CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
UK fraud watchdog investigating GFG Alliance

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is investigating Gupta Family Group Alliance, including its financing arrangements with collapsed Greensill Capital, it said on Friday.

© Reuters/Russell Cheyne FILE PHOTO: The GFG Alliance flag flies at the completion of a 330 million pound deal to buy Britain's last remaining Aluminium smelter in Fort William Lochaber Scotland

"The SFO is investigating suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in relation to the financing and conduct of the business of companies within the Gupta Family Group Alliance (GFG), including its financing arrangements with Greensill Capital UK Ltd," the SFO said in a statement.

© Reuters/RUSSELL CHEYNE FILE PHOTO: A view of the Lochaber Aluminium smelter and hydroelectric site, which is owned by Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance, at Fort William

A representative of GFG Alliance, steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta's family conglomerate, said the group had no immediate comment on the matter.

The SFO said it had no further comment given it was a live investigation.

GFG Alliance, Gupta's privately held conglomerate, has relied heavily on Greensill Capital to fund its operations.

Greensill is facing insolvency after its main insurer stopped providing credit insurance on $4.1 billion of debt in portfolios it had created for clients including Credit Suisse.

Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said on Tuesday it was formally investigating the UK operations of supply chain finance company Greensill as part of global probes.

Greensill lent money to firms by buying their invoices at a discount, but collapsed in March 2021 after insurers pulled their cover.

(Reporting by Huw Jones; editing by David Goodman and Jason Nee

Wall Street Bets was right: Hertz's bankruptcy auction will actually give shareholders a handsome payout - even after Wall Street decided the stock was worthless

egraffeo@businessinsider.com (Emily Graffeo) 

Retail traders helped spur a nearly 825% spike in Hertz last summer after it filed for bankruptcy.

They bought the stock even as Hertz said its shares could be "worthless."

Shareholders will receive a payout in Hertz's takeover bid, vindicating retail traders' instincts.

Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.

Long before GameStop and Reddit's Wall Street Bets became synonymous, the social-media platform was enamored of another stock: Hertz.


The car-rental company became the target of Reddit-fueled traders last summer when it announced it would file for bankruptcy. Shares of Hertz spiked as much as 825% in a matter of weeks. Wall Street onlookers were scratching their heads, wondering why retail investors were scooping up shares of a company that couldn't meet its debt obligations.

In June, retail investors who steadfastly believed that "stonks only go up" were especially excited that the billionaire investor Carl Icahn missed out on Hertz's massive rally. Icahn had sold his Hertz position at an average price of $0.72, representing a loss of more than $1.8 billion.

"Good job guys. Hertz is now a viable company again. Carl Icahn is a clown who bought high, sold low," a Wall Street Bets user commented last summer.

Even Hertz itself didn't have as much faith in its stock as the retail traders did. When the company issued more shares in June, it said its stock could be "worthless."

"We are in the process of a reorganization under chapter 11 of title 11, or Chapter 11, of the United States Code, or Bankruptcy Code, which has caused and may continue to cause our common stock to decrease in value, or may render our common stock worthless. Investing in our common stock involves a high degree of risk," the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Typically, in a corporate bankruptcy case like Hertz's, equity shareholders would receive nothing. In March, Hertz unveiled its reorganization plan, which said shareholders would receive no payout.

But on Wednesday, Hertz announced that it had accepted a $6 billion bid from a group of investors - Knighthead Capital Management, Certares Opportunities, and Apollo Capital Management - to exit bankruptcy. Knighthead's plan values Hertz at about $7.4 billion including debt, according to Bloomberg. The winning bid would pay shareholders close to $8 a share.

As part of the Hertz proposal, institutional and accredited equity investors would be given about $240 million in cash and the chance to participate in either a $1.6 billion rights offering or warrants for about 20% of the reorganized company, Bloomberg reported.

Many of the traders who speculated on Reddit likely won't qualify as institutional or accredited investors and therefore won't get new shares. But their instinct about the value of Hertz's stock turned out to be correct, even when much of Wall Street didn't believe so.

The $8 share price is higher than what any retail investor who purchased last summer paid.

Andrew Glenn, a managing partner of Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes who orchestrated the winning bid, told Insider the equity payout to shareholders was "unprecedented."

"Just six weeks ago, shareholders were going to get nothing, and now they're getting upwards of $8 a share," Glenn said. "That doesn't happen every day in bankruptcy. In fact, I've never seen it happen."

He added that a confluence of events had led to the success for the equity shareholders and Hertz's valuation: the V-shaped recovery, pent-up demand for travel, and a shortage of rental cars as many companies sent their cars to the used-car market during the pandemic.

"It's just a perfect storm that happened first gradually and then very quickly over the first quarter of this year and really the last two months," he said. "Our clients saw that trend happening before it unfolded, they had conviction as to the valuation, and they entered into the bankruptcy and became the mouthpiece in court for the Knighthead proposal."

Shares of Hertz extended their gains for the second day in a row on Thursday, jumping as much as 11%, to $6.36. That followed a nearly 70% surge on Wednesday.
Read the original article on Business Insider

NICE NAZI DIES
WWII secretary to Wernher von Braun dies in Alabama

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — The World War II secretary to German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun has died in Alabama, where she spent much of her postwar life.

Dorette “Dorothea” Hertha Kersten Schlidt died Monday in Huntsville, according to a funeral home obituary. She was 100.

Born in Stargard in what is now northwestern Poland, Schlidt worked as von Braun’s secretary in the 1940s at the German rocket factory at Peenemuende, where thousands of concentration camp prisoners died in the Nazi war effort.

Heidi Weber Collier, a friend who visited with Schlidt recently, told al.com that Schlidt had been working in a law office when von Braun hired her as an aide at the complex. She helped von Braun retrieve notes and documents about the project after an Allied bombing raid, Collier said.

“He would work late at night and read out things he wanted her to type,” Collier said. “She didn’t sleep much, but they would be ready for him to review in the morning.”

It was at Peenemuende that she met Rudolf Schlidt, a guided missile expert who helped develop the Nazis' V-2 rocket, which killed thousands of civilians in Britain. The couple married in 1945, and in a then-secret U.S. effort known as Operation Paperclip, they joined hundreds of other German scientists in moving to the United States.

Schlidt now had a new, Cold War mission — developing U.S. military and space technology — and they settled in Huntsville when von Braun's team moved to Redstone Arsenal to develop the first U.S. rockets.

Rudolf Schlidt was one of the last surviving team members when he died in 2012.

The Associated Press

Wernher von Braun: History's most controversial figure ...

https://www.aljazeera.com › opinions › wernher-von-br...

May 3, 2013 — Pivotal to the history of spaceflight, von Braun's Nazi past makes him incredibly ... the government programme under which hundreds of German scientists were brought into America. ... its contents were deemed so important to the future of Germany's ... Exploring space and finding our own Pale Blue Dot.

The Right Stuff (1983) - Scott Beach as Chief Scientist - IMDb

https://www.imdb.com › title › characters

Quotes · Chief Scientist : Our Germans are better than their Germans. · 

Hundreds of Fossilized Footprints From Ancient, Bear-Sized Mammals Found in Wyoming


For years, paleontologists and paleobotanists have spent time on Wyoming’s Hanna Formation, a 58-million-year-old zone of rock in the southern part of the state that contains a wealth of fossils of marine fauna like ammonites and various forms of ancient plant life. In 2019, though, Anton Wroblewski stumbled across something new: a massive exposed trackway spanning thousands of years, marking a seaside destination for many ancient mammals in the Paleocene.

© Illustration: Anton Wroblewski Hippos and tapirs the size of bears once roamed Wyoming, and left their mark.

“The angle of the light was just right on the surface of the rock that I could see these impressions that were at very regular intervals and went for dozens and dozens of meters,” said Wroblewski, an ichnologist—someone who studies trace fossils—at the University of Utah. “I looked at them and said ‘holy cow, those are footprints.’”

 Image: Anton Wroblewski undefined
Some of the mammalian trackways, in white for the eye’s convenience.


An analysis of the trackways is published today in Scientific Reports. Following the tracks down their length, Wroblewski found they ran nearly 3,500 feet along the sandstone escarpment, about a third longer than the Burj Khalifa is tall. The tracks were splotches roughly 10 inches wide, suggesting they belonged to animals about the size of bears. The footprints were found amid trace fossils of bivalves and polychaetes (marine worms), confirming the lumbering mammals were by the seaside. These prints were left as the animals made their way across the muddy bank of the lagoon or bay that occupied the region. It’s the oldest example of large mammals taking by a marine environment.

Sixty million years ago, Earth was a boomtown for mammals. The dinosaurs were gone, leaving furry animals with the space and safety to grow bigger and proliferate. One of the places the warm-blooded creatures set up shop was what became the Hanna Formation. For millions of years, the western United States was occupied by a vast inland sea, inhabited by a vast diversity of creatures. There’s some debate as to when that Western Interior Seaway retreated, but it’s clear that some marine water was still sitting in what is today Wyoming when these mammals chose to walk through it.

As to the identity of the trackmakers, there were actually two. It’s hard to parse the (relatively) small timescales between them, but the prints were made tens of thousands of years apart. One type was probably made by a hippo-like ungulate called Coryphodon, by Wroblewski’s assessment, based on the size and shape of the five-toed print. The other mammal species was also an even-toed ungulate—an “artiodactyl,” the same order that includes bison, giraffe, and cows, among other modern mammals—but its identity is less certain. Those trackways only had four toes, which paleontologists don’t find in the fossil record until a few million years after the trace fossils in Wyoming formed.

© Graphic: Anton Wroblewski undefined

A graphic showing how the animals walked across what was once mud but is now high and dry in Wyoming.

“The molecular data suggests that these four-toed animals evolved in the Cretaceous [145 to 66 million years ago], but the body fossils say they didn’t show up until the Eocene [56 to 33.9 million years ago],” Wroblewski said. “Well now, I’ve got trace fossil evidence of something with four toes that looks like an artiodactyl or maybe a tapiroid, right in between those two age dates.”

Scientists have to make a lot of assumptions about the history of life, since only a tiny fraction of the plants and animals that have lived on Earth actually left behind a fossil. When something like these footprints comes along and shows that certain guesses were correct, well, that’s got to be satisfying.

More: Meet the Wild Creatures That Roamed Ancient Texas

The Weather Network

Who punched a hole in the clouds?
Duration: 00:55 
A strange gap in the clouds looms overhead in Sherwood Park, AB

Two in three Americans think there is intelligent life on other planets

Fred Backus 

Most Americans think we're not alone in the cosmos — a belief that has grown over the past few years. Most of those who hold this opinion also think we will make contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life within the next hundred years. And, on the topic of UFOs, most think the U.S. government knows more than it is telling the general public.

© Credit: CBSNews intelligent-life-2.jpg

Sixty-six percent of Americans now believe that there is intelligent life on other planets — an increase of 10 percentage points since the last time CBS News asked this question in 2017. As recently as 2010, fewer than half of Americans believed this was so.

© Provided by CBS News

Moreover, a third of those who believe in sentient extraterrestrial life think human contact with beings from another world will occur during their lifetime (including 10% of Americans who volunteer that we already have). Another 24% think such contact will be made within the next hundred years. Thirty-six percent think it won't happen until further into the future, while 6% think that while there is intelligent life on other planets, we will never have contact with it.

© Provided by CBS News

Though few Americans say they believe aliens have contacted us already, many more at least entertain the possibility. Fifty-one percent of Americans think UFOs — or Unidentified Flying Objects — might sometimes be the result of alien spacecrafts visiting Earth. This rises to 71% among those who believe intelligent life on other planets exists.

© Provided by CBS News

And most Americans think that whatever UFOs are, the U.S. government knows more than it's telling the general public. Just 20% think the government has told everything it knows about UFOs    

.

© Provided by CBS News

This poll was conducted by telephone March 23-28, 2021 among a random sample of 1,009 adults nationwide. Data collection was conducted on behalf of CBS News by SSRS of Glen Mills, PA. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard landline and cell phones.

The poll employed a random digit dial methodology. For the landline sample, a respondent was randomly selected from all adults in the household. For the cell sample, interviews were conducted with the person who answered the phone.

Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish using live interviewers. The data have been weighted to reflect U.S. Census figures on demographic variables. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. The error for subgroups may be higher and is available by request. The margin of error includes the effects of standard weighting procedures which enlarge sampling error slightly. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.

Rare 'Alien' Isotopes in Earth's Crust Point to Recent Brush With a Cataclysmic Event
Mike McRae

Far down in the periodic table you'll find a list of heavy elements born in chaos. The kind of chaos you might find in an exploding star perhaps, or a collision between two neutron stars. 

© MEHAU KULYK/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

Physicists have uncovered a pair of large, still-radioactive isotopes in samples of deep-sea crust pulled up from 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) below the Pacific Ocean.

We'd expect to see many heavyweight elements in the swirl of dust and gas that formed our planet eons ago - but most should have decayed into more stable forms long before now. So finding examples in Earth's crust close to the surface today raises some interesting questions.

The finding could tell us a thing or two about cataclysmic cosmic events taking place within a few hundred light-years from Earth, and relatively recently in our geological history. It could also shine a light on the way atomic heavyweights form.

You see, building atoms takes a lot of energy. Protons can be squeezed into helium under the kind of gravity you'd find in a star, but stellar fusion will only take you so far. To build a chunky behemoth such as plutonium, you'll need the kind of energy that can deliver a machine-gun burst of neutrons.

There are a few conditions in the Universe under which this 'rapid neutron capture', or r-process, can occur, including supernovae and neutron star mergers.

Over the history of the Universe, plenty of stars have crashed and popped to spill a thick dust of iron, uranium, plutonium, gold, and other fat atoms throughout the galaxy. So it's to be expected that planets like Earth would have scooped up a good amount of them.

But not all elements are born the same. Variations in the number of their neutrons make some more stable than others. Iron 60, for example, is a 'blink and you'll miss it' kind of isotope if you view it on the cosmic scale, with a half-life of just 2.6 million years before it decays into nickel.

Finding this short-lived isotope on our planet today – especially in the crust, just out of reach of modern artificial processes – would imply a relatively recent delivery of iron fresh from the cosmos.

Iron 60 has appeared in rock samples before, dating back just a couple of million years. It's also been seen in materials brought back from the lunar surface.

But to get a good sense of the specific kind of r-process that produced these specimens, it would pay to see what other isotopes rained down with them.

Physicist Anton Wallner from the Australian National University led a team of researchers in search of new samples of iron 60 to see if they could identify isotopes of other heavy elements close by.

What they found was plutonium 244, an isotope with a half-life of just over 80 million years – stable for plutonium, but hardly the kind of element you'd expect to stick around since our planet came together 4.5 billion years ago.

In all, the team discovered two distinct influxes of iron 60 which had to have arrived within the past 10 million years. Both samples were accompanied by small but significant quantities of plutonium 244, each in a similar ratio.

Finding them together adds more detail than finding either apart. The amount of plutonium in them is lower than would be expected if supernovae were primarily responsible for their production, pointing to contributions from other r-processes.

Exactly what was behind this particular sprinkle of alien space dust is left up to our imagination for now.

"The story is complicated," says Wallner.

"Possibly this plutonium-244 was produced in supernova explosions or it could be left over from a much older, but even more spectacular event such as a neutron star detonation."

By measuring their respective radioactive fuses and making a few assumptions on the astrophysics behind their distribution, the researchers speculate the production of iron 60 is compatible with two to four supernova events going off between 50 and 100 parsecs (around 160 and 330 light years) of Earth.

This isn't the first time iron 60 has indicated a supernova taking place perilously close by in recent history.

By looking at the isotope in connection with other elements, we could slowly build a signature that tells us more about the crash-bang conditions of our neighborhood in the millions of years before humans started to pay close attention.

It'll take more hunting for alien isotopes, though.

"Our data could be the first evidence that supernovae do indeed produce plutonium-244," says Wallner.

"Or perhaps it was already in the interstellar medium before the supernova went off, and it was pushed across the Solar System together with the supernova ejecta."

This research was published in Science.

Habitat for endangered spiny softshell turtle protected southeast of Montreal

MONTREAL — The Nature Conservancy of Canada said Thursday it acquired two hectares of land southeast of Montreal to protect the habitat of the endangered spiny softshell turtle.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The conservation group said the properties along the water in Pike River, Que., about 70 kilometres southeast of Montreal, are close to one of the few known spiny softshell turtle egg-laying sites.

About 100 turtles were released into the water of the Rivière aux Brochets in Pike River on Thursday, joining more than 1,600 other turtles that have been reintroduced in the area since 2010.

Conservancy vice-president Joel Bonin said the newly protected land is critical for the future of the species that has been classified as endangered by the federal government in 2005.

Quebec Environment Minister Benoit Charette said on Thursday the provincial government gave the nature conservancy $40.1 million to help protect natural environments, and that part of that money went to purchase the two hectares of land.

"We are seeing another beautiful initiative that derives not only from the Quebec government through the projects … but also from the natural areas conservation program by the Canadian government," Charette said.

Lyne Bessette, federal Liberal member for the region, said the Canadian government wants to protect a quarter of Canada’s land and oceans by 2025. "It's important to take actions as fast as possible, for today and future generations," Bessette said.

One of the previous owners of the newly protected land in Pike River is David Gasser, whose family owned two dairy farms in the community. "We need to take care of the environment if we want it to take care of us," Gasser said.

Conservancy project coordinator Valérie René said a protected natural area offers a quieter place for turtles to grow safely.

She said that the spiny softshell turtles are slow to adapt, making it harder for them to survive in highly urbanized environments. It can take more than 12 years before a turtle’s reproduction process begins, René said.

“This gives them a protected oasis where they can continue to survive, eat and live their turtle life,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on May 13, 2021.

Virginie Ann, The Canadian Press

Scientists urge restoration of federal gray wolf protections

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — A group of scientists urged the Biden administration Thursday to restore legal protections for gray wolves, saying their removal earlier this year was premature and that states are allowing too many of the animals to be killed.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropped wolves in most of the lower 48 states from the endangered species list in January. The decision was among more than 100 Trump administration actions related to the environment that President Joe Biden ordered reviewed after taking office.

The move didn't affect Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, where federal protections had been lifted years earlier and hunting is allowed. But it removed them elsewhere in the lower 48 states, including in the western Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest that have wolf populations, and others where experts say the predators could migrate if shielded from human harassment.

The decision was premature because the species hasn't fully recovered, 115 scientists argued in a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Martha Williams, principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. High numbers of state-approved killings since then have caused setbacks, the letter said.

“We've been shocked by the way states have been willing to go to all-out war against the wolves," said John Vucetich, a professor of wildlife conservation at Michigan Technological University.

Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Vanessa Kauffman said the agency had no update on wolves. The agency has continued defending their removal from the endangered list against lawsuits filed by environmental groups.

Wolves were wiped out across most of the U.S. by the 1930s under government-sponsored poisoning and trapping campaigns. A remnant population in the western Great Lakes region has since expanded to some 4,400 animals in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

More than 2,000 occupy six states in the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest after wolves from Canada were reintroduced in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park beginning 25 years ago.

Wisconsin had a court-ordered hunt in February in response to a lawsuit from a pro-hunting group. Participants killed 216 wolves — nearly one-fifth of the state’s population, far exceeding the state’s quota of 119. Another hunt is planned for this fall.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little last week signed into law a measure that could lead to killing 90% of the state’s 1,500 wolves with methods such as using night-vision equipment, chasing them on snowmobiles and ATVs and shooting them from helicopters. In Montana, proposed legislation would allow the use of bait, night-vision scopes and snares.

The states "have clearly indicated that they will manage wolves to the lowest allowable standards,” the scientists said in their letter.

“The recent politicization of wolf management in states like Idaho and Montana puts long-term recovery of wolves in jeopardy by reducing the probability of such dispersals,” said Jeremy Bruskotter, a wildlife policy professor at Ohio State University.

The Fish and Wildlife Service contends it’s not necessary for wolves to be in every place they once inhabited to be considered recovered.

Livestock farmers and ranchers contend wolf numbers are too high and threaten their livelihoods.

Lawyers representing the government and groups suing to restore federal protections agreed this month to a scheduling plan intended to get matter resolved before hunts that might take place this fall.

John Flesher, The Associated Press

New Washington state law makes drug possession a misdemeanor

© Provided by The Canadian Press

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — The jeans were from American Eagle, via Goodwill, and they were too short for their new owner, 6-foot Shannon Bowman.

So Bowman stitched a couple inches of denim onto the bottom of the legs and put them on for the first time two days after her friend had given them to her. She didn’t notice the tiny, nearly empty baggie of methamphetamine in the coin pocket.

That fact more than four years later would lead to a Washington state Supreme Court decision striking down Washington’s drug possession law; the expected vacation of tens of thousands of criminal convictions dating back decades; and the overhaul of the state’s approach to drug possession signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee on Thursday.

“It’s cool there’s a lot of people who are going to have a second chance to make things right,” Bowman said in a recent interview. “Hopefully they go down a good road.”

The bill signed by Inslee makes drug possession a misdemeanor, rather than the felony it was under the old law. Inslee said the measure will “help reduce the disparate impact of the previous drug possession statute on people of color.”

“It moves the system from responding to possession as a felony to focusing on the behavioral health response, which is a much more appropriate and successful way to address the needs that underlie drug abuse,” the governor said.

Oregon this year became the only other state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of all types of drugs and increase access to treatment. Washington’s measure likewise aims to greatly expand treatment services and outreach, including to homeless people with severe behavioral health issues.

The Washington measure requires police to divert a defendant’s first two offenses to treatment before the case even made it to a prosecutor, and if a defendant’s case ever reached a prosecutor, the prosecutor would be able to divert as well. Regional “recovery navigator” teams will be set up to help provide “continual, rapid, and widespread access to a comprehensive continuum of care” to “all persons with substance abuse disorder.”

In two years, the provision classifying drug possession as a misdemeanor expires, reverting to current law with no prohibition. That’s designed to give lawmakers time to re-evaluate how the state’s new policies are working and potentially figure out a long-term strategy for drug policy.

The 5-4 ruling in Bowman’s case - known as the Blake decision, because she was charged under a surname she hasn’t used in more than 20 years - held that Washington’s drug law was unconstitutional because it didn’t require prosecutors to prove that a defendant knowingly had the drugs. That left the possession of small amounts of drugs, including heroin, cocaine and meth, legal under state law, even for children.

The justices issued the ruling in February, well into the legislative session in Olympia. Lawmakers scrambled to write a new law.

Bowman, 43, now lives in a motor home on her parents’ property near Kettle Falls, north of Spokane. She has been working as a logger but the felony on her record long kept her from renting her own place, she said.

At the time of her arrest in 2016, she and her boyfriend, who was addicted to heroin, were renting a room in a Spokane house for $200 a month. They had recently been homeless.

Police took her to jail, where her blood pressure was so high that they sent her to a hospital. When she returned to the jail, guards searched her and found the baggie in her coin pocket.

Bowman told the AP she had kicked an addiction to pain pills and never used meth because of her blood pressure. Had she known the baggie was in her jeans, she would have ditched it while she was at the hospital, she said.

She didn’t think the outcome of her case made for good public policy.

“For there to be no punishment at all, I didn’t feel like that was going to help anything. But felonies for people like me? That was a little extreme,” she said.

Rachel La Corte And Gene Johnson, The Associated Press