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Noah Golden opened an account at Chase bank in 2017 for his then-6-year-old daughter. The idea was to gradually deposit funds and then present her with the windfall when she turns 18. Golden, 41, seldom monitored the account. Year after year, he just kept putting cash into it. It wasn’t until recently the Woodland Hills resident discovered that, on dozens of occasions, someone else — not his daughter — was taking money out. This is one of numerous horror stories I received in response to last week’s column on Chase’s failure to prevent an 81-year-old customer from wiring more than $600,000 to an overseas scammer. Advertisement Business Column: Chase let an elderly customer wire more than $600,000 to an overseas scammer A scammer compelled an 81-year-old woman to wire more than $600,000 overseas within a span of days. Chase bank did little to stop the fraud. In that case, Chase says it followed all its security protocols, including … [Read more...] about Column: Here’s what happened after $1,200 was drained from an 11-year-old’s bank account

“Take the profit out of war,” said Kevin Zeese, one of the more important activists of the Occupy Movement in the United States, “and you take out war.” His audience was made up mainly of U.S. war veterans gathered in New York to observe — and protest — the 11th anniversary of the conflict in Afghanistan. That is the longest war the United States has ever waged. The veterans ranged from those who had seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan to many who had fought in Vietnam. There was also one 88-year-old World War II veteran. That link between profit and war sticks out in a recent Center for Public Integrity (CPI) investigation. The U.S. Congress could be spending $3 billion on tanks the army does not want. That includes repairing many M1 Abrams tanks the army won’t use. As Aaron Mehta, one of the authors of the CPI report puts it: the army “has decided it wants to save as much as $3 billion by freezing refurbishment of the M1 from 2014 to 2017, so it can redesign the hulking, clanking … [Read more...] about When war passes for foreign policy

To hear a recital from the Rig Veda is like listening to a recording from the late Bronze Age. The language in which it was composed is unequalled in prestige and remarkable in both antiquity and continuity, but it is no one’s mother tongue. No baby grows up speaking Sanskrit. Following the recent sharp exchanges about the teaching of Sanskrit, I would like to do my bit to disturb the persistent and completely erroneous belief that Sanskritists lived in a religious bubble. Let its detractors not forget that Sanskrit was the reason ancient India had links with Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Baghdad, and later, Toledo. In Mughal times, Sanskrit writers learnt Persian, translated Persian and Arabic, and compiled Perso-Sanskrit lexicons. It was these pundits who collaborated with each other during Dara Shikoh’s venture to translate the Upanishads into Persian, which led to European recognition of how advanced and intellectual Hindu philosophy was. A good deal of the early cottage industry … [Read more...] about ‘There was once a mighty lord of Ayodhya’

Amid an Omicron-fuelled third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the attendance for this year’s Republic Day parade is likely to be curtailed to approximately 5,000 to 8,000. While the Met department has predicted cloudy skies in Delhi on January 26, the Indian Air Force has promised the “largest and grandest” fly-past ever with 75 aircraft to mark ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav celebrations. Amid a row over the West Bengal tableau being rejected, however, the Centre has given a nod to the participation of 25 other tableaux. The Bengal tableaux that was to depict Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose to mark his birth anniversary, will now be displayed at Kolkata’s Republic Day parade. The central government, however, has announced that R-Day celebrations will now begin from January 23 every year instead of January 24 to include the birth anniversary of Bose. The Narendra Modi-led government earlier started celebrating the iconic freedom fighter’s birth anniversary as ‘Parakram Divas’. Here’s … [Read more...] about Covid Limit on Attendance, ‘Grandest’ Flypast, 25 Tableaux. All You Need to Know About R-Day 2022

The contents of a fresh set of leaked phone conversations involving Niira Radia and her associates paint an alarming picture of the extent to which the influential lobbyist — whose clients include Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata — sought to influence, use, manipulate and even browbeat the media in pursuit of her corporate agendas. Apart from highlighting the use of journalists to plant stories and columns or as intermediaries with politicians, the latest tapes released by the news magazine, Outlook, suggest more strong-arm lobbying techniques were also used or considered, including the possibility of blacklisting the national news agency, PTI. Outlook, which had earlier published 140 conversations originally intercepted by the Income Tax department as part of its ongoing surveillance of Ms. Radia, now says it has 800 more conversations in its possession. Nineteen of those audio tapes, with partial summaries, were published on its website by Sunday evening. Editor Vinod Mehta said that … [Read more...] about In Radia tapes, an alarming picture of media manipulation

Len Tillem, the longtime Sonoma attorney who delivered free legal advice on regional radio, died from cerebral hemorrhage on Jan. 13, the Press Democrat reported . He was 77 years old. Tillem got his start in radio in the 1990s on Napa’s KVON and Santa Rosa’s KSRO before bringing his words of wisdom to San Francisco’s KGO in 2000 on a Sunday afternoon show, “The Len Tillem Show.” When a guest called in, he asked in a Queens accent, “Why are you calling a lawyah?” He was good at nudging his callers to share the details of their situations and then delivering advice with humor and compassion. “He was a wonderful guy and I loved listening to him on the air and having him as a guest on my show,” KGO host Ronn Owens wrote on Facebook . “He had a wonderful way of informing his listeners about the law and entertaining them at the same time. My deepest condolences to his family.” Tillem’s show was canceled in 2011 when KGO switched to an all-news format. He brought his … [Read more...] about Len Tillem, who delivered legal advice alongside NYC schtick on KGO, dies at 77

Pandemic winners are losing The future path of the pandemic is uncertain, but investors may have already made up their minds about the prospects for companies that had prospered months earlier. Netflix and Peloton plunged late in the day yesterday, on signs that “stay at home” stocks, which were already under pressure , could take a turn for the worse as people begin to venture out again. Netflix reported its fourth-quarter earnings after the market closed, and warned that subscriber growth was about to slow. This sent the streaming giant’s stock down 20 percent, erasing more than $40 billion in market cap. Ed Lee , a media watcher at The Times, says the report suggests that the company is more vulnerable to competition than its investors are comfortable with: Rivals are eating into Netflix’s business. The company, which now has 222 million subscribers, forecast that it would gain only 2.5 million customers in the current quarter, far from analysts’ … [Read more...] about When Pandemic Stars’ Shines Dim

When President Joe Biden in March 2021 gave his first primetime address, he astutely pointed to the one thing that has united almost all Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic: a shared sense of sacrifice. "We all lost something—a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us," Biden told the nation . Parents of school-aged children, like myself, are among those who have incurred a terrible cost throughout the pandemic, and continue to do so. Many students had no in-person instruction for a year-and-a-half. “Remote learning” is widely accepted to have been an abject failure . In places where schools are now reopened, rigid COVID-19 safety rules of questionable efficacy have made the typical school experience a shell of itself . The mental and educational tolls exacted on innocent kids may never be fully calculated . People are starting to notice. Despite all this, parents continue to be … [Read more...] about Teachers Unions Need to Adapt, Just Like the Rest of Us