ANZ opens Gold vault in Singapore

"Singapore gold investors now have another option when it comes to stashing their gold. New Zealand's biggest banking group, ANZ, has announced that it has opened a gold vault in the Singapore. The bank's vault has the capacity to house 50 tons of gold. According to the bank, close to 15% of the world's primary production, and counts among its clients central banks and sovereign wealth funds. 'Singapore is strategically located between the world's top two gold producers, China and Australia, as well as the world's largest consumption markets,' said ANZ co-head of fixed income, currencies and commodities, Eddie Listorti." Continue reading

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We Are Becoming a Nation of Burger Flippers

"The American workforce is slowly converting to a force of burger flippers and shelf stockers, mostly older people in semi-retirement. The implications for the economy are serious, and the ballooning cost of health care for businesses under Obamacare bears much of the responsibility: The law’s (expensive) mandate that employees who work over 30 hours per week receive mandatory health benefits is suppressing the hiring of full-time workers, particularly by small businesses. Even Sen. Max Baucus, one of the law’s architects, said 'I just see a huge train wreck coming down,' at an April 17 hearing." Continue reading

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‘No plans to leave Russia’: Snowden has job offer, awaits reunion with family, girlfriend

"An 'exhausted' Edward Snowden will have his own choice of accommodation, has no current plans to leave Russia, and still misses his girlfriend, according to his Russian lawyer. The US national has been issued a 12-month residence permit, which can be extended indefinitely. Snowden only has to register and then has the legal right to travel anywhere in Russia. Snowden is legally allowed to work in Russia, and has already had one job offer. In what may or may not be a serious proposal, the founder of Russia’s Facebook equivalent Vkontakte, the flamboyant Pavel Durov, has offered the computer specialist a seat on his 'all-star security team'." Continue reading

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John Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace in “hibernation mode”

"There is a good reason for that silence over the last five months: the company is, for the time being, effectively out of money. 'The situation that we’re at right now is that things are turned down to sort of a hibernation mode,' Carmack said Thursday evening at the QuakeCon gaming conference in Dallas. 'If we don’t wind up landing an investor, it’ll probably stay in hibernation until there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things,' he said. Funding Armadillo, he said, has 'always been a negotiation with my wife,' he said, setting aside some 'crazy money' to spend on it." Continue reading

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No One Saw This Coming…

"Last fall, I sat in a cozy living room on the outskirts of Tallinn, Estonia, drinking coffee, eating freshly baked pastries and listening to a former parliament member for the Soviet Union tell me about a phone call he had recently received from inside Russia’s central bank. The bank officials wanted input on how to build a reserve currency, one backed by the plentitude of hard assets Russia owns. What he told me – easily the most-stunning bit of information I gathered on that research trip – has stuck with me. 'Russia,' he announced, 'is using oil, gas and minerals as the new tools of war instead of military tools. This will be the beginning of a currency cold war.'" Continue reading

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Copper And Gold Flowing From Turquoise Hill – Part I With Harris Kupperman

"The whole country is basically a boomtown. It’s one of these funny places where you really need to be on the ground to understand it. So you have a country that five, ten years ago didn’t have that much in the way of wealth, and the average citizen wasn’t making that much money. And suddenly they’ve gotten really high paying jobs in the mining sector, and they’re making a few thousand U.S. dollars a month. Prior to this mining project, some of them weren’t making that much in a whole year. All of this newfound wealth is entering the economy. It’s creating a middle class. It’s creating a booming economy." Continue reading

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Texas jailer must face trial after video caught him raping 15-year-old

"A federal judge ruled this week that a trial against a Texas jailer can go forward after video caught him allegedly raping a 15-year-old female inmate. In a suit filed late last year, Michelle and Danny Hall accused former Harris County correctional officer Robert Robinson of raping their daughter, M.S.H., during her two month stay at Houston’s Harris County Juvenile Justice Center. The suit accuses Robinson of 'grooming' the girl with food and candy, before the encounters 'quickly escalated with quid pro quo requests that exchanged gifts for genital fondling and touching.'" Continue reading

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Gone in 30 seconds: New attack plucks secrets from HTTPS-protected pages

"The technique, scheduled to be demonstrated Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, decodes encrypted data that online banks and e-commerce sites send in responses that are protected by the widely used transport layer security (TLS) and secure sockets layer (SSL) protocols. The attack can extract specific pieces of data, such as social security numbers, e-mail addresses, certain types of security tokens, and password-reset links. It works against all versions of TLS and SSL regardless of the encryption algorithm or cipher that's used." Continue reading

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Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores; $19,250 For August Delivery

"With hundreds of units expected to land in Europe and the Americas this month, Bitfury products represent the most advanced chips to hit mass production and will significantly change the bitcoin mining landscape. Bitfury ASIC chips use a 55nm process and are sold running at an estimated 1.56 GH/s per chip, with demonstrated performance up to 2.7 GH/s. Although they are clocked slower than Butterfly Lab’s 4 GH/s chips, they will run 4x more efficiently at 0.8 Watts/Ghps. Power efficiency will be a deciding factor in a bitcoin miner’s longevity as profitability narrows with increasing difficulty." Continue reading

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A Stainless Steel Bitcoin Wallet

"This project is to make your own Stainless Steel Bitcoin Wallet. You'll need a plate of stainless steel. About 3x6 inches. You'll need a DC power supply of some sort. I used a fairly large bench-top version, but you can use just about anything. It just might take longer to etch. Anywhere from a 9 volt battery (maybe) to a wall-wort, to a hacked ATX." Continue reading

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