Swiss Bank pleads guilty in US court

Swiss bank Wegelin is Switzerland's oldest bank. It pleaded guilty in a New York court to helping over 100 Americans evade their taxes in the amount of $1.2bn for almost 10 years.

Wegelin, based in the small Swiss town of St Gallen, started in business 35 years before the US declaration of independence.

It becomes the first foreign bank to plead guilty to tax evasion charges in the US.


The Wegelin case comes four years after Swiss bank UBS agreed to pay a $780m in fines under deferred prosecution agreement.  A deferred prosecution agreement is when a fine is paid in exchange for the charges being dropped.

It remains to be seen whether US authorities will continue with, or drop, parallel charges against three Wegelin bankers, Michael Berlinka, Urs Frei and Roger Keller.

AMD to design a 64-bit ARM Opteron for 2014

AMD combines ARM technology in new CPUs

AMD steps up its game and announces it is producing a 64-bit ARM technology-based server processor for 2014. It claims a highly integrated 64-bit multicore SOC for energy-efficient, high density servers.
By merging ARM and x86 architecture together, AMD is hoping their "ambidextrous"strategy will provide a level of flexibility the market is looking for.
AMD initially led the industry with the introduction of 64bit computing to the consumer market. They are looking to repeat their success by collaborating with ARM to bring 64bit multicore processors to the consuming masses. 2013 will show us know if AMD stays on track with their 65-bit ARM plans. New silicon implementations from Samsung and Apple will give us a quick sample of the 64 bit potential of ARM technology.

Making online impersonation unlawful

Arizona is set to introduce legislation that makes it unlawful to use another's name online. The worry here is that parody accounts of celebrities and public figures may be curbed by this legislation. However, under US law, a defence to defamation is the first amendment which guarantees that free speech is protected under US constitution. What is not protected under the first amendment is criminal action that seeks to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten others through spooling emails, text or other devious motive in the online space.  Many other state have similar legislation, namely California, New York and Texas, and this trend should expand as online frauds and identify theft become more serious  driving up insurance rates and curbing confidence in the economy which increasingly depends on the internet and the cloud.