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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Judge James A. Stoelker of Santa Clara County, California Superior Court was disqualified from hearing a case on predatory lending practices the day before Christmas, on a technicality. The case was filed by David and Salma Merritt of Santa Clara County against multiple defendants, including Countrywide, Bank of America, and First American Title, among others.

The Merritts had challenged Judge Stoelker’s involvement in the case, claiming many of his rulings had favored his former clients even when law would have indicated otherwise. Some of the defendants are Judge Stoelker’s former clients.

The events leading to this case began in 2006 when the Merritts accepted a home loan from Countrywide. At that time, Countrywide was advertising 30-year mortgages at between 1 and 3 percent interest. The Merritts received a “good faith estimate” consistent with those advertisements. They claim that Countrywide representatives tricked them into signing loan documents that were subsequently altered to appear to commit them to an obligation they had not agreed to.

A review of similar predatory lending cases filed by individuals in California found that all had been settled in at most 9 months, usually in favor of the banks. Merritt v. Mozilo has continued in the courts for much longer, celebrating its third anniversary last Saturday. The Merritts’ claims are consistent with published statements by Eileen Foster, former Executive Vice President of Fraud Risk Management at Countrywide, that fraud was endemic to certain parts of Countrywide.

Theirs was the only case heard in Department 9 that morning in recognition of Christmas. That hearing was scheduled, because the Sixth District of the California Court of Appeals (case number H038883) required the Santa Clara County Superior Court to (a) give all parties an opportunity to be heard regarding the possible disqualification of Judge Stoelker and (b) reply to the appellate court by December 26. This appellate ruling was only issued on November 26, and Judge Mark H. Pierce did not schedule the required hearing until December 12. The notice for this hearing required parties to file responses ten days before, which meant that the parties only had two days to prepare their replies.

On August 16, the Merritts learned Judge Stoelker had represented defendants in this case on numerous occasions before he was appointed to the bench in December 2010 and had not disclosed this fact to the Merritts. The next day they filed a Verified Statement of Disqualification asking Stoekler to recuse himself. The California Code of Civil Procedure (CCP) 170.3(c)(3) and (4) [confirmed in the 1988 appellate decision in Lewis v. Superior Court] give a judge ten days to respond to to such a motion. Stoelker replied on the eleventh day.

“All Rise” was heard at 9:04 AM local time Monday morning, whereupon Judge Pierce entered the courtroom. Attending by phone were attorneys James Goldberg representing Bank of America and Brian Craft representing First American Title. David Merritt was present representing himself. Goldberg had filed a brief asserting that the Merritts’ Verified Statement of Disqualification was served upon Judge Stoelker on August 17 but was not filed, as witnessed by the fact that it was not listed on the docket. Judge Pierce reported that he had checked the files and found that this Statement had indeed been filed, and he didn’t know why it was not on the docket. Attorney Goldberg suggested that the fact that the Statement was not on the docket may have contributed to Judge Stoelker’s failure to respond within the ten day limit. Judge Pierce replied, “That’s a stretch.”

Attorney Craft asked about next steps, since all action in this case had been stayed by the appellate court pending resolution of this issue. Judge Pierce then replied that Judge Manoukian would be handling discovery in this case, replacing Judge Stoelker in that capacity. He further stated that a reply to the appellate court had been prepared concurring with the appellate court’s disqualification of Judge Stoelker and asked Mr. Merritt to retrieve that order from the clerk in the courtroom and file it as usual with the clerk’s office. He also noted that this action would lift the stay. Other actions in this case could now proceed with the next steps being scheduled January 22, 2013, or later.

This is the second appellate reversal of decisions by this superior court in this case. The first reversal came on December 19, 2011, when the appellate court reinstated Wells Fargo as a defendant.

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

In testimony given before a U.S. military hearing, criminal investigator Benjamin Bierce narrated his account of how an incident involving five soldiers involved the serial rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl prior to shooting her. The hearing will determine whether four current U.S. soldiers have to face a court martial hearing; an additional former soldier allegedly involved in the incident, Steven D. Green, was recently discharged from the military and has pleaded not guilty to rape and murder charges in federal court in Kentucky.

According to Bierce, a U.S. Special Agent investigating the incident, the brutal attack which saw Abeer Qassim al-Janabi slain and her parents and younger sister murdered was premeditated. Citing a sworn statement from Army Specialist James Barker, the five accused were said to have plotted the rape whilst drinking whisky and playing cards.According to Agent Bierce, Spc. Barker said that Pte. Spielman grabbed the girl while Pte. Green seized her father and they then took them into the house and Sgt. Cortez and Spc. Barker followed them inside.

Pte. Green supposedly led the father, mother and younger sister into the bedroom and closed the door, while the teenage girl remained in the living room with the other Americans, Spc. Barker’s statement said.

Sgt. Cortez then allegedly pushed the girl to the floor, pulled up her dress and tore off her underwear while she was struggling, Bierce said, again citing Spc. Barker’s statement. Sgt. Cortez appeared to then rape Abeer and afterward, Spc. Barker tried to rape the girl, the statement said.

Then Pte. Green came out of the bedroom with an AK-47 rifle and announced: “They’re all dead. I just killed them,” according to Spc. Barker’s statement.

Then Sgt. Cortez held Abeer down while Pte. Green raped the girl; according to Spc. Barker’s statement. Pte. Green then picked up the AK-47 and shot Abeer once, waited, and then shot her a few more times, the U.S. official, Agent Bierce, said, quoting from Spc. Barker’s statement.

Spc. Barker said that he then poured kerosene lamp fuel on the girl’s body but Barker did not say who set it on fire.

Gary Griesmyer, another Special Agent, quoted Sgt. Cortez as telling him that the teenage girl was crying and talking in Arabic and that Spc. Barker told her to “shut up.”

Private Justin Watt testified that Pte. Howard told him before the incident that Pte. Green, Sgt. Cortez and Spc. Barker were planning to rape a girl, and Pte. Howard was going to be the lookout.

Watt testified that he heard Mr. Green say, “I want to kill and hurt a lot of Iraqis.” Green has been discharged from the military and has pleaded not guilty in a federal court in Kentucky where he will stand trial; he will not be facing a court martial regardless of what occurrs in the Baghdad hearing.

“If you have the power to make something right, you should do it. Investigation is not my job. But if something went down — something terrible like that — then it’s my obligation to come forward,” Watt said.

Watt also said life for some of the soldiers in the B Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, was horrible while they were manning a military post in nearby Yusufiyah. Some lived in a “dilapidated, abandoned water treatment facility” he said.

Pfc. Watt, who is identified as the whistle-blowing soldier who disclosed the attack during a counseling session, also said; “I feared for my safety at the TCP (traffic control point). It’s like this, I find out that guys in my squad, guys I trusted with my life, are allegedly responsible for one of the most brutal rapes/murders I’ve ever seen. And everyone has a weapon and grenades.”

Pfc. Justin Cross testified that deadly attacks by insurgents sapped morale and raised combat stress in the U.S. Army unit that included the soldiers accused of raping and murdering Abeer. He said that the “mentally draining” living conditions of the combat unit was a factor.

“It drives you nuts. You feel like every step you might get blown up. You just hit a point where you’re like, ‘If I die today, I die.’ You’re just walking a death walk.” Pfc. Cross told the hearing.

An article 32 hearing, like this, seeks to determine if a soldiers should face court martial. Its similar to that of a preliminary hearing or a grand jury proceeding in civilian law.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005File:Turing1.jpg

More than 50 programmers, scientists, students, hobbyists and fans of the A.L.I.C.E. chat robot gathered in Guildford, U.K. on Friday to celebrate the tenth birthday of the award winning A.I. On hand was the founder the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, designed to pick out the world’s most human computer according to an experiment laid out by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing more then 50 years ago. Along with A.L.I.C.E.’s chief programmer Dr. Richard S. Wallace, two other Loebner prize winners, Robby Garner and this year’s winner, Rollo Carpenter, also gave presentations, as did other finalists.

The University of Surrey venue was chosen, according to Dr. Wallace, not only because it was outside the U.S. (A.L.I.C.E.’s birthday fell on the Thanksgiving Day weekend holiday there, so he expected few people would attend a conference in America), but also because of its recently erected statue of Alan Turing, who posed the famous A. I. experiment which inspired much of the work on bots like A.L.I.C.E. University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre organizers Lynn and David Hamill were pleased to host the event because it encourages multi-disciplinary interaction, and because of the Centre’s interest in interaction between humans and computers.File:ALICE Birthday Cake.jpg

Dr. Wallace gave a keynote address outlining the history of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. Many people commented on the fact the he seemed to have moved around a lot in the last ten years, having lived in New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Maine, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, while working on the Alicebot project. The A.L.I.C.E. and AIML software is popular among chat robot enthusiats primarily because of its distribution under the GNU free software license. One of Dr. Wallace’s PowerPoint slides asked the question, “How do you make money from free software?” His answer: memberships, subscriptions, books, directories, syndicated ads, consulting, teaching, and something called the Superbot.

Rollo Carpenter gave a fascinating presentation on his learning bot Jabberwacky, reading from several sample conversations wherein the bot seemed amazingly humanlike. Unlike the free A.L.I.C.E. software, Carpenter uses a proprietary learning approach so that the bot actually mimics the personality of each individual chatter. The more people who chat with Jabberwacky, the better it becomes at this kind of mimicry.

In another interesting presentation, Dr. Hamill related present-day research on chat robots to earlier work on dialog analysis in telephone conversations. Phone calls have many similarities to the one-on-one chats that bots encounter on the web and in IM. Dr. Hamill also related our social expectations of bots to social class structure and how servants were expected to behave in Victorian England. He cited the famous Microsoft paperclip as the most egregius example of a bot that violated all the rules of a good servant’s behavior.

Bots have advanced a long way since philanthropist Hugh Loebner launched his controversial contest 15 years ago. His Turing Test contest, which offers an award of $100,000 for the first program to pass an “audio-visual” version of the game, also awards a bronze medal and $2000 every year for the “most human computer” according to a panel of judges. Huma Shah of the University of Westminster presented examples of bots used by large corporations to help sell furniture, provide the latest information about automotive products, and help customers open bank accounts. Several companies in the U.S. and Europe offer customized bot personalities for corporate web sites.

Even though Turing’s Test remains controversial, this group of enthusiastic developers seems determined to carry on the tradition and try to develop more and more human like chat bots.Hugh Loebner is dedicated to carry on his contest for the rest of his life, in spite of his critics. He hopes that a large enough constituency of winners will exist to keep the competition going well beyond his own lifetime. Dr. Wallace says, “Nobody has gotten rich from chat robots yet, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. There is such a thing as ‘bot fever’. For some people who meet a bot for the first time, it can pass the Turing Test for them, and they get very excited.”

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

News emerged yesterday that Boko Haram Islamists are suspected to have killed 44 worshippers during dawn prayers early Sunday morning in the small town of Konduga in Nigeria. The attacks were believed to be a revenge on citizen vigilante groups forming to help the government battle Islamist extremists and occurred 35km from the state capital Maiduguri.

A further 26 people are being treated for severe injuries. Boko Haram’s insurgency has killed at least 3,600 people since 2009, including killings by security forces.

In recent weeks the military has encouraged the formation of vigilante groups to help locate and arrest members of Boko Haram. Boko Haram has attacked churches and mosques. A video has been released where Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau takes responsibility for the attacks.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

The Interacademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), a global network of the world’s science academies, has released a statement urging parents and teachers to provide children with ‘the facts about the origin and evolution of life on Earth’. The statement is signed by 67 of the 92 member academies of the organisation, and notes that in some schools around the world, “testable theories” about evolution are being “concealed, denied or confused by theories not testable by science”.File:UreyMillerExperiment.jpeg

The statement presents four “evidence-based facts” that no scientific evidence has ever contradicted. These include the Earth being approximately 4.5 billion years old, life on Earth being at least 2.5 billion years old, and commonalities in all living organisms indicating a common primordial origin based on the process of photosynthetic organisms.

The news follows developments, mainly in the United States, where there is a concerted effort to include the teaching of ‘intelligent design‘ (ID), a theory which claims that complex biological features indicate that the presence of an intelligent ‘designer’ in schools. Opponents of this movement argue that it doesn’t qualify as a scientific theory, and is simply a disguise for creationist beliefs. In the US, where the separation of church and state is mandated by constitutional law, efforts to include ID in school syllabi were quashed by the courts, as the teaching of religion in schools is against the Establishment clause of the constitution of the United States. Despite this, George Bush has in the past remarked that he believes intelligent design should be taught in schools. The President has not shown any sign of plans to personally intervene in the legal debate however.

In December 2005, following legal case between the parents and the school district of Dover (Pennsylvania, USA), the judge decided that intelligent design was a religious view, and that it was unlawful to teach it as an alternative to evolution within the classroom. The IAP statement suggests that the science academies believe that ID is still being taught within some schools, however.

A Gallup poll conducted in May concluded that 46 percent of Americans believe that God created man in his present form sometime in the past 10,000 years, with 13 percent believing mankind evolved with no divine intervention and 36 percent saying that mankind developed over millions of years from lesser life forms, but with God guiding the process.

The IAP statement acknowledges limitations in current understanding, but argues that the process of science allows it to be open-ended and subject to correction and expansion as new understanding emerges.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, announced Tuesday that it is in talks with a consortium of Canadian pension funds to explore the possible sale of the company.

If successful in their bid, the consortium would take the publicly-traded company private, which would mean an end to the trading of BCE shares on the Toronto (TSX: BCE), New York (NYSE: BCE) and the Swiss (SWX: BCE) stock exchanges. BCE is one of the most widely held stocks in Canada.

BCE revealed that the potential takeover group includes the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board. Each of the pension funds involved have signed non-disclosure and standstill agreements with BCE. It was also revealed that New York-based private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would join the Canadian-led consortium as a minority partner.

“We are pleased to be a partner with this consortium of leading Canadian institutional fund managers and look forward to working closely together in this transaction.” said Henry Kravis, co-founding member of KKR. “Our experience in large, complex transactions of comparable size will be of significant value to this process,” continued Kravis.

BCE is also leaving the door open to rival bids, “taking into consideration the need to meet all legislative and regulatory requirements, including ensuring the Company remains Canadian to meet existing foreign ownership restrictions,” the company stated. In addition, BCE may retain the status quo if it does not receive a bid that it feels would enhance shareholder value.

One other pension fund that has expressed interest is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP). “We are pleased that this process is not exclusive and we will continue to review our options, including leading an alternative Canadian consortium,” said Jim Leech, Senior Vice-President, Teachers’ Private Capital. OTPP is currently BCE’s largest single shareholder, with an approximate ownership stake of 5.3 percent.

BCE, as Bell Canada, has been in business for 127 years. It provides phone service, satellite television, Internet access, wireless services, and other technologies to residential and business customers.

If analyst estimates are accurate, the sale of BCE could be worth about CA$32 billion or roughly $40 per share. On Tuesday, BCE shares were up CA$2.34 to close at $38.60 on the TSX, and up US$2.03 to close at $34.10 on the NYSE.