier on its noon broadcast after an employee apparently called the NTSB seeking to verify them.
The names appear to mock the events of the crash. The prank names were: Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow.
Why Did He Choose Me?
I do admit I admire the creativity of the people who send these out. This one isn’t at all creative, very straight forward, but neither is there a hook, unless, oh yeah, free money. Do the words “too-good-go-be-true” ring a bell?
Grammar, sentence structure and phrasing: Sparse, but not bad
Content: Weak. Bank of France – in what country? Why transfer out these funds? Why did you choose me?
Appeal: None
Please reply me with this email: c_noyer@yahoo.fr Hello Friend, I need your assistance in transferring a deceased client fund worth of $18,500,000.00 Million US Dollars out of my Bank here in French central bank (Banque de France). If interested, kindly respond back to me immediately for further details on my proposed transaction. Kind Regards, Mr. Christian Noyer Governor, French central bank (Banque de France) Once again please reply me with this email: c_noyer@yahoo.fr
“We’re Moving On . . . ” at Pensacola Beach
Night before last, night a man was shot at the beach at 3:45 in the morning. According to the (very sketchy) details in the Pensacola News Journal, he had been having a fight with his girlfriend, had finished his fight and was then shot three times by a man he doesn’t know and who has no relationship to him. (This is what I understand from reading the paper; it doesn’t make sense to me, but it also says alcohol was involved.)
I only knew about the shooting because I saw a tiny little article about it on the AOL Local news section. When I went to look at it, it was gone.
In this morning’s paper, there is this sketchy description, and then – in several different sections – local are people quoted as saying “we’re moving on.”
OK I get it. We’re a beach community, and this is peak tourist season as folks pour in here from all the Southern states and other countries to enjoy our fabulous sugar-white sand beaches.
Before the tourists had hit the beach, the crime scene tape was down and a beach excavator had carted off the bloody sand.
I do get it. I really do. The season is short and we don’t want to be known as a beautiful beach where people can get shot. It’s a marketing problem.
There is something, however, that sticks in my craw about the swiftness of the moving on, and the barely there press coverage. A man was killed. Maybe he had been drinking. Maybe he had a fight with his girlfriend. Maybe he was at the beach very late (or very early) in the morning. None of these things seem to have anything to do with him having been shot, other than maybe being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the wrong person had a gun and shot him. It seems a little disrespectful, to me, to move on quite so swiftly. A man lost his life. We don’t know why. Maybe we could just take a little time to figure out what happened and to acknowledge his loss?
Mr. Henry White Wants to Show Us His Gratitude
Dear Friend, Due to your effort, sincerity, courage and trust worthiness you showed at the course of the Uk Online Lotto Winning cheque shipment to your location, I want to compensate you and show my gratitude to you with the sum of $950,000USD (Nine Hundred And Fifty Thousand United States Dollars). I have authorized the finance house where I deposited the money to issue you international certified bank draft cashable at your bank. My dear Friend,I will like you to contact the CEO in charge of the finance house for the collection of this international certified bank draft. The name of the Person with your Cheque is MR DAVID WILLIAMS COMPENSATION AND FINANCE HOUSE HEAD OFFICE CONTACT AGENT : MR DAVID WILLIAMS Email:david.williams.09003@hotmail.com Finance and Security House United Kingdom Deposit Firm FSH Towers Chelsea T45H U.K. At the moment, I am very busy at Sydney,Australia because of the investment projects which myself and my new partner Mr Peter Hills of CTL Company are having at hand. Finally, remember that I have forwarded instruction to Mr David Williams at the finance house on your behalf to send the bank draft to you as soon as you contact him without delay. Please I will like you to accept this token with good faith as this is from the bottom of my heart. Thanks and God bless you and your family. My sincere advice to you as a christian is that you should endeavour to pay your tithe to a bible believing church when you get the money because i noticed it as a fudiciary agent that you were skeptical about your winnings when you were been ask by the Uk lotto Agency Inc to file out a claim for your prize. And now the current policy of the Lotto organiser is that if an emerged winner fails to claim up his/her winning cheque of $950,000USDOLARS it's now mandatory that this fund can be remitted or forfeited to the fudiciary agent in charge of this winners file. 1. Full Names: 2. Residential Address: 3. Phone Number: 4. Fax Number: 5. Occupation: 6. Sex: 7. Age : 8. Nationality: 9. Present Country: However, I want you to contact him immediately as soon as you receive this information because he is leaving for the US by the end of this month and this might cost a delayment for you to receive this draft. Hope to hear from you soon. Yours Faithfully Mr. Henry White Compensator Officer
Worst Drivers in the World: Traffic Fatalities by Country
Driving in the Middle East is a whole other world, a world of chaos until you realize that the rules are different, no matter what the published rules are. To drive in Qatar, I started at 0430 on a Friday morning, when there was little or no traffic (things have changed) and would drive until traffic began to thicken. Eventually, I knew the city and gained confidence that I could drive without getting killed. In Kuwait, for months, I would only drive to relatively nearby shopping areas, or drive only on back roads carefully plotted on the map during low traffic hours. After a while, you begin to get a sense of things, and the sensation of imminent death lessens.
Adventures in Qatar: a radiator dropping off a truck in front of me, being hit on purpose by a man who didn’t like women driving, being pushed into a round about by a Hummer, being nearly assaulted by two young Qataris who believed we had insulted them by being in the lane where they wanted to be, watching men drive up the wrong side of the ring roads because they were too important to wait in line, later standing and laughing at their crashed cars – Daddy would buy them another. It sounds crazy, but you get used to it.
Kuwait was a whole different ball game, controlled chaos at high speeds. Adventures in Kuwait: the sleeping elderly man driving in the lane next to me who almost hit me, watching drivers drive through red lights as if they were green, sparks off the fenders of SUVs on Highway 30 as people wove quickly in and out of traffic, the dramatic crashed and burned out cars on the sides of the highways, the car impaled on a palm tree – 10 feet above the road. Kuwait was so surreal that I couldn’t even begin to imagine how some of the accidents happened; I learned to be a very prayerful driver.
So out of idle curiosity, today I looked up highest rate of traffic fatalities per country, and found this on Wikipedia. So here’s a surprise . . . Kuwait’s fatalities statistic is roughly equal to that of the United States. Qatar’s is significantly higher, and many countries are even double or triple Kuwaits fatality rate. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this.
List of countries Fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants
World 20.8
Afghanistan 39.0
Albania 13.9
Angola 37.7
Argentina 13.7
Armenia 13.9
Australia 5.71
Austria 8.2
Azerbaijan 13.0
Bahamas 14.5
Bahrain 12.1
Bangladesh 12.6
Barbados 12.2
Belarus 10.9
Belgium 10.1
Belize 15.6
Benin 31.2 1
Bhutan 14.4
Bolivia 16.7
Bosnia and Herzegovina 10.9
Botswana 33.8
Brazil 19.9
British Virgin Islands 21.7
Brunei Darussalam 13.8
Bulgaria 8.8
Burkina Faso 31.1
Burundi 23.4
Cambodia 12.1
Cameroon 28.1
Canada 9.2
Cape Verde 25.1
Central African Republic 32.2
Chad 34.3
Chile 13.7
China 5.1
Colombia 11.7
Comoros 30.3
Republic of the Congo 28.8
Cook Islands 45.0
Costa Rica 15.4
Croatia 9.1
Cuba 8.6
Cyprus 10.4
Czech Republic 10.4
Denmark 3.1
Dominican Republic 17.3
Ecuador 11.7
Egypt 42.0
El Salvador 12.6
Eritrea 48.4
Estonia 7.5
Ethiopia 35.0
Fiji 7.0
Finland 6.5
France 5.5
The Gambia 36.6
Georgia 16.8
Germany 4.5
Ghana 9.32
Greece 14.4
Guatemala 14.7
Guinea-Bissau 34.4
Guyana 19.9
Honduras 13.5
Hungary 9.9
Iceland 3.8
India 11.1
Indonesia 16.2
Iran 35.8
Iraq 38.1
Republic of Ireland 3.51
Israel 3.7
Italy 8.7
Jamaica 12.3
Japan 3.85
Jordan 34.2
Kazakhstan 30.6
Kenya 34.4
Kiribati 7.4
Republic of Korea 11.3
Kuwait 16.9
Kyrgyzstan 22.8
Laos 18.3
Latvia 8.7
Lebanon 28.5
Lesotho 26.7
Liberia 32.9
Libya 40.5
Lithuania 14.8
Luxembourg 9.0
Madagascar 33.7
Malawi 26.0
Malaysia 24.1
Maldives 18.3
Mali 32.1
Malta 3.4
Marshall Islands 7.4
Mauritania 35.5
Mauritius 11.1
Mexico 20.7
Federated States of Micronesia 14.4
Mongolia 14.5
Montenegro 14.6
Morocco 28.3
Mozambique 7.0
Myanmar 23.4
Namibia 28.6
Nauru 9.9
Nepal 15.1
Netherlands 3.9
New Zealand 8.6
Nicaragua 14.2
Niger 37.7
Nigeria 32.3
Norway 5.4
Oman 21.3
Pakistan 25.3
Palau 14.8
Palestinian territories 5.6
Panama 12.7
Papua New Guinea 14.2
Paraguay 19.7
Peru 21.5
Philippines 20.0
Poland 10.7
Portugal 7.9
Puerto Rico 12.8
Qatar 23.7
Republic of Macedonia 6.9
Republic of Moldova 15.1
Romania 9.4
Russia 19.5
Rwanda 31.6
Saint Lucia 17.6
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 6.6
Samoa 12.8
San Marino 0
Sao Tome and Principe 33.0
Saudi Arabia 29.0
Senegal 32.5
Serbia 9.8
Seychelles 18.5
Sierra Leone 28.3
Singapore 4.8
Slovakia 7.1
Slovenia 10.4
Solomon Islands 16.9
South Africa 33.2
Spain 6.9
Sri Lanka 13.5
Sudan 34.7
Suriname 15.8
Swaziland 26.3
Sweden 2.9
Switzerland 4.7
Syrian Arab Republic 32.9
Tajikistan 14.1
Thailand 19.6
Timor-Leste 16.1
Togo 28.1
Tonga 7.0
Trinidad and Tobago 15.5
Tunisia 34.5
Turkey 13.4
Turkmenistan 18.6
Tuvalu 9.5
Uganda 24.7
Ukraine 11.2
United Arab Emirates 37.1
United Kingdom 3.59
United Republic of Tanzania 34.3
United States of America 12.3
Uruguay 12.8
Uzbekistan 9.7
Vanuatu 18.6
Venezuela 21.8
Vietnam 16.1
Yemen 29.3
Zambia 25.6
Zimbabwe 27.5
Like all statistics, I think some are honest, and some need to be taken with a grain of salt. I found reading through them fascinating. You can get more information, accidents per thousand cars, total accidents, etc.
Undoing Public Disclosure, One Small Move at a Time
I am appalled. I have scoured the TV News, have looked through newspapers – not a word! I steam at corruption in Kuwait and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and then a small NPR Report on yesterday’s news alerts me to a measure, passed in Congress, WITHOUT A WHISPER!
(oh? I was shouting? Sorry. Carried away. Outraged) You can access the NPR station and listen to the entire repulsive report by clicking here.
Congress Repeals Financial Disclosure Requirements For Senior U.S. Officials
by EYDER PERALTA
A tourist takes cover underneath an umbrella while snapping a photo of the U.S. Capitol on March 6, 2013 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Joining the Senate, the House of Representatives approved a measure today that repeals a requirement that top government officials post financial disclosures on the Internet.
The House, like the Senate, acted quietly without a vote. Instead, they sent the measure to the president’s desk by unanimous consent.
The provision was part of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (Stock), which became law in March of 2012. The act was intended to stop members of congress from profiting from nonpublic information.
As NPR’s Tamara Keith reported, at the time, Sen. Joe Lieberman called the law “the most significant congressional ethics reform legislation to pass Congress in at least five years.”
“That law mainly addressed conflict-of-interest policies for members of Congress and their staffs, but it also included a requirement that the financial disclosure forms filed by some 28,000 high-ranking federal employees be posted online.
“While those forms are public records, they must be requested individually from employing agencies. The Stock Act envisions online posting first on agency sites and later in a central, searchable database.
“The posting requirement was delayed three times out of concerns about the potential for identity theft and other crimes against career employees, as well as security risks to the government.”
The Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for a more open government,called today’s repeal an “epic failure.”
The foundation explained that instead of addressing specific security concerns, Congress has acted broadly.
For instance, they note, the president, vice president, members of Congress, congressional candidates and individuals subject to Senate confirmation are still required to make their financial disclosures public. But the change in law now makes the posting of those disclosures on the Internet optional.
Sunlight adds:
“Not only does the change undermine the intent of the original bill to ensure government insiders are not profiting from non-public information (if anyone thinks high level congressional staffers don’t have as much or more insider information than their bosses, they should spend some time on Capitol Hill) but it sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online.
“Are we going to return to the days when the public can use the Internet to research everything exceptwhat their government is doing? Will Congress, in its twisted wisdom, decide that information is public if journalists, academics, advocates and citizens are forced to dig through file cabinets in basements in Washington, DC to find it? And does anyone think that makes us safer?
“As my colleague Tom Lee noted, ‘This approach is known as ‘security through obscurity.’ Essentially, the idea is that rather than fixing a system’s flaws, you can just make the system opaque or unusable or unpopular enough that those flaws never surface.'”
Update at 5:35 p.m. ET. 30 Seconds:
NPR’s Tamara Keith tells us the House procedure took exactly 30 seconds.
Correction at 5:29 p.m. ET. An earlier version of his post said the House followed the Senate. In fact, the Senate voted Thursday and the House voted today.
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