Uki Goni writes:  Under a torrential downpour, hundreds of thousands of people marched in silence in Buenos Aires on Wednesday evening. Soaked to the bone, old and young alike held their ground to pay tribute to Alberto Nisman, the crusading prosecutor whose deathi under mysterious circumstances one month ago has created political turmoil with as yet unforeseeable consequences in Argentina.

If such a massive and spontaneous display of respect for the man who dared accuse Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in court of attempting to cover up what he alleged was Iran’s role in the deadliest terrorist bombing in Argentina’s history grated on the mind of the president, she certainly did not show it.

The march came days after Nisman’s 289-page criminal complaint was made public. Nisman’s death may yet prematurely end her time in office, but Fernández’s life story to date reads like a fairytale.r.

Unlike Evita, who held no elected post, the energetic and highly intelligent Fernández launched herself into an independent political career that quickly outshone that of her husband.

With the economy in tatters but with no viable opposition to question his bold tactics, Kirchner stood up to big business and bondholders and led the economy on a dramatic turnaround that felt nothing short of miraculous. The couple’s popularity ratings soared to over 70% and stayed there for years. In 2007.

Buoyed by solid approval ratings and a booming economy, Argentina’s first elected female president introduced generous social spending programmes that boosted her popularity even further. The reforms included what may be her proudest achievement, a universal child benefit plan that has helped many families out of poverty and raised school attendance to peak levels.

Robert Parry writes:  Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who has become the face of reform for the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev and will be a key figure handling billions of dollars in Western financial aid, was at the center of insider deals and other questionable activities when she ran a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund.

Prior to taking Ukrainian citizenship and becoming Finance Minister last December, Jaresko was a former U.S. diplomat who served as chief executive officer of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by Congress in the 1990s and overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) to help jumpstart an investment economy in Ukraine.

But Jaresko, who was limited to making $150,000 a year at WNISEF under the U.S. AID grant agreement, managed to earn more than that amount, reporting in 2004 that she was paid $383,259 along with $67,415 in expenses.

Jaresko formed HCA and EEGF with two other WNISEF officers, Mark Iwashko and Lenna Koszarny. They also started a third firm, Horizon Capital Advisors, which “serves as a sub-advisor to the Investment Manager, HCA.

From 2007 to 2011, WNISEF co-invested $4.25 million with EEGF in Kerameya LLC, a Ukrainian brick manufacturer, and WNISEF sold EEGF 15.63 percent of Moldova’s Fincombank for $5 million, the report said. It also listed extensive exchanges of personnel and equipment between WNISEF and Horizon Capital.

Prior to the coup and the resulting civil war, Jaresko’s WNISEF was generously spreading money around. The “long-term equity incentive plan” was “not compensation from Government Grant funds but a separately USAID-approved incentive plan funded from investment sales proceeds”.

The filing also said the bonuses were paid regardless of whether the overall fund was making money, noting that this “compensation was not contingent on revenues or net earnings, but rather on a profitable exit of a portfolio company that exceeds the baseline value set by the board of directors and approved by USAID” – with Jaresko also serving as a director on the board responsible for setting those baseline values.

Despite ethical questions, Jaresko is cited by the New York Times has sharing American vaues.  Ar Davos she castigated Russian President Vladimir Putin:

Jaresko’s ex husband Figlus provided a narrative of events as he saw them as a limited partner in EEGF, saying he initially “believed everything she [Jaresko] was doing, you know, was proper.” Later, however, Figlus “learned that Jaresko began borrowing money from HCA REDACTED.

Last December, Jaresko had resigned from her WNISEF-related positions, taken Ukrainian citizenship and started her new job as Ukraine’s Finance Minister.

Showing how much Jaresko’s network is penetrating the new Ukrainian government, another associate, Estonian Jaanika Merilo, has been brought on to handle Ukraine’s foreign investments. Merilo’s Ukrainian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (UVCA), which is committed to “representing interests of private equity investors to policymakers and improving the investment and business climate in Ukraine,” included Jaresko’s Horizon Capital as a founder.

The question remains whether Jaresko’s is the right kind of experience to handle IMF money and whether the money will go to help the impoverished people of Ukraine or simply wind up lining the pockets of the well-heeled and the well-connected.  Finance Between the Bullets

Walter Russell Mead writes: The most interesting, as opposed to the most explosive, component of Syriza’s agenda is its commitment to attack the “oligarchs”—the small number of extremely wealthy, powerful, and well-connected Greek families and individuals who sit at the top of Greece’s deeply corrupt, clientelist system. The struggle against the the oligarchs is heating up.  The “oligarchs” include private TV channels, “crony” bank loans for the well-connected, majority shareholdings of private banks.  Can aggressive tax audits be used on offshore bank accounts?

Jeremy Scahill and John Begley write:  SIM cards were not invented to protect individual communications — they were designed to do something much simpler: ensure proper billing and prevent fraud, which was pervasive in the early days of cellphones. Soghoian compares the use of encryption keys on SIM cards to the way Social Security numbers are used today. “Social security numbers were designed in the 1930s to track your contributions to your government pension,” he says. “Today they are used as a quasi national identity number, which was never their intended purpose.”

The only effective way for individuals to protect themselves from Ki theft-enabled surveillance is to use secure communications software, rather than relying on SIM card-based security. Secure software includes email and other apps that use Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mechanism underlying the secure HTTPS web protocol. The email clients included with Android phones and iPhones support TLS, as do large email providers like Yahoo and Google.    Hacking SIM cards

The Italian coastguard launched a massive operation to rescue more than 2,000 migrants in difficulty between the Italian island of Lampedusa and the Libyan coast.

Italy said it was evacuating staff from its embassy in Libya and suspended operations there, highlighting the worsening security situation in the violence-plagued country.

Some 2,164 migrants coming from Libya had to be saved from a dozen boats, Italian media reported, citing the country’s emergency services.

More than 900 other migrants were picked up by coastguard and customs police boats, while the rest were rescued by various ships in the area, the TV station said.

The Italian transport ministry said some of its coastguards had been threatened by four armed men earlier in the day who approached them by speedboat from the Libyan coast.

Last year, more than 3,200 people died while attempting to reach Italy by boat from North Africa.  The United Nations has described the sea crossing as the most dangerous route in the world.

To get more support, governments tie these immigrants to terrorism.  While this may well be the case, what is clear to us is that women and their children are involved.  While this particular instance in Italy may not involved human trafficking, it calls our attention to the perils of a treacherous journey taken for often nefarious reasons.

A fictional account of what is going on was written by popular Italian writer Andrea Camilleri in  Rounding the Mark, in which two seemingly unrelated deaths form the central mystery.  They take Detective Montalbano deep into a secret world of illicit trafficking in human lives.  Women’s children are wrested from families by profiteers who make vast sums of money selling them.