Old Home Remedies

Six men have been found guilty in Canada of murdering eight fellow bikers in the worst mass killing in the history of the province of Ontario.

Police described the case as one of “internal cleansing” within the Bandidos biker gang.

The victims from the Toronto chapter were shot dead and found in abandoned vehicles in April 2006.

The jury took just over a day, after a more than six-month trial, to return 44 murder and four manslaughter verdicts.

Tirade

The trial had heard from more than 70 witnesses.

The accused were Marcelo Aravena, 33, Wayne Kellestine, 60, Dwight Mushey, 41, Michael Sandham, 40, Frank Mather, 36, and Brett Gardiner, 25.

As the proceedings drew to a close, Aravena launched a tirade of expletives at his lawyer, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported.

The paper quoted the leading police investigator as saying justice had been done.

Det Insp Paul Beesley said: “Motorcycle gangs are inherently violent and this is a glimpse of just how violent they are.”

First-degree murder carries mandatory life imprisonment in Canada.

The Bandidos are one of North America’s most notorious biker gangs and second only in power to the Hells Angels worldwide.

The Toronto chapter was not recognised by the Bandidos’ head office in Texas.

The six convicted men were mostly from a disgruntled probationary chapter in Winnipeg.

The victims were killed on a farm belonging to Kellestine.

Their bodies were found in vehicles in a field near the town of Shedden, 14km (10 miles) from where they had been killed.

When Macau’s casino monopoly was abolished in 2001, US and other investors built massive casino complexes on land reclaimed from the sea.

This boom radically changed the skyline and economy of the Chinese-run city – it now makes more in gambling revenues than the strip in Las Vegas.

But critics say daily life and values have deteriorated.

The case of Ao Man-long, the tiny territory’s former minister of transport and public works, offers a snapshot of this dramatic process.

Macau’s highest court has just put Ao away for 27 years, convicting him of numerous counts of corruption, bribery, abuse of power and money-laundering.

Ao oversaw a huge boom in construction from 1999 until his arrest in December 2006.

Investigators say Ao also managed to collect about US$100m (£50m) in a series of accounts and properties around the world – about 57 times what he and his family could legitimately have earned.

Testimony during his trial showed how he chose winning contractors and took large bribes from bidders for his interventions.

Stanley Ho made his fortune from Macau’s lucrative casino trade but the billionaire has struggled to adapt to the tiny territory’s changing fortunes.

Mr Ho’s firm, Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM), which had a monopoly on gambling for four decades until 2002, has lost out to slicker, foreign rivals who are attempting to transform Macau into Asia’s Las Vegas.

SJM’s share of gambling revenue in the former Portuguese territory, which surpassed the Las Vegas strip in 2006, declined to 40% in 2007 from 75% in 2005, a year after the first foreign company set up shop.

Seedy past

Mr Ho’s famous old casino, the Lisboa, which is closely associated with Macau’s seedy past of gangster gunfights, has proved less popular with punters than the glitzy casinos operated by US firms Las Vegas Sands, MGM Mirage and Wynn Resorts.

However, Mr Ho is fighting back. His firm plans to use the $494m (£247m) it raised from a stock exchange listing in neighbouring Hong Kong this month to give the Lisboa a long-awaited facelift and re-develop several other casinos in the territory.

Las Vegas Sands, the hotel and casino operator, has announced increased losses between July and September as US punters spent less during the downturn.

The company made a loss of $123m (£74m) during the period, almost four times the $32.2m loss it made a year earlier.

It also said increased income taxes contributed to the bigger loss.

Despite the loss, overall revenue rose by 3.2%, to $1.14bn, helped by strong spending by gamblers at the company’s Macau casinos in China.

And the company was upbeat about its prospects for next year.

“Today we have more [Las Vegas] group room nights on the books for 2010 than we expect to realise in all of calendar 2009,” said chief executive Sheldon Adelson.

The company also said it was focusing on cutting costs to improve profitability.

“It looks like they exceeded expectations in Macau, but they got destroyed in Las Vegas,” said Robert LaFleur at Susquehanna Financial.

Translation: Every American who wants to access a “state exchange” or get the tax credits in the bill would have to submit data about themselves to the Social Security Administration or Department of Homeland Security for verification. If you don’t do it, no exchanges or tax credits. If your data doesn’t match, no exchanges or tax credits, unless you can convince SSA or DHS bureaucrats that you are who you say you are.

Sound familiar? Then you probably read my Cato Policy Analysis “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.” The paper discusses how verification of immigration status for employment eligibility would plunge Americans into a Kafka-esque bureaucracy and deny many law-abiding Americans the ability to work. Ultimately, the system requires a national identification card.

The same goes with a health care “eligibility verification” system. If you’re one of the millions of people about whom the Social Security Administration has bad data, plan to spend long hours waiting in line to plead with indifferent federal bureaucrats for health care access. When attacks and complications on the verification system break it down, they’ll move to “strengthen” the system. Get ready to dig up your birth certificate—they’ll want to scan it into their computers—plan to be photographed and fingerprinted, and get ready to stand in line for your national ID card.

Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest oil company, has become the latest oil major to report a steep drop in quarterly profits.

The company said net profit for the three months to September dropped 68% to $4.73bn, from a year earlier.

That was below what analysts had been expecting, sending shares slightly lower in New York.

Royal Dutch Shell and BP both reported declines in third-quarter profits, but beat analysts’ expectations.

Italy’s Eni also said its earnings plunged 58%.

Oil companies worldwide have been hit by the drop in oil prices.

Global crude prices hit a record $147 a barrel last year, but have now dropped down to near $80 a barrel.

Exxon said revenue fell to $82.26bn from $137.7bn a year ago.

Chevron, the second-largest US oil company, will report its third-quarter results on Friday.

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Astronomers have discovered over 200 new worlds orbiting our closest 5,000 stars; all this despite modern telescopes lacking the power to see planets beyond our Solar System.

Others are searching for light from the first stars to shine in the Universe over 13 billion years ago, a task which has so far proved impossible.

Around the world these scientists are doing what they do best – detecting the things they cannot see amid a background of things they can.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a maverick band of astronomers in Europe and the US decided that simply being unable to see a planet orbiting another star was insufficient reason for not looking.

Their success hinged on an attempt to pick up the subtle motions of stars they could see being tugged by orbiting planets which they couldn’t.

This was a daunting prospect, given how subtle such motions might be. “A big planet only pulls its star at the speed that a human can run,” explains Professor Geoff Marcy from the University of California at Berkeley, one of the original planet-hunting pioneers.

Attempts to detect such tiny motions across light-years of space took almost 10 years, recalls Marcy. “And the first planets found to be causing them were real giants – many times the size of Jupiter and orbiting so close to their stars they caused relatively large, more easily detectable stellar wobbles.”

Today, the prizes in this field are to be found in locating smaller planets.

Worlds of the sizes currently being sought will only wobble their stars at the speeds an insect crawls across a table – just a few centimetres per second. But such trivial motions, barely detectable by current technology, could betray the presence of something of immense significance: another Earth-sized planet.

This is the grail which keeps the teams working on this quest whilst still potentially decades away from the first actual image of such a world.

Astronomers say they may have detected the light from some of the earliest stars to form in the Universe.

They have pictures of what appear to be very faint galaxies that shone more than 13 billion years ago, a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The remarkable claim dramatically exceeds the current, broadly accepted record for the most distant detection.

The Caltech-led team behind the work recognises there will be sceptics but says it believes its data is strong.

It has published details in The Astrophysical Journal; and the group leader, Professor Richard Ellis, has been arguing the case at a conference in London, UK.

“We’ve had these galaxies for over a year and we have gone back to the telescope and revisited them, to prove their signals are robust,” he explained.

“We feel confident now that we have done all that is humanly possibly to show the community that these galaxies are at these great distances,” Professor Ellis told BBC News.

The Swift space telescope has detected a gamma-ray burst some 12.8 billion light-years from Earth – a record.

These intensely bright but fleeting flashes of very high-energy radiation signal some of the Universe’s most violent happenings.

This blast, designated GRB 080913, probably originated in the catastrophic explosion of a massive star.

“This is the most amazing burst Swift has seen,” said lead scientist Dr Neil Gehrels.

“It’s coming to us from near the edge of the visible Universe,” explained the researcher from the US space agency’s (Nasa) Goddard Space Flight Center.

The burst was detected at 0547 GMT on 13 September, in the constellation Eridanus.

Because light moves at finite speed, looking farther into the Universe means looking back in time. The distance this flash has had to travel means Swift is seeing the event less than 825 million years after the Universe came into being; and some 70 million years further back in time than the previous record holder, a burst detected in 2005.

Indeed, it is one of the most distant objects ever seen. Only the light from some faint galaxies has been detected beyond this burst – 100-300 million light-years further away.

Scientists are very keen to probe these great distances because they will learn how the early Universe evolved, and that will help them explain why the cosmos looks like it does now.

Swift was launched in 2004. It is a three-in-one observatory. Its Burst Alert Telescope is set up to catch the intense but fleeting flash of very high-energy gamma radiation that initially signals a GRB event. Swift then swings itself to look directly into the flash with X-ray and ultraviolet/visible telescopes.

This longer wavelength afterglow can last days and Swift alerts ground-based observatories to join the spectacle.

Indeed, it is the ground campaign that establishes the distance.

In this case, astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2m telescope at La Silla and Very Large Telescope at Paranal (both in Chile) targeted the afterglow.

Analysis of the light spectrum confirmed the blast had a redshift of 6.7. Redshift is a measure of the degree to which light has been “stretched” by the expansion of the Universe. The greater the redshift, the more distant the object and the earlier it is being seen in cosmic history.

The figure 6.7 equates to 12.8 billion light-years.

Although a Nasa-managed mission, Swift has significant British and Italian contributions.

The UK’s major input has been to provide an X-ray camera and elements of the UltraViolet/Optical Telescope.