Posts Tagged ‘pogo stick’
“Money laundering is a very sophisticated crime and we must be equally sophisticated”*…
It’s bad form to mention money-laundering. Instead, you talk about asset-management structures and tax beneficial schemes. — John Sweeney
This is the untold history of how prominent civil servants in the UK tailored US-devised anti-money laundering (AML) policies in ways that suited the needs of Britain’s financial services industry. In the aftermath of these initial compromises in 1987, criminal money managers in both the US and the UK were able to continue to operate in an environment that easily allowed them to hide and use dirty money. The researchers analysed six months of previously unseen personal correspondence and documents exchanged between various actors in the UK Government during 1987. From this they conclude that the core of the current, global AML regime, was not the destruction of drug money laundering and banking secrecy, nor the ending of criminal financial enablers and with it hot money; rather it was the protection and leverage of national trading interests on both sides of the Atlantic. And the drive to protect these interests would see crime control laws made, amended and changed to cater for the interests of the US and UK banking and finance industries. The file had been classified as secret and held by the UK Treasury until it was released to the public in 2017 as an archive document transferred to The National Archives in accordance with The Public Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act…
Mary Alice Young and Michael Woodiwiss tell the extraordinary story of governments effectively competing with criminal gangs at “A world fit for money laundering: the Atlantic alliance’s undermining of organized crime control.”
(Image above: source)
* Attorney General (1993 to 2001) Janet Reno… whose words can be understood, per the article cited above, in more than one way…
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As we follow the money, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that George B. Hansburg was issued a patent (#2,793,036) for his invention of “an improved pogo stick”– the modern two-handled pogo stick.
While spring stilts had been invented in 1891, the original pogo stick was created in 1920 by Max Pohlig and Ernst Gottschall– the first two letters of whose surnames gave the device its name.
Tastes like chicken…
Readers struggling with an appropriate response to the U.N.’s recent suggestion that all of us in the developed world should be getting much more of our protein from eating insects will be relieved to know of the brainchild of four London-based graduate students, the Ento Box…
What began as a graduate project has matured over the past two years, with a series of caterings and pop-up restaurants introducing insect-based dishes to new audiences around the U.K. Just before Easter, the founders of Ento (which is a portmanteau of bento box and entomology) served buffalo caterpillars at the Edinburgh Science Festival, the largest event they’ve participated in so far. They want Ento to grow organically–with more supper clubs this year and a restaurant in about 18 months. Slow growth allows them to see firsthand how the food is received, to understand their customers, and to build up good will en route to hitting supermarket shelves in a few years. Before mass consumption of insects can become a first-world reality, you need to fix the perception problem. With a nod to the aesthetics of sushi presentation, that’s precisely what Ento does…
“Sushi was a very inspiring story for us,” says cofounder Julene Aguirre-Bielschowsky, who met her cofounders at the Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc double masters course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. Aguirre-Bielschowski, who is German but is originally from Mexico, says she and her colleagues were initially met with skepticism from advisors, but she says they found inspiration in a 30-year-old Japanese travel book that advised tourists to beware of “strange Japanese restaurants that serve raw fish.”
If sushi could make fans out of skeptics in just three decades, then why not bugs?…
Read all of the appetizing tale at CoExist.
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As we struggle with our chop sticks, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that George B. Hansburg of Walker Valley, N.Y. was issued a U.S. patent for his invention of an improved pogo stick (No. 2,793,036). In the event, while the design was a step forward over earlier incarnation, Hansburg’s 1955 version posed something of a risk to the user’s chin. He went back to the drawing board and two years later patented something much more like the pogo stick we’ve come to know and love.
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