News & Notes Volume I, No. 34

• Banknote flowers for Valentine's Day (Borneo Post).
• February 16: 1659: The first British bank check (Money Week).
• Because they can only deal in cash, California's marijuana dispensaries pay their taxes in it (The Guardian). "The Sacramento branch of the California tax collection agency reeks of marijuana."
• There is DEFINITELY a War on Cash: The Game of Monopoly goes cashless (Trusted Reviews). The new version uses credit cards and a scanner.
• More Scottish discrimination (The Courier).
• Curacao sees a need to update its currency (Curacao Chronicle).
• More about the fate of the 500-Euro note (Reuters). Mario Draghi says a 200-Euro note is big enough. He's not waging a 'war on cash' (Bloomberg). EU finance ministers are sympathetic (The Guardian). And more from CNN (CNN Money).
• The Swiss 1000-Franc note isn't going anywhere (The Guardian). Maybe the U.S.$ 100 is next? (Daily News).
• Someone tried to game the online voting for the new Scottish 10-Pound note (OxStu). And here (The Independent). Oxford's Somerville College is her namesake.
• Upcoming Archives International auction (ARTFIX Daily).
• South Africa wants its banknotes back (Business Daily).
• The dos and don'ts of currency mutilation in Great Britain (Yahoo! Finance).
• The Confederate Greyback (Greenwich Sentinel).
• No more cash fares on Amsterdam buses (NL Times).
• Fifty years ago, Australia almost had a "royal" currency (Canberra Times).
• Notes will begin changing in Australia (The Australian). They'll become more tactile. The five-dollar note will feature the wattle (Herald Sun). And here (Sky News).
• Are Aussies hoarding their $100 notes? (Commonwealth Bank of Australia).
• Connecticut authorities feared that even the family's paper money was contaminated with Ebola (Courthouse News). 
• Women on U.S. notes (Coin World).
• Arizona's "Constitutional Tender" laws make progress towards a vote (Tenth Amendment Center).
• Someone is distributing free 50-Euro notes, accompanied by a Bible verse (Yahoo! News, in German).
• Stack's Bowers now owns Manifest Auctions (Coin World).
• How Hetty Green's family burned a million dollars (Atlas Obscura). Here's a link to some period journalism  (Chicago Tribune).
• BOOK: Chasing Gold:Incredible Story of How the Nazis stole Europe's Bullion, by George M. Taber (Wharton School of Business).
• Seminars and presentations scheduled for the upcoming Dallas National Money Show (COIN Week). 

                                               Nothing says "love" like money (Othman Ishak, in the Borneo Post).

• A 'hold' rating for Koenig & Bauer (Octa Finance).
• A banknote strapping industry report (Empowered News).
• "Banknote Security: Depth Profiling by Ambient Mass Spectrometry" (Spectroscopy NOW)

• "Substantial" thefts of banknotes from a Dutch printing facility (NL Times).
• Fake Indian notes aren't technically perfect, but they still deceive (Times of India).
• Avoiding counterfeit currency while traveling (Forbes). Generic advice.
• Reserve Bank of Australia's governor Stevens takes heat for the theft, last year, of banknotes meant to be incinerated (Australian Financial Review).
• "The Doctor" ran an international fake passport syndicate (The Telegraph).
• The 500-Euro note and crime (The Guardian, via HITC Business).
• Frustrated by the poor-quality counterfeits he bought online, he sought to make his own (Shanghai Daily).
• A case of fake ID cards (Transport Topics). Scary implications.
• At the candy shop, Benjamins came cheap (Chicago Sun-Times).
• COLLOQUIUM PAPER: "Criminal Capitalism in Imperial Russia: Counterfeiters, Merchants, and Gendarmes", by Sergei Antonov (NYU Jordan Center). More discussion of Antonov's presentation is here. The approach seems similar to Stephen Mihm's A Nation of Counterfeiters.
• She was arrested with green ink on her hands (Muskogee Phoenix).