Why does Madoff still have any money or assests?

He shouldn't be left with ANYTHING:

Bernard Madoff, the disgraced Wall Street financier, has been ordered to forfeit over $170bn, prosecuters said.

Denny Chin, the US district judge assigned to Madoff's case, entered a preliminary order of forfeiture in New York on Friday.

The order forces Madoff to forfeit all of interests to assets, including a $7m apartment in Manhattan, an $11m house in Palm Beach, Florida and a $3m home located in New York's borough of Long Island.

The government also settled claims against Ruth Madoff, the financier's wife, who must also forfeit her interests totalling $80m in property which she had claimed was hers, prosecutors said.

Madoff, 71, a former non-executive chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange, pleaded guilty in March to charges that his secretive investment advisory operation was a multibillion-dollar scam - the largest in US history.

Madoff could spend the rest of his life in prison when he is sentenced on Monday.

It's WTF Tuesday!

Headline: Madoff says 12 years is plenty. No, actually it's not. But the intention is that you die in prison, so however long that takes, sir.

Trees that don't grow will help the environment?

Scientists in the United States are developing a "synthetic tree" capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.

They make more money taking tourists to look at whales than killing whales?

Delegates to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) annual meeting here agreed it was worth extending reform talks that began a year ago.

Pro- and anti-whaling countries emphasised that fundamental differences remain between the two blocs.

Earlier, animal welfare groups released a new report arguing that whaling countries would gain economically by switching to whale-watching.

They calculate that whale-watching generates tourism revenue of about $2.1bn (£1.3bn) per year around the world, dwarfing income from whaling, which is measured in tens of millions of dollars.

A Scottish town no one has ever lived in.

Fire ants in Canada?!

Hasn't Congress learned ANYTHING AT ALL from this last election?

Congress stuffs war-funding bill with cash for other items.

All dogs speak Japanese.

I have found the perfect t-shirt for blogging...

It's WTF Saturday!

Irony? Or just stupidity?

Major U.S., Canadian and British life and health insurance companies have billions of dollars invested in tobacco companies, says a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Wesley Boyd, the study's lead author, found that at least $4.4 billion US in insurance company funds are invested in companies whose affiliates produce cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco.

"Despite calls upon the insurance industry to get out of the tobacco business by physicians and others, insurers continue to put their profits above people's health," said Boyd, a faculty member of Harvard Medical School.

"It's clear their top priority is making money, not safeguarding people's well-being," he wrote.

Fish? What fish?

An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

Money? What money?

Bernie Madoff, the $60bn fraudster, ordered his London office to sell its $165m portfolio of UK gilts only a month before he confessed to the FBI that his business was a "big lie".

The London directors followed his instructions, transferring the sale proceeds to Madoff's New York office. However, it is still not clear where this money went to.

Trust insurance companies? Paul Krugman warns Congress:

Health reform will fail unless we get serious cost control — and we won’t get that kind of control unless we fundamentally change the way the insurance industry, in particular, behaves. So let me offer Congress two pieces of advice:

1) Don’t trust the insurance industry.

2) Don’t trust the insurance industry.

Hypnotize your patients! What could possibly go wrong?

Doctors should be taught to hypnotise patients not to feel pain instead of using general anaesthetics during some operations, the Royal Society of Medicine will be told today.

So what's a few lies between friends?

Army officials, alerted by Dr. Andersen, began an investigation. They uncovered an apparent case of falsified research by a doctor who had befriended Dr. Andersen when they both worked at Walter Reed, treating American soldiers severely injured in Iraq.

The full report of that Army investigation, recently obtained by The New York Times, provides an unusually detailed anatomy of a suspected case of medical research fraud — one all the more disturbing because it occurred at the nation’s premier military research hospital.

[snip]

The Walter Reed episode also shows how medical journals may fail to conduct adequate due diligence on the studies they publish — information that other doctors rely on for guidance. As happened in the Kuklo case, for example, they often deal only with a study’s principal author, rather than all the credited contributors. In his study, Dr. Kuklo, who has not responded to repeated interview requests, reported that a bone-growth product sold by Medtronic, called Infuse, performed “strikingly” better than the traditional bone-grafting technique used to heal soldiers’ shattered shin bones. Other Walter Reed doctors told an Army investigator that claim was overblown.