Two American brothers of a Mexican casino magnate who fled drug and fraud charges in the United States and has been seeking a pardon enabling him to return have emerged as major fund-raisers and donors for President Obama’s re-election campaign.

The casino owner, Juan Jose Rojas Cardona, known as Pepe, jumped bail in Iowa in 1994 and disappeared, and has since been linked to violence and corruption in Mexico. A State Department cable in 2009 said he was suspected of orchestrating the assassination of a business rival and making illegal campaign donations to Mexican officials.

When The New York Times asked the Obama campaign early Monday about the Cardonas, officials said they were unaware of the brother in Mexico. Later in the day, the campaign said it was refunding the money raised by the family, which totaled more than $200,000.

Last fall, Carlos Cardona and another brother in Chicago, Alberto Rojas Cardona, began raising money for the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Cardona brothers, who have no prior history of political giving, appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the world of Democratic fund-raising, Democratic activists said.

The money Alberto Cardona raised put him in the upper tiers of fund-raisers known as bundlers, according to a list released last month by the campaign. He and Carlos Cardona each gave the maximum $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee, and a lesser amount to a state victory fund. A sister, Leticia Rojas Cardona of Tennessee, donated $13,000 to the national committee, and another relative in Illinois gave $12,600, records show. There is no record of Pepe Cardona making a donation.

Pepe Cardona is one of the largest players in Mexico’s violent and tumultuous casino trade. In 2007, he survived an assassination attempt that was attributed to members of organized crime. The State Department cable, which was part of the cache made public by WikiLeaks, said he was suspected of illegally funneling $5 million into Mexican political campaigns in 2006.

The first campaign donations by Alberto and Carlos Cardona came shortly after news articles revealing Pepe Cardona’s criminal past appeared in the United States and Mexico last fall.

One of them, a long exposé in September by a Mexican magazine, Proceso, chronicled Pepe Cardona’s relatively swift rise to fortune and notoriety in Mexico after fleeing the American authorities. He obtained Mexican gambling licenses, and with help from investors in Louisiana, he started opening casinos in and around Monterrey, eventually becoming known as Mexico’s “casino czar.”

The article reported that Tango Media, an advertising company it said is owned by Alberto Cardona, worked on the campaigns of politicians favored by Pepe Cardona in communities where he owned casinos. It also said Carlos Cardona was involved in one of Pepe Cardona’s business deals.

Major Obama Donors Are Tied to Pepe Cardona, Mexican Fugitive – NYTimes.com.

Now, about a decade in to this great experiment in collaborative creation, Wikipedians efforts are resulting in increased credibility among academic historians, signaled most recently by an essay by the president of the American Historical Association William Cronon in the association’s publication Perspectives on History. Cronon writes:

 Whatever reservations one might still have about its overall quality, I don’t believe there’s much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.

I myself use it on a daily basis, and am pretty sure most of my colleagues and students do too even if they won’t admit it. . . . Wikipedia is today the gateway through which millions of people now seek access to knowledge which not long ago was only available using tools constructed and maintained by professional scholars.

These strengths of Wikipedia are enormously useful to anyone looking for basic information online. But for the academy, Wikipedia has a particular value, one Cronon particularly loves: It is pushing the world of academic scholarship to be more open, for the walls at its edges to fall. Cronon explains:

Wikipedia provides an online home for people interested in histories long marginalized by the traditional academy. The old boundary between antiquarianism and professional history collapses in an online universe where people who love a particular subject can compile and share endless historical resources for its study in ways never possible before. Amateur genealogists have enabled the creation of document databases that quantitative historians of the 1960s could only fantasize. . . In the wikified world of the Web, it’s no longer possible to police these boundaries of academic respectability, and we may all be the better for it if only we can embrace this new openness without losing the commitment to rigor that the best amateurs and professionals have always shared more than the professionals have generally been willing to admit.

One of the Nation’s Top Historians Decides It’s Time to Embrace Wikipedia – Rebecca J. Rosen – Technology – The Atlantic.

A series of incidents in this city have highlighted escalating resentment among Hong Kongers toward the ever-growing presence of mainland Chinese in the city, a shift that has Beijing both incensed and worried.

In recent weeks the tension has risen following a poll showing that the number of Hong Kong residents identifying themselves as Chinese citizens—as opposed to Hong Kong citizens or a mix of both—fell to 16.6%, a 12-year low. Three years ago, 38.6% of Hong Kong residents considered themselves Chinese citizens.

Hong Kong-Mainland Tiffs Worry Beijing – WSJ.com.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has millions of . . . “adverse event” reports, ranging from fatigue to fatal heart attacks, for thousands of prescription drugs dating back to 1969. But the information hasn’t been readily accessible—until now.

A start-up company, AdverseEvents Inc., has streamlined the FDA’s often impenetrable database and made it easy to search the adverse-event reports for more than 4,500 drugs, free and online.

Another start-up, Clarimed LLC, has done the same for reports filed with the FDA on 130,000 medical devices, a far more complex group that runs the gamut from syringes to stents to tanning beds and diagnostic machines that could impact tens of thousands of lives.

Both companies, which launched in September, see their services as empowering patients, many of whom now comb Internet discussion boards for medical information.

Searching for Side Effects – WSJ.com.

Chinese investors are buying New Zealand farmland for the first time as economic ties with the Asian powerhouse grow ever deeper, sparking considerable anxiety in a country where livelihoods are heavily reliant on agriculture. New Zealand’s government [in late January 2012] approved the sale of 16 dairy farms to a company controlled by the Shanghai Pengxin Group, run by wealthy property developer Jiang Zhaobai.

. . . nationalist voices have lined up against the sale, saying it will open the floodgates to foreign ownership. A consortium of local farmers and businessmen led by merchant banker Sir Michael Fay are taking legal action to try and stop or reverse the sale, which is due to close next week, in hopes they can buy the land themselves at a cheaper price.

. . . the prospects for New Zealand’s economy and the prosperity of its 4.4 million people are increasingly tied to China.

In 2008, the two countries signed a free-trade agreement, the first such agreement China signed with a developed nation. China has overtaken the U.S. to become New Zealand’s second-largest export market, behind only neighboring Australia, and by far its largest buyer of dairy products — a commodity that makes up a fifth of New Zealand’s export earnings. And the number of Chinese tourists visiting New Zealand has rapidly increased as well.

In New Zealand, rural land can be sold to overseas investors only with approval from a government agency which attempts to determine whether those investors are of good character and that their investment will benefit New Zealanders.

In buying the farms, Pengxin agreed to certain conditions, such as having its milk products processed by a New Zealand-owned company.

Pengxin spokesman Cedric Allan said a growing Chinese middle class is interested in consuming a diet filled with more protein and Western-style products such as yoghurt and cheese.

He said some Chinese are wary of consuming their own dairy products after some were found to be contaminated with the chemical compound melamine that killed at least six infants and sickened 300,000 children in 2008.

The Associated Press: Anxiety in New Zealand as Chinese buy dairy farms.

Investors cannot be counted on to make rational choices so regulators need to “step into their footprints” and limit or ban the sale of potentially harmful products, the head of the UK’s new consumer protection watchdog said on Tuesday.

In his first big interview since starting work last autumn, Martin Wheatley told the Financial Times that the 2008 financial crisis had fundamentally reshaped regulators’ assumptions about the people they protected.

“You have to assume that you don’t have rational consumers. Faced with complex decisions or too much information, they default … They hide behind credit rating agencies or behind the promises that are given to them by the salesperson,” said Mr Wheatley, a key figure in the government’s effort to revamp financial regulation.

Rather than simply ensuring that consumers are provided with complete and accurate information, the FCA will be monitoring firms to make sure that the right kinds of products get sold to the right kinds of people.

“This much more interventionist style in many respects [means] stepping into the footprints of the investors,” he said

For example close monitoring might have prevented the recent problems at HSBC, which was fined £10.5m for selling complex investment products with five-year time horizons to customers who were too ill and elderly to benefit from them.

This activist approach is taking shape at a time when the risk of mis-selling and poor consumer choices is running especially high. With interest rates at historic lows, many investors searching for higher yields are turning to complex, poorly understood products. Banks and brokers, meanwhile, are under heavy pressure to find new sources of revenue.

“Those two things don’t meet in a happy place … The profitability to the firm appears to be a bigger concern than the suitability to the customer,” Mr Wheatley said.

Watchdog to protect ‘irrational’ investors – FT.com.

Its detractors may end up dubbing it “Dementiaville”, but Switzerland is brushing aside a debate raging among geriatric-care experts with plans to build a mock-1950s village catering exclusively for elderly sufferers of Alzheimer’s and other debilitating mental illnesses.

The newly approved €20m (£17m) housing project is to be built next to the Swiss village of Wiedlisbach near Bern and will provide sheltered accommodation and care for 150 elderly dementia patients in 23 purpose-built 1950s-style houses. The homes will be deliberately designed to recreate the atmosphere of times past.

The scheme’s promoters said there will be no closed doors and residents will be free to move about. To reinforce an atmosphere of normality, the carers will dress as gardeners, hairdressers and shop assistants. The only catch is that Wiedlisbach’s inhabitants will not be allowed to leave the village.

Switzerland, like the rest of Europe, is struggling to cope with an elderly and growing population of dementia sufferers. There are 107,000 elderly people afflicted with mental illness and that figure is expected to double over the next 20 years.

Yet not all geriatric-care specialists are convinced that creating an illusory world is the right approach. Michael Schmieder, director of Switzerland’s Sonnweid home that caters to 150 resident dementia patients, said he opposed the idea of creating an illusory 1950s-era atmosphere. “The very notion is an attempt to fake the normality that people with dementia don’t have,” he said.

Mr Schmieder’s care home offers complete freedom of movement for its residents. “We offer wellness, just like a four-star hotel,” Mr Schmieder said. “Our patients are living in the here and now, not back then.”

But Switzerland’s Alzheimer’s Association, which promotes a variety of schemes to help sufferers from the disease, said it supports the project. Its spokesman, Birgitta Martensson, denied that it was creating a ghetto for the mentally ill. “Different types of care programmes are needed because the illness has different stages,” she said. “A dementia village is a good solution for people in advanced stages of the disease.”

Switzerland’s ‘Dementiaville’ designed to mirror the past – Europe – World – The Independent.

If Urmson’s team is taking a Googly approach to the auto industry, it’s also taking a Googly approach to driving. The company, Urmson notes, “is really all about processing big data,” and the road is just another data set to be mined. So Google isn’t teaching its computers how to drive. It’s collecting data—its cars have driven 200,000 miles in total, recording everything they see—and letting its algorithms figure out the rules on their own.

“If you read the DMV handbook on four-way stop signs, it’s easy,” [Chris] Urmson says. “Whoever gets there first gets to go. If there are simultaneous arrivals, priority goes to the vehicle on the right.” But it rarely works that way. “People optimize stop signs,” he says. A polite robot vehicle, playing by the official driving rules, could be lost in a sea of aggressive humans. Instead, it needs to learn how people really drive. “This is the data-driven viewpoint,” says Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford roboticist who heads the self-driving project. “The data can make better rules. It’s very deep in the roots of almost everything Google does.” Urmson describes it as an attempt to “hack driving.”

It is, in short, a stealthily semiautonomous computer on wheels. “There are tens of thousands of processes running in parallel,” [Mercedes Benz R&D head Johann] Jungwirth says. A car like this boasts upwards of 60 ECUs, or electronic control units, handling everything from automatic braking to automatic trunk opening. The technology trade magazine IEEE Spectrum notes that a premium-class automobile runs 100 million lines of computer code, more than Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Intellectual property lawsuits, the bane of the technology industry and until recently a rarity in the car business, have been proliferating. As futurist Paul Saffo says, for a company like Mercedes nowadays, “the value add is the software and the computers. The wheels are primarily there to keep the computers from dragging on the ground.”

Nobody knows how self-driving cars might change the fabric of our lives. “The moment you start putting intelligence in a car you start changing the essence of what a car is,” futurist Saffo says.

Consider, for instance, GM’s OnStar system. Initially a geolocation-equipped service intended to provide roadside assistance to stranded drivers—but capable, via its connected nature, of much more—it has become a kind of digital Trojan horse. Most recently, GM signed a partnership with RelayRides, a “neighbor-to-neighbor” car-sharing service that lets drivers rent out their vehicles when they are not in use. One simple but powerful feature of OnStar is that it offers remote unlocking of a vehicle. Integrated with RelayRides’ software, this allows easy access for renters, who don’t have to worry about exchanging keys with the owners. “I walk up to the car, send a command to OnStar with my phone, and it gets unlocked remotely,” explains RelayRides founder Shelby Clark. GM is the first major manufacturer to partner with the company, but Clark says that RelayRides has “had conversations with lots of automakers. Everyone is moving toward this concept of the networked car, the car as a platform.” (Indeed, there’s nary a big automaker that’s not partnering with car-sharing services—or building its own.) For Clark, it’s a no-brainer: “Why is my mobile phone more powerful than my car?”

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here | Magazine.

Private equityhas proved better at enriching its own managers than producing investment profits for US pension funds over the past decade, according to a study prepared for the Financial Times by academics at Yale and Maastricht University.

The industry faces mounting political scrutiny as the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, a former private equity executive, has drawn attention to its business model and favourable tax treatment. Mr Romney will release his tax returns todayafter pressure from Republican challengers.

Private equity describes its fees as “two and twenty”, a 2 per cent management fee and 20 per cent share of profits. However, the management fee is usually calculated as a proportion of total capital committed by the investor, which takes time to invest.

So in the early years, the management fee can be a much higher proportion of actual cash invested. For instance, if a $1bn fund invests $100m in its first year, the $20m management fee would be 2 per cent of committed capital, but 20 per cent of invested capital for that year.

From 1991 to 2000, US pension funds paid an average 2 per cent of invested capital each year in management fees, and received 21 per cent returns, after fees, annually from their private equity investments, according to data from the CEM Benchmarking database used for the study. The database covers about a third of US pension fund assets.

The rise in management fees since 2000 may reflect greater fundraising, meaning that more funds are in the early investment phase when fees are high. The increased use of third-party fund of funds to invest in private equity could also have added an extra layer of fees.

The Private Equity Growth Capital Council, a trade body, said that calculating fees on the basis of committed capital was the industry standard, and it was inappropriate to compare fees on the basis of invested capital.

Private equity profits called into question – FT.com.

As policymakers in Washington focus on China’s expanding presence in Africa and growing assertiveness in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean region, Danish diplomatic assistance is opening the gate for China to establish a strategic foothold in the Arctic.

Denmark has made a strategic decision to prioritize its economic relationship with China and is now becoming the key gateway for Beijing’s commercial and strategic entrée into the Arctic. Denmark advocates giving China a seat at the Arctic policy table. Friis Arne Peterson, the Danish ambassador to China, stated in October that China has “natural and legitimate economic and scientific interests in the Arctic.” Copenhagen likewise supports giving China permanent membership on the Arctic Council, the eight-nation forum that includes the five Arctic Ocean coastal states (the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia) as well as Sweden, Iceland and Finland.

Greenland’s substantial deposits of minerals including rare earths, uranium, iron ore, lead, zinc, petroleum, and gemstones make the Arctic island a key bargaining chip as Denmark cultivates Beijing. Copenhagen administers Greenland’s foreign policy and will likely dangle the island’s rich geological potential in front of Beijing as it works to bolster the China-Denmark trade relationship.

Denmark’s ploy to pull China closer is likely to work: From Beijing’s perspective, having Chinese companies buy several billion dollars per year worth of pharmaceuticals and machinery and doing container shipping business with Maersk is well worth it to gain access to Arctic negotiating tables and Greenland’s minerals.

Transit permission may become important if China continues building its icebreaker fleet and summer passage through the Canadian and Russian Arctic routes becomes increasingly viable. China currently has only one operational icebreaker, the Xuelong, but a new 8,000 tonne vessel is due to enter the fleet in 2014. The likely westbound route from Nuuk in Western Greenland to Qingdao via the Canadian Arctic is around one-half the distance to Qingdao through the Panama Canal, while the likely eastbound route via the Russian Arctic is less than two-thirds the distance to Qingdao via the Cape of Good Hope.

China’s New Strategic Target: Arctic Minerals – China Real Time Report – WSJ.