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“Fake Togo football team” con

September 15, 2010
Passport of Togo

Image via Wikipedia

A most enterprising “agent”.

I cannot help but admire the cheek and the scope of the con. It is in the same league as “selling the Eiffel Tower“.

  1. Take a country which most people couldn’t find on a map (Togo)
  2. Take another country which is rich but not a front-line football nation (Bahrain).
  3. Short-circuit communication links by internet and e-mail between the football federations of Bahrain and Togo.
  4. Arrange a friendly international match to be played in the rich country.
  5. Show-up for the international match with a full team of officials and players (from where? on what passports?)
  6. Take full benefit of all on offer to the visiting team from the friendly (rich) host federation.
  7. Do a little gold trading and any other little money laundering needed on the side.
  8. Play the match – even though the players are huffing and panting after a few minutes.
  9. Leave the country before the sh** hits the fan

The Telegraph:

Bahrain won the friendly 3-0 but they were surprised by the poor quality of the Togolese team with head coach Josef Hickersberger describing the match in Riffa on Sept 7 as “boring” and “a wasted opportunity”. Togo sports minister Christophe Chao told Jeune Afrique: “Nobody has ever been informed of such a game. We will conduct investigations to uncover all those involved in this case.”

According to the Gulf Daily News, BFA vice-president Shaikh Ali bin Khalifa Al Khalifa confirmed Bahrain went through all the correct channels in organising the match. Shaikh Ali added all the paperwork received before the friendly were officially signed and stamped from the Togolese Football Federation.

The publication went on to report a letter listed a 20-member Togo team, including each player’s passport number and date of birth.

However, a completely different list of 18 players was provided by a team official a few minutes before the start of the match.

The Bahrain Football Association (BFA) said it had been arranged under all the usual official procedures and through an agent they had known for several years.

The real Togo team. image:morethanthegames.co.uk

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Forgeries of a Forger’s Forgeries

September 14, 2010
Konrad Kujau, author of the Hitler-Diaries, Ki...

Image via Wikipedia

A forgery of a forgery is no original but can still have considerable value……

From Der Spiegel:

A Dresden court has sentenced a woman for forging copies of masterpieces made by Konrad Kujau, famous as the author of the “Hitler Diaries.” Copies of his copies allegedly earned the convict 300,000 euros.

The story sounds like it could be made up, an elaborate hoax meant to fool Germany’s media and public alike. A woman claiming to be the great niece of Konrad Kujau, author of the mother of all forgeries, the “Hitler Diaries,” has been convicted of selling forged versions of paintings made by Kujau in his later years, themselves copies of famous masterpieces.

The falsifications in question were, absurdly, fakes of Konrad Kujau’s own copies of masterpieces from artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Franz Marc and Claude Monet. A talented artist, Kujau, who died in 2000, turned to producing fakes in the late 1980s following his four-year stint in prison for fraud stemming from the “Hitler Diaries” case. Though clearly marked as fakes, Kujau’s newfound fame meant that people were willing to pay up to €3,500 for his work. He also sold many of his own pieces.

Petra Kujau worked for Konrad Kujau for a time in the 1990s. Prosecutors on Thursday, however, expressed doubt that she was in fact related to the famous forger.

Dresden prosecutors say that Petra Kujau and her accomplice purchased fakes produced in Asia before attaching Konrad Kujau’s signature to them and selling them on. She was convicted and sentenced on the basis of the 40 counts she ultimately confessed to.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/The_Sower.jpg/75px-The_Sower.jpg

painting

Image via Wikipedia

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Termites predict climate change!

September 13, 2010
Termietenheuvel

Image via Wikipedia

USA Today reports that Termites help predict impact of climate change.

They rely on instinct rather than mathematical models but they surely couldn’t do worse than Michael Mann & The Hockey Stick Gang

Termites are careful builders that locate their mounds in areas with the right balance of moisture and drainage. This intuitive understanding of geology and hydrology can help explain how a local ecosystem might evolve, according to the study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.

“By understanding the patterns of the vegetation and termite mounds over different moisture zones, we can project how the landscape might change with climate change,” explains co-author Greg Asner.

http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/green-house/2010/09/10/termitex-wide-community.jpg

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v1/n6/full/ncomms1066.html

Regional insight into savanna hydrogeomorphology from termite mounds

by Shaun R. Levick, Gregory P. Asner, Oliver A. Chadwick, Lesego M. Khomo, Kevin H. Rogers, Anthony S. Hartshorn, Ty Kennedy-Bowdoin & David E. Knapp

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UK University parents emit twice as much CO2 as Ash Cloud Volcano

August 24, 2010

A new study by the UK’s low cost delivery service for students has found that the average fuel cost in the UK for transporting student belongings to and from university is £192 million per year. In total, parents taking their children’s belongings to and from uni emit 291k tonnes of CO2 every year – twice as much CO2 as Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano; which grounded flights across the world with a giant ash cloud, emitted every day.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iceland/eyjafjallajokull/index.html?inline=nyt-geo


The research, commissioned by low cost student baggage delivery service www.UniBaggage.com asked 1,196 parents if they helped their children move their belongings to and from student housing throughout their three years at university. In the academic year of 2008 – 2009 there were 2,396,050 university students in the UK.

The NYT reports that:

Seismic activity is petering out at the volcano that caused major European air-traffic disruption earlier this year, though the eruption has not yet been declared officially over, the authorities in Iceland said Monday. The most serious problem now is posed by mud flows created when heavy rains mix with ash settled along the top of glaciers close to the Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced EY-ya-fyat-lah-YO-kut) volcano, said Sigurlaug Hjaltadottir, a geophysicist with Iceland’s Meteorological Office.

But Eyjafjallajokull’s bigger sister Katla is still due to erupt at any time.

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