Citibank fined $100 million for interest rate manipulation
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Citibank will pay a huge fine for manipulating an important interest rate.
The bank settled with attorneys general in 42 states for $100 million. Following an investigation, the states said Citibank manipulated Libor, a benchmark interest rate that helps set lending rates across the world.
Citibank made millions of dollars of gains from its “fraudulent conduct,” the attorneys general said.
“Our office has zero tolerance for fraudulent or manipulative conduct that undermines our financial markets,” New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in a press statement. “Financial institutions have a basic responsibility to play by the rules — and we will continue to hold those accountable who don’t.”
This is the third bank that settled with state attorneys general for illegally influencing the Libor. Barclays, Deutsche Bank and now Citibank have been fined $420 million collectively.
Citibank agreed to comply with ongoing investigations into other banks’ Libor cases.
CNNMoney (New York) First published June 15, 2018: 3:00 PM ET
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Mad-Scientist Dad Just Won Father’s Day By Building His Son a Jet-Powered Scooter
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What was the best thing your parents ever built for you? A treehouse? Maybe a go-kart? I’m afraid their efforts pale in comparison to the jet-powered scooterColin Furze built for his son who finally has a definite answer to the question, “which parent do you love the most?”
Unlike the jet engines powering commercial airliners whose hot exhaust could easily melt your face, the battery-powered ducted fan strapped to this scooter produces its thrust without scorching the rider’s legs. It’s also controlled remotely, allowing Furze to limit the speed of the scooter. Had my dad handed me a jet-powered scooter as a kid, five minutes later I’d be soaring off ramps and risking life and limb with it.
Stanford’s new lab could make particle accelerators 1,000 times smaller
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Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Particle accelerators have proven vital to understanding subatomic physics, but current technology tends to make them… rather large. And Stanford is determined to address that. SLAC has started assembling a new location, FACET-II (Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests), that could lead to accelerators 100 to 1,000 times smaller than you see today. The facility will produce ultra-high quality electron beams that should help develop new, more size- and cost-effective plasma acceleration techniques.
One of those techniques is the plasma wakefield acceleration method you see above. The approach shoots super-energized electrons through a plasma to create a “wake” that provides energy to trailing particles. Where existing accelerators may need miles to provide enough acceleration power, this would need only “a few meters.” FACET-II is also flexible enough to offer the possibility of accelerating positrons (antimatter electrons), and could develop new electron sources like extremely bright X-ray lasers.
The facility won’t be ready until the end of 2019, and it won’t be cheap at $26 million. If it does produce smaller accelerators, though, it could dramatically reduce the costs of future locations. It’ll also serve as a hub for other forms of accelerator research, so you may see some additional breakthroughs regardless of how long it takes SLAC to achieve its main objective. Either way, it may be worth the effort if it improves humanity’s understanding of atoms and the universe at large.
Boeing gave $20,000 to these ten wacky personal flyer designs
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GoFly Prize / Texas A&M University
Last year, Boeing announced the GoFly Prize, a new competition that will award one winner $1 million for a successful personal flying device prototype. It has to take off and land vertically, carry a human 20 miles without the need for refueling or recharging and be quiet, safe and compact, but otherwise, the design is completely up to those building it. Phase I of the competition just wrapped up and GoFly has announced the top 10 designs, each of which will be awarded $20,000.
GoFly says over 600 innovators from more than 30 countries submitted designs for Phase I and 97 experts selected the top 10. The winning teams come from Latvia, the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Japan and their submissions include an incredibly wide range of designs. Aeroxo LV from Latvia describes its device as a “tilt rotor aerial vehicle type that combines VTOL capabilities of helicopter with range and speed of fixed-wing aircraft.” Georgia Tech’s HummingBuzz design “utilizes the fully electric, ducted coaxial rotor configuration, with the fuselage on top, in the shape of a motorcycle.” And team Mamba from the US touts its hexcopter’s safety while Tetra from Japan notes its design’s stylishness.
With Phase I completed, Phase II is now underway and anyone, not just the 10 teams selected for Phase I prizes can enter. The registration deadline is December 8th and by February 6th, teams will have to provide a status report about their prototype’s flying capabilities. The top four teams will then receive $50,000 each. In October 2019, GoFly will hold the final fly-off and hand out a number of prizes. The “disruptive advancement” prize comes with $100,000, the smallest and quietest entries will each get $250,000 and the Grand Prize winner will be awarded $1 million.
You can check out all of the top 10 Phase I designs here.
The study is an observational one, meaning it can only identify associations and not whether common drugs are causing depression or suicide in people. Still, the researchers found some worrying links between the use of common medications and the potential for depression. Most notably, the researchers found that those taking three or more medications with depression risks had a greater chance of self-reporting depressive symptoms on a nine-question survey. Their rate of self-reported depressive symptoms was 15.3 percent, about double the rate reported by those taking just one drug with a risk of depression and about triple the rate of those taking no medications with risk of depression.
This is particularly concerning, the researchers suggest, because patients may not make a connection between their depressive symptoms and the drugs they’re taking. Drugs with risks of depression are very common, they may not have clear warning labels, and some can even be purchased as over-the-counter medications. The most common of them are drugs such as hormonal birth control, beta-blockers (used for conditions such as high blood pressure, heart attacks, and migraines), and proton-pump inhibitors (used for acid reflux).
In all, there are more than 200 medications in use in the US that list depression or suicidal symptoms as possible adverse effects. The only class of drugs with a “black-box warning”—the Food and Drug Administration’s clearest and gravest warning label—for suicidal risks are antidepressants.
While the study is just a starting point for probing the potential role of prescription drugs in depression and suicide, the authors argue that now is the time for that start. The study comes as public health researchers report high rates of depression and suicide in the country. Between 2013 and 2016, 8.1 percent of American adults had depression in a given two-week period. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released nationwide figures showing that suicide rates had increased nearly 30 percent overall between 1999 and 2016, with nearly every state seeing increases. Of those who committed suicide, 54 percent were not known to have a mental health condition such as depression.
Dreary data
The authors of the JAMA study—led by Dima Mazen Qato, a pharmacist and health policy expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago—say that more research into the links between drugs and depressive symptoms are needed. In the meantime, they suggest that doctors should better communicate risks to patients who are taking medications with potential side effects of depression and suicide.
Their conclusions are based on data from a nationally representative observational survey that collected information between 2005 and 2014 on 26,192 participants aged 18 or over. Overall, 37.2 percent of participants reported taking at least one medication that listed depression as a potential adverse effect, with 7.5 percent of those taking three or more.
The prevalence of self-reported depressive symptoms rose from 6.9 percent in the participants taking just one risky drug to 9.5 percent in those taking two, and to 15.3 percent in those taking three or more. Those taking no drugs with a risk of depression had a rate of self-reported depressive symptoms of 4.7 percent. Thus, the more drugs with a risk of depression, the greater the likelihood of depressive symptoms, the researchers found.
This held up when the researchers excluded data on patients who were taking psychotropic drugs—ones that intended to alter a mental state. It also held when researchers compared rates of depressive symptoms just in patients with high blood pressure, comparing those that took three or more drugs with a depression risk and those who took drugs with no such risk.
The researchers also noted that the situation may be getting worse over time. Breaking the data out across the survey period, they found that use of drugs with a risk of depression increased from 35 percent in 2005-2006 data to 38.4 percent in the 2013-2014 data. Between those time frames, use of three or more risky drugs increased from 6.9 percent to 9.5 percent.
The study had plenty of limitations in addition to being an observational study. For one thing, the survey data didn’t include information on mental health history. So, it’s not possible to sort out the patients who had preexisting or independent cases of depression. Also, the self-reported survey on depressive symptoms is a screening tool, not a diagnostic. And self-reported data can yield skewed or incomplete pictures of mental health.
Still, the authors conclude that “polypharmacy” (taking more than one drug at the same time) is a concern for medications with risk of depression—and one that requires more research.
is working on a proof-of-concept in-car payment system with automotive software supplier Xevo. With four initial commercial partners in Chevron, Texaco, Applebee’s and ParkWhiz, a future owner could use the
Digital Wallet to buy gas or food-to-go, or reserve and pay for a parking spot without leaving the vehicle. Perhaps even more important than those three,
, too. The service would be tied to the carmaker’s Blue Link app suite and would store an owner’s payment details to enable transactions.
The carmaker still has big questions to answer about the service, such as whether the digital wallet will be contained within the mobile Blue Link app, or be integrated into the vehicle’s infotainment software. An impending pilot program will determine the best deployment, but that means implementation in consumer vehicles remains awhile away.
Hyundai’s announcement moves it into a space slowly gaining more entrants.
Florida Didn’t Run FBI Background Checks on Gun Buyers for a Year Because of a Forgotten Login
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The state of Florida failed to conduct national background checks on tens of thousands of applicants looking to procure a concealed weapon permit for more than a year, and the reason is about as dumb as it gets: the person in charge of performing the checks forgot their login information.
An Office of Inspector General investigation obtained by the Tampa Bay Times showed that from February 2016 until March 2017, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services stopped using FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System—the primary database to make sure concealed carry applicants don’t have a checkered past in other states. No applications during that period underwent the required national background check.
That is fucking nuts, and the details of the Inspector General investigation only makes it worse.
According to the report, just two employees regularly accessed the FBI database: Lisa Wilde, the employee who was found to be negligent, and a mailroom employee who had next to no training with the system. Wilde stopped using the database in February 2016 and waited 40 days before reporting that she was having trouble logging into her account to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Infuriatingly, Wilde didn’t go through the proper channels to report the issue, choosing to send an email to the public email address for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s (FDLE) firearm purchasing program instead of directly contacting someone who could help. Her email was forwarded to the proper person, and she was informed the username she provided was wrong. Wilde was given the correct username, which hadn’t been used to login for more than a month, but still reported experiencing issues.
An employee at the FDLE told Wilde that he could help fix the problem, but she would have to contact him via phone call. He also reported trying to call Wilde but she didn’t pick up. Wilde never called and never followed up on the email, opting instead to just not conduct the background checks. This went on for more than a year until another employee finally realized the department hadn’t received a single denial from the FBI database for quite some time.
Wilde clearly holds a significant part of the blame for this massive oversight, but here’s a fun tidbit from the Tampa Bay Times. In an interview with the paper, Wilde said she was working in the Agriculture Department’s mailroom when she was given oversight of the background check database in 2013. “I didn’t understand why I was put in charge of it,” she said. Yikes!
So just how many applications went through without being reviewed by the FBI during that period? According to the Florida Agriculture Department’s annual concealed weapons permit report, there were nearly 275,000 applications from July 1st, 2016 through June 30th, 2017. Just 6,470 of those were denied, and nearly half of those denials were due to incomplete applications.
(For comparison’s sake, the 2017-2018 report shows 200,000 applications during the same period but saw 2,000 more denials with the federal background check in place.)
In the IG report, department employees said the federal background checks are “extremely important” and admitted that without the check, concealed weapons licenses “may have been issued to potentially ineligible individuals.”
A spokesperson for the state’s Department of Agriculture told the Tampa Bay Times the following regarding the report:
As soon as we learned that one employee failed to review applicants’ non-criminal disqualifying information, we immediately terminated the employee, thoroughly reviewed every application potentially impacted, and implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again.
Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam told the paper just 365 applications required the federal background check. Upon learning of Wilde’s negligence, the department “immediately completed full background checks” on the applications in question and ended up revoking 291 of them.
Per Putnam, “a criminal background investigation was completed on every single application.” The Agriculture Department spokesperson echoed that statement, telling the Times it conducted background checks using two other databases, the Florida Crime Information Center database and the National Crime Information Center database.
That’s not particularly reassuring, especially seeing as Florida has been home to two of the most horrific mass shootings in recent memory: the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. The latter, in which 50 people were killed, took place during the period that Florida was not conducting FBI background checks (though the shooter acquired his firearms license before that time).
Putnam, the head of the Agriculture Department, is currently making a run for governor of the state of Florida. According to the Times, he’s spent much of his time in his current position trying to speed up the process of issuing concealed carry permits. In 2012, he held a press conference to announce the state’s one millionth concealed carry permit. During the event, he said application process time dropped from 12 weeks to 35 days under his leadership.
He’s only doubled down on his position since hitting the campaign trail. In 2017, he tweeted that he’s a “proud NRA sellout” and has made guns a central issue of his campaign. On his website, he brags, “As Commissioner of Agriculture, Adam expanded the state’s concealed weapon license program so it is now the largest in the country.” That’s probably pretty easy to accomplish when you’re just skipping an entire step of scrutiny for thousands of applications.
