Roberto Borge (C), former governor of Quintana Roo state of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is escorted by Panamanian security forces while being extradited to Mexico to face charges for corruption, at the Toncontin airport in Panama City, Panama January 4, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos Lemos
JANUARY 4, 2018
PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - A former state governor for Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was extradited on Thursday from Panama to Mexico, where he faces corruption charges, Mexico’s attorney general’s office and secretary of external relations said in a statement.
Roberto Borge, who governed the touristy state of Quintana Roo from 2010 to 2016, was taken under strict security from the offices of Panama’s national police to an air force base, where he boarded a Mexican plane, local television footage showed.
Mexican prosecutors accuse Borge of using funds obtained illegally, embezzlement and abuse of public office. Borge has denied the allegations.
Borge was arrested in Panama City in June as he was preparing to board a flight to Paris. Panama’s foreign ministry said last week that it would send Borge to Mexico.
For the PRI, the extradition is the latest reminder of corruption scandals as the party tries to rehabilitate its image ahead of a presidential election in July.
The PRI, which is trying to keep hold of power as President Enrique Pena Nieto’s term ends, has faced a spate of graft allegations, and four of its former governors were arrested on such charges last year in various countries, including Borge.
Last month, Mexican authorities arrested Alejandro Gutierrez, a former high-ranking PRI official, in a corruption investigation in the northern state of Chihuahua.
'I wasn't marching down the street asking for this pay raise. Now I'm worse off'
Jeri Lynn Horton-Joyce, daughter of Tim Horton, is served in the Shaikh Zayed Road location in Dubai. This photo was taken for a story published in the Gulf News, a daily English language newspaper in Dubai. (Asghar Khan/Gulf News)
By Aaron Saltzman,Jan 03, 2018
Employees at an Ontario Tim Hortons owned by the children of the chain's founders say they have been told to sign a document acknowledging they are losing paid breaks, paid benefits, and other incentives as a result of the province's minimum wage hike.
"I feel that we are getting the raw end of the stick," said one front line employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of losing their job.
The franchise is located in Cobourg, Ont., about 115 kilometres east of Toronto. The owners are Ron Joyce Jr. and Jeri-Lynn Horton-Joyce, the son and daughter of the chain's co-founders, Ron Joyce and the late Tim Horton, respectively. Employees say they are married.
In the document, copies of which were obtained by CBC News, Ron Joyce Jr. Enterprises wrote:
A picture of the document outlining cuts to paid breaks due to Ontario's minimum wage hike employees at Tim Hortons say they were told to sign.
"Breaks will no longer be paid. A 9 hour shift will be paid for 8 hours and 20 minutes."
"These changes are due to the increase of wages to $14.00 minimum wage on January 1, 2018, then $15.00 per hour on January 1, 2019, as well as the lack of assistance and financial help from our Head Office and from the Government."
The letter is signed "Sincerely, Jeri, Ron and Lisa."
The Tim Hortons location on Division Street in Cobourg, Ont. Employees got a letter outlining increased benefits costs and cutting paid breaks due to the province's minimum wage hike. (James Pickersgill)
The act doesn't require employers to give employees coffee breaks or any other kind of break other than eating periods.
Meal breaks are unpaid unless the employee's employment contract requires payment.
"Organizations are finding ways to transition to a higher minimum wage. We are encouraging them to work together to share best practices and innovations," said a spokesperson for Ontario's Ministry of Labour in an email to CBC News.
"The Ministry of Labour is dedicated to ensuring Ontario workers are protected and know their rights under the Employment Standards Act."
Cobourg resident James Pickersgill posted a copy of the letter to local Tim Hortons employees on Facebook. (James Pickersgill)
Besides losing paid breaks, the document states workers with more than five years of service will have to pay 50 per cent of the cost of benefits, and employees with between six months and five years service will have to pay 75 per cent.
An employee with more than five years service told CBC News that prior to this, their benefits were covered 100 per cent by the company.
"That was a big benefit for the people who work at Tim Hortons, because it's not a great paying job," said the employee, who said they were making $13 an hour prior to the minimum wage hike.
"The benefits are what kept me there. Now you are going to make me pay that.
"I don't understand why you can take it away. Sounds like you are penalizing your staff because the government is trying to help your staff," they said.
Employees are also losing incentives for working on their birthday and for working six months without taking a sick day.
"We did receive this letter. I have not signed it and I still have it," said another front line employee who also asked to remain anonymous.
"My shift has 15-year-olds, and I feel they should be taking the letter home to their parents to read before they sign anything," they said.
Wage hike but worse off?
Another employee said that with unpaid breaks and having to pay 50 per cent of the cost of benefits, their biweekly paycheque will actually be $51 dollars lower than it was before the minimum wage hike.
"I've worked for the company for a very long time, and I was very upset. I wasn't marching down the street asking for this pay raise. Now I'm worse off," they said.
James Pickersgill, a Cobourg resident whose friend's spouse works at one of the Cobourg locations, posted a picture of the document on his Facebook page. It was shared more than 600 times in less than 24 hours.
"Cobourg's a small place. Word of mouth goes mental. People are talking about it wildly," said Pickersgill.
He said some people are pointing to this situation as a reason why the minimum wage should not have gone up, because it forces small businesses into difficult decisions. But a far greater number of people are outraged, he said.
No comment
"People are talking about boycotting their stores, and saying 'I'll go to another [Tim Hortons], but I won't go to that one,'" said Pickersgill.
Employees say the owners of the franchises are at their winter home in Florida.
A woman answering the phone at the Tim Hortons location on Division Street in Cobourg, who said she was the manager, told CBC News she had no comment.
In an email to CBC News, Tim Hortons corporate media relations said:
"Almost all of our restaurants in Canada are independently owned and operated by small business Owners who are responsible for handling all employment matters, including all policies for benefits and wages, for their restaurants."
"Restaurant Owners are expected to comply with all applicable laws and regulations within their jurisdiction."
Dionysios Demetis-January 2, 2018 It’s 7am and I’m driving down Hull city centre to pick up Brett Johnson, known in cyberspace by the alias Gollumfun and dubbed the “Original Internet Godfather” by the US Secret Service.
Johnson was on the notorious US Most Wanted list in 2006, before being arrested for cybercrime and laundering US$4m. I’ve never met anyone whose name has been on that list, and so our encounter comes with some level of subliminal intimidation. Turns out, he’s both casual and friendly and I’m keeping an open mind.
But I also have to remind myself that he’s a former cybercriminal, who invented a “popular” online tax-return fraud scheme, plenty of identity theft variants and ShadowCrew – the precursor to the dark web.
We’re scheduled to spend two days together. I invited Johnson to give a talk at the Business School of the University of Hull and, some weeks after his talk – in partnership with the FBI – at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, he flies over for his first trip to the UK.
Johnson – who over the course of the next 48 hours takes me through his former criminal mindset blending cybersecurity and money laundering (a topic that I’ve spent more than a decade researching) – exudes confidence, but admits that being involved in cybercrime was the biggest mistake of his life.
He has nothing but good words for US Secret Service agents, but he did disappoint them when they let him out of prison on the understanding that he would work as an informant (he carried on committing fraud from within their premises).
Johnson praises the FBI, as we walk along campus, and tears well up when he mentions the name of special agent K.M, who guided him in dropping cybercrime for good. His sister Denise and wife Michelle always come up when discussing how he turned his life around. They “saved my life”, he says, while recalling the hardships of his formative years when he felt pushed into skulduggery at the age of ten: the family fraud ring was led by his mother who also convinced Johnson’s grandmother to join in.
“It was almost written in stone that I was going to end up in some sort of fraud,” he says.
His first marriage in 1994 was paid for courtesy of insurance fraud. Johnson staged a fake car accident to finance his wedding day. By the time he started using the web, it was a natural progression to shift his fraudulent behaviour online.
He started by scamming eBay buyers. Then he exploited a loophole when a Canadian judge ruled that satellite dishes can be “pirated” legally (in Canada but not the US). Johnson reprogrammed the transmission cards for his Canadian customers and discovered he couldn’t fulfil the orders fast enough. Soon enough, he thought: “Why send them the product altogether? Who are they going to complain to?”
Clearly, Johnson made many, many mistakes. He’s the first to admit it and often points to himself as “this idiot” who broke the law, then broke it again, and took quite some time in prison (including eight months of solitary confinement) to come to terms with what he had done.
Brett Johnson, a.k.a. Gollumfun, taking questions from the University of Hull audience.Nadia Samara & Mohammad Al Shammari
More than a decade later, he now channels his expertise in darknet intelligence gathering, blackhat auditing, penetration testing and social engineering into his consultancy firm, Anglerphish Security. Johnson, who now advises Fortune 500 companies, seems confident that he has turned his back on crime. He tries, he says, to convince young cybercriminals – who contact him online – to quit their deceptive ways.
Schooled in the dark (web) arts
Cybercriminals are deluded when it comes to sidelining the consequences of their actions, Johnson explains. They repeatedly deny negative outcomes and, later on, accept they’ll carry on committing crime no matter what. Cybercriminals focus on the joy of their dark craft, harvest interconnected practicalities and exploit subtleties that stretch way beyond the confines of a computer screen and escalate to geopolitics.
As a simple example, Johnson used to hijack IP addresses in Eastern Europe when committing identity fraud as they were less likely to be reported to the US, due to the deteriorating political relationships between the countries. Everything matters. Detail matters most. That’s why, he explains, in the context of “friendly fraud” (or refund fraud), miscreants do their homework.
“Really, criminals are the only people on the planet who read the Terms of Service on websites. No one else reads them,” he says. They do it, he adds, to “get an idea of how that website operates.”
Time, he says, is also critical and “if you wait out a victim long enough then they’ll go away exasparated” – a lesson he learned early from his first eBay scam. Online victims rarely report a crime to the cops. It’s a trend that frustrates cybercrime police units. Worse still, some companies decline to report cyberattacks and can – as was recently revealed with the latest Uber scandal – go to extreme lengths to conceal a system hack affecting customer data.
When it comes to cyber-enabled financial crime, Johnson says, hijacking identities remains central to the process. It was this knowledge that, in 2004, led him to take over Counterfeitlibrary.com: the site that attracted cybercriminals who wanted a fake identity.
One of the cornerstones of cybercrime is “networking between individuals to realise maximum success or potential for financial crime”, he explains. The vast majority of online fraudsters aren’t “professionals”. Instead, they feed off each other: publishing manuals, guides, notes and helping out in forums wherever possible. If one cybercriminal finds a loophole in a multinational’s system, then it’s all hands on deck. The £2.5m stolen from Tesco Bank in the UK last year started from a single forum post of someone claiming that they had taken out £1,000.
That’s exactly why monitoring what’s going on in the dark web is so important for companies. But it’s not just potential corporate victims who are being trained in this dark art. Top cybercriminals charge wannabe scammers hundreds of dollars for six-week online courses on how to commit fraud. They also protect each other; giving advice on how to maintain and secure their own anonymity online. Back in the day, Johnson did the same thing for free for ShadowCrew members. Now, everything is monetised.
Chasing shadows
Johnson ran the ShadowCrew network, where he sold fraudulent bank accounts, prepaid debit cards and collaborated extensively with others to combine phishing scams and the CVV1 hack. ShadowCrew moderator Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years for masterminding the online theft of 170m card numbers. And it was that network that eventually landed Johnson behind bars.
But it doesn’t end there: Johnson also established online tax fraud based on hijacked identities – a highly lucrative criminal activity. It became central to the illegal flow of money that he’d set up. He used the California Death Index and filed tax returns for the dead; surprisingly, it worked. He could file one tax return every six minutes but couldn’t open online bank accounts fast enough. Over the course of his cybercriminal activities, Johnson had opened “hundreds of accounts”. Some weeks he claims he was “pulling out US$160,000 in cash.”
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04:24
ListenBrett Johnson describing web-based tax fraud with Dionysios Demetis)
Despite being an early architect of online crime, even Johnson is amazed by the scale of it today. ShadowCrew had 4,000 members, he says, whereas AlphaBay boasted 240,000 users before it was shutdown by the FBI. But with what appears to be an ongoing multi-state orchestrated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on major darknet forums, cybercriminals quickly flock elsewhere. Bitcoin, Johnson adds, is an almost perfect tool for cybercrime.
Brett Johnson, a.k.a. Gollumfun, presenting at the University of Hull.Dionysios Demetis
Banks, companies and many different institutions routinely adopt anti-fraud tools to prevent their systems from being vulnerable to hacks and scams but – at the same time – fraudsters embrace them, too. They test the tools to make sure that their activity avoids detection. They also purchase off-the-shelf software that blocks detection attempts altogether and scrambles behavioural detection efforts.
Another tool he demonstrates allows anyone to buy hijacked IP addresses from a wide list of countries, including the UK, and costs around 30p per IP address. It also calculates, for a further 15p, a risk score for the fraudster of the probability of detection/blocking of that IP address by commercial anti-fraud and anti-spam software.
I find it difficult to get past the subtle irony of IP risk scores informing the decisions of cybercriminals. Then again, if they’re doing their own operational security, fraud-based “risk management” seems a natural next step in this evolving tango.
There’s so much to discuss with Johnson that our allotted two days go by very quickly. After his visit, we connect online and he suggests renaming my long lost Unix alias from carlito, which is a moniker now reserved by someone else, to carl1to – with the number “1” denoting the first Carlito in a nod to a 90s mobster movie starring Al Pacino. Somehow, it feels like a fitting end to my time with the Original Internet Godfather.
Dionysios Demetis (left) with Brett Johnson (right)
For the long form discussion between Demetis and Brett Johnson, listen to the audio file below.
A pall of inaction and apathy hangs over Delhi’s reaction to its air pollution crisis. Source: Reuters/Anindito Mukherjee
DELHI’s air pollution crisis made international headlines in early December when a cricket match between India and Sri Lanka was suspended due to poor air quality.
“Compared to seven years ago, we are treating 3,000 more people within the four-hour standard”
That’s what Jeremy Hunt told Channel 4 News last night.
By Georgina Lee-4 JAN 2018
He was referring to the national standard that says 95 per cent of patients should be admitted to hospital, transferred or discharged within four hours of arriving in A&E.
It’s true that the number of people being treated within the four-hour target has gone up compared to seven years ago.
But the total number of patients attending A&E has gone up in that time too.
What Mr Hunt didn’t mention was that since his government has been in office, the proportion of patients being admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours has fallen – and the total number of people waiting more than four hours has risen six-fold.
The proportion of patients treated within four hours has fallen below the 95 per cent target
We’re going to compare figures by quarter (e.g. January to March 2010 versus January to March 2017). That’s because there are more hospital and casualty admissions in winter than at other times of the year – so the summer months will perform better.
So what does the data show?
In the first three months of 2010 – just before the Tories took office – 96.9 per cent of patients in A&E were seen within four hours. By the first quarter of 2017, that had dropped to 87.6 per cent.
Even when we compare summer periods – when hospitals tend to be less busy – there’s also a drop.
In July to September 2010, 97 per cent of patients were seen within four hours. By July to September 2017, that figure had fallen to 85.2 per cent.
The number of patients waiting more than four hours has risen six-fold since 2010
And the picture’s worse when we look at the actual number of patients who have to wait more than four hours in casualty departments.
In the three months up to March 2010, just over 100,000 patients waited over four hours for treatment. In the first quarter of 2017, that figure stood at just under 700,000.
The most recent quarter-by-quarter figures we have cover the three months between July and September 2017. In that period, there were 586,000 patients waiting more than four hours in A&E. The same period in 2010 saw 106,000 patients waiting four hours or more.
That’s a summer-to-summer increase of nearly 600 per cent.
The latest month-by-month data is for November 2017, when 222,000 people waited over four hours. In November 2010, that figure was 46,000. That’s a rise of nearly 500 per cent.
What about the emergency funding boost?
You might remember that in November, Philip Hammond announced an extra boost to the NHS budget to help relieve pressure on services.
He pledged £337 million for this winter, and £1.6 billion for 2018-19.
It’s no surprise then, that the Chancellor’s announcement was met with lukewarm support: the boss of NHS England, Sir Malcolm Grant, said that while they welcomed the extra money, it would only go “some way to filling the widely accepted funding gap”.
“We can no longer avoid the difficult debate about what is possible to deliver for patients with the money available” he added.
Is this about staffing numbers?
“In the period I’ve been Health Secretary, we actually have 40,000 more doctors, nurses and clinicians”
But, as the draft workforce strategy from Health Education Englandpoints out, in that time, “England’s population has grown by 2.1 million, and has continued to age. The number of people with long-term conditions has grown sharply.”
While the government has announced a 25 per cent increase in medical school places from 2018-19, those doctors will only become consultants or GPs by 2030 at the earliest.
Mr Hunt acknowledged this, and told the programme last night that he’s asking staff to “bear with us.”
But it’s not just a problem of creating roles and training places – it’s also about vacancies and staff retention. The Health Education England report points out that there are currently 42,000 vacancies across the NHS for nurses and midwives.
And “the vast majority of vacant posts do not translate into vacant shifts as most are covered by bank or agency staff, but using agency staff is expensive and continuity of care can be compromised.”
According to the report, about 8 per cent of vacant shifts remain uncovered – and in some regions, like London, that figure is as high as 15 per cent.
The report also highlights that the percentage of nurses leaving the NHS for reasons other than retirement increased from 7.1 per cent in 2011-12 to 8.7 in 2016-17.
By their calculations, “had the rate [of nurses leaving the NHS for reasons other than retirement] remained at 2012 levels through to 2017, we would have 16,000 more nurses working in the NHS today – that’s almost half of our currently vacant nurse posts filled.”
"[The reason] that people do so terribly in Africa from a surgical point of view is that there are just no human resources," he said.
Globally, an average of 1% of patients die after surgery, but researchers say this number rises to 2.1% for patients in Africa.
Post-surgery survival rates are lower in Africa than the global average despite patients there being younger and lower risk, the report says.
Patients in Africa also mostly undergo surgery that is "more minor" and have "fewer complications".
The most common surgery is caesarean delivery, which accounts for 33% of operations. Infection was the most common post-surgery complication, researchers say.
It was the largest study of its kind ever undertaken in Africa, analysing data of 11,422 adult patients across in 25 countries - including Ethiopia, Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa.
No comparisons between those different African nations are available, however, "because of lower-than-expected surgical volumes" researchers say.
Analysis - Tulip Mazumdar, Global Health Correspondent
MAURO FERMARIELLO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYImage captionSurgeons scrub up before performing surgery - but more investment is needed
Image copyright
This study builds on the work of the Lancet Commission on Global Surgerywhich last year found 5 billion people around the world don't have access to safe surgery.
In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 10 people can get basic surgical care. But even when they do, complication rates are much higher than other parts of the world.
This all comes down to weaker health systems, fewer medical staff, and patients not having access to the full care they need. Having surgery isn't just about the medical procedure, it's about aftercare.
Patients should be properly monitored after surgery, but that can be very difficult with families often living many miles from their nearest health centre, and struggling to afford follow-up appointments.
Also, as the authors themselves state, "increased surgery is important" but "it is essential that these surgical treatments are safe and effective".
If resources aren't available for safe surgery, complication rates - inevitably and unnecessarily - become higher.
JANUARY 4, 2018
