Doggles posted:

https://twitter.com/dorseycwin/status/1107831584990904322

ekuNNN posted:

A horse themed gender reveal party! So tacky and decadent and gross.


















Wait its literally for a horse

lancemantis posted:

is it even possible to view the original star wars anymore?

quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition#Reception

Harmy's Despecialized Edition is a series of fan restorations of the first three films in the George Lucas-created Star Wars franchise: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, intended to reproduce their appearance as originally shown in cinemas. The edits were created by a team of Star Wars fans led by Petr "Harmy" Harmáček, an English teacher from Plzeň, Czech Republic. The original Star Wars trilogy was released theatrically by 20th Century Fox for Lucasfilm between 1977 and 1983. Subsequent releases on home media, such as the 1997 "Special Edition" releases, introduced significant changes to the films, including additional scenes, altered sound-effects, and new computer-generated imagery – these changes were met with a generally poor response from critics and fans. As of 2019, the films are no longer commercially available in their original theatrical releases.

Harmáček felt that altering the films in this way constituted "an act of cultural vandalism", and in 2010 was inspired to create his own series of fan edits that restored the theatrical releases in high definition. With no experience in professional film editing, he taught himself as he went, using programs such as Avisynth and Adobe After Effects. Taking the 1993 LaserDisc releases as a guide and a majority of source material from the 2011 Blu-ray releases, Harmáček and a team of eight other fans constructed the edits over many thousands of hours of work. In 2011, one year after the project had begun, the first version of Harmy's Despecialized Edition was published online. Updated versions have been created in the years that followed.

As a fan edit, Harmy's Despecialized Edition cannot be legally bought or sold, and is "to be shared among legal owners of the officially available releases only". Consequently, the films are only available via various BitTorrent trackers and through specialized rapid download programs using file sharing sites. Reaction to the project has been positive: Nathan Barry of Wired praised the films as "an absolute joy to watch", while Gizmodo described them as "very, very good". Sean Hutchinson of Inverse placed Harmy's Despecialized Edition at number one on his list of the best Star Wars fan edits and called them "the perfect pre-1997 way to experience the saga".

lancemantis posted:

this is almost as good as CIWS stories

Plank Walker posted:

of all the cars to 3d print why would you choose a fiat?

Peanut President posted:

what if you have both a son and daughter, are there hooters but its dudes in speedos?

Platystemon posted:

https://twitter.com/JohnEzekowitz/status/1190838322551230464

quote:

Italian mafia bonds sold to global investors

Instruments were backed by front companies charged with working for the ’Ndrangheta organised crime group


International investors bought bonds backed by the crime proceeds of Italy’s most powerful mafia, according to financial and legal documents seen by the Financial Times.

In one case, the bonds — backed in part by front companies charged with working for the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta mafia group — were purchased by one of Europe’s largest private banks, Banca Generali, in a transaction where consulting services were provided by accountancy group EY.

About €1bn of these private bonds were sold to international investors between 2015 and 2019, according to market participants. Some of the bonds were linked to assets later revealed to be created by front companies for the ’Ndrangheta.

The ’Ndrangheta is less well-known outside Italy than the Sicilian mafia but has risen over the past two decades to become one of the wealthiest and most feared criminal groups in the western world, engaging in crimes ranging from industrial-scale cocaine trafficking to money laundering, extortion and arms smuggling.

Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, has estimated that the activities of the ’Ndrangheta, which is not made up of a centralised organisation but hundreds of autonomous clans, generate a combined turnover of €44bn a year.

Other investors in the bonds included pension funds, hedge funds and family offices, all looking for exotic ways of earning high returns at a time of record-low interest rates, according to people involved in the deals.

The bonds were created out of unpaid invoices to Italian public health authorities from companies providing them with medical services.

Under EU law, overdue invoices owed by state-connected entities incur a guaranteed penalty interest rate. This makes them attractive for special purpose vehicles, which place them into a large pool of assets and issue bonds backed by the expected cash flows from the future settlement of the invoices.

Most of the assets securitised in the deals were legitimate but some were from companies later revealed to be controlled by certain ’Ndrangheta clans, which had managed to evade anti-money laundering checks to take advantage of international investor demand for exotic debt instruments.

One bond deal purchased by institutional investors contained assets sold by a refugee camp in Calabria that had been taken over by organised criminals. They were later convicted for stealing tens of millions of euros of EU funds.

Almost all were private deals not rated by any credit rating agency or traded in financial markets. CFE, a Geneva-based boutique investment bank, constructed the vehicle that sold bonds to investors including Banca Generali.

When contacted by the FT, Banca Generali said it was unaware of any problems with the underlying assets that backed the bonds it had purchased for its clients and that it had relied on other intermediaries to conduct anti-money laundering checks on the underlying portfolios.

“Banca Generali and Banca Generali Fund Management Luxembourg are getting to know right now of the mentioned bad news,” the company said. It “rel[ied] on the notion that the transaction was eligible when [they] entered the securitised portfolio”, it added in an emailed statement.

CFE said it had never knowingly purchased any assets linked to criminal activity. It added that it conducted significant due diligence on all the healthcare assets that it handled as a financial intermediary, and that it also relied on the checks of other regulated professionals who handled the invoices after their creation in Calabria.

Both companies said that any legal issues that emerged after the invoices had been acquired were immediately reported to the Italian authorities. CFE said that the total amount of invoices later revealed to be linked to organised crime made up a very small proportion of the total amount of assets it had handled connected to the Italian health systems.

EY, which was not required to conduct due diligence on the assets in the securitisation when providing consulting services for the structuring for one of the vehicles purchased by Banca Generali, declined to comment.

Shame Boy posted:

Uhhhh


Why is a refugee camp even capable of selling financial instruments?

quote:

Over the past two decades, the leading families of the ’Ndrangheta — pronounced “en-dran-ghet-ah” — have expanded operations far outside their small home region. Today they control a large part of cocaine importation into Europe, as well as arms smuggling, extortion and cross-border money laundering. Several hundred autonomous clans have been transformed into one of Italy’s most successful businesses, with some studies estimating their combined annual turnover to be as high as €44bn — believed by law-enforcement agencies to be more than all the Mexican drug ­cartels combined.

Yet even among such lucrative criminal activities, the riches on offer from plundering Italy’s public health system stood out as a golden opportunity. By corrupting local officials, organised criminals have been able to make vast profits from contracts given to their own front companies, establishing monopolies on services ranging from delivering patients in faulty ambulances to transporting blood to taking away the dead.

All these services were billed to the Italian taxpayer through the country’s centrally funded yet regionally administered health service, which distributes an annual budget of billions of euros — an unrivalled prize for criminal gangs. So tight was the clans’ grip that doctors in Lamezia Terme reported having to wait outside a hospital ward for men from the ’Ndrangheta to open the locked door with their keys.


An investigation by the Financial Times has established how the trail of money from these crimes washed into the financial centres of London and Milan. Over the past five years, profits gained from the misery of patients in Calabrian hospitals were packaged up into debt instruments using the kind of financial engineering typically favoured by hedge funds and investment banks. Hundreds of millions of euros of these bonds, many containing dubious invoices signed off by parts of the health system later found to have been infiltrated by organised crime, were sold to international investors ranging from Italian private banks to a pension fund in South Korea.

The previously unreported use of capital ­markets by Mafia clans profiting from Calabria’s health crisis shows how far a criminal subculture once derided as mountain-dwelling goat farmers has metastasised into a globalised crime syndicate that is as comfortable operating in the world of high finance as it is extorting local businesses.

How the ’Ndrangheta emerged as one of the world’s most successful criminal enterprises can only be understood by realising how well-suited its agile and entrepreneurial organisational structure, based on blood ties, is to maintaining a stranglehold on Calabrian public life.

Calabria is not only the poorest region in Italy, but one of the most deprived in the EU. With a population of two million, its gross domestic product per head is €17,200, almost half the European average. A US diplomatic cable in 2008 noted: “If it were not part of Italy, Calabria would be a failed state.” The ’Ndrangheta, it said, “controls vast portions of its territory and economy, and accounts for at least three per cent of Italy’s GDP (probably much more) through drug trafficking, extortion and usury”.

A decade — and three Italian recessions — later the local economy has got worse, with the region consistently ranking in last place nationally in almost every category. Unemployment has increased from 12.9 per cent in 2010 to more than 20 per cent today.

quote:

The story of how money looted from Calabria’s hospitals ended up being routed into the global financial system illustrates the sophisticated ways in which the ’Ndrangheta launders the proceeds of its crimes. Through interviews and the analysis of financial documents and Italian legal filings, the Financial Times has found how the clans made use of a vast financial conveyor belt. The ­proceeds of the horrors of the corrupted hospitals were ­unwittingly bundled up by intermediaries and mixed with other assets into debt products. These then flowed through the City of London, Luxembourg and Milan, eventually ending up in the investment portfolios of the clients of private banks and hedge funds.

From 2015 to 2018, hundreds of millions of euros of invoices signed off by officials in Calabria’s cash-strapped municipal health authorities were purchased by intermediaries. These middlemen bought the unpaid invoices from suppliers at a steep discount because they were, in effect, guaranteed by the Italian state. They were then sold on to specialist financial companies, who merged them into pools of assets and sold investor bonds backed by the unpaid bills.

While many legitimate companies in Italy have used this process to offload debts owed to them by regional health authorities, the complex chain of intermediaries leaves it vulnerable to exploitation by organised criminals. Indeed, some of these same authorities were subsequently placed under emergency administration by the Italian state for full-scale Mafia infiltration. Several years after the invoices were sold, a number of the companies that had issued them were raided by anti-Mafia investigators for being fronts for ’Ndrangheta clans.

Front companies for organised crime working in the Italian healthcare sector managed to offload invoices owed to them by regional health authorities to unwitting intermediaries, who then sold them on again to legitimate financial companies. They then packaged them into specialised debt products marketed to investors hungry for exotic higher-yielding bonds at a time of record-low interest rates. Other investors in debt instruments connected to the Calabrian health system included hedge funds and ­various family offices, according to people involved in the deals.

None of these bonds was rated or assessed by major credit rating agencies or traded on financial markets. Instead, some were privately placed by boutique investment banks, several of which have offices in Mayfair or the City of London.

One example of how money tainted by ’Ndrangheta activity ended up in the legitimate international financial sector is a so-called ­special purpose vehicle called Chiron. In May 2017, ­this was one of numerous such entities established by companies specialising in healthcare financing in Italy.

The Chiron vehicle bought up close to €50m of unpaid healthcare invoices, including bills originating from Calabria and other parts of southern Italy. The ultimate buyer of the resulting bonds was the Luxembourg arm of the private bank of Generali, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, which was seeking to offer its clients higher-interest alternative investment products. The company that constructed the Chiron vehicle was CFE, a boutique investment bank with offices in London, Geneva, Luxembourg and Monaco. The Italian branch of EY, the global professional services firm, acted as a consultant on the deal.

One of the companies that contributed to ­Chiron’s invoices was Croce Rosa Putrino SRL, an ambulance and funeral company servicing the hospital in Lamezia Terme. In late 2018, police arrested 28 people, after an investigation by the public prosecution office of Catanzaro alleged that various front companies for local ’Ndrangheta families, including Croce Rosa Putrino, had seized control of the hospital’s funeral, ambulance and other health services. The case is still being prosecuted.

Banca Generali and CFE told the Financial Times that neither company had ever knowingly purchased any assets linked to the Calabrian healthcare system that had been connected to organised criminal activity. CFE said that it conducted significant due diligence on all the healthcare assets that it handled as a financial intermediary, and that it also relied on the checks of other regulated professionals who handled the invoices after their creation in Calabria. All the assets were deemed to be legal when acquired. CFE said that any invoices connected to organised crime it inadvertently handled made up a tiny amount of its business. Both companies said that any legal issues that emerged after the invoices had been acquired were immediately reported to the Italian authorities.



Regular health service companies working for Italian hospitals are owed money by hospitals. Instead of waiting to be paid, they sell on the invoices at a discount. This helps them get cash upfront, but they lose a bit on what they are owed due to the discount.

The buyers of these invoices package them up into a big pool of invoices inside a special purpose vehicle, SPV, and then sell bonds to investors backed by the invoices.

The investors get paid interest on the bonds as the invoices are gradually paid off by the Italian health authorities. Intermediaries work to ensure the bills are paid, and the money flows from the health authority to the investor.

Another privately sold bond analysed by the FT included invoices issued by a Calabrian religious charity caring for African refugees. This was later raided in an anti-Mafia operation for diverting EU funds into the hands of a powerful ’Ndrangheta clan. Gratteri, who led the investigation, described the food being provided to the refugees as “food that is usually given to pigs”. Twenty-two people were convicted.

Last year, Italy’s central government took drastic action. Rome dissolved the regional health authorities of Catanzaro and Reggio Calabria for Mafia infiltration, having discovered widespread fraud and double billing of invoices, as well as officials working inside them who had been banned from public office. They remain under special administration. But about €1bn of these private Italian healthcare bonds had been bought and sold between 2015 and 2019, according to market participants, with significant numbers of invoices originating from the two health authorities under emergency administration. The full scale of how much dirty money entered into the global financial system in this way is impossible to quantify.

“Large banks have stayed away from these sorts of healthcare-related deals in Italy,” says one financial professional who has worked on similar transactions. “It is a difficult sector, and particularly in certain regions there are risks that anyone getting involved is going to have to face.”

quote:

The human cost of years of looting Calabria’s health system has been devastating. Italy has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, but the region’s health statistics are among the worst in Europe. The average number of years that Calabrians enjoy good health stands at 52.9, according to Italy’s statistical office, lower than both Romania and Bulgaria. A resident in the wealthy northern Italian region of Bolzano, by comparison, enjoys on ­average 70 years of good health. Calabria also has the highest rate of infant mortality in Italy, while tens of thousands of “health refugees” leave the region each year to get treatment in better hospitals in the north.

Local doctors describe some of Calabria’s ­hospitals, which are suffocating under mountains of debt built up through corruption, mismanagement and embezzlement, as on a par with the developing world.

In the corrupt hospital in Lamezia Terme, anti-Mafia investigators found evidence of widespread malpractice. Some employees were recorded joking as they discussed putting a newborn baby into a faulty incubator. “This time prepare ­yourself, in case they arrest us,” one said as he laughed. “That incubator with the melted wires is disgusting. God bless us all tonight. I’ll be at home praying [for the infant] with rosary beads.” His colleague laughs again: “I hope it works.”

In another recording, an employee tells how a patient in a critical condition was dropped from a stretcher in an ambulance: “Let’s hope he doesn’t die because if he does, there will be trouble.”

The impact of organised crime’s infiltration of the health system has left many of the region’s ­hospitals deeply vulnerable to coronavirus. “Calabria does not have the capacity to deal with [it]. There are not enough intensive care beds to take in patients in a serious condition,” says Scura. (The region’s decision to impose a strict lockdown seems to be working: Calabria has so far suffered fewer than 100 deaths from Covid-19, ­compared with almost 17,000 in Lombardy.)

The vast levels of debt built up by hospitals over the years have left the emergency administrators sent by Rome with few options. Many fear that organised criminal activity in the health service has become an entrenched feature of Calabrian life. “Calabrian healthcare has been in a permanent state of emergency for decades,” says Sergi. “Every two or three years, there are anti-Mafia operations linked to healthcare, and maybe Rome parachutes people in, but soon after another clan comes in and starts it all over again.”

Jusupov posted:

ekuNNN posted:

https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_qofhkmsnfR1sjcnrz.mp4

500excf type r posted:

Everyone shopping for a car at a dealership has access to all the resources they could need to make a fully informed decision without needed financing from or through the dealer.

Being ignorant is not and should not be a badge of pride.

quote:

When the Biden administration announced a fresh investigation into the origins of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan on Tuesday, the Chinese reaction was swift and furious.

Zhao Lijian, foreign ministry spokesperson, accused the US of “political manipulation” and of “stigmatising” China — the sort of regular spat that has prompted growing comparisons to the cold war.

But just a day earlier, another announcement told a different story about the ties between the world’s two leading powers. Goldman Sachs, an emblem of the globally dominant American finance industry, unveiled a wealth partnership with the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. The deal could allow the Wall Street firm to draw on the savings of hundreds of millions of the bank’s Chinese customers.

In an era that is increasingly defined by geopolitical competition and a push towards economic “decoupling”, American finance has never been closer to Chinese wealth.

Seduced by untapped savings and a growing asset management market, worth an estimated Rmb121.6tn ($18.9tn) last year, Wall Street’s most storied firms are embedding themselves more deeply than ever into the country.

In addition to Goldman Sachs, BlackRock said earlier this month it had received approval for a wealth management partnership with China Construction Bank, while JPMorgan Asset Management announced in March plans to invest $415m in China Merchants Bank’s wealth unit. From Europe, Amundi and Schroders have gained approvals for majority owned partnerships in wealth management.

“Within Goldman Sachs, we’re excited from top to bottom,” says Tuan Lam, head of client business for Asia ex-Japan at the company’s asset management arm. “We’ve obviously been thinking about China for quite a long time and, with the recent regulatory changes and the market changes, we just have a very high level of conviction around the opportunity.”

China, which on one measure now has more billionaires than the US, is opening its doors wider than ever to foreign firms. In the past two years, it has liberalised elements of its tightly controlled financial system and allowed US and European companies greater access. Although still wary about giving foreign institutions too large a role, the government is eager to draw on their expertise to help build a savings infrastructure that can help manage an impending demographic crisis driven by an ageing population.

Against that backdrop, some investors say the biggest risk is not getting into China quickly enough. But any great China gold rush is not without challenges. As with other key areas of the economy, finance is ultimately under the sway of an all-powerful Communist party that has ruled since 1949.

It also sits uneasily against the geopolitical backdrop, where tensions between China and the west have flared over issues from the coronavirus pandemic to technology, from Xinjiang to Taiwan. Domestic politics in the US, also, are more than ever driven by what President Joe Biden this year called the country’s most serious competitor.



Jarvis Li, a 29-year-old analyst at a securities company in Shenzhen, cannot yet afford to buy a house. He hopes by putting his savings in stocks, funds and wealth management products he can at least outpace inflation.

“I like products that are safer,” he says, but adds that there are “too many choices” on the market.

Goldman Sachs’ new venture with ICBC, in which it will have a majority stake, aims to add more. Its savings products will initially target high net worth savers and in future could be offered to people like Li.

The recent flurry of new savings products is part of an ongoing push to expand investment options in a country where huge quantities of savings have historically sat in bank deposits or chased after speculative returns in the real estate market. Goldman Sachs estimates 60 per cent of all household assets were in property in 2020, and a further 24 per cent were in cash and deposits.

“It is a nation of savers, but the saving predominantly occurs in cash and real estate,” says Susan Chan, head of Asia at BlackRock, which now has approval to begin running a joint venture with CCB and Singapore’s state fund Temasek. “The capital markets, the infrastructure, the way they look at asset management, it’s still relatively young.”

For the likes of Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, wealth partnerships with Chinese banks offer vast distribution networks that will allow them to quickly sell their investment products to the country’s savers — especially those with a high net worth. ICBC has 680m retail customers, more than twice the entire US population.

China’s state-owned banking system, the largest in the world by assets, has for years offered “wealth management” products to its customers, typically as an alternative to deposits. But the industry has been riven by controversy — especially regarding its role in shadow finance and the promise of implicit guarantees to customers — and underwent dramatic reforms in 2018 that paved the way for greater foreign involvement.

While firms like Goldman have a long history in China, the recent reforms which have swept across the entire financial industry will allow them to expand much further.

“The government believes that foreign asset managers and foreign banks can represent a new sort of institutional investor, a new player, with best practice, a well established process and good standards,” says Xiaofeng Zhong, chair of greater China at European asset manager Amundi, which last year gained approval for the first majority foreign-owned wealth management joint venture. Its partnership with Bank of China has already launched over 20 products and gained “billions of dollars” in assets, he says.

“What’s really attracted us to the wealth management joint venture is for the first time it allows managers to more directly tap into those large wealth management savings pools that the big Chinese banks have built up over the years,” says Lieven Debruyne, global head of distribution at Schroders, which gained approval to partner with Bank of Communications in February.

In China, the wealth management sector is just one part of a jigsaw of savings initiatives — alongside an expansion in mutual fund businesses, which as of last year foreign firms such as JPMorgan can now fully own, and an evolution of its pension system.

Census data released this month showed its population was growing at the slowest rate in decades. Over-65s now make up 13.5 per cent of the population, compared to 8.9 per cent in 2010.

“The retirement crisis in China is bigger than in any other country in the world,” says BlackRock’s Chan. She adds that there an urgent need for China to help its population get into the investment mindset of, “I need to save for the future”.

Snake plot chart showing the gulf in US-China pensions assets in billions of dollars and a dot plot chart showing the Assets to GDP ratio
A ‘fallacy of control’

For international investment firms, China is the world’s most clear-cut opportunity. While rallying markets have boosted their earnings in the short term, they face deep structural challenges in the highly mature markets of Europe and the US.

“Fundamentally, China is where the growth is,” says Richard Gray, a partner in wealth and asset management at EY.

But he also says that, while Chinese regulators and western firms have operated on a pragmatic basis so far, the biggest risk is the political environment changing. Gray says the foreign firms could eventually find themselves becoming “a forced seller of something you helped create” or have problems repatriating earnings, if they fall foul of regulators.

“Entering a different market, you’re very much at the mercy of the local regulators,” he says. “When you’re not part of the club, there is no political shield against regulators regulating you harder than some of the local players.”

In an example of how quickly the mood can change, last November’s initial public offering of Ant Group — once considered a fintech national champion — was pulled by the government at the last minute.

“China is too big a market to ignore, but at the back of your mind is the thought, ‘What can go wrong?’,” says Greggory Warren, senior equity analyst at Morningstar in the US. “In China, the rules and attitudes can change overnight.”

Peter Alexander, managing director at Z-Ben Advisors in Shanghai, an asset management consultancy, points to what he calls the “fallacy of control” when it comes to partnering with Chinese banks. He suggests that some foreign participants are driven by “short-term thinking” in the rush for distribution.

For their part, foreign asset managers often emphasise long-term shifts. A quota system means outflows from China are tightly controlled, but firms hope for greater flexibility to take the country’s savings to global markets. Goldman Sachs, which expects there to be $70tn of investable assets across the country’s households by 2030, plans to offer “cross border” products to its customers, while JPMorgan also points to its “global capability”.

“Chinese investors are underweight global offshore markets,” says Desiree Wang, managing director for China asset management at JPMorgan Asset Management.


Despite the business logic, Wall Street’s push into China presents a jarring contrast with the political mood in both countries.

In Washington, scrutiny of American finance’s alliance with China is rising. Republican senator Marco Rubio said this week that Wall Street was becoming “more tightly integrated with China than ever before”. And he said that “disconnect” was one of “our nation’s greatest vulnerabilities” in a confrontation “over who will determine the course of the 21st century”.

Previous administrations have pushed for greater access for US firms in China, reflected in last year’s phase one trade deal between the two countries. But it is still unclear how the new Biden administration will approach the issue, especially given his focus on “worker-centric” trade policy.

Eswar Prasad, a China finance expert at Cornell University, suggests that western firms are now “less starry-eyed” about doing business in the country, even as they continue to “lust” after its ever-wealthier citizens.

“These firms will have to undertake various contortions to avoid getting caught in the crossfire,” he says. While they still have “potent lobbying machines,” he adds, “their effectiveness in influencing US policy toward China has become highly constrained by the current political climate”.

That mood was on display at a congressional hearing on Thursday when financial chiefs were questioned about their China ties. David Solomon, Goldman Sachs chief executive, said the US-China relationship is “incredibly complex”.

“There are places where obviously we co-operate, there are places where we’re confrontational,” he said. “We try to navigate that in an appropriate way.”

Additional reporting by Qianer Liu, Tabby Kinder and Joshua Franklin

Pryor on Fire posted:

don't worry nothing ever goes wrong in tunnels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBEEUPjqu-s&t=3701s

Peanut President posted:

he steals scientific and medical equipment to solve his wife's incurable disease, thats it

CRUSTY MINGE posted:

IIRC weed is just kinda ignored there in personal use settings and amounts. There was a push a few years ago to block tourists from partaking but I think that failed. Plenty of growers and traffickers still get nailed, and always have, but personal use amounts are generally just shrugged off.

The Dutch have lost the weed game to Canada and random US states, and you don't have to play some stupid song and dance at a cafe to get it either. Just go in the building with the big WEED sign or green cross outside.

But your health care system has got to be better than the patchwork quilt of bullshit we have in the US. I would hope.

evilpicard posted:

No it just makes you answer a questionnaire then tells you to eat fewer calories or no one will love you

ikanreed posted:

t.co links don't even work anymore

quote:

An expat facing execution in Sharjah for the murder of a German engineer has sent a message to his victim’s relatives – urging them to take “solace” from the fact the man’s death was not pre-meditated. Muslim convert Shahid King Bolsen, from the US, killed 58-year-old Martin Herbert Steiner in 2006 with a lethal dose of the powerful anaesthetic chloroform. Bolsen and his Ethiopian maid were accused of luring married Steiner to Bolsen’s Sharjah home with promises of sex. He claims Steiner got aggressive and he administered the lethal drug to stop him. In his battle to avoid the firing squad Bolsen, a father of four, made an emotional statement in which he admitted his crime but claims it was unintentional, saying: “I’m not guilty of murder, I’m not a threat to society.”