Blog dedicado a la formación en todos sus ámbitos: presencial, online, a distancia
(FBI photo)
Lots of collectors buy and sell their finds in order to finance their hobby: there’s nothing unusual about that. They just don’t normally have a room full of reprinted wine labels, corks, corking equipment, siphons, and stamps that look remarkably similar to those used to create serial numbers and other markings on vintage wine bottles.
Interestingly, it’s not a crime to counterfeit a famous collectible wine. You can plaster fake labels on bottles and give them away to your friends as much as you like. It only becomes a crime once you counterfeit wines with fraudulent intent–for example, trying to pass them off as genuine rare vino at an auction or private sale for elite collectors. Which he did.
Federal prosecutors showed off some of the man’s alleged counterfeiting equipment, and bottles that he offered for sale. The ultimate experts testified in his trial: the owners of the prestigious family-owned wineries that those bottles purportedly came from.
His defense team countered with the argument that everyone in elite wine circles owns and sells some counterfeits, and Kurniawan, as an “outsider,” makes a convenient scapegoat. All of those corks and labels? He was “reconditioning” bottles, an accepted thing to do. And he was wallpapering a room in his home with reprinted labels. Right.
Jurors in this federal trial didn’t buy it, and convicted him. He could be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison. This was big news because it’s the first-ever federal conviction for selling counterfeit wines.
Accused Wine Counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan Guilty in Landmark Case
Prosecutors Reveal Evidence Against Accused Wine Counterfeiter [Wine Spectator]
First of all, yes, Bill Gates could be in multiple Secret Santa exchanges. But only one person in the Reddit gift exchange was going to get a present from Bill and she’s spoken up to let everyone else know that he is hers. You hear that? HERS. So back off.
In an experience that will surely give her bragging rights for at least another week, which in Internet time is like being famous in the real world for 30 years, a Reddit user named Rachel writes that was shocked to find out that the “friendly fellow” named Bill who sent her gift was actually a Bill the billionaire founder of Microsoft.
She writes that when it came time to open her gift, she had decided to document the whole experience. The first thing she noticed was a stuffed animal. Okay, cool.
“I didn’t know I gave off the stuffed animal vibe, but I excitedly added him to my collection of teddy bears and other delightful friendly creatures,” she says. “Next, I found the card. To me, from Bill. This still had not clicked, by the way, that it was Bill Gates.”
He sounded like a friendly fellow, she said, imagining someone peering through her wish list of an iPad, makeup and glittery things, and felt bad. When she opened the card she realized that this nice guy Bill had donated to a charity on her behalf, Heifer International.
Things hadn’t clicked yet, and she kept going, excited that her secret Santa had given such a great gift. But there was more — a bulky, heavy part of the gift, which turned out to be a travel book, Journeys of a Lifetime. As she flipped through the book, she says she at first missed the inscription, message and signature from THE Bill Gates on the first page and went to the next part of the present.
It was a photo of a man, holding a sign. A sign that she now had in her possession, which was signed “Bill Gates.” Aaaaaand cue extreme shock.
“And then it finally hit me. All the presents I just tore open, the charity, then everything– was from Bill GATES. I quickly went back to the book to see a really nice message and note from Bill wishing me a Merry Christmas and a Happy Birthday (not pictured, because I really want to keep one part of this gift to myself) my jaw hit the EVER LOVING FLOOR.”
Gotta hand it to that Bill guy. He does sound like quite a friendly fellow.
Spoiler alert: Bill Gates did not get you, because he got me. [Reddit Gifts]
For more than 100 years, shipping wine via the USPS has been a no-no, with that work left to private freight handlers and couriers. But now, staring in the mirror while wondering how it sank this far so quickly, the Postal Service is reportedly looking to get back into the booze biz.
Writing for Today.com, wine critic Edward Deitch says the USPS is looking at all the money FedEx and UPS have made shipping the wine it could not and hoping that lawmakers in DC will pass the Postal Reform Act of 2013, which would once again give the USPS the ability to deliver beer, wine, and liquor in areas where state and local laws also allow for it.
USPS hopes these clinking bottles can add up to $50 million a year for it, but that would only cover about 1/100th of the $5 billion deficit the Service ran up in the last fiscal year.
Even Sen. Tom Carper from Delaware, who introduced the Act admits that opening the USPS mail bags to booze “is not a silver bullet, but what I like to call a silver BB… And what the Postal Service needs is a lot of these.”
Wine companies would be able to cash in on presumably lower shipping rates from USPS, but they would also be giving up a lot of the accountability and customer-facing service provided by better-funded shippers like FedEx and UPS.
Buffalonians have long been living without a Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, but that all changed this week when the chain opened the city’s very first location. And it sounds like the arrival of fast food chicken is causing everyone to lose their collective umm, minds, to put it delicately. The drive-thru was backed up for hours, with waiting drivers spilling into normal traffic. Tensions in line were running high, and things seemed grim.
“Just didn’t expect it to be three hours and there was a point where I couldn’t turn around,” one Buffalo resident told Time Warner Cable News (What? TWC News? Weird) of his drive-thru wait for dinner. “They were just swearing and yelling and then everyone started beeping the horns and the cops came and took care of it.”
Another prospective Popeyes diner decided there was no going back either, and decided to stick it out after stopping by just out of curiosity. By then, things were shifting from bad to worse when someone apparently tried to cut in the drive-thru line.
“It just escalated,” she says. “I saw this big dude come from the back of the car and try to wrestle the girl, then the whole family came out, tried to, you know, jump her and cars walked by, passed by. It just got hectic.”
But hold your tongue if you’re just calling this another fast food place, a place perhaps undeserving of such high drama. It’s special, say its devotees.
“Wouldn’t classify Popeyes as fast food. It’s something else. It’s like a culture, a way of life, a cuisine I guess,” another resident claimed.
The owner says he wasn’t prepared for the big traffic back-up in the drive-thru line on Tuesday night, but the staff is going to forge bravely ahead.
“We keep up. We’ve got enough food already for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, so the truck is coming to bring the food,” he said.
Popeye’s opens to long lines [Time Warner Cable News]
Subway Pizza Express, as this new concept is called, takes the personal-sized pizzas that are available in some Subway stores and makes an entire restaurant out of them. They exist for a very specific and lucrative purpose: making fast personal pan pizzas for college students. There’s already one near the campus of Texas A&M University, and another is about to open at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, replacing what used to be a Sbarro in the food court.
Unlike most food court pizzerias, you can choose your own toppings just as you choose your own sandwich fillings at a Subway. They advertise the pizzas as taking only 90 seconds to go from uncooked to fully-baked, using the same high-speed toaster ovens that Subway uses to create toasted subs.
Subway Pizza Express coming to Nebraska Union [UNL Today]
News: Subway to Open Pizza Concept [Brand Eating]
The latest update to the iPhone version of the app introduces something called “Auto Shazam,” which “does the hard work for you by continuously recognizing popular music and TV around you.”
You have to turn this feature on — which makes it slightly less terrifying than if it were the default — but once it’s on, it will keep trying to recognize music, and movies that it hears. As mentioned above, this continues even after you lock your phone.
Aside from the bizarre idea of allowing a smartphone app to eavesdrop on your channel-flipping or dial-changing (not to mention all the other sounds it might try unsuccessfully to identify), we can’t imagine that having Auto Shazam on all the time is a good idea for your battery or your wireless bill.
Right now, the Auto Shazam thing is just for iOS; news that makes me glad to have an Android phone.
Shazam for iPhone can now listen for songs and shows in the background [Engadget]
According to CBS Sacramento, the city and local businesses have tried a variety of methods to make the crows go away, but have resigned themselves to cleaning up the birds’ leavings and waiting for them to go away.
It is legal for people to shoot the birds if they have a hunting license for them. The limit is 24 crows per day, which is interesting since it’s the first time we’ve ever heard of a hunting limit with roots in a nursery rhyme.
In the meantime, mall shoppers are kind of confused. “When she was trying to park, she asked me if she was in the spot,” one shopper told CBS Sacramento. “We couldn’t even tell because of how much white bird crap was on the [ground].”
Crows Bomb Yuba City Mall, Blurring Lines In Parking Lot [CBS Sacramento]
This is so hard.
Playing the game of choosing whether a name belongs to a composer or a kind of pasta is a profoundly humbling experience. If you’re anything like the Consumerist team, you’ll probably go through throes of certain failure, only to be met with a more respectable score at the end than you imagined possible. And you’ll also learn there are more types of spaghetti than you ever dreamed. [ClassicFM.com]
That’s the kind of thing that ProPublica’s new interactive “ER Wait Watchers” tool can help you figure out.
Plugging in your ZIP code will provide you with wait time data, driving distances, and patient recommendation stats for nearby emergency rooms.
It’s important to note that the times given by the tool are NOT real-time estimates intended to tell you exactly how long a patient will wait to be seen. Instead, this info is based on publicly available data from the federal government, along with expected drive times to the hospital. It also has phone numbers people can call to try to get an up-to-the-moment estimate on wait times.
So while you don’t know for certain that the wait time at the hospital down the block is twice as long as the wait time at the emergency room in the next town, it does give consumers an easy way to compare how quickly the local hospitals have gotten around to seeing patients in the past.
Each ER also has a percentage rating showing the likelihood of previous patients to recommend the facility. That can be factored into one’s thinking when determining which hospital they would want to go to in case of an emergency, as the positive of a short wait time might be offset by inadequate care.
Again, even though the ER Wait Watcher isn’t of use if your appendix is erupting as you read this, it’s useful information to have so that you can plan ahead in case you ever need to make a trip to the ER.
Have you heard of this Pablo Picasso guy? Sure you have. He’s Picasso, a super famous artist who everyone is just dying to get a piece of. But for most of us average folks, owning a real work by Picasso is only a pipe dream. So how did one of us commoners managed to take home a million-dollar drawing by Picasso for only $140?
No, he didn’t snag it by any shady means (including but not limited to shoving down pants or dropping into an art gallery from the ceiling in the dead of night): The 25-year-old art lover won the piece as part of an online charity raffle for just $140, reports Reuters.
The lucky winner said he’d been looking for some nice art to hang in his living room when he read about “L’Homme au Gibus” or “Man with Opera Hat,” which was being raffled off by Sotheby’s in Paris to benefit a charity working to preserve the ancient city of Tyre in Lebanon.
“I was looking for art and I thought I might as well,” the project manager at a fire sprinkler firm explained.
Now that he’s got the winning ticket out of the 50,000 put up for sale for 100 euros each, he says he won’t sell off his million-dollar acquisition… at least not yet.
“I’m still in shock. I’ve never won anything like this before… Obviously,” he said.
What do you mean, obviously? The rest of us go around winning super expensive artwork all the time. Okay, no. No we don’t. You’re super lucky.
Million-dollar Picasso sold at charity raffle for 100 euros [Reuters]
One the one hand, you’ve got something made of chickpeas, lemons and garlic all mashed together that you wear under your pants, and on the other you’ve got hummus. Wait, just kidding. Clothing is nothing like hummus, really, which is what the owner of Hanes Hummus is insisting in the face of a cease-and-desist from Hanes Brands Inc., the purveyors of underwear and other apparel.
The man behind Hanes Hummus says the “Hanes” part of the brand is simply his nickname, a play on his first name, Johannes, reports The Star Phoenix. He says he got a letter from the garment company last week threatening to sue him if he didn’t stop selling his products under that name and to destroy everything he’d made with the brand on it.
The letter arrived on a day that had been pretty good for him, as he says his hummus had just appeared in a weekly community newspaper in Saskatoon, where he lives. He says he’d been getting congratulatory calls all day, and then… cease-and-desist.
“I went from being really, really happy to having a sick feeling in my stomach,” he said, adding that no one would confuse Hanes Hummus with the underwear brand, as Hanes claims.
“Not once has anyone said, ‘Like Hanes the underwear,’ ” he said. “My brand is Hanes Hummus. It’s not just Hanes.”
His attorney sent off a reply that plays on that very obvious difference in products, including passages like: “I am confident that HBI is not in the food production business at all, let alone the production of fine and tasty hummus of the type manufactured and sold by Hanes Hummus.”
And: “I was not aware that HBI’s Tshirts were edible, made with chick peas, lemon or garlic.”
Because they’re not. We also contacted Hanes Brands to see if the company has a comment on the situation, as the Hanes Hummus owner says he hasn’t heard back yet as of yesterday.
“They have resources I can’t really compete with. If I hear back from them, we’ll take the next step,” he said.
Hummus maker strikes back at underwear giant [The Star Phoenix]
Reader Ingrid spotted this Easter display at Garden Ridge, a store that does carry crafting supplies. We usually give craft stores a pass when it comes to holiday creep, because you have to start making seasonal crafts at least a few months in advance. These items aren’t craft supplies, though. They’re creatures that emerged from my worst lagomorphic nightmares.
Are people holding it in because of the actual pee alarm, or just because there is a sign about a pee alarm? (WSB-TV)
WSB-TV reports that the program — supposedly the first of its kind — is currently being tested in a single elevator in a Midtown Atlanta train station. It apparently uses sensors to detect when someone has decided to go #1 somewhere between floors 2 and 3.
“If somebody was to urinate in here, there’s going to be a splash factor. It would splash and it would sense,” explains MARTA’s director of elevators and escalators, which sounds like a fun job until you go back and re-read what he just described and realize that this is what he has to deal with all day.
The urine detection device (or UDD) somehow detects that micturating is occurring and it sounds an alarm intended to bring the MARTA police and deal with the baddie with the bad bladder.
In the month since the one test UDD was put into place (along with a sign warning people about the UDD’s existence), MARTA says there has only been one incident and that elevator violator was arrested. Before the UDD, MARTA says this particular elevator was being urinated in on a daily basis.
Based on that success, MARTA will begin rolling out UDDs to other elevators in the coming months at a cost of $10,000 a pop.
We wonder if it’s the UDD’s sensors that are keeping potential urinators from doing their business or if MARTA could save a lot of cash and just install signs saying there is a UDD in the elevator, much like the people who put up alarm company window stickers without actually having a home security system, or the pools with empty warnings about a chemical in the water that will create a cloud of colored water around someone who couldn’t be bothered to hit the restroom.
Sure, everyone wants a bit of bubbly to ring in the New Year on Dec. 31, but the way to do it is purchase it. Which means you should not stuff a bunch of Champagne down your pants and just walk out of the liquor store. Because while it’s impressive that one could fit so many bottles securely in clothing, that’s stealing.
A liquor store in Englewood, Colo. is out $1,100 in bubbly, and is blaming a man the store’s security camera captured apparently shoving the bottles down his pants when a clerk turned away, reports 9 News (video in link autoplays).
He made it out of the store without being caught, despite the fact that he struck up a conversation with the clerk before he left.
“I think he knew what he was after. He seemed to dial right in on the champagne,” the store’s general manager and buyer says. “[He was] wearing clothes that were appropriate for trying to steal things, loose-fitting clothes.”
It would appear he’s got classy taste — no $6 bottles of bubbly for him — he only took very fancy stuff. The three bottles he took included a $260 Roederer Cristal, a $260 Pol Roger, and the most expensive bottle in the store, a $550 Salon Blanc de blanc.
“It’s really hard on a small business, amazingly hard,” the manager said. “People are much more aware and on their guard now.”
The store has sent images from the surveillance video to other businesses in the area to warn them about the thief, and the police are investigating.
Champagne thief caught on camera stealing expensive bottles of bubbly From Englewood store [9 News]
As part of its huge story on bacteria and chicken breasts, our pals at Consumer Reports put together a helpful guide for shoppers who want to know what each of the labels on their chickens mean.
This chart at GreenerChoices.org (also run by Consumer Reports) provides even more detailed information on nearly two dozen different chicken labels. Here the ones that most of us will come up against while grocery shopping:
Organic: In order to be labeled “USDA Organic,” the chicken had to have been fed not just a vegetarian diet, but a diet that does not include any genetically modified ingredients or toxic synthetic pesticides. It also means that antibiotics can not be used for anything other than medically necessary antibiotics (though some may argue that there are farmers who stretch the boundaries of what is medically necessary). However, chickens can be provided with antibiotics during their first day of life; the drug-free rule kicks in the day after the shell breaks open.
Organic certification, which requires annual inspections, mandates that access to the outdoors be provided for the chickens, but sets no specific standards for the size of the outdoor area, the size of the door leading between inside and outside, or the amount of time the birds spend outdoors.
No antibiotics: These chickens are never given antibiotics, including in the egg. That said, there is no inspection process to verify this label before it is employed.
No hormones: This label can be used on all conventionally raised chickens in the U.S. as the use of hormones in not allowed in the production of chickens for market. So if you see “no hormones” on a label, it just means “chicken.”
Cage-Free: Another label that is just touting the industry minimum, says CR. “No chickens raised for meat in the U.S. are kept in cages. Neither does it mean that the birds have access to the outdoors.”
Free-range: The only difference between conventionally raised chickens and free-range is that the chickens have access of some sort to the outside. Once again, there are no standards for size of the outdoor area or for the door to the outside, and inspections are not required to use this label.
No GMOs: To get the “Non GMO Project Verified” label, the chicken’s feed must be comprised of less than 0.9 percent of genetically modified crops. Verification is required for this label.
Natural: CR dubbed this one “the most misleading label” of the bunch, as more than half of the survey respondents said they believed “natural” meant the chickens didn’t receive antibiotics or chow down on feed containing GMOs. 42% of respondents said they thought the term meant the chickens were raised outdoors, while 1-in-3 said they thought it meant the same as “organic.” The only substantial requirement for “natural” chicken breasts is that they contain no artificial ingredients, but even then there is no process to verify this claim.
Alaska Airlines is now BFF with Russell Wilson.
It pays to be a fan, and not just with the sense of self satisfaction that comes when your team is 12-2 like the Seattle Seahawks. Anyone wearing a jersey bearing quarterback Russell Wilson’s name and number will get to board early on flights out of Seattle on Alaska Airlines.
For the rest of the season, any passengers with the No. 3 Seahawks jersey on will board early on those outbound Seattle flights, reports KING-5 News (via NFL.com).
Wilson hasn’t lost yet at a home game, so it seems that makes him a pretty attractive partner for the airline. The carrier did a similar promotion last year with the Portland Timbers soccer team.
Of course, there are some scenarios that could be tricky — what if the entire flight of people decides to show up in the jerseys? Will kids be separated from their parents for the sin of not also owning a Wilson jersey? Probably not. Wilson would never stand for that kind of thing.
Russell Wilson jersey gets you priority boarding on Alaska Airlines [KING-5]
Airline lets fans in Russell Wilson jerseys board early [NFL.com]
In a statement to potentially affected customers, Target confirms that the “unauthorized access to Target payment card data” at its retail locations (Target.com purchases were apparently not impacted by the attack) lasted from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, effectively encompassing the heart of the store’s holiday shopping business and affecting around 40 million Target shoppers, according to the retailer.
“Your trust is a top priority for Target, and we deeply regret the inconvenience this may cause,” said the company in a demonstration of corporate understatement.
The breach didn’t just get at basic things like customer names and addresses — nope, Target says the data thieves rode off into the virtual sunset with info that included customer name, credit or debit card number, and the card’s expiration date and CVV (that three-digit security code on the back of your card).
“We are partnering with a leading third-party forensics firm to conduct a thorough investigation of the incident and to examine additional measures we can take that would be designed to help prevent incidents of this kind in the future,” says Target, which is recommending that customers do the sensible thing and review their accounts for signs of fraud and identity theft.
“If you see something that appears fraudulent, REDcard holders should contact Target,” explains the company in an FAQ, “others should contact their bank.”
Target is swearing up and down that its payment systems are now safe and secure, but will customers believe them? Would you?
CR looked at 316 chicken breasts purchased at various types of food retailers, everything from the regionally owned grocery store to national supermarket and big box chains, in 26 different states. The samples covered both name brand products, including Perdue, Pilgrim’s, Sanderson Farms, and Tyson, and conventional no-brand chicken that many of us buy from the poultry section of the market.
Since most chickens produced for the retail market are provided with a steady diet of antibiotics, CR also made sure to test breasts that were labeled as “antbiotic-free” and “organic.” Here is a PDF of every brand included in the tests.
Each breast was tested for the presence of six bacteria — salmonella, campylobacter, staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, enterococcus, and klebsiella pneumoniae. Salmonella, campylobacter and staph are common causes of food poisoning. E. coli and enterococcus are usually the result of fecal contamination, while klebsiella is naturally present in the human stomach but can cause infections like pneumonia.
In addition to determining the mere presence of each bacteria type, CR testers then tried to determine which strains of each pathogen had been found, as one strain of a bug like salmonella may be rather mild while some, like the Heidelberg strain that was behind the recent outbreak, can wreak havoc.
Here are some of the findings:
* There was no significant difference between the average types of bacteria found on conventionally raised chickens (i.e., with antibiotics) and those labeled as “organic” or “no antibiotics.”
* Nearly 80% of the tested samples tested positive for enterococcus, followed by E. coli (65%), campylobacter (43%), klebsiella pneumoniae (13.6%), salmonella (10.8%), then staph (9.2%).
* Of the samples testing positive for E. coli, 17.5% were tainted with the “ExPEC” strain, which is more likely than other types to make a human sick with a urinary-tract infection.
* About half the samples (49.7%) tested positive for at least one multidrug-resistant bacterium, and 11.5% carried two or more types of multidrug-resistant bacteria.
* The drug-resistant bacteria found on the chickens breasts was significantly more resistant to those classes of antibiotics that are FDA-approved for the production (i.e., non-medical) of chickens than for those drugs that are only approved to prevent and treat disease. The FDA recently asked the drug makers to voluntarily stop selling those antibiotics that are solely for production, though farmers would still be feeding their animals all the “preventative” drugs they are now.
Here are some of the results for several name brands, along with the averages for smaller brands and antibiotic-free breasts:
Though most, if not all, of these bacterial issues can be overcome by cooking the chicken breast to an internal temperature of 165° F, that doesn’t get rid of the most common way for humans to contract these food-borne illnesses at home — cross-contamination during the preparation process. You pick up the chicken breast, touch a dinner plate or some utensils without properly cleaning your hands and you may have bought yourself a vacation to Diarrhea Town.
James R. Johnson, M.D., a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota tells Consumer Reports that you may be able to pick up one of these bugs just by touching the outside of the packaging.
Even though both conventionally raised and antibiotic-free chicken breasts contained roughly the same amount of bacteria, choosing antibiotic free is still a smarter choice for public health.
Consumer Reports’ recent tests of packaged ground turkey products found that conventionally raised turkey was more likely to contain drug-resistant bacteria. And choosing meat that is antibiotic free means you are encouraging farmers to not feed their animals drugs that are helping to foster new antibiotic-resistant superbugs that sicken around 2 million Americans and cause more than 23,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
Among other regulatory and legislative measures, Consumer Reports is calling on Congress to give the USDA authority to recall meat and poultry products that are tied by DNA fingerprinting to disease outbreaks. Amazingly, the agency does not currently have this authority.
