Visa Scam at Rayat London College lays low the University of Wales

Once upon a time I was a post-doc at University College Cardiff which has a Royal Charter dating from 1883 and which was part of the University of Wales, Cardiff until 2004 when it became Cardiff University. I have fond memories of Cardiff since it was with Cardiff as a base that my colleagues ensured my education on the finer points of rugby and Welsh pubs and Dylan Thomas and rugby songs. So it was a matter of some regret for me to hear that the current University of Wales was to be abolished because of wrong-doings at one of its accredited colleges.

The University of Wales  was a federal university founded in 1893 with accredited institutions throughout Wales, including the universities of Glyndŵr, Newport, Swansea Metropolitan and Trinity Saint David. It accredited courses in Britain and abroad, with over 100,000 students but following a visa fraud at one of its accredited colleges, Rayat London College,  it no longer exists. At the time of its closure, the Chancellor of the University of Wales was HRH the Prince of Wales and the Pro-Chancellor was the Archbishop of Wales, Dr. Barry Morgan. Professor Marc Clement was President and the Vice-Chancellor was Professor Medwin Hughes.

It is not the first time that the techniques of academic cheating and fake degrees have been found to have been exported from India to colleges around the world.

THES:The Rayat London College which offered courses validated by the University of Wales has been linked to an alleged scam that helped foreign students to cheat their way to qualifications. The BBC found a lecturer from Rayat College London explaining to students how to cheat in exams and how to deceive the UK Border Agency. …. The scam would have allowed students to complete a 15-month course in under a week by cheating in exams. …. The college has suspended a lecturer, registrar and admissions officer, and said it dissociated itself from any wrongdoing and had referred the matter to the police.

Now Murdoch’s WSJ caught in a circulation scam as his European publishing head resigns

It’s pretty clear that The Guardian does not much care for Rupert Murdoch or his newspapers but they are involved in so much which is shady that it provides permanent employment for some of The Guardian’s “investigative journalists” (who are not themselves above some hanky panky from time to time).

After the News of the World / News International phone hacking fiasco, this time it is the Wall Street Journal which has been found to have been cooking the books about its circulation figures. Andrew Langhoff  who is Murdoch’s publishing head in Europe has resigned to contain the damge. Executive Learning Partnership, or ELP, a Netherlands-based consulting firm is also implicated.

The Wall Street Journal also carries the story: Publisher of WSJ Europe Resigns After Ethics Inquiry

The Guardian - 

One of Rupert Murdoch’s most senior European executives has resigned following Guardian inquiries about a circulation scam at News Corporation’s flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the Journal’s true circulation.

The bizarre scheme included a formal, written contract in which the Journal persuaded one company to co-operate by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities, a move which led some staff to accuse the paper’s management of violating journalistic ethics and jeopardising its treasured reputation for editorial quality.

Internal emails and documents suggest the scam was promoted by Andrew Langhoff, the European managing director of the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones and Co, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in July 2007. Langhoff resigned on Tuesday.

…… In what appears to have been a damage limitation exercise following the Guardian’s inquiries, Langhoff resigned on Tuesday, citing only the complaints of unethical interference in editorial coverage. Neither he nor an article published last night in the Wall Street Journal made any reference to the circulation scam nor to the fact that the senior management of Dow Jones in New York failed to act when they were alerted last year.

The affair will add weight to the fears of shareholders in Murdoch’s parent company, NewsCorp, that the business has become a ‘rogue corporation’, operating outside normal rules. Some shareholders have launched a legal action in the US, attacking the Murdoch family after the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World and following lawsuits in which NewsCorp subsidiaries have been accused of hacking into competitors’ computers and stealing their customers. …..

……

Circulation figures directly affect the advertising rates that can be charged and this circulation scam is nothing more than a method to defraud advertisers and – eventually – all the subscribers. Even the antics at the News of the World can be put down to maintaining circulation numbers. The certainly unethical – and perhaps criminal – behaviour of Murdoch and his henchmen and his newspapers can all be put down to greed, and a touch of narcissism  coupled with highly inflated egos.

Related: Rebekah Brooks and NoW – another new low

Carbon trading fraudsters lobby hard to keep their playground unregulated

Stupidity (in introducing cabon trading in the first place) and greed among the carbon traders and speculators reigns supreme.

No surprise!

Reports calls for tougher regulation on carbon trading scheme: image clickgreen.org.uk

Clickgreen reports:

Finance sector lobbyists are pushing the European Commission to block tighter regulation of the EU’s carbon market, a new report from Corporate Europe Observatory and Carbon Trade Watch, published today, reveals. 

The Commission is currently reviewing regulation of the market following a number of fraud cases and leaked documents suggest that it will include carbon trading under the revised Market in Financial Instruments Directive.

But according to Letting the market play, lobbyists from the International Emissions Trading Association – the main body representing carbon traders – and BusinessEurope have sought to minimise new regulations, with BusinessEurope claiming “no further regulation” is needed. 

Report author Oscar Reyes said: “Carbon markets are a playground for fraudsters and speculators. Financial regulations are the Commission’s belated attempt to trim the excesses, but the problems lie at the core. Handing over environmental policy to traders has done nothing to address climate change.”  ……..

The report shows that while IETA has blamed a “lack of action from the side of the regulators” for the cases of carbon fraud, its lobby strategy has been driven by a desire to find new opportunities for speculation by whatever means are necessary. 

In January 2011, the European Commission halted trading on a key part of the carbon market after the latest in a series of large fraud cases was uncovered.  According to Carbon Trade Watch, less than a month later and with the suspension still partly in place, the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA, the main carbon traders’ lobby group) was privately insisting to Brussels officials that “there might be no need to regulate this market”.

Carbon trading greed drives land grab and eviction of 20,000 in Uganda

I take man-made carbon dioxide (3 – 4% of an atmospheric concentration of 0.04%) as being quite insignificant and essentially irrelevant for climate change.

But global warming ideology has led to the opportunistic development of the carbon trading  obscenity which funnels vast amounts of tax money into the sticky hands of a few developers and their parasitic politicians and bureaucrats. The UN (Kyoto protocol) and the EU (carbon trading) programs are particularly to blame. The frauds and scams connected with carbon trading do nothing for our climate but they encourage the greed which leads to the most obscene and despicable behaviour. I posted recently about the excesses in Honduras which led to the murder of 23 farmers. But I had missed this story which came out in the New York Times two weeks ago. 20,000 Ugandans have been evicted, houses burned and people killed to allow a UK company to plant forests and earn millions in selling the resulting carbon credits:

In Scramble for Land, Group Says, Company Pushed Ugandans Out 

KICUCULA, Uganda — According to the company’s proposal to join a United Nations clean-air program, the settlers living in this area left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner. People here remember it quite differently. “I heard people being beaten, so I ran outside,” said Emmanuel Cyicyima, 33. “The houses were being burnt down.” Other villagers described gun-toting soldiers and an 8-year-old child burning to death when his home was set ablaze by security officers. “They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”

According to a report released by the aid group Oxfam on Wednesday, more than 20,000 people say they were evicted from their homes here in recent years to make way for a tree plantation run by a British forestry company, emblematic of a global scramble for arable land.

“Too many investments have resulted in dispossession, deception, violation of human rights and destruction of livelihoods,” Oxfam said in the report. “This interest in land is not something that will pass.” As population and urbanization soar, it added, “whatever land there is will surely be prized.”

Across Africa, some of the world’s poorest people have been thrown off land to make way for foreign investors, often uprooting local farmers so that food can be grown on a commercial scale and shipped to richer countries overseas.

But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.

The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations. The company involved, New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.

Read article 

That the New Forest Company is opportunistic and greedy is inevitable and understandable when the benefits of the carbon trading programs were flouted under their noses. That they were unaware of the methods used is not credible. The results of the carbon trading scams are becoming sick and despicable and the EU politicians and bureaucrats who administer such schemes cannot continue to hide behind their misplaced intentions to “save the globe” and their “rules”.

Greed for EU carbon trading credits leads to the murder of 23 Honduran farmers

The EU carbon trading fiasco continues and is characterised by greed and fraud. But it has now expanded to embrace the murder of 23 farmers by the developers who in their greed for EU carbon credit money had forcibly – and with the aid of the Honduran authorities and private militias – stolen the farmers’ lands.

Aguán farmers allegedly killed by private militias

Canada Free Press reports:

The deaths were facilitated by the “direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials”

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes. In Brussels, the reported killings have triggered European policymakers into action, with Green MEP Bas Eickhout calling the alleged human rights abuses “a disgrace”

EurActiv carries the full story

… In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament’s Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.

The deaths were facilitated by the “direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials,” the report said.

In some cases it cited “feigned accidents” in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were simply shot, or “disappeared”. 

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will be holding a hearing into the report on 24 October, and a delegation of MEPs will be visiting the region between 31 October and 4 November.

But because of a three-year gap between the stakeholder consultation process and the biogas project approvals, the CDM board recently ruled that the project had met the criteria of its mandate.

And the gullible European politicians who have caused this mess are taking refuge behind their “rules”.  The global warming ideology which lies behind all the carbon trading scams has much to answer for.

“We are not investigators of crimes,” a board member told EurActiv. “We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed.”

Wikileaks cable reveals the fraud that is the Kyoto protocol

Prof. Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer is the Co-Chair of Working Group III of the IPCC – deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Researck (PIK). PIK is somewhat notorious for being a scientific institution where all their results are governed and constrained by political correctness. Only results which support global warming dogma are ever published by PIK. It is also the institution which is home for the sea level alarmist Stefan Rahmstorf.

But last year even a high priest such as Ottmar Edenhoffer was forced to admit:

“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.  Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this.  One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

It becomes increasingly apparent that climate policy has very little to do with science and everything to do with creating and tapping into vast flows of money. And now courtesy of the Wikileaks cable releases we learn:

To “terja”: time to introduce a new verb into English from the Swedish?

One result of the revelations of the fraudulent manipulation of images by Terje Hellesö – a former award winning photographer (with the award now retracted) by the on-line community on the Swedish Flashback forum has been the introduction of a whole new vocabulary in Swedish with variations of his first name to describe stolen and manipulated images.

A comment on my earlier post led me to look at

1. English words which were of Swedish and Scandinavian origin, and
2. English words dealing with manipulation of images.

The Viking legacy has left many place names which are Scandinavian in whole or in part. In modern times many English words have been assimilated into all the Scandinavian languages. I have the impression that there may be more words of Scandinavian origin perhaps in the Celtic languages. But I was a little surprised that the list of English words emanating from Swedish or the old Scandinavian languages was not very long.

List of English words of Swedish origin

List of English words of Scandinavian origin 

Coming then to the manipulation of images there are a number of words in English which refer to some specific type of image manipulation. Manipulation has been evident from the onset of photography. Initially these referred to multiple-exposures or various dark-room techniques such as retouching , splicing negatives, scratching or air-brushing. The advent of computers and digital technology has led to “photoshopping” now becoming an accepted word (v. to photoshop which is an example of a noun becoming a verb). Digital manipulation may include resizing, shadowing, duplicating, cropping, re-scaling, retouching, emphasising, enhancing, splicing, color balancing, painting or “editing” all or part of the images being manipulated.

But there does not seem to be a word which particularly describes the act of stealing an image and then manipulating and combining it with other images. It seems therefore that there is space in English for a new word to describe the specific type of manipulation that Hellesö has carried out. My perception is that this form of manipulation may be quite wide-spread. It is also probably high time that Swedish contributed a new word to come into English usage. From the proposed verb “terja” I have chosen to go to “terjading” in preference to “terjaing” as being less difficult to pronounce.

ter.ja (tair – yah)

verb – to terja

the manipulation of a digital image by stealing images available on the internet and creating a montage of  stolen and or manipulated images together with other images and the representation of such images as one’s own original work without attribution to the original image creator.

Related forms - terjad ¦ terjas ¦ terjading

Adjective – terjad

Origin – (2011) after Terje Hellesö and his theft and manipulation of  wild-life images disclosed on an internet forum

Examples :

I terjad yesterday, I terja today , he terjas always, he will terja tomorrow.

To terja an image is as reprehensible as to plagiarise.

Terje terjad his images probably starting from when he acquired his first digital camera. 

While image manipulation may well be permissible, terjading is always unethical. The penalties for terjading  however are not enshrined in law except – incidentally – for any theft or intentional fraud that can be proven.

His terjad photographs won him an award.

Nobel laureate resigns from American Physical Society because of its stand on global warming

In October last year Professor Hal Lewis resigned from the American Physical Society because “It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave”.

Yesterday another high profile member (Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973  Dr. Ivar Giaever) also resigned for much the same reason.

WUWT:

Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears. 

Here’s the resignation letter:

From: Ivar Giaever [ mailto:giaever@XXXX.com]

Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 3:42 PM
To: kirby@xxx.xxx
Cc: Robert H. Austin; ‘William Happer’; ‘Larry Gould’; ‘S. Fred Singer’; Roger Cohen
Subject: I resign from APS

Dear Ms. Kirby

Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now”.

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.Best regards,

Ivar Giaever

Nobel Laureate 1973PS. I included a copy to a few people in case they feel like using the information.

Ivar Giaever
XXX XXX
XXX
USA
Phone XXX XXX XXX
Fax XXX XXX XXX  

The supposedly “settled” science is looking decidedly wobbly.  And any science justifed on the basis of a “consensus” is fundamentally suspect .

Hellesö apologises – sort of – and only further antagonises his Flashback nemesis

UPDATE! Hellesö says on his website that he has removed 96 pictures – presumably all manipulated. 93 were pictures of lynxes, 2 of badgers and one of a raccoon dog. 

Terje Hellesö, an award winning nature photographer, has been revealed to be  a massive fraud and a cheat. Many of his photographs have been manipulated with stock images of wildlife from the internet having been inserted into landscapes with many “artistic” effects. The skilful detective work in finding his manipulations and the source of the original images  has come from the on-line community of the Swedish Flashback forum. They have also put together a web site where all the manipulations discovered have been posted.  At least some 20 pictures have been manipulated and another 10 or so are suspicious. But Hellesö has removed all his old images from his web-site and it is unclear how many images he may have manipulated  and when he first started his fraudulent career. It seems to go back at least 3 or 4 years and it could be that the start of his manipulations coincided with his use of  digital images or perhaps with his learning how to use Photoshop. A new vocabulary has emerged for the fraudulent manipulation of images and based on his name as an adjective –  a “terjade” picture has now become an accepted  word-form!!!

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency which had named him as the Nature Photographer of the Year 2010 has now withdrawn their award since their jury have now come to the conclusion that some of his his photographs even before 2010 were probably manipulated. Their press release (in Swedish) is here. However they are not asking him to return the prize money (about 15,000 kronor or $2,500) because they have no regulations about what to do when a prize is withdrawn. But, as some of the Flashback readers have pointed out, there should then be no hindrance in asking for the prize money to be returned precisely because there are no governing regulations.

But now Hellesö has posted a long, rambling, self-serving, self-pitying sort of apology on his website – which seems to be no apology at all but instead a form of damage control and an attempt to take charge of the narrative and to resurrect himself. He does not reveal how many pictures he has manipulated – perhaps thousands – and when he started his nefarious career. He does not offer to recompense the thousands who paid the expensive fees he charged for attending his photography courses. He does not offer to compensate the organisations who paid him dearly for including his images in exhibitions and publications and often lost money in their enterprises. He does not apologise for the heart-rending stories he invented from thin air about the circumstances surrounding his encounters with the imaginary wildlife that he was supposed to have photographed.

His “apology” is much too long, too badly written and much too self-serving to be reproduced or translated in full. But there are some sections which reveal his intentions quite clearly and that his remorse is no more than a micron or two deep.

I ask for pardon because I made a number of photomontages in which I gave you all 
a very different picture than the reality I was trying to convey. This I will never ever repeat in the same way. If in the future I manipulate images, I will reveal exactly how I do so. I never ever again will have a desire to cheat anyone. Or of having to lie to hide the truth. …. I hope with all my heart that you can forgive me, and that maybe I will come to get a second chance from you. …

It begs the question if he is admitting that his previous manipulations were intended to cheat people (as they did).

I will come to speak publicly about this in different places, in ways you will discover later. I will share much of that here in this blog as well. 

Indeed!! A new “show and tell” career perhaps.

I would also say sorry to the Environmental Protection Agency who gave me the award 
“Nature Photographer 2010″. The pressure that you had to endure in this, is not something I would have wished for you. I know you did not know anything about my current lynx project when you gave me this award, and I have read your reasoning 
numerous times. I understand that you now choose to withdraw the award from me, , but I will keep in mind your justification (for the award) for myself so that I can draw some strength for tomorrow. Over time, I hope that my pictures – including here on this blog - will be some form of redress for the choice you originally made.

He promises that his future pictures will be available for scrutiny and for expert comments which will be published on his blog. It seems to be just an attempt to create a way for his fan club to post nice things about him.

He clearly sees his resurrection – phoenix-like – from the ashes of his present career. He has been accused of being a narcissist, an ego-maniac, and much worse. But his “apology” has only served to anatagonise the on-line community even further and they are now mobilised and energised to scrutinise everything he has ever done.

But to me he sounds like Tricky Dicky did in 1974 – and I am old enough to remember his self-serving TV performances! An attempt to control the narrative of his own demise.

Internet forum unveils the compulsive photoshopping of an award-winning nature photographer

It started on August 26th when Gunnar Glöersen, a wildlife management expert for the Swedish Hunting Association (Svenska Jägareförbundet) received a call from a journalist – Jan Henricson of  Svensk Jakt - asking him to comment on the authenticity of a suspicious photograph of a lynx taken by Terje Hellesö. Hellesö is a well-known nature photographer who received the 2010 Swedish Environmental Protection Agency’s Nature Photographer of the Year award.

On the 26th Glöersen wrote in his blog about his suspicions not only about this photograph but also of other wildlife photographs by Hellesö. His blog post was taken up in the on-line Flashback forum which exploded with all Hellesö’s photographs being investigated by the on-line community (and the knowledge and expertise and ingenuity with the amateur investigators is truly impressive). In the 2 weeks since Glöersen’s blog post the Flashback forum post has had over 800,000 readers.

Last Monday (5th September) The Local reported:

Photographer Terje Hellesö, recipient of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency’s Nature Photographer of the Year award, has been reported to police after admitting that he manipulated a number of his pictures of predatory animals. …

“Doesn’t this lynx in the July greenery have a winter furr? How about the lynx that’s reflected in the pool, is it walking in the air or on land, and can you really see the paws in that angle?”, Glöersen wrote in a blog post dated August 26th. Glöersen also questioned the authenticity of the picture, and decided to examine more of Hellesö’s work. Based on his wildlife expertise, he began to suspect that Hellesö’s alleged accomplishments were simply too good to be true.

Among Hellesö’s claims called into question by Glöersen are reports that the nature photographer had seen 150 lynx in nine months, when Glöersen himself had only seen 15 in 52 years. Glöersen also questioned Hellesö’s claim to have photographed a raccoon dog from a meter away, in an area where they’re not even supposed to exist.

In a debate between Glöersen and Hellesö on Sveriges Radio (SR) on August 30th, Hellesö at first denied the allegations that he had doctored his images. “No no no, of course not. Not under any circumstances,” he said. However, four days later, on September 3rd, he changed admitted the forgeries to his wife. ”I didn’t know about this myself. I’m still in shock,” Malin Hellesö told SR. …..

On Monday, Tommy Berglund, an inspector and wildlife tracker at the County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland, reported Hellesö to the police for fraud.
While he filed the report as a private citizen, rather than as a part of his official duties, Berglund is nevertheless concerned about the affect Hellesö’s claims have meant for local wildlife management efforts. “Raccoon dogs are among the worst carriers of rabies,” Berglund told newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN). “Tons of resources have been used in vain to find wildcats and raccoon dogs that don’t exist.”

Because of the time and money they’ve spent, and the fact that numerous concerned people have called the Administrative Board, Berglund thinks this is an important issue, and certainly a matter for the police.

But what is truly impressive is the speed and skill with which the investigative work was done by the on-line community and in a way which I think the main stream media would not dare to do. The depth of knowledge and skill available on-line is now beyond the ability and the competence of the main stream media.  In general Hellesö seems to have used stock pictures of wildlife from the internet, flipped them, resized them and then inserted them into forest landscapes which he presumably had photographed himself. The following are animations of how just some of the pictures were manipulated by Hellesö:

The award winning Lynx picture

Another lynx in the woods

And Lynx No.3

A raccoon dog in the wild

Update: The latest count gives at least 19 manipulated (Terjade) photographs.

Hellesö’s career as a wild-life photographer is over but he probably has a new book and a new career in the field of “How I fooled the world”!