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What's the secret formula for silly science?

Improbable.com

The Ig Nobel Prizes sometimes knock scientific decorum off its pedestal.

By Alan Boyle

If there's a formula for silly science, Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams surely has it figured out. For 21 years, he and his?friends at the Annals of Improbable Research have made international headlines by honoring breakthroughs like the first?study of homosexual necrophiliac ducks, and the invention of the bra that?turns into a gas mask.

But here's a clue or two for?future laureates: Make sure there's a dash of seriousness to go with the silliness. One sure way not to win an Ig Nobel?is to try too hard to be funny.


"If you were to set out and try to win an Ig Nobel Prize, you would almost certainly fail," Abrahams told me. "To win a prize, you've got to do something that makes pretty much everyone laugh when they first hear about it, and then it gets into their mind enough that they just want to keep thinking about it and finding out more. It's not that hard to make something funny, and it's not that hard to come up with something that will make people scratch their head and wonder about it. But it's very hard to come up with things that will do both of those."

Abrahams will talk about his secret formula for Ig-worthy science, and spin some tales about past Ig Nobel winners, tonight during "Virtually Speaking Science,"?our monthly talk show on the Web and in the Second Life virtual world. The hourlong program gets started at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT / SLT). You can listen to it live?on BlogTalkRadio, or be part of the avatar?audience at?Stella Nova's MICA Small Auditorium in Second?Life.?No worries if you can't make it in real time: The first-Wednesday?show will be archived as a podcast at BlogTalkRadio as well as on iTunes.

The subject of tonight's show is apt,?because today we're announcing the winners of this year's Weird Science Awards. The Weirdies celebrate the silliest science of the past year, from A (for Aflockalypse) to Z (for zombie ants).

The Ig Nobels, which take their inspiration from the Nobel Prize, are a much bigger production. They're announced each September (or sometimes early October) during a Harvard ceremony that features real Nobel laureates, musical interludes and occasional barrages of paper airplanes. For the past two decades, it's been a formula for success for Abrahams and his fellow AIR-heads.?After the Ig Nobel?festivities, Abrahams takes the show on the road, to Britain, the Netherlands and other locations around the globe. Abrahams has also written several books that recount the tales behind the Ig Nobel winners.

You'll hear some of those stories tonight?? but to prime the pump, I discussed the Ig phenomenon?with Abrahams during a phone interview on Tuesday. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: Are there particularly better or worse years for the Ig Nobels? Where does this past year rate?

Marc Abrahams: One of the main qualities that everything has to have if we're doing a good job is that it's surprising. If each of the winners is not surprising, we have not been doing a good job. So I think the idea of surprise is like the idea of infinity. It's hard to compare infinities. It's hard to compare surprises. As long as everything is surprising, we're happy. And for all the winners we had, we saw plenty of people who were very, very surprised.

Q: So whether it's infinity, or infinity times two, it's hard to compare. It almost sounds like you're saying "I can't decide which of my children I like best."

A: Well, you probably can. But if you were to be asked on consecutive days, the answers would not be very consistent, probably.

Q: Have you seen any areas that are really ripe for being recognized with an Ig Nobel? Any subject that is just crying out for the Ig Nobel treatment?

A: There are so many ... I can't think of a particular subject that stands out over the others as having not been recognized. It's more that there are certain things that people do that seem to keep on producing this quality of work. We've seen no signs that anything is slowing down. Humanity seems to be getting better and better at producing this stuff. Or maybe just at making it apparent to the rest of the world so that we can find it.

Anything that's so complicated that people will probably never really understand it is going to produce some good Ig Nobel prizes, because people are going to try their hardest to understand it, or pretend to understand it. I'll mention medicine, because medicine is far too complicated, and most doctors who know what they're doing seem to spend most of their time realizing that they barely know anything at all. But there are other doctors who don't seem to feel that way. Those are the ones who tend to win more Ig Nobel Prizes.

Q: Are there some researchers who go out and deliberately try to win a prize?

A: Oh, yeah. From the beginning we've had far more people than we would have ever expected who seem to devote their lives to trying to get an Ig Nobel Prize. There are some who are constantly sending in all sorts of things. They're welcome to nominate themselves. Anybody can. But we get thousands and thousands of nominations every year. Ten to 20 percent of those are people nominating themselves. They almost never win. And of the very few people who have nominated themselves and won, in almost every case, they did not set out to win an Ig Nobel Prize. They may have set out to win a Nobel Prize, but the way it came out was just a side effect. They had something they were trying to get done, and somewhere along the way, or after it was all finished, it became apparent that, wow, this is Ig Nobel-class work.

Q: Have some researchers' lives been changed because they won an Ig Nobel? For example, the woman who invented the bra that converts into a pair of gas masks?

A: Yeah, that's a good example. Especially in the last five or 10 years, there seem to be a fair number of people who have had pretty good things happen to them. They've started businesses, or their businesses have taken off. They've gotten book contracts or have become better known. Elena Bodnar is a good example. Kees Moeliker, the homosexual-necrophiliac-duck guy. Even Andre Geim, who used magnets to levitate a frog and win an Ig, and then 10 years later got a Nobel Prize ... the Ig Nobel had nothing to do with him getting a Nobel Prize, but Andre being Andre, the same kinds of forces were at work in him that led to both those things.

I've seen Andre say several times in interviews that it took a lot more courage for him and his colleague Michael Berry to accept their Ig Nobel Prize than the Nobel Prize. They've both been well-known and respected scientists for a long time, and sometimes there's been a little bit of a stigma against scientists getting up in public and appearing to be fully human and enjoying life. If you look back at the last century or so, it's hard to come up quickly with more than two or three names of scientists who enjoyed being funny in public. Richard Feynman is about the only one.

Q: During September's Ig Nobel ceremony, the mathematics prize went to preacher Harold Camping and other doomsayers who predicted the end of the world, erroneously. Is there room for a prize to recognize the 2012 Maya apocalypse this year?

A: It's certainly possible. We have a policy of not discussing candidates for future prizes in public. But I'm comfortable in saying that pretty much anything you can think of could be a candidate, if someone were to make a nomination. With those predictions, the problem is, who do you nominate? We're hesitant to give a prize in a case where it's not at all clear who we're giving it to. We don't award the prize to a concept. We award it to a specific person or a specific group of people.

Q: I'm greatly tempted to ask you to list some of your favorite prizes from the past...

A: I don't have any one that is the absolute favorite. There's the levitating frog with magnets, there's the homosexual necrophiliac duck, Elena Bodner's emergency bra ... boy, where to stop? Jacques Benveniste won two Ig Nobel Prizes: one for explaining that water molecules are able to remember things, and the second for extending that research and starting a company that was going to let the public send credit card information over the Internet or a phone line, in return for which this company would send you drugs over the Internet or the phone line. You would somehow take a glass of water and hook it up to your telephone, and they would deliver your medicine to you.

Q: If you're talking about multiple winners, there's the Japanese slime-mold research group.

A: Yup. And who knows? It's conceivable that any of the winners could win again in the future for things they haven't yet done.

There's also the case of the prize that went to two teams of researchers who independently came up with studies saying that herring, those little fish, communicate by farting. One of the groups has an especially good story. It was research done in Sweden, in Stockholm harbor, at the request of the Swedish government. This was back when the Soviet Union still existed, and the Swedish government was convinced that the Soviets were sending submarines into the harbor, but they needed proof before they could get up in public and accuse them.

So they put some microphones underwater, figuring that they would get recordings of the sounds of the submarines. They heard some mechanical clanking, very rhythmic. It sounded like metal banging, and they thought, "This is it! These are the submarines. But we're going to do this right, and we're going to get some good biologists to analyze this and tell us for sure what this is."

So they got these guys, who pretty quickly realized that these were not Soviet submarines. These were herrings, farting. We occasionally do shows in Scandinavia, and if one of them comes to the show, they'll usually go to the market beforehand, buy a freshly cut herring, bring it to the show and demonstrate. "This is a herring, and I'm going to show you the sound it makes."

I recently ran across a big report about the Swedish effort to detect submarines, and it was a wonderful report to read ...?only it was missing this vital information. It didn't say anything at all about this, which in a way was one of the key elements in the whole history of the relationship between these two countries.

That got me thinking about all the history that's taught in schools, and how it's always so dignified. You never get these things that are sometimes really right in the heart of what happened. Nobody talks about them because they're not dignified.

Tune into BlogTalkRadio or drop into Second Life to join the "Virtually Speaking Science" conversation with?Abrahams at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT / SLT) tonight. And check out these previous podcasts from the "VSScience" show:


Many thanks to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for co-sponsoring Wednesday's Second Life talk at the MICA Small Auditorium at Stella Nova.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Source: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/04/9950637-the-secret-formula-for-silly-science

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Source: http://vectismedia.co.uk/?p=1615

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Hepatitis C virus hijacks liver microRNA

ScienceDaily (Jan. 2, 2012) ? Viral diseases are still one of the biggest challenges to medical science. Thanks to thousands of years of co-evolution with humans, their ability to harness the biology of their human hosts to survive and thrive makes them very difficult to target with medical treatment.

Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working with colleagues from the University of Colorado, have shown for the first time how a small RNA molecule that regulates gene expression in human liver cells has been hijacked by the hepatitis C virus to ensure its own survival -- helping medical scientists understand why a new antiviral drug appears to be effective against the virus.

MicroRNAs are involved in regulating the expression of genes in cells, usually by blocking the production of key proteins or by destabilizing the messenger RNAs that encode the cell's proteins as it grows and divides. Normally they act by downregulating gene expression. The research team found that the binding of a prominent microRNA in liver cells, called miR-122, to the viral RNA results in its stabilization, promoting efficient replication of the virus genome in the liver and supporting the virus' lifecycle.

"The hepatitis C virus has done two very interesting things with miR-122," says Stanley M. Lemon, MD, professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology and a member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Center for Translational Immunology.

"First, it has evolved a unique relationship with a key regulator, since miR-122 represents about half of all microRNAs present in the liver. Second, the virus has usurped a process that usually downregulates gene expression to upregulate the stability of its RNA and expression of viral proteins needed for its lifecycle. It's a classic example of how viruses subvert normally beneficial functions of the cell to their own nefarious purposes."

Work by Dr. Lemon and his colleagues in 2005 helped to demonstrate that miR-122 was required for hepatitis C to replicate itself, but the mechanism was not understood. Now the UNC research team has shown how it works, which helps to explain how a new experimental antiviral drug target the virus. The drug, called an "antagomer," binds to miR-122 and sequesters it in the liver and thus destabilizes the viral genome, accelerating its degradation in the liver. Results of the most recent study are published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hepatitis C is a continuing public health problem, which is difficult to measure because symptoms occur months to years after infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates as many as 4 million people in the United States may be persistently infected with hepatitis C virus, and most do not know they are infected. More than a third of those who are long-term carriers may develop chronic liver disease or liver cancer, a deadly form of cancer that is becoming increasingly common due to the spread of this virus.

Other members of the research team include Tetsuro Shimakami, Daisuke Yamane, Rohit Jangra and Carolyn Spaniel from UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the division of infectious diseases at UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine and Brian J. Kempf and David Barton from the department of microbiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The research was funded in part by UNC Lineberger's University Cancer Research Fund and the National Institutes of Health as well as a Gastrointestinal Special Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) Grant at the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Tetsuro Shimakami, Daisuke Yamane, Rohit K. Jangra, Brian J. Kempf, Carolyn Spaniel, David J. Barton, and Stanley M. Lemon. Stabilization of hepatitis C virus RNA by an Ago2?miR-122 complex. PNAS, January 3, 2012 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1112263109

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120102180838.htm

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Zimbabwe police stop Anglican prayer retreat (AP)

HARARE, Zimbabwe ? Zimbabwean police stopped a retreat of 80 clergy over claims that their prayer gathering was not given police clearance under sweeping security laws, the country's mainstream Anglican church said Tuesday.

Zimbabwe's Anglican church has been split by a breakaway group led by a bishop close to the president, who has seized church properties without police intervention. The bishop has been excommunicated by world Anglicans.

The mainstream Diocese of Harare said in a statement that police ordered them to disperse Monday from the Peterhouse private school but they refused, denying any wrongdoing and insisting police remove them by force.

The mainstream Diocese of Harare said in a statement that police loyal to Bishop Nolbert Kunonga returned Tuesday to the school 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of the capital and were in a standoff, demanding the clerics, including two bishops, leave the school grounds.

"We deplore this action and call upon higher authorities to intervene. So much for freedom of religion," the head of the mainstream Anglicans, Bishop Chad Gandiya, said in the statement.

The boarding school is not linked to the church but allows Christian and other groups to use its facilities during vacations.

The police action marked the beginning of "another year of persecution at the hands of a hostile police force" and was a clear indication of the allegiance of police to Kunonga, the statement said.

The 80 clerics headed by Gandiya and Bishop Julius Makoni, the bishop of the eastern city of Mutare, represented the church in Harare and eastern Zimbabwe for their annual New Year's retreat.

Kunonga, the breakaway bishop, claims to lead Zimbabwe's Anglicans and has already refused to hand back the Harare Cathedral, offices, buildings, church bank accounts and vehicles he seized with the protection of police loyal to President Robert Mugabe.

In 2007, Kunonga was excommunicated by the main Anglican Province of Central Africa and the worldwide head of the church after he was accused of inciting violence in sermons supporting Mugabe's party.

The schism in the Zimbabwe's Anglican community has left many mainstream Anglicans without places of worship and they've experienced intimidation and threats of violence.

On a visit to Zimbabwe in October, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, met with Mugabe and handed over a dossier detailing incidents of intimidation and violence that included death threats to Anglican bishops and police raids on churches and mission schools to drive out worshippers, clerics and staff loyal to Gandiya.

Williams told reporters after meeting with Mugabe that the president told him he was unfamiliar with the scale of intimidation the mainstream Anglicans in Zimbabwe were facing.

Kunonga, who has denied the allegations against him, won a Supreme Court ruling in August allowing him to retain control of Anglican properties until an appeal by the mainstream Anglican church is resolved.

That ruling was made by Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, who like Kunonga is an open supporter of Mugabe's party.

Kunonga insists he broke away from the mainstream Anglicans after the church in Britain recognized gay marriage and the rights of same sex partners. Mugabe is a bitter critic of homosexuality.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120103/ap_on_re_af/af_zimbabwe_anglicans

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Washington Nationals Shooting For Prince Fielder?

Milwaukee Brewers' Prince Fielder hits a home run during the first inning of a baseball game against the Texas Rangers, Sunday, June 13, 2010, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo has been persistent in saying Adam LaRoche is the team's first baseman going forward, barring something extraordinary. Signing Prince Fielder could qualify as the extraordinary move that would push LaRoche out of the first base job.

The Prince Fielder front has been mostly quiet, and the Nationals have been careful with displaying their interest thus far. While the team keeps putting water onto the subject, one Nationals player told Jon Heyman of CBS Sports, "We're in the market. We're still shooting for him.''

More evidence the Nationals could be playing coy is a recent report from Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun. Connolly says Scott Boras and Prince Fielder were in the Baltimore-Washington area, but did not meet with Orioles owner Peter Angelos. It's safe to assume they did meet with the only other owner in the area, the Lerner family, which happen to own the Washington Nationals.

Star-divide

Source: http://www.mlbdailydish.com/2011/12/30/2671386/washington-nationals-shooting-for-prince-fielder

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Thai Government Scraps Plan to Transfer Debt to Central Bank

December 31, 2011, 4:14 AM EST

By Daniel Ten Kate and Suttinee Yuvejwattana

(Adds analyst?s comment in fifth paragraph.)

Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Thailand?s government scrapped a proposal to transfer $35 billion of legacy debt from bank bailouts to the central bank and will instead seek to extract cash from commercial lenders to finance flood defenses.

?Transferring debts to the Bank of Thailand will be like printing money,? Finance Minister Thirachai Phuvanatnaranubala told reporters today after meeting Bank of Thailand Governor Prasarn Trairatvorakul. ?The methods we are using must not affect fiscal and monetary discipline and must not hurt confidence among foreign investors and international agencies.?

Deputy Prime Minister Kittiratt Na-Ranong said yesterday the step would save the government as much as 65 billion baht ($2 billion) in annual interest costs that could be used to fund anti-flood measures. Thirachai had opposed the measure, warning this week it could hurt investor confidence and stoke inflation.

The proposal increased concerns that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra?s administration was infringing on the central bank?s independence, after Kittiratt in October said the Bank of Thailand should lower interest rates to help businesses cope with the country?s worst flooding since 1942.

The government ?didn?t study this issue well enough to argue with the Bank of Thailand,? said Pipat Luengnaruemitchai, vice president of Phatra Capital Pcl, Thailand?s second-biggest brokerage by market value. ?Anything involving monetary policy discipline, the government loses the debate all the time because the Bank of Thailand has better credibility.?

Baht Gains

The baht gained 0.7 percent to 31.54 per dollar as of 3:06 p.m. in Bangkok, the biggest advance in a month. Yesterday it fell the most in two months to the weakest level since Aug. 16, 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The government will attempt to raise about 50 billion baht for debt payments by taking 0.39 percent of the 0.4 percent fee that commercial banks pay to the Deposit Protection Agency and by amending the law to allow the Financial Institutions Development Fund to collect fees from commercial banks. The government paid 45 billion baht in interest on the debt this year, Thirachai said today.

?This will remove the interest burden from the government,? he said. ?If the central bank records a profit, they can also use that to reduce the debt.?

The Financial Institutions Development Fund racked up a 1.4 trillion-baht debt bailing out lenders after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when the government closed more than 60 financial companies and seized half of the nation?s 14 commercial banks.

Bank Losses

Under a repayment agreement in 2002, the finance ministry makes interest payments while the central bank pays down the principal whenever it earns a yearly profit. The Bank of Thailand has reported annual net income once since 2004 and last year reported a net loss of 117 billion baht, mostly due to losses on foreign exchange.

Thailand?s central bank expects to record a loss this year, Prasarn told reporters today. Kittiratt yesterday said that it would post a ?high profit.? Prasarn said the Bank of Thailand, finance ministry and Council of State would meet again to discuss legal amendments to help pay the debt.

?We agreed that what we will do must not prompt the central bank to print money and it should help reduce the fiscal burden,? Prasarn told reporters today after the meeting. ?It must not affect foreign reserves too.?

Interest Payments

Since 1997, the principal on the debt has fallen by 300 billion baht, or about 21 billion baht per year. During that time, the government has paid as much as 65 billion baht in interest annually, according to Kittiratt.

Korn Chatikavanij, Thirachai?s predecessor under a previous administration, opposed the idea to transfer fees from the Deposit Protection Agency to the government to pay the debt.

?If you shift the revenue to the government, eventually the government would be morally bound to support banks if they run into liquidity problems,? he said in a telephone interview yesterday. ?The whole idea of having a deposit guarantee scheme is to avoid the government having to be involved.?

--Editors: Tony Jordan, Stephanie Phang

To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok at dtenkate@bloomberg.net; Suttinee Yuvejwattana in Bangkok at suttinee1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Anstey at canstey@bloomberg.net

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-31/thai-government-scraps-plan-to-transfer-debt-to-central-bank.html

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Community Works To Save Sick Man's Farm


"I'm just a neighbor helping a neighbor that's all i know to say," says life long Richard Wilkerson.

Since early October, Richard Wilkerson has been coming here with nearly 100 other volunteers.

"They've been coming here after their work shift, staying for four or five hours or late into the night, some of them five and six days a week," says Kevin Trent, Calvin Harp's brother-in-law.

These volunteers are stripping Calvin Harp's tobacco.
"he's slipping in and out right now..."

Harp has stage-four pancreatic cancer and can no longer work on his farm.

"Oh he loved doing it, he'd sneak out here after church sometimes," says Trent.

Friends and family describe Harp as a strong, generous man..

"...He would do anything for anyone, at any time, didn't matter," says Tim HighBaugh, who describes himself as friend.

They say Calvin Harp poured his heart into this work and they have come here to make his farm survives as a way to celebrate him.

"Oh we joke and talk about memories with him..." says Highbaugh.

For some it might be hard to understand, but they swear there is healing in the physical labor of stripping the tobacco.

The volunteers have been working for three straight months, producing more tobacco, quicker than Harp Farm has done before.

They expect to be finished tonight or tomorrow.

Source: http://www.wbko.com/home/headlines/Community_Works_To_Save_Sick_Mans_Farm_136412193.html

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New U.S. tactic for suspected Swiss bank tax cheats (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? U.S. authorities hunting in Swiss banks for suspected tax cheats have a new weapon in their arsenal: an arcane but aggressive legal maneuver more commonly used against drug smugglers, money launderers and Imelda Marcos, widow of the Philippine dictator.

Backed by court judges, federal prosecutors are issuing subpoenas -- official papers which compel the recipients to provide potentially damning evidence -- to United States taxpayers suspected of holding hidden accounts at Swiss and other offshore banks, according to criminal defense lawyers whose clients have received the papers.

The grand jury subpoenas are unusual in that they ask bank clients -- not the banks themselves -- to turn over to the authorities their bank account details since 2003, including statements with the highest annual balances. Taxpayers who refuse to comply potentially face a stark choice: be found in contempt of court and thus subject to civil or criminal fines and jail time, or disclose potentially incriminating evidence against themselves.

"This is a very hot issue right now," said Nathan Hochman, former assistant attorney general for the Tax Division of the Justice Department who is now in private practice at the law firm Bingham McCutchen. Hochman said that defense lawyers representing taxpayers were furious over the tactic, which already has been challenged in some courts.

NEW TACTIC IN SHOWDOWN

The subpoenas, at least a dozen of which have been issued over the past year or so, are the latest twist in a showdown between Switzerland and the United States over the battered tradition of Swiss bank secrecy. Swiss law, dating to 1934 and stemming from a medieval tradition, protects client bank information from disclosure; bankers who reveal client details can face jail time.

The subpoenas are evidence of tensions between Switzerland, the global capital of offshore wealth with an estimated $2 trillion in hidden assets, and the U.S. Justice Department, which is conducting criminal investigations of 11 Swiss banks suspected of enabling tens of thousands of wealthy Americans to evade U.S. taxes through secret bank accounts holding billions of dollars in hidden assets. The banks include Credit Suisse AG (CSGN.VX), which received a target letter last July notifying it that it was formally under criminal scrutiny; HSBC Holdings plc (HSBA.L), and Basler Kantonalbank, a large Swiss cantonal, or regional, bank.

The Justice Department is seeking to force the banks to disclose American client names and account information and pay hefty fines or face serious consequences, including possible indictment or deferred-prosecution agreements. "The number one thing is the customer data -- it is at the heart of the issue," said a U.S. government official briefed on the matter and on the subpoenas.

Earlier this month, the upper house of the Swiss parliament backed an amendment that would allow Switzerland to compel its banks to hand over American client data, even if authorities don't already know the client names; the lower house still has to approve it. The amendment covers an existing tax treaty between the United States and Switzerland in which the Alpine country has agreed to hand over client data but generally only if the U.S. side already knows the client's identity.

Tax lawyers representing clients receiving the subpoenas, known as Title 31 subpoenas, say that U.S. prosecutors are effectively staging an end-run around the treaty process. "The government is looking for a shortcut to traditional investigative steps in an international case," said a tax lawyer in Washington, D.C., who declined to be identified because he represented a taxpayer indicted by a grand jury in a sealed case.

Title 31 is a part of the U.S. Code of Laws that deals with money and finance. Federal prosecutors used the Title 31 subpoena strategy against Imelda Marcos around 1990 as part of a federal inquiry into bribes allegedly paid by Westinghouse Electric Corp to the Philippine government, according to prosecutors.

American taxpayers receiving the subpoenas include those who applied too late to one of two IRS voluntary disclosure programs, as well as clients who appear to have been "outed" by a clutch of recently indicted or charged Swiss bankers.

Federal prosecutors suspect that the nearly 20,000 U.S. taxpayers who came forward under the programs represent a fraction of the total tax evaders.

LEGAL WRANGLING

At issue is a U.S. legal principle known as the required records exception to the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment. Courts have ruled that the amendment, granting persons the right not to be forced to incriminate themselves, has an important exception for "required records" that must be kept for activities that are regulated and of a "public" nature. Federal prosecutors issuing the court-backed subpoenas argue that offshore private banking falls into this category of activity.

But courts have issued conflicting opinions on whether that reasoning is correct.

Last August, in a closely watched case brought by a wealthy California taxpayer known only by the initials M.H., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld a district court's prior ruling that M.H. was in contempt of court for refusing to produce the bank documents.

Meanwhile, last September, a federal judge in Texas ruled that a different taxpayer did not have to comply with a subpoena for bank records because the records did not fall under the required records doctrine. The Justice Department is appealing against that ruling, according to court papers.

According to a criminal defense lawyer in Washington, D.C., with a client who has received a subpoena, the subpoenas are "tantamount to a required confession -- the production and authentication of records that are not in a regulated industry and have none of the 'public' aspects of other required records cases." The lawyer added that "while it may be a clever attempt, it pushes the 'required records' aspects of 5th Amendment case law to -- and most of us think well beyond -- its limits."

The lawyer declined to be identified, citing confidentiality rules governing grand jury subpoenas. But he added that some banks were "dragging their feet" in turning over documents to clients, while others, in particular "smaller banks," were refusing to do so. He did not identify the banks.

Jeremy Temkin, a criminal tax lawyer at Morvillo Abramovitz in New York, called the subpoenas on bank clients "an extension of the pressure on the Swiss to pressure on the American taxpayer. It's a very aggressive position."

(Editing By Howard Goller, Phil Berlowitz)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111228/bs_nm/us_usa_swiss_client_subpoenas

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Arson suspected in San Diego church blaze

? Investigators say arson is suspected in a blaze at a San Diego church that was deliberately torched 10 days earlier.

It took firefighters about 15 minutes to extinguish the fire early Friday at the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall in University Heights. No one was hurt.

The blaze is believed to be deliberately set and it's being investigated as a hate crime. The numbers "666" were scrawled on the building and church literature was in ashes at the front of the church.

On Dec. 20, an arson fire caused $75,000 damage at the church. Fire spokesman Maurice Luque tells City News Service the fire may have been set to destroy evidence of a burglary.

A damage estimate from Friday's fire hasn't been released.

The Associated Press

Source: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/dec/30/arson-suspected-in-san-diego-church-blaze/

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