The holiday week has seen a freeze on adding new games to the iTunes App Store, but there are still plenty of great ones floating around. Leading this week?s charge is Terra Noctis, a side-scrolling platforming game that will remind players of the greats in the genre. Check it out, and four other quality titles, below.
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2011: A year of contradictions: Scienceline takes a look back at some of the best contradicting science stories of 2011, by Benjamin Plackett:
Like alcohol it seems, coffee may or may not cause cancer?
Better luck next year: 2011 didn?t deliver on these eight predictions, by Laura Geggel and Ashley Taylor:
When it comes to predicting the future, weather forecasters, stock market traders and even the Oracles at Delphi have had a hard time foreseeing beyond the present. This year was no different, with doomsayers, physicists and amateur astronomers making predictions that fell flat. Here is a roundup of eight predictions that did not come true in 2011?
Questions you never thought to ask: Scienceline brings you the best obscure science stories from 2011, by Kate Yandell and Jonathan Chang:
The closer you look at the world, the stranger and more interesting it becomes. 2011 was no exception. The following stories come from people who dedicated themselves to obscure topics ? from how to survive as an incompetent carnivorous plant to what makes a queen bee a queen. Their discoveries make great holiday party conversation starters ? but consider finishing eating before sharing some of them?
The Indiana Jones? of 2011: A selection of the craziest places that scientists are sciencing, by Emma Bryce:
Scientists in submarines! They had to be somewhere?
Under the lab coat:The top sex stories of 2011, by Susan E. Matthews:
If my mother is right, every year the world gets a little bit more sexually explicit ? from movies to advertisements to politics to, well, even sometimes science. And while this perspective may be a combined result of time passing and my dear mother getting, well, older, we can?t deny that some of the top stories of 2011 have been rather sexually entangled. Well, isn?t that what makes the world go round? Here?s a look at some of the top sex-related stories of 2011?
I hear they are not done yet ? there may be more lists still to come, so check Scienceline again over the next few days.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=6513e0b7c89fdacf715c375241e6251e
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WASHINGTON?The International Monetary Fund recently told the Greek government that a worsening economic outlook suggests the beleaguered nation may be unable to reduce its debt to sustainable levels even with a planned 50% write down in privately-held Greek government bonds, according to two officials familiar with the conversations.
"A 50% haircut may no longer be enough" to bring Greece's debt to sustainable levels given the new IMF economic forecasts, said one of the officials.
An official at the IMF confirmed staff are working on starker economic assessment than ...
WASHINGTON?The International Monetary Fund recently told the Greek government that a worsening economic outlook suggests the beleaguered nation may be unable to reduce its debt to sustainable levels even with a planned 50% write down in privately-held Greek government bonds, according to two officials familiar with the conversations.
"A 50% haircut may no longer be enough" to bring Greece's debt to sustainable levels given the new IMF economic forecasts, said one of the officials.
An official at the IMF confirmed staff are working on starker economic assessment than ...
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577130092642369400.html?mod=europe_home
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Don Cayo was the 2011 winner of a fellowship for Canadian journalists that is offered by the Foreign Press Centre of Japan. He travelled to Japan last month as their guest.
OSAKA, Japan
It?s hard to imagine that savvy Canadians, regardless of whether they work in government or in private enterprise, would be content to ignore the huge economic potential of a big international player like, say, the whole of South Korea or two-thirds of India.
Yet that?s the size of the opportunity that is all but slipping through Canada?s fingers in the Kansai region of western Japan. In any compilation of who?s who among international suppliers and customers doing business in this intensely productive part of the world, we Canadians don?t even rate a mention at the bottom of the list.
Yet, although this region may have only 0.3 per cent of Canada?s land area, it has well over half as many people and half the gross domestic product.
Kansai also punches above its weight among the other regions of Japan. Although it contains only about one-twelfth of the land area of the country, it is home to nearly 20 per cent of its universities and 21 per cent of its research institutes. Its thousands of companies specialize in two high-growth areas ? environmental technology and medical advances ? and the region is similarly strong in its track record for collaboration between researchers and businesses, and for filing patent applications. It?s also an active trader, more dependent for its prosperity on international suppliers and markets than on the substantial Japanese domestic market.
Canada is heavily engaged in trade with other regions of Japan. The country is B.C.?s second-largest trading partner, purchasing almost 14 per cent of our total exports. Until it was recently knocked into third place by fast-growing China, Japan was also the second-largest trading partner for Canada as a whole.
Yet Canadians? collective response to all this activity seems to be a yawn.
Although Premier Christy Clark has promised to try to make good with an official visit in the spring, those who pay attention to these things saw it as a snub that she over-flew Japan to go straight to China and India last month on her first, and so far only, trade mission trip.
But even if she had decided to stop in Japan, she wouldn?t have been able to conveniently land here. Because, while almost a hundred flights a week link Kansai International Airport to the United States and several hundred more fly in and out of other parts of the developed world, the former scheduled flights to Vancouver and Toronto have been scrubbed.
As well, the consulate Canada used to maintain in Osaka was closed several years ago and, although it was recently replaced with a less prestigious trade office, this appears to be so low profile that only one of the many business leaders interviewed for this series of stories on Japan seemed to know it existed.
When the people who were helping with logistics on this assignment sought to arrange an interview with Osaka?s Canadian Chamber of Commerce, they drew a blank and concluded that it was inactive.
Kansai is a long way ? almost as far as you can get and still be in Japan ? from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami area, so it suffered no physical damage at all. Nor did its economy take much of a hit, says Noriko Mimura, manager of the investment promotion division of Kankeiran, a federation of Kansai regional companies. Aside from a brief blip caused by disruptions of the supply chain from factories in the east that were damaged or washed away, production in this region barely faltered.
However, nor did Kansai get the economic boost it expected as a result of a shift of production from the devastated east to the untouched west, says Katushiro Miyamoto, a professor at the graduate school of economics at Kansai University.
Initially after the quake, quite a few businesses were gearing up to bolster their operations here, Miyamoto said, but the reality of power supply problems set in ?and people realized there is no point shifting production to Kansai region.?
The power issue stems not from nuclear plant damage, but from the reluctance of local governments, who?ve been spooked by the damage at Fukushima from the tsunami, to allow them to continue producing. The problem is particularly acute in Kansai, because the region is even more dependent on reactors than is the rest of Japan. Fully half the power here was nuclear-generated, compared to about 30 per cent nationwide, so the impact of legislated conservation measures was felt more keenly by industries here.
Canada is too late into the game to compete as a supplier of liquid natural gas to meet the short- or even medium-term demand in Kansai for a buffer to produce energy while the future of nuclear is being decided and other sources of supply are being developed. We have a lot of gas, but no way to get it to the Japanese market before 2015, when the nation?s first LNG terminal is expected to open in Kitimat.
dcayo@vancouversun.com
Blog: vancouversun.com/economy
? Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Source: http://feeds.canada.com/~r/canwest/F56/~3/ypYIps_OOIg/story.html
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Continue reading RunCore outs new storage solutions for CES, Marvell-based Falcon series included
RunCore outs new storage solutions for CES, Marvell-based Falcon series included originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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CHICAGO?? If your Christmas had everything ? holiday lights, a visit from Santa, a family meal ? what likely went missing was snow.
So far this winter, the northern US? from New England to the Dakotas ? has mostly eluded snow and sub-freezing temperatures. In cities that were digging out of storms at this time last year, temperatures have been almost double the average.
Examples on Monday: It was 52 degrees F in Minnesota's Twin Cities, 27 degrees above average. In Chicago, temperatures reached 45 degrees, making it the 16th day this month that temperatures exceeded 40 degrees. Fewer than 2 inches of snow have fallen in Chicago so far this season, according to the WGN Weather Center here.
The story is the same in the east. Slammed with a blizzard, New York City was grappling with more than 20 inches of snow by this time last year. No flakes have fallen this season to date. If none is recorded in Central Park by New Year?s Eve, it will be only the third year in 140 years of recorded weather history that the city hasn?t seen snow in December.
Although the National Climatic Data Center does not yet have total results for December, it reports that 13 states in the Northeast and the upper Midwest recorded a top-10 warmest November and none had a top-10 coldest November. The month was the 25th warmest in the center's 117 years of recordkeeping.
However, snowbirds who now see no reason to fly needn?t give up their plane tickets to Florida yet, says Alan Reppert, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather in State College, Pa.
"It still is early in the winter season. We still have several months to get snowfall," Mr. Reppert says.
AccuWeather meteorologist Josh Nagelberg, a colleague of Reppert, had predicted back in October that the Midwest and Great Lakes region would be, starting in December, experiencing the harshest winter in recent memory, due to record-breaking snowfall averages and blasts of Arctic air. Mr. Nagelberg emphasized his forecast with a doomsday quote that went viral for days: "People in Chicago are going to want to move after this winter."
Accuweather?s Reppert could not explain why the prediction has so missed the mark, at least so far. For the year overall, warmer temperatures resulted in heavier rainfall ? 2011 is expected to be the wettest on record in Chicago, for example, he says. "If any of those storms fell as snow, it would have been pretty well close to a normal December in those areas," he says.
One reason for the unpredictability in gauging winter weather is the Arctic Oscillation, an atmospheric pattern of the northern latitudes that is difficult to predict more than two weeks in advance, says Angela Fritz, an atmospheric scientist with the Weather Underground, a media outlet located in San Francisco that specializes in long-range forecasting.
Winter conditions in the upper tier of US states are often determined by the strengthening of pressure systems around the Arctic. When pressure systems are weak, cold air that is normally trapped flows southward, resulting in extreme winter conditions for the US and Western Europe, says Ms. Fritz.
More US news from the Christian Science Monitor
While that was the case for the past two winters, Arctic high-pressure systems this year are "allowing the cold air to get trapped up north," says Fritz. "Last year, the refrigerator door was left open. This year, the refrigerator door was left closed."
Story: Factbox: Will 2012 top 2011 for record weather disasters?Due to the unpredictability of the system, meteorologists know only that the milder temperatures will continue through mid-January. But even without the colder air, snowflakes are possible.
"The Arctic Oscillation doesn?t mean we won?t get snow. It means, in the grand scheme of things, we won?t get an extreme winter like we did in 2010 and 2011," Fritz says.
This report,"Where's the white stuff," was first published in the Christian Science Monitor.
? 2011 The Christian Science Monitor
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45799486/ns/us_news-christian_science_monitor/
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RENO, Nevada?? Federal land managers have agreed to postpone their precedent-setting plan to castrate hundreds of wild stallions in eastern Nevada pending a federal court's review of the issue.
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The U.S. Bureau of Land Management's action came a week after a coalition of conservationists and wild-horse defenders sued the government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to block the plan's implementation.
Under a compromise approved by the court Thursday, the agency will be allowed to begin a long-term removal of roughly 1,800 wild horses from the sprawling Pancake Complex near Ely beginning about Jan. 12 as scheduled.
But the BLM agreed to put on hold its plans to castrate 200 wild stallions before releasing them back to the complex.
Horse activists think the court will rule in its favor.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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ScienceDaily (Dec. 24, 2011) ? The recently discovered Comet Lovejoy has been captured in stunning photos and time-lapse video taken from the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The comet graced the southern sky after it had unexpectedly survived a close encounter with the Sun.
A new time-lapse video sequence was taken by Gabriel Brammer from ESO less than two days ago on Dec. 22, 2011. Gabriel was finishing his shift as support astronomer at the Paranal Observatory when Comet Lovejoy rose over the horizon just before dawn.
In the words of Gabriel Brammer himself: "On the last morning of my shift I tried to try catch it on camera before sunrise. The tail of the comet was easily visible with the naked eye, and the combination of the crescent Moon, comet, Milky Way and the laser guide star was nearly as impressive to the naked eye as it appears in the long-exposure photos."
The sequence also features the pencil-thin beam of the VLT's Laser Guide Star set against the beautiful backdrop of the Milky Way, as astronomers conduct their last observations for the night.
ESO optician Guillaume Blanchard made a marvellous wide-angle photo of Comet Lovejoy and ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky, captured the spectacle from Santiago de Chile. Blanchard said: "For me this comet is a Christmas present to the people who will stay at Paranal over Christmas."
This bright comet was also seen from the International Space Station in another stunning time-lapse sequence on Dec. 21 as the crew filmed lightning on Earth's night side (see: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=125774121).
Comet Lovejoy has been the talk of the astronomy community over the past few weeks. It was discovered Nov. 27 by the Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy and was classified as a Kreutz sungrazer, with its orbit taking it very close to the Sun. (Kreutz sungrazers are members of a family of comets thought to come from the break up of one single large comet in the 12th century, and which now orbit the Sun along the same path.) Just last week, the comet entered the Sun's corona, a much-anticipated event, passing a mere 140,000 kilometres from the Sun's surface. A close shave indeed...
The comet was expected to break up and vaporise, but instead it survived its steaming hot encounter with the Sun and re-emerged a few days later, much to everyone's surprise. It is now visible from the southern hemisphere, appearing at dawn, and features a bright tail millions of kilometres long, composed of dust particles that are being blown ahead of the comet by the solar wind.
Lovejoy will now continue in its highly eccentric orbit around the Sun and once again disappear into the distant Solar System. It would be interesting to know if it will actually survive to re-appear in our skies in 314 years as predicted.
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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111224134633.htm
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By Dr. Jennifer Coates, PetMD
I?ve started my holiday shopping, and as is often the case, I seem to have better plans for my animals in comparison to my human family members.
My best idea this year is to turn Apollo?s skuzzy old leash into a toy. He is obsessed with shaking it to death every time we go on a walk. I know I should discourage this behavior, and I do when it crosses the line from cute to annoying (which only creates confusion for the poor guy, I?m sure). Sometimes, however, it?s just easier to go with the flow. So my plan is to cut the leash into two or three pieces, add a few knots, and voil? ? a cheap prey item that I?m sure he?ll love more than any toy I could buy for him at a store.
I will also be getting Apollo a new leash (and perhaps some Bitter Apple or something similar to discourage him from displacing his behavior onto the new leash), but frankly this gift is more for me than for him.
What makes a good present for a pet? I think it is something that improves the quality of the animal?s life. Too often we buy things that make our lives easier or more fun and call them presents for our pets. Did your cat really like those antler ears you bought last year? And the joy of shopping for animals is that that they honestly couldn?t care less how much you spend on them, which is why I feel perfectly justified in repurposing Apollo?s old leash and calling it a present.
I think the best presents are boredom-relievers. Research has shown that boredom and stress play huge roles in the development of behavioral and other health problems in both dogs and cats.
For cats, how about a comfy fleece pad (or even an old sweatshirt) placed on a chair or perch in front of a sunny, south-facing window? If you are feeling flush, buy a birdfeeder and mount it within site of the window. If your cat could benefit from some exercise, tie a string on a cheap ?mouse? and make it scurry across the floor, but keep the string away from your cats when you are not supervising play since the last thing you want is to have one of them swallow it.
For dogs and cats, how about a puzzle feeder? Simply put a portion of your pet?s regular food ration inside and make him work for it. Zoos use these kinds of things all the time to provide mental stimulation for their animals.
An active dog would love anything that gives him more opportunities to be outside and/or play. Toys don?t have to be elaborate; it?s more about finding time. Perhaps you could give your dog some ?coupons? he can redeem for trips to the dog park, or walks on especially beautiful days, or a discount package at a doggy daycare provider that emphasizes play.
Happy Shopping!
Related:
Should I Give a Pet as a Gift?
Pets & Animals Holiday Gift Guide
Stress-Free Holidays for Pets
Source: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/what-pets-really-want-for-christmas.html
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Never mind the queen's speech?here's a special Christmas Day message from John Sinha at Occupy London.
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DENVER ? Santa's piling up more than presents this year. The big man's trackers at NORAD say Santa Claus also broke records this Christmas Eve.
Volunteers at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado had fielded more than 80,000 calls Saturday evening, breaking the previous record. Also, Santa's NORAD Facebook page approached 980,000 "likes." Last year, Santa had 716,000 "likes."
Volunteers at NORAD Tracks Santa said kids started calling at 4 a.m. Saturday to find out where Santa was.
"The phones are ringing like crazy," Lt. Cmdr. Bill Lewis said Saturday.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been telling anxious children about Santa's whereabouts every year since 1955. That was the year a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to call Santa on a hotline, but the number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up talking to the Continental Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD's predecessor.
The officers on duty played along and began sharing reports on Santa's progress. It's now a deep-rooted tradition at NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canada command that monitors the North American skies and seas from a control center at Peterson.
Santa's first stop in the U.S. came at 9:02 p.m. MST in Atlanta, said Canadian Navy Lt. Al Blondin.
NORAD's Santa updates are blowing up on social media, too. In addition to the website and Facebook and Twitter pages, Santa this year has a new tracking app for smart phones. The app includes the Elf Toss, a game similar to Angry Birds.
First lady Michelle Obama was among the volunteers for a second year in a row. She took about 10 calls from her family's holiday vacation in Hawaii. Lewis said Obama's voice didn't throw any of the phoning children.
"They all just asked run-of-the-mill stuff. They wanted to know about Santa," Lewis said.
___
Online:
http://www.noradsanta.org
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This Christmas, gather your family around the fire... and then bring your TV and place it right next to the burning yule log. You've got a lot of movie watching to do!
While the studios have films from Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg (two!) and Matt Damon out in the multiplex, the cheaper, more traditional alternative is to sit back and watch classics such as "A Christmas Story," "Miracle on 34th Street" and "Elf." Yes, "Elf" is now a classic. And now, as you watch these films, you can impress your family and friends with lots of little known trivia. Knowledge: it's the greatest gift of all (if you can't get those new Air Jordans that everyone has been going crazy over).
We've dug up some of the most interesting trivia about some of the greatest Christmas films, including Steve Whitmire's story about his supernatural interaction with Jim Henson. Whitmire, who took over as the voice for Kermit the Frog upon his mentor Henson's passing in 1990, told MuppetCentral.com that he was terrified to record the songs for "The Muppets Christmas Carol," which he considered his first true experience as Kermit. The night before he was scheduled to do so, Henson visited him in a dream.
They were at a hotel, where Henson was working the desk. Whitmire -- in the dream -- told Henson that he was nervous to do the voice.
"He stopped, and there was a thoughtful gesture Jim would do where he would take both of his index fingers and put them under his chin, and he did that and thought and he said, 'It will pass,'" Whitmire remembered. "Which is exactly what Jim would have said. You would have to really know Jim to know this, but that's exactly what he would have said. Then he turned and he said, 'I've really got to run...' and he took off out the door."
Check out the slideshow below for more facts. From the overly passionate kiss of "It's A Wonderful Life," Will Ferrell's secret Santa past, the true story of the gangster film in "Home Alone" and more, these oddities will help you be an expert tonight.
It's A Wonderful Life
1?of?9
While it's now seen as a wholesome family standard, the film didn't have its small bit of controversy. James Stewart was so nervous to perform the kiss with Donna Reed (it was his first post-war film kiss) that after a night of worrying, Frank Capra had them do it all in one take -- and then had to edit out part of the smooch because it was too long and passionate to pass the censors of 1947.
While it's now seen as a wholesome family standard, the film didn't have its small bit of controversy. James Stewart was so nervous to perform the kiss with Donna Reed (it was his first post-war film kiss) that after a night of worrying, Frank Capra had them do it all in one take -- and then had to edit out part of the smooch because it was too long and passionate to pass the censors of 1947.
MORE SLIDESHOWS
It's A Wonderful Life
While it's now seen as a wholesome family standard, the film didn't have its small bit of controversy. James Stewart was so nervous to perform the kiss with Donna Reed (it was his first post-war film kiss) that after a night of worrying, Frank Capra had them do it all in one take -- and then had to edit out part of the smooch because it was too long and passionate to pass the censors of 1947.
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Over the past decade, the New York Knicks have given their fans plenty of reason to boo. Eddy Curry, anyone?
But the crowd at Madison Square Garden reserved its venom last night for an opposing player, as Kris Humphries took to an NBA court for the first time since his divorce from Kim Kardashian. Listen to the extended, loud reaction now:
It doesn't sound like anything will get better for Humphries, either, as half the respondents in a new Nielsen poll voted the power forward the Most Hated Player in the league. He beat out LeBron James by two percent.
See, that's what happens when you take your talents to E!.
Fans booking Kris Humphris: Fair or foul?
Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/12/nba-fans-to-kris-humphries-booooo/
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Our internal e-mail lists have us discussing all kinds of stuff: Asian American identity, representation in the media, the experiences of activism in an academia setting and its progression as we transition to the working, adult world. And sometimes, people talk about Yu Darvish, the half-Japanese, half-Iranian pitching phenom, while other people stand around politely and think to themselves when the next season of American Idol will come out since they know nothing about baseball. (And of course, that someone is me.) Let us watch, shall we?
Joz: The Texas Rangers win negotiating rights to Yu Darvish.
Russell from GASP!: Just watched this video [from mlb.com]. Looks to be a good deal if they can snag him. ?Their pitching roster is already good, with them reaching the world series two years in a row, if he can pitch as well as Cliff Lee I?m sure he?ll be welcome. On that note, whatever happened to Okajima and Matsuzaka for the Red Sox?
Lily: Sadly, Daisuke was on the DL I think for allllll of the Red Sox?s last (heartbreaking and disastrous) season and hasn?t had nearly as good of seasons since his first two with the Sox (also not pitching as many games either for DL or management decisions, I think some combo of both). And Okajima is playing for the Pawtucket Red Sox (our AAA team), for non-baseball people that means he got demoted. We?ve got a couple other Asians on the team but I don?t think anyone who is particularly good? but I didn?t watch overly much of the end of the season because well, you know.
Russell: Oh man, didn?t know that Okajima was pitching in the minor-leagues.? Sucks since they were really in need of good closing pitching last season.? Oh well, here?s hoping either of them will make it back into the starting rotation. Oh, and completely off-topic but a good player to watch for is Kolten Wong.? He played for my University and got drafted 22nd in last year?s draft by the Cards.? Since Pujols is gone, hopefully they?ll bump him up from the minor leagues for a DH spot or something; he was pretty awesome when he hit here.
Everyone else: ?
Ernie: Yay, sports are great! I love sports!
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Engadget's Holiday Blues-buster 2011: win an iPad 2 16GB WiFi, courtesy of Broadcom! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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MIAMI/ATLANTA ?? By the time authorities busted a fake AIDS clinic in Miami, it had bilked Medicare of more than $4.5 million. Still, the man behind the scheme remained far ahead of the agents pursuing him.
Michel De Jesus Huarte, a 40-year-old Cuban-American, hadn't simply avoided arrest. He had hatched a plan to steal millions more from Medicare by forming at least 29 other shell companies ? paper-only firms with no real operations. Each time, he would keep his name out of any corporate records. Other people ? some paid by Huarte, some whose identities had been stolen ? would be listed in incorporation papers.
The shells functioned as a vital tool to hide the Medicare deceit ? and not only for Huarte. Hundreds of others have used the veil of corporate secrecy to help steal hundreds of millions of dollars from one of the nation's largest social service programs, a Reuters investigation has found.
Reuters video: The Medicare swindle
Huarte is now behind bars and did not respond to requests for comment. But basic checks by Reuters of Medicare providers in one city ? Miami ? suggest shell companies remain prime tools in perpetrating fraud. Simply by reviewing the incorporation records of Medicare providers in two buildings there, reporters uncovered information that one government official said could prompt "a serious criminal investigation" of some of the companies.
The fraud rings merge stolen doctor and patient data under the auspices of a shell company and then bill Medicare as rapidly as possible. Other shell companies are often layered on top to camouflage the fraud, law enforcement officials say.
Some of the shells purport to be billing companies; they form a buffer between the sham clinics and Medicare. Others pay kickbacks to doctors and patients who sign off on bogus medical claims or sell their Medicare ID numbers to enable the shell company to bill the government. Still other shells act as fronts to launder the profits.
The key to this kind of fraud, known as a "bust-out" scheme, is for each of the fake companies to bill as much as possible before authorities catch on. Shell companies become a tool that helps keep the crooks ahead of the cops.
"This is a 'Catch Me If You Can' environment," says Ryan K. Stumphauzer, a former assistant U.S. attorney with the Department of Justice in Miami who prosecuted the Huarte case and scores of other Medicare frauds involving shell companies. "We had no clue who Huarte was. We had no idea there was some mastermind out there."
More from the Reuters series
Last year, "improper payments" resulted in $48 billion in losses to the Medicare program, nearly 10 percent of the $526 billion in payments the program made, according to a Government Accountability Office report last March. Exactly how much of those payments moved through shell companies remains unclear. That's because neither Medicare nor law enforcement agencies systematically track how often such companies are used in the frauds. And not until 2007 did the federal government form task forces to exclusively target Medicare fraud rings.
But recent indictments issued by those task forces indicate that shell-perpetrated fraud is pervasive. Reuters examined indictments issued since 2007 in the eight states that have Medicare fraud task forces in place. The examination found that shell companies were involved in more than a third of the fraudulent Medicare claims identified by the task forces ? $1 billion of the $2.9 billion uncovered.
The indictments and other cases indicate that at least 300 shell companies posed as legitimate Medicare providers and billing firms, or laundered payments from Medicare. Court records show shells have purported to provide services ranging from treating varicose veins to supplying prosthetic limbs.
"These companies are nameless, faceless entities collecting billions in secret," says Patrick Burns, director of communications for the advocacy group Taxpayers Against Fraud in Washington, D.C. Medicare is "chasing it," he says. "But they're not getting any closer."
Only on msnbc.com
Tools of deception
The shell companies bedeviling Medicare exemplify a national problem that Reuters documented in a series of stories this year. During the last decade, Washington has called on the rest of the world to clean up shady financial flows and improve corporate transparency to combat terrorism and tax evasion.
Even so, U.S.-based shell companies remain a significant tool of deception ? in this case, to swindle hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayer-supported Medicare.
In one of the largest cases of Medicare fraud ever charged, the operation was enabled by shell companies. In October 2010, federal prosecutors indicted 44 members of an Armenian organized crime ring. Their network, which stretched from Los Angeles to Savannah, Ga., used 118 shell companies in 25 states to pose as Medicare providers, billing more than $100 million, according to federal indictments in three states.
The difficulty of spotting ? and stopping ? shell-perpetrated Medicare fraud is compounded by incorporation laws that vary from state to state and make forming fake businesses easy.
Intentionally submitting false corporate information constitutes fraud in every state. But none check the validity of corporate records when a company incorporates or collect information on the "beneficial owners" ? those with a controlling interest in the corporations.
Because Huarte's shell companies, like others, were incorporated with various state governments, the corporate documentation gave the fake clinics a veneer of legitimacy. And because Huarte was seldom listed in the incorporation papers, connecting him to the cons became more complicated.
The strategy enabled the scheme to go largely undetected by authorities for years, even though most of the operations had mailing addresses that betrayed their fiction. More than a dozen corresponded to UPS stores, Reuters found. Others tracked back to shabby apartments.
For example, a purported cancer clinic called Bellemeade Oncology Care lists its address in Georgia state records as 1500 Bellemeade Dr., #4D, Marietta, Ga. But a visit to the address reveals it isn't a clinic at all. Rather, it's an apartment with a broken washing machine on the front stoop and a pick-up truck parked in the grass outside the complex on Atlanta's north side.
In Florida, FBI agents say almost every Medicare fraud scheme involves shell companies. There, Reuters scrutinized incorporation documents for firms located in two buildings near the Miami International Airport. In a building with dimly lit corridors, a rickety elevator and almost no one in sight, a host of companies purport to provide services to Medicare recipients. But telltale signs of fraud abound.
Many of the 26 companies in the buildings had replaced corporate officers at least once in the last four years. Some had changed ownership, or their corporate executives represented more than one medical-related company. Law enforcement officials consider such activities to be red flags for fraud.
Reuters subsequently asked analysts from the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to use its software programs to examine the companies. The board monitors $787 billion in stimulus funds for fraudulent activity using sophisticated computer systems; last year, it had worked with Medicare officials to look for patterns of fraud.
Earlier this month, board head Earl E. Devaney said the companies Reuters identified represent "a pretty big case."
Devaney, who is also the inspector general for the Department of the Interior, says the board's analysis of the 26 Medicare providers led investigators to another 15 Medicare entities associated with those providers. He believes the findings could prompt a "serious criminal investigation."
The Miami Medicare providers, he said, "have the distinct look of the kinds of scams we've seen before." The results of the board's analysis were sent to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services for further investigation, Devaney said.
'Whack-a-mole'
Federal prosecutors struggled for years to spot, let alone stop, Huarte's shell game. They describe his operation as "remarkable for its geographic breadth, organization, sophistication, and size." From 2005 until early 2009, Huarte and at least seven co-conspirators operated at least 35 fake Medicare clinics in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina, court records show.
During that time, his scams operated "virtually uninterrupted," according to a September 2009 superseding indictment and other court records filed in U.S. District Court in Florida.
They billed Medicare for more than $100 million and received at least $34 million in payments for non-existent HIV and AIDS treatments and varicose vein care and pain management therapy that never occurred.
The key: Huarte stayed steps ahead of authorities by setting up new companies before the government could sniff out the fraud from his old ones, court records show.
"It was like whack-a-mole for a time," says Alanna Lavelle, a director of investigations for Medicare contractor WellPoint Inc., who chased the case against Huarte for more than a year. "It became frustrating."
It began like this: In 2005, Huarte and his co-conspirators formed or acquired control of six medical clinics in Florida, each with its own office. Patients were then recruited and paid kickbacks to periodically appear at the clinics or allow use of their Medicare numbers, according to a plea agreement signed by Huarte in October 2009. The clinics were shams - patients weren't receiving legitimate treatment there. Later, when authorities caught on, Huarte created shell companies consisting of entirely fictional clinics -- those that corresponded with mailbox stores, for instance.
Most of the clinics purported to treat HIV and AIDS patients. Bills submitted for expensive injections of drugs such as Infliximab and Rituxan, which fight immune system deficiencies, cost Medicare as much as $7,800 per dose, according to the indictment.
To disguise Huarte's role, "straw owners" were paid as much as $200,000 to put their names on Florida incorporation records and bank accounts. In return, some straw owners agreed to "flee to Cuba to avoid law enforcement detection or capture," according to the indictment.
For instance, Madelin Machado is listed as president of Zigma Medical Care, the fake Miami clinic that collected $4.5 million from Medicare. In January 2008, after authorities figured out the scam, Machado was indicted for healthcare fraud in Florida. She subsequently disappeared, although she's still listed as Zigma's president in state records.
Huarte's cover-ups proved successful for years, even as he secretly directed his fake companies, authorities say. He later replaced Zigma and the other Florida clinics with shell clinics in Atlanta such as New Age Family Institute and Elusive Quality, according to federal court records. Although each was registered in state incorporation records, neither the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) nor state officials checked the validity of the corporate documents, a review that may have uncovered the fraud.
CMS, which runs Medicare, says it doesn't have the resources to analyze incorporation records for each of its 1.5 million providers and suppliers. Those records are separately maintained by each state.
Almost all of Huarte's corporate data proved a lie. The purported representative of New Age Family Institute was a deaf retiree whose identity had been stolen, an FBI affidavit said.
Medicare claims filed by each of the fake clinics were accompanied by all the right doctor, patient and treatment codes, say law enforcement officials and fraud investigators.
But New Age Family Institute was purportedly located in Atlanta at 205 South 49th St., according to state incorporation records. A Google Maps search shows that address doesn't exist. Elusive Quality's address - 925B Peachtree Street N.E., Suite 131 - was actually a UPS store in Atlanta's Midtown district.
Some of the people listed as officers in incorporation papers say they didn't know their names had been used until contacted for this article.
One, Jimmie Dominic Dancer, is an instructor at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. State incorporation records name him as the chief executive and chief financial officer of S.T.R. of Georgia, a purported HIV and AIDS clinic in Atlanta that was part of the Huarte fraud network.
Dancer says he was surprised to learn that his name was listed in state records. A specialist in internal medicine, he says he has not practiced medicine since 2002. "I've never been a CEO or CFO," he said. "I've never heard of S.T.R. of Georgia."
The big con
For much of 2008, Huarte continued his use of shell companies outside of Florida. From February to December 2008, he and co-conspirators formed at least 29 new sham Medicare clinics in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Louisiana, according to state incorporation records.
Authorities say Huarte bought lists of real Medicare beneficiaries from a Medicare contractor and from employees of a company that administered benefits. Then he submitted claims in the beneficiaries' names.
But instead of billing Medicare directly as he had done initially, Huarte changed his approach, court records show. He began charging Medicare Advantage Plans, a program administered by private health insurers such as WellPoint and UnitedHealthcare Group, according to the indictment and a July 2009 motion to revoke bond.
A break came in early 2008, when a Medicare beneficiary complained to WellPoint that his Medicare benefits statement was wrong. It listed him as having received HIV treatments from a Huarte sham clinic called BIBB Group Services ? but he didn't have HIV and he'd never received any such care.
WellPoint fraud investigator Lavelle says her team began to review the claims and the incorporation records for other clinics in Georgia.
Reuters also reviewed records and found that BIBB Group's purported home in the central Georgia town of Warner Robins ? 1000 Martha Street, Suite F ? is an abandoned building behind a $59-a-night motel.
Despite efforts to stop him, Huarte and his cohorts adapted.
Using stolen patient information, they called WellPoint's customer service line. They pretended to be the patients, Lavelle says, and asked to change the patients' billing addresses to post office boxes. That way, the patients themselves wouldn't receive benefits letters and the fraud might remain undetected, she says.
For the next 15 months, WellPoint denied claims and stopped payment on checks worth $34 million that were sent to Huarte clinics.
After BIBB Group claims were blocked, new ones flowed in from new shell clinics. They first came from First Choice Group Services, Lavelle says. When those were stopped, new bills for HIV and AIDS treatments came from Strong Hope Co., In Excess LLC and More Than Ready Co. LLC. Each of those firms was formed in August 2008, according to Georgia state records.
"We saw more unusually named clinics pop up," Lavelle says. "We actually thought they were playing with us."
The addresses for Strong Hope, In Excess, More Than Ready and four other shell clinics also tracked to UPS stores. They billed Medicare for $15.1 million in false medical services and received $4.2 million in payments, according to court records.
Huarte's four-year Medicare fraud spree was finally ended in 2009. That's when federal investigators in Florida identified co-conspirators who ran Miami check-cashing businesses that turned the Medicare checks into cash. Early that year, the check-cashers agreed to secretly wear recording devices that caught Huarte and others talking about the scam.
In October 2009, Huarte, the master of the Medicare shell game, pleaded guilty to healthcare and mail fraud. He was sentenced to 22 years in a federal prison in Pennsylvania and ordered to repay $18.3 million.
Although WellPoint had blocked millions in payments, Huarte's fake clinics outside Florida had still received more than $12 million from almost a dozen private insurers, according to Huarte's plea agreement. In total, his fraud garnered at least $34 million from Medicare.
At a sentencing hearing in January 2010, former prosecutor Stumphauzer told the judge why he felt Huarte deserved a lengthy prison term for his shell-driven scam.
"I think what really troubles me most is their innovation," he said, according to a court transcript.
"Every time Medicare gets close, every time Medicare clamps off one path, it never occurs to them to stop stealing. They just evolve the scheme and steal some more."
Funding the fraud fight
CMS says it has been handcuffed in combating shell companies that posed as legitimate providers because it lacked the resources to extensively review the backgrounds and addresses of providers. Less than 5 percent of all payments were subjected to audits.
That led to a system in which Medicare cut checks and asked questions later. Analysts and law enforcement officials call it "pay and chase."
Until recently, Congress offered little funding to help Medicare prevent abuses. But the healthcare reform law passed in March 2010 allocates $350 million over the next 10 years to fight fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, its sister program for the poor. The law also imposes stiffer sentences for the scam artists.
CMS is installing new fraud-fighting computer analytics to check the backgrounds of doctors and providers to ensure, for example, that Medicare ID numbers aren't being stolen. The programs may help connect the people to the corporations they're running about 75 percent of the time, says Peter Budetti, deputy administrator and director of program integrity at CMS.
Beginning in January, the locations of providers also will be checked by "geo-spatial mapping," Budetti says.
In the aftermath of the Huarte case, CMS and private contractors launched a comparison of UPS store addresses and Medicare provider locations. Investigators visited 823 locations and found that 185 providers ? 22 percent ? listed a UPS store as the practice location on their Medicare enrolment application. CMS says 134 providers have had their license revoked or deactivated.
Methodology
To examine how often shell companies were used in Medicare fraud schemes, Reuters obtained a list of some 300 closed criminal cases brought by federal Medicare fraud task forces in eight states since March 2007.
Reuters then scrutinized federal court records using Pacer, a publicly available court docket system. Open case files for fraud rings indicted by the task forces also were examined.
The federal indictments rarely make specific reference to shell companies. So Reuters looked for descriptions of false corporate entities that posed as legitimate Medicare providers or for sham companies pretending to be billing firms. Reuters also looked for firms that paid kickbacks to doctors and patients, or that laundered stolen Medicare funds.
Reporting By Brian Grow.
New providers also will be subject to automated enrolment screening. Their names will be checked against databases that include the federal government's banned contractor lists, state and federal criminal dockets, and state licensing records.
But how much shell-perpetrated fraud these steps will eliminate remains unclear. The dragnet, for instance, might prompt criminals to simply create new shell companies ? entities with no prior histories that wouldn't register on any government watch list.
Nor do the steps address the fundamental loophole. Although the new screening system will have access to state incorporation records, CMS acknowledges it will still struggle to pierce the shell-company veil because states don't collect information on the real owners when corporations are formed or sold.
"We want to catch this stuff when it's at the $30,000 level instead of the $10 million level before anyone notices," Budetti says.
"With the shell companies, these people just keep trying over and over again."
Additional reporting by Kelly Carr; editing by Blake Morrison and Michael Williams.
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45754719/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
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Two Earth-sized planets have been discovered circling a dying star that has passed the red giant stage. Because of their close orbits, the planets must have been engulfed by their star while it swelled up to many times its original size.
This discovery, published in the science journal Nature, may shed new light on the destiny of stellar and planetary systems, including our solar system.
When our sun nears the end of its life in about 5 billion years, it will swell up to what astronomers call a red giant, an inflated star that has used up most of its fuel. So large will the dying star grow that its fiery outer reaches will swallow the innermost planets of our solar system ? Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
Researchers believed that this unimaginable inferno would make short work of any planet caught in it ? until now.
This report describes the first discovery of two planets ? or remnants thereof ? that evidently not only survived being engulfed by their parent star, but also may have helped to strip the star of most of its fiery envelope in the process. The team was led by Stephane Charpinet, an astronomer at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Plan?tologie, Universit? de Toulouse-CNRS, in France.
"When our sun swells up to become a red giant, it will engulf the Earth," said Elizabeth 'Betsy' Green, an associate astronomer at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, who participated in the research. "If a tiny planet like the Earth spends 1 billion years in an environment like that, it will just evaporate. Only planets with masses very much larger than the Earth, like Jupiter or Saturn, could possibly survive."
The two planets, named KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02, circle their host star in extremely tight orbits. Having migrated so close, they probably plunged deep into the star's envelope during the red giant phase, but survived. In the most plausible configuration, the two bodies would respectively have radii of 0.76 and 0.87 times the Earth radius, making them the smallest planets so far detected around an active star other than our sun.
The host star, KOI 55, is what astronomers call a subdwarf B star: It consists of the exposed core of a red giant that has lost nearly its entire envelope. In fact, the authors write, the planets may have contributed to the increased mass loss necessary for the formation of this type of star.
The authors concluded that planetary systems may therefore influence the evolution of their parent stars. They pointed out that the planetary system they observed offers a glimpse into the possible future of our own.
The discovery of the two planets came as a surprise because the research team had not set out to find new planets far away from our solar system, but to study pulsating stars. Caused by rhythmic expansions and contractions brought about by pressure and gravitational forces that go along with the thermonuclear fusion process inside the star, such pulsations are a defining feature of many stars.
By studying the pulsations of a star, astronomers can deduce the object's mass, temperature, size and sometimes even its interior structure. This is called asteroseismology.
"Those pulsation frequency patterns are almost like a finger print of a star," Green said. "It's very much like seismology, where one uses earthquake data to learn about the inner composition of the Earth."
To detect the frequencies with which a star pulsates, researchers have to observe it for very long periods of time, sometimes years, in order to measure tiny variations in brightness.
"The brightness variations of a star tell us about its pulsational modes if we can observe enough of them very precisely," Green said. "Let's say there is one pulsational mode every 5859.8 seconds, and there is another one every 9126.39 seconds. There could be lots of stars with rather different properties that could all manage to pulsate at those two frequencies. However, if we can measure 10, or better yet, 50 pulsational modes in one star, then it's possible to use theoretical models to say exactly what the star must be like in order to produce those particular pulsations."
"The only way to do that is to have a telescope sitting in space," she added. "On Earth, we can only observe a star at night. But unless we follow it 24/7, the mathematics give us artifacts. Observing through the atmosphere means that even in the very best of cases we can only detect brightness variations to a ten-thousandth of a percent. But if you've got 50 or a 100 modes going in a star, you need to measure better than that."
For that reason, the team used data obtained from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope for this study.
Unobstructed by the Earth's atmosphere and staring at the same patch of sky throughout its five-year mission, the Kepler Space Telescope sits in a prime spot to detect tiny variations in brightness of stars.
Green had been pursuing a survey to look for hot subdwarf stars in the galactic plane of the Milky Way.
"I had already obtained excellent high-signal to noise spectra of the hot subdwarf B star KOI 55 with our telescopes on Kitt Peak, before Kepler was even launched," she said. "Once Kepler was in orbit and began finding all these pulsational modes, my co-authors at the University of Toulouse and the University of Montreal were able to analyze this star immediately using their state-of-the art computer models."
This was the first time that researchers were able to use gravity pulsation modes, which penetrate into the core of the star, to match subdwarf B star models to learn about their interior structure.
While analyzing KOI 55's pulsations, the team noticed the intriguing presence of two tiny periodic modulations occurring every 5.76 and 8.23 hours that caused the star to flicker ever so slightly, at one five thousandth percent of its overall brightness. They showed that these two frequencies could not have been produced by the star's own internal pulsations.
The only explanation came from the existence two small planets passing in front of the star every 5.76 and 8.23 hours. To complete their orbits so rapidly, KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02 have to be extremely close to the star, much closer than Mercury is to our sun. On top of that, the sun is a cool star compared to KOI 55, which burns at about 28,000 Kelvin, or 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Planets this close to their star are tidally locked," Green said, "meaning the same side always faces the star, just like the same face of the moon always faces the Earth. The day side of Mercury is hot enough to melt lead, so you can imagine the harsh conditions on those two small planets racing around a host star that is five times hotter than our sun at such a close distance."
The extremely tight orbits are important because they tell the researchers that the planets must have been engulfed when their host stars swelled up into a red giant.
"Having migrated so close, they probably plunged deep into the star's envelope during the red giant phase, but survived," lead author Charpinet said.
"As the star puffs up and engulfs the planet, the planet has to plow through the star's hot atmosphere and that causes friction, sending it spiraling toward the star," Green added. "As it's doing that, it helps strip atmosphere off the star. At the same time, the friction with the star's envelope also strips the gaseous and liquid layers off the planet, leaving behind only some part of the solid core, scorched but still there."
"We think this is the first documented case of planets influencing a star's evolution," Charpinet said. "We know of a brown dwarf that possibly did that, but that's not a planet, and of giants planets around subdwarf B stars, but those are too far away to have had any impact on the evolution of the star itself."
"I find it incredibly fascinating that after hundreds of years of being able to only look at the outsides of stars, now we can finally investigate the interiors of a few stars ? even if only in these special types of pulsators ? and compare that with how we thought stars evolved," Green said. "We thought we had a pretty good understanding of what solar systems were like as long as we only knew one ? ours. Now we are discovering a huge variety of solar systems that are nothing like ours, including, for the first time, remnant planets around a stellar core like this one."
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University of Arizona: http://uanews.org
Thanks to University of Arizona for this article.
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