There are 11 sunspot clusters and massive 2042 is too large to even distibuish everything that is going on in there. The solar wind is a blistering 642 km/sec. Earth is approaching a stream of debris from ancient Comet Thatcher, source of the annual Lyrid Meteor Shower. Usually the shower is mild (10-20 meteors per hour) but unmapped filaments of dust in the comet's tail sometimes trigger outbursts ten times stronger. Forecasters expect this year's peak, however strong it may be, to occur on April 22nd. In order to study the effects of today's geomagnetic storm on Earth's upper atmosphere, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched a double balloon mission to the stratosphere: The two balloons carried two experiments. One is the group's Rapid Response Space Weather Payload, which measures high energy radiation. The other carried a colony of extreme-loving halobacteria. The purpose of their flight is to discover if they can live in the extreme environment of the stratosphere. Oh, and in honor of Easter, the students sent a team of peeponauts as well.
The Greed for Speed
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing whether high-speed trading firms are engaging in insider trading by taking advantage of fast-moving market information unavailable to other investors.
The investigation, launched about a year ago, involves a range of trading activities and is still in its early stages, according to a senior FBI official and an agency spokesman. Among the activities being probed is whether high-speed firms are trading ahead of other investors based on information that other market participants can't see.
Among the types of trading under scrutiny is the practice of placing a group of trades and then canceling them to create the false appearance of market activity. Such activity could be considered potential market manipulation by encouraging others to trade based on false orders.
Another form of activity under scrutiny involves using high-speed trading to place orders to conceal that the transactions are based on an illegal tip.
"There are many people in government who are very focused on this and who are concerned about it and who think it breaks the law," an FBI spokesman said. "There is a big concern that high-frequency traders are getting material nonpublic information ahead of others and trading on it."
Ultimately, federal prosecutors would have to decide whether the facts of a specific case warrant bringing charges, the FBI official said.
The probe, which has picked up steam in recent months, comes amid heightened scrutiny of computerized trading. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating whether high-speed trading firms have gained advantages that aren't available to regular investors, such as access to superfast data feeds.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into ties between high-speed traders and major exchanges, examining whether the firms are getting preferential treatment that puts other investors at a disadvantage, said people familiar with the probes.
Since the beginning of the investigation, the FBI, working with the SEC, has developed fact patterns of potentially illegal trading and run them by prosecutors to determine if they could be used in a criminal case.
For the FBI, the investigation marks a new and unusual phase of its focus on insider trading. Because high-speed trades are executed by computer programs, it is often more difficult to detect nefarious activity and to prove that it was executed intentionally.
FBI officials said they are looking for patterns in the market that can reveal whether any trading activities in question violate the law. They would then have to be able to prove that those trades were made with fraudulent intent.
Related
· High-Speed Trading Firm Tries Charm Offensive
The FBI said it has dedicated a large number of agents to the investigation. FBI officials are looking into whether some brokers trade on information about client orders before executing them, and whether brokers use information about after-hours trading to beat the market when it opens the next morning.
Among those being probed are proprietary-trading outfits, which trade strictly for their own account, as well as fast-moving broker operations that buy and sell orders on behalf of clients, such as mutual funds and pension plans.
The push comes after a long-running focus on more traditional insider trading by federal prosecutors and the FBI in New York.
Speed in the Spotlight
Scrutiny has been growing on fraction-of-a-second differences in access to information. Recent highlights:
· Second Firm to Stop Direct Feeds to High-Speed Traders (March 19, 2014)
· Speedy Traders Face New U.S. Scrutiny (March 18, 2014)
· N.Y. Probes Traders' Access to Data (March 18, 2014)
· Firm Stops Giving High-Speed Traders Direct Access to Releases (Feb. 20, 2014)
· Traders Turn to Laser Beams to Zip Data (Feb. 11, 2014)
· Trade Tactics: Slow vs. Speed (Feb. 10, 2014)
· High-Speed Traders Unite to Press Case (Jan. 5, 2014)
· Action Urged on High-Speed Traders' Early Access to Data (Sept. 24, 2013)
· Traders Pay for Early Peek at Key Data (June 12, 2013)
· High-Speed Traders Exploit Loophole (May 1, 2013)
· For Superfast Traders, a Way to Jump Line (Sept. 19, 2012)
The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has charged 90 people with insider trading using confidential information about earnings reports, mergers and other market-moving news since October 2009. So far, 79 of those people have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial and none have been acquitted.
The Justice Department said it is working with other regulators on the probe, including the SEC, CFTC and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees broker-dealers. The investigation, which the FBI calls the High-Speed Trading Initiative, is also focusing on whether the waves of orders that flood the market from high-frequency firms are being used to manipulate prices to their benefit.
Investigators are also seeking leads from traders or others who may have participated in illegal activity. "People will benefit to varying degrees by calling us at an early stage," he said.
Market regulators have been investigating whether high-frequency traders have unfair advantages over other investors for several years. SEC enforcement officials continue to probe whether high-speed firms were using so-called order types—directions traders use to tell an exchange how to handle their orders—to jump ahead of less savvy investors. In a page-one article in September 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported that a former high-frequency trader, Haim Bodek, blew the whistle to the SEC on how certain order types could hurt other investors.
CFTC investigators are probing whether high-frequency firms are routinely distorting futures markets by acting as buyer and seller in the same transactions, illegal trading activity known as wash trades. Such trades are banned by U.S. law because they can feed false information into the market and manipulate prices.
Write to Scott Patterson at and Michael Rothfeld at
Report: EPA tested deadly pollutants on humans to push Obama admin’s agenda
11:53 AM 04/02/2014
Michael Bastasch
· See All Articles
· Email Michael Bastasch
· Subscribe to RSS
The Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting dangerous experiments on humans over the past few years in order to justify more onerous clean air regulations.
The agency conducted tests on people with health issues and the elderly, exposing them to high levels of potentially lethal pollutants, without disclosing the risks of cancer and death, according to a newly released government report.
These experiments exposed people, including those with asthma and heart problems, to dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants, including diesel fumes, reads a EPA inspector general report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The EPA also exposed people with health issues to levels of pollutants up to 50 times greater than the agency says is safe for humans.
The EPA conducted five experiments in 2010 and 2011 to look at the health effects of particulate matter, or PM, and diesel exhaust on humans. The IG’s report found that the EPA did get consent forms from 81 people in five studies. But the IG also found that “exposure risks were not always consistently represented.”
“Further, the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms,” the IG’s report noted. “An EPA manager considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures” but “human subjects were not informed of this risk in the consent form.”
According to the IG’s report, “only one of five studies’ consent forms provided the subject with information on the upper range of the pollutant” they would be exposed to, but even more alarming is that only “two of five alerted study subjects to the risk of death for older individuals with cardiovascular disease.”
Three of the studies exposed people to high levels of PM and two of the studies exposed people to high levels of diesel exhaust and ozone. Diesel exhaust contains 40 toxic air contaminants, including 19 that are known carcinogens and PM. The EPA has publicly warned of the dangers of PM, but seemed to downplay them in their scientific studies on humans.
“This lack of warning about PM,” the IG’s report notes, “is also different from the EPA’s public image about PM.”
The EPA has been operating under the assumption that PM is deadly for years now. The IG’s report points to a 2003 EPA document that says short-term exposure to PM can result in heart attacks and arrhythmias for people with heart disease — and long-term exposure can result in reduced lung function and even death. A 2006 review by the EPA presents even further links between short-term PM exposure and “mortality and morbidity.”
“Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress on Sept. 22, 2011.
“If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country,” Jackson added.
PM is a “mixture of harmful solid and liquid particles” that the EPA regulates. PM that is 2.5 microns or less is known as PM2.5, which is about “1/30th the thickness of a human hair.” These small particles can get into people’s respiratory system and can harm human health and even lead to death after just short-term exposure.
The EPA set PM2.5 primary standards at 15 micrograms per cubic meter of air on an annual average basis, but the agency exposed test subjects to PM levels of 600 micrograms per cubic meter — 40 times what the EPA sets as an acceptable outdoor air standard.
But in five of the studies, people were subject to levels higher than what they signed on for. The EPA IG found that one person was hit with “pollutant concentrations that reached 751 [micrograms per cubic meter], which exceeded the IRB-approved concentration target of 600 [micrograms per cubic meter].”
The EPA says that when PM2.5 levels are between about 250 and 500 micrograms per cubic meter “[e]veryone should avoid any outdoor exertion. People with respiratory or heart disease, the elderly and children should remain indoors.”
No one was killed during the test, but a source close to the issue says that one test subject — a 58-year-old obese woman with medical problems and a family history of heart disease — was ordered to go to the hospital by the EPA after being exposed to “ambient air pollution particles” in October 2010.
Other test subjects also experienced health problems during their testing. One subject developed a persistent cough after being exposed to ozone for 15 minutes in April 2011 and two other subjects suffered from “cardiac arrhythmias” during testing in 2010 after being exposed to “clean air.”
Regulatory implications
The EPA has been trying to justify setting stricter PM2.5 standards in its upcoming national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS). But the agency’s public statements on PM don’t square with its lax attitude about testing the air pollutant on humans.
“Maybe the biggest reason to slow down the new rule is that the EPA is talking out of both sides of their mouth,” Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter said last year. “On one side exposure to it is deadly, and on the other they say human exposure studies are not harmful.”
The EPA has said for many years now that PM is a deadly air pollutant that can cause death even after short-term exposure, but it did not disclose the mortality risks in some of its human tests, despite exposing people to high levels of PM.
One manager overseeing EPA human testing told the IG’s office that “the exposure risk for healthy individuals is minimal” and that a person breathing 420 micrograms per cubic meter for two hours “would inhale the same concentration as they would breathing 35 [micrograms per cubic meter]” which is the EPA’s 24-hour regulatory standard for outdoor PM2.5 levels.
The manager also said “that PM risk is focused on susceptible populations and that the risk is small for those with no overt disease.”
This alarmed Republicans who said that either the EPA was misrepresenting the science around PM2.5 to advance its own regulatory agenda or it was exposing people to deadly pollutants for little scientific gain.
“It’s alarming how the EPA is purposefully and blatantly ignoring an ongoing investigation of the legality and therefore scientific legitimacy of the use of human testing,” Vitter said. “This is another example of the EPA continuing to pick and choose scientific ‘facts’ to support their overreaching agenda.”
“It is a concern that EPA would assert in the rulemaking process that PM2.5 exposure is deadly while simultaneously asserting in the waivers signed by participants in EPA human exposure studies that these exposures are not harmful,” Republicans wrote to the EPA in February 2013. “Furthermore, there are valid questions about the quality or usefulness of the exposure studies actually relied upon by EPA.”
The agency actually proceeded in its PM2.5 rulemaking while the EPA IG’s office was conducting a review of its human testing procedures.
“EPA policy decisions must be based on sound science,” Lek Kadeli, acting administrator for the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), said in response to the EPA IG’s report. “While there is a critical need for studies involving human subjects, ORD also understands that the research must be conducted in an ethical and vigilant manner.”
“As documented in the OIG’s report, EPA has established guidelines for conducting this type of research that are far in excess of what is normally required by universities, industry, and other government agencies conducting human studies research,” Kadeli said.