Report: USADA in possession of positive Armstrong samples

A reporter from France 2, Nicolas Geay, claimed he had exclusive information from a source, according to which he “could now reveal” that blood samples taken earlier during Armstrong‘s career had been retested under the authority of USADA and “ultimately came back positive”.

USADA is expected to send the final report to the UCI in two weeks time, according to French television, and make it public at the same time in order to put the governing body of the sport under pressure to ratify their life-time ban for Armstrong.

Read the rest here.

“After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of the self. So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence. Within weeks I became lethargic and suffered mild brain damage. I am still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time. I only take drugs that are given to me.”

Read the rest, and see the art, here.

Among the many things we are left to consider in the wake of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, there is one I still can’t quite get over: the staggering price of a high-end call girl. What service can anyone provide to justify up to $5,500 an hour?

Read the rest here.

Zac Moffatt, digital director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, argues that Obama’s digital team is running much the same playbook they did in 2008 — something he believes will give the Republicans an online edge in 2012.

“Obama’s campaign is still running their Facebook campaign like it’s 2008,” Moffatt tells Mashable when asked about Obama’s reputation as the “social candidate.” He compares the Democratic campaign to the historical rise and fall of successful technology companies.

Read the rest here.

“What they’re going through seems like the Greece situation a couple of years ago, and there are concerns that if it’s not addressed soon enough, it could move further to the same vicious cycle,” Thanos Papasavvas, strategist at Investec Asset Management, told CNBC Europe’s “Squawk Box” Wednesday.

Read the rest here.

LONDON—Investors with risk appetite may want to look at gold stocks, particularly those of companies ripe for takeover, analysts say.

A gap between the price of bullion and gold-mining stocks has emerged, and history shows that it likely won’t last long. Equities should catch up to gold prices and close the valuation gap.

Read the rest here.

12,000 South African gold miners have followed their platinum miner counter-parts by going on strike from Gold Fields. Gold Fields is the world’s 4th largest gold mine, and the strike is costing the firm 1,660 ounces of gold a day in lost production according  to Gold Fields’ spokesman Sven Lunsche.

Read the rest here.

Asian stocks rose, reversing earlier losses, as economic reports from China, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand fueled speculation that central banks will boost stimulus measures.

Read the rest here.

The irony is refreshing. Requiring photo identification to vote suppresses the minority vote, but at the Democratic National Convention, it is required! Obviously the DNC does not want minorities to participate.

Read the rest here.

UStream TV Occupy Eye

By now, many of us are aware of the Leap Motion, a small, $70 gesture control system that simply plugs into any computer and, apparently, just works. If you’ve seen the gesture interfaces in Minority Report, you know what it does. More importantly, if you’re familiar with the touch modality — and at this point, most of us are — the interface is entirely intuitive. It’s touch, except it happens in the space in front of the screen, so you don’t have to cover your window into your tech with all those unsightly smudges.

Read the rest, and see a demo video, here.

Yet, if you read about the tussle between the two great economists, you are struck by two things. First, how pragmatic a man John Maynard Keynes was. And second, how utopian the ideals of Friedrich Hayek are. This is odd, as each man attached himself to a polar opposite political philosophy: Keynes’s ideas were adopted by idealistic lefties, while Hayek’s thoughts were lapped up by conservatism, a philosophy that by definition rejects dogma. It is as if we have gone through the looking glass.

Read the rest here.

The full extraordinary story of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden has been revealed for the first time by a member of the elite team that killed the arch terrorist in his secret lair in Pakistan.

What follows is a timeline of how the two numbers in the monthly jobs report — with July’s report coming Friday morning — get gathered and then disseminated in the administration. It’s based on close to a dozen conversations with current and former administration officials.

Read the rest here.

Kim Man Lui and Lun Hu

Many technical price patterns in financial time series used as trading strategies are learned by traders’ astute observations on the movement of price vectors. The authors propose data mining techniques to explore relationships between price movements and price vectors automatically. One such relationship, candlestick patterns, was discovered by human observation.The authors studied three years of data from 42 Hong Kong Hang Seng Index composite stocks.By two-level clustering to deal with shape and scale of the daily price vector of a time series of a stock price, a time series is converted into a symbolic price sequence. The previous price trend and the next price trend on each trading day can be converted into two symbolic trend sequences. The authors then looked for correlations between the symbolic price sequence together with the previous trend sequence and the next price trend sequence. The result shows three patterns have statistical significance (p < 0.05) on only two out of 42 stocks and indicates that the discovered patterns for one stock may not be the same kind for others, meaning that there is no generic pattern for the two assets. The authors conclude that price patterns, if any, as reported in technical analysis literatures, should not be equally applicable to any time series of stock prices.

Thanks to real-world data, the keys to your digital kingdom are under assault.

Read about it here.

Read the article here.

The federal government has closed a criminal probe of alleged financial misconduct by Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio, who styles himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” and no charges will be filed, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said on Friday.

Read the rest here.

AMPA, Fla. — T. Boone Pickens said natural gas vehicles can survive just fine without Congress approving his so-called Pickens Plan.

“It’s going to happen, and you don’t have to have Washington do it, thank God,” Pickens said at Wednesday’s energy luncheon hosted by POLITICO.