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Daily Archives: February 13, 2018

The world’s worst money launderers are the UK, Switzerland and the USA

BoingBoing: ‘The USA has moved up in the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index to number two, behind Switzerland; in reality, though, the UK is the world’s worst money-laundry, but because its laundering activities are spread out over its overseas territories — taken as a whole, the UK leads the world in helping criminals and looters hide their fortunes. America’s role in money-laundering is well-documented; the ease of incorporating anonymous shell companies has been key to making fortunes disappear — and they also constitute the wide end of the funnel for dark money in US politics. One notable feature of the Financial Secrecy Index is how different it is to official government indices of money-laundering states; the EU’s index, which put 17 nations on notice last December, consists primarily of small, largely impoverished nations that account for a tiny fraction of the world’s money laundering (the exception being the UK overseas territories, which are mentioned independent of the UK itself). Somehow, the EU list doesn’t include its own member-states’ prolific money-laundries, nor the money laundering in its major trading partners…”

Evolving Assessments of Human and Natural Contributions to Climate Change

CRS report via EveryCRSReport.com – Evolving Assessments of Human and Natural Contributions to Climate Change, February 1, 2018. “As Congress continues to deliberate whether and how to address climate change, a key question has been the degree to which humans have influenced observed global climate change. Members of Congress sometimes stress that policies or actions… Continue Reading

Integrity: Without it Nothing Works

Jensen, Michael C., Integrity: Without it Nothing Works (April 6, 2014). Rotman Magazine: The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management, pp. 16-20, Fall 2009; Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 10-042; Barbados Group Working Paper No. 09-04; Simon School Working Paper No. FR 10-01. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1511274 – “Note: This paper… Continue Reading

Poynter – News researchers lead on big stories

David Beard: “This era’s great journalistic diggers include Julie Tate, Kitty Bennett, Alice Crites, Margot Williams and Sheelagh McNeill. Often underappreciated and not as visible as TV-familiar leading journalists, these news researchers and others have been the bane of Rob Porter and Judge Roy Moore in recent months, finding key documents and evidence that led… Continue Reading

World’s biggest city database shines light on our increasingly urbanised planet

Eu Joint Research Center: “The JRC has launched a new tool with data on all 10,000 urban centres scattered across the globe. It is the largest and most comprehensive database on cities ever published. With data derived from the JRC’s Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), researchers have discovered that the world has become even more… Continue Reading

WaPo – President Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims in his first year

In the 21st century it has become increasingly critical for every individual to continuously seek out the facts and readily identify them from false and/or misleading information, stories, narratives, and speech, regardless of the person groups or entities that propagate speech that is is predicated on lies. The challenge of accomplishing this goal has ramped… Continue Reading