Too big to jail? When the Justice Department announced its record $1.9 billion settlement against British bank HSBC last week, prosecutors called it a powerful blow to a dysfunctional institution accused of laundering money for Iran, Libya and Mexico’s murderous drug cartels. But to some former federal prosecutors, it is only the latest case in which the government stopped short of bringing criminal money-laundering charges against a big bank or its executives, at least in part on the rationale that such prosecutions could be devastating enough to cause such banks to fail. They’re calling it “too big to jail.” Read the full story here.
In their hands: A cellphone game for kids about U.S. geography, Stack the States, gets rave reviews from parents. Its creator, Dan Russell-Pinson, considered making the 99-cent app better by adding a feature to allow children to play online against one another. But with the Federal Trade Commission poised to issue more stringent online child privacy rules, he has dropped the idea. “It would require all kinds of data sharing,” says Russell-Pinson, the founder and sole employee of Freecloud Design in Charlotte, N.C. “I would be kind of afraid to do that.” The software industry is bracing for new regulations—expected to be approved this week—that it says will stifle creativity and saddle small businesses with over-burdensome legal and technical costs. Read the full story here.
Sacred pages: Israeli authorities say they have put 5,000 fragments of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls online in a partnership with Google. The digital library is being launched today with important texts like the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the Ten Commandments, and a portion of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, dated to the first century B.C. It’s part of a broader attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts—who were once criticized for allowing them to be monopolized by small circles of scholars—to make them broadly available. You can find the digitized texts here.
