The recent "voluntary recall" by Maclaren of a million strollers whose scissoring hinges could chop off kids' fingers is just another example of poor regulation of industry, if court papers cited by the NY Post this morning are true.

The Post dug up a suit showing that the British company knew five years ago that the strollers posed a possible threat. The Consumer Products Safety Commission says companies are required to report "immediately" when they learn of even a "potential hazard."

The Post story, however, puts all the blame on the company and none on the federal government's CPSC.

If there was a 2004 lawsuit in Connecticut accusing the company of a serious defect in the China-made strollers, why couldn't the CPSC have been proactive enough to find out about it and force a recall back then? There was a Web back then. That kind of thing is easy to keep track of, especially if you're a federal agency. And especially if the company is one of the U.K.'s biggest exporters to the U.S. of a product used by millions of Americans.

Depending on companies to report their own misdeeds is the kind of volunteerism that's not going to happen. So-called "voluntary regulation" doesn't work, as the Wall Street meltdown showed. Just one example: The Street's "self-regulatory" Securities Industry Association (actually a lobby) featured Bernie Madoff on its board of directors.

The reliance on e-mails as definitive, incriminating evidence of chicanery was once a given, but that didn't last long. Social media have now damaged the credibility of such e-mails, as the monumental Bear Stearns fraud verdict shows.

E-mails shooting back and forth during 2007 between Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin looked like bullets that hit the target, damning the two hedge-fund goniffs on charges of securities fraud. (See my previous item for details from the indictment.)

Such careless and stupid e-mails revealing crooked behavior doomed previous goniffs, like Jack Abramoff and his henchmen in the infamous Wampumgate corruption scandal of the Bush era. (The unmasking of that scandal was one of John McCain's finest moments, if you recall.) The e-mails wove a fascinating web of corruption extended to the religious right, several congressmen, and Karl Rove. And the e-mails not only brought Abramoff and crew to justice, but they forced congressmen out of their jobs.

But this is a new time, and texting and twittering have now convinced many people that e-mails are also thoughts on the fly that aren't necessarily proof or even strong evidence. That's obviously because we all now rue some of the thoughts on the fly that we text and twitter. And texting and twittering are even more careless and less thought-out than e-mails.

So cases built on e-mails no longer have the cred they once had.

But the problem is this: Those thoughts on the fly are often really good evidence of malicious or illegal intent. Twittering and texting have merely inured the common folk, blinding them to that fact. Just because someone twitters, texts, or e-mails incriminating statements doesn't make those statements not incriminating.

In any case, John Hueston, who prosecuted Enron's top crooks, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, says it best in this morning's New York Times:

The verdict in the Bear Stearns fraud case has far-reaching implications for Wall Street execs, and it's all good — for them.

Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin were found not guilty in Brooklyn federal court of fraud and other charges related to their blatant lying about their hedge funds, which were built on the subprime-mortgage house of cards.

In the only federal prosecution so far of any of the goniffs who helped cause last year's Wall Street meltdown, they got away with murder (of their investors' money), if you read the last year's indictment. Even their participation in the homicide of Bear Stearns (their funds lost almost $2 billion) was blessed by the jury, which said the prosecutors didn't give them enough evidence.

According to the indictment, back on March 2, 2007, Cioffi and Tannin were freaked out by their funds' extremely shaky — even doomed — liquidity because the subprime mortgages underlying the CDOs they were peddling were collapsing. They drank "a vodka toast" privately just for surviving the previous month without having to fold their huge hedge funds, and they kept their worries to themselves, not even telling their bosses, apparently. To investors, however, they lied, saying everything was hunky-dory (lie) and that they were putting their own money into their funds (lie).

The next day, March 3, according to the indictment, Cioffi told Tannin that things could be worse: "[W]e have our health and families ... [w]e are not a 19-year-old Marine in Iraq. ..."

The only real prosecution for securities fraud relating to the subprime crisis has flopped: Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin were acquitted today of fraud charges. A federal jury in Brooklyn took less than six hours to reach the verdict, after a month-long trial.

They were indicted in June 2008, a year after two funds they managed failed, costing investors a cool $1.6 billion. The duo were accused of not telling investors about the the shaky subprime-mortgage foundation of their funds.

The WSJ notes that the trial "trial was viewed a test of the boundary between putting a positive spin on bad results and outright fraud."

As my colleague James Lieber recently noted in a Voice cover story, Cioffi and Tannin were the targets of a Bush-era prosecution (and they were hardly big fish), and Barack Obama's crew has yet to launch a major securities fraud prosecution of its own.

In any case, the not-guilty verdict makes such prosecutions even more unlikely now.

Another psycho doctor: Baruch Goldstein

The most damning info is laid out in this morning's WashPost, which reports that the Virginia mosque he attended in 2001 featured a hard-line, militaristic imam named Anwar al-Aulaqi, who lectured admiringly about the strategies of an al-Qaeda military leader.

Increasingly, Hasan sounds like another crazy, extremist doctor, Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 praying Muslims and wounded 150 more in a suicidal, homicidal attack at a Hebron mosque in February 1994. Goldstein was a devotee of nut case radical Jew Meir Kahane. See this 2001 article for more on the extremist ultra-Orthodox Jewish movement in America that helped fuel Goldstein.

U.S. extremist Jews continue financing terroristic Jews in Israel. Remember crook lobbyist and ultra-Orthodox Jew Jack Abramoff? As I pointed out in September 2005, he funneled some of his ill-gotten funds to Jewish extremists in Israel who hunt Arab "rats."

No doubt extremist Muslims in the U.S. are doing the same thing for terroristic Muslims overseas. Just something to keep in mind as Hasan's links to radical Muslims are explored.

In any case, one of the clues dug up about Hasan should have disqualified him from treating any soldier: He cared for a bird he owned "by placing it in his mouth and allowing it to eat masticated food," as the NYT notes this morning.

Anyone who has had extensive experience with psychiatrists (as I have) would have seen that as a clue that this guy should have had his doctorate yanked.

The Fort Hood killer psychiatrist's case of pre-traumatic stress disorder couldn't be more clear.

Especially if it's true that Major Nidal Malik Hasan defended suicide bombing in an Internet post as a heroic, even life-saving, measure.

Perhaps we'll learn as details unfold that Hasan — himself a suicide killer — was one of the Army's psychiatrists and psychologists who were pressured during the first five years of the Iraq War to not diagnose screwed-up soldiers as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead, the Army's doctors were diagnosing soldiers as supposedly having "personality disorder," a pre-existing condition for which they wouldn't qualify for treatment. The military had a financial motive — keep healthcare costs down — in addition to the motive of covering up the huge PTSD problems of returning soldiers.

Who knows Hasan's motives at this point? (The WashPost has some good tidbits on his being a shrink assigned to study soldiers' trauma.) But perhaps his horribly twisted thinking was exacerbated by his legitimate frustration that Army docs like him were pressured for years to screw the screwed-up soldiers sent to them for diagnoses and treatment.

It's for sure that Hasan, like every other mental-health practitioner in the military, knew about that scandalous situation. Since 2007 or so, it has been laid out well in many mainstream outlets.

Everyday horror: A woman and her child flee from a burning compound during one of the Congo's typical election campaigns.

The soaring price of gold and the plummeting price of human life are converging this week. Is that good or bad news?

Gold prices surged to an all-time high today, spurred by the International Monetary Fund's sale of 200 tons of the stuff to India's central bank.

That's got to be great news for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which sits atop the world's most concentrated collection of untapped gold and other precious metals. Latest news on the Street shows that mining company Randgold advanced 6 percent after saying it's boosting its stake in the DRC's lucrative Moto gold deposit.

At this point, however, even more blood than anything else flows in the DRC, still the scene of the world's deadliest conflict since World War II.

Just yesterday, Human Rights Watch accused the UN peacekeeping force MONUC of actually supporting the Congo military's current campaign of murder and rape. The UN force is partners with the Congo army in Operation Kimia II.

The Congo is the rape capital of the world — sexual violence is a recognized tool of war — so the "rape of the Congo" is more than just a metaphor for the constant plundering of the country's natural resources.

Sad fact: The lust for the Congo's rich resources has never resulted in an easing of tensions over there, but has only intensified the civil war for control. So gold's record-high prices aren't exactly destined to spread peace and sunshine over central Africa.

It wasn't long ago when Frank DiPascali was called the "key" to the "global intrigue" of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

That was when his lawyer (Marc Mukasey, son of Bush era Department of Terror chief Michael Mukasey) crowed that DiPascali would be a snitch ""of a historic nature, somebody who can pull the curtain back on a fraud and answer a lot of questions" — questions that "the whole world wants to be answered."

You want answers? You want financial crooks brought to justice? Barack Obama's administration isn't doing it, as my colleague James Lieber points out this week. The best steps toward justice so far in both the Madoff scandal and Wall Street's meltdown are being taken by 2nd District federal judges in lower Manhattan. They're talking the talk and walking the walk.

In the murky Bank of America/Merrill Lynch affair, federal judge Jed Rakoff previously blasted both the bankers and Obama's SEC, rejecting their suspiciously kid-gloved settlement and ordering the case to trial. And now, in the Madoff scheme, federal judge Richard Sullivan has rejected a joint request by Obama's Justice Department prosecutors and DiPascali's lawyers to grant bail to the Madoff flunky.

Humorous fallout from the New Jersey corruption scandal involving politicians, rabbis, body parts, public works and contractors: Former Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joseph Ferriero, convicted about a week ago on federal corruption charges, gets to vote Tuesday because he hasn't yet been sentenced.

As a good Democrat, he would probably vote for Jon Corzine in the gubernatorial race, because Corzine's foe, Chris Christie, was the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Ferriero. But neither Corzine nor Christie is much of a bargain, so what's a crook to do?

Matt Friedman explains at PolitickerNJ.com that New Jersey law allows felons to vote until the time of their sentencing. Ferriero isn't the only pol on this list. So if Republican Christie were to lose the gubernatorial race against incumbent Democrat Corzine by only a few votes, the goniffs would have the last laugh.

Jeffry Picower, accused of raking in billions from pal Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, was found dead in the bottom of his Palm Beach swimming pool today.

The 67-year-old goniff and philanthropist got more than $2.4 billion from the fraud in just the past six years, according to court documents. Far from being a victim, authorities say, Picower "earned" up to 950 percent a year — not a bad return on Madoff's zero investments. (See the May 12 complaint.)

When he wasn't doing buyout deals, Picower did a lot of good with some of the gelt, through his foundation, which now is supposedly broke. It wasn't immediately known whether Picower's death was an accident, suicide, murder, or just bad karma. He was said to have been suffering from Parkinson's and other maladies.