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Symbol # Picks Authors
BLAP 4 Carlito , rdragon , hlsh , conix
CINT 3 GreyGoose_69 , MrPink33 , Quickinvestmentss
SAEI 2 paramount , J Bling
NSCT 2 jimmybob , Shylo
LBGE 2 Carlito , spikerbrad
VMGI 1 konantroutman
VIZS 1 Quickinvestmentss
VCTY 1 Pittsburgh_Chillin
TLAN 1 cheftrader
SSPTD 1 PipBoy
SREH 1 Le2dynasty
SPPH 1 bigtuna177
SMPP 1 Le2dynasty
SFIO 1 dayadoger
SFAZ 1 PIZZABUSTER1
PRMO 1 XuanLongSon
PHIG 1 shavitmi
PCLI 1 madras50
MXGD 1 bjizzle
IGSM 1 saddis12
EPCG 1 Tony_From_MI
ECOF 1 =idFix=
CGFIA 1 uponstocks4me
BILL 1 BEIJING BILL
AWYI 1 jamon1
AVTI 1 cjstocksup
AVEW 1 danrpoints
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CYCA 3 john7777 , anydaynow_1ar , tradingspaz
MFTH 2 rich007cia , makeitme
CWRN 2 grajekk , anydaynow_1ar
TIVU 1 luvpennies
PPBL 1 theliwhiteshark
PCLI 1 luvpennies
NEGS 1 x-ray-eyes
NBVG 1 luvpennies
MMUH 1 Zoro99
MDFI 1 ask_jr
LBGE 1 luvpennies
HSCC 1 brackep
GRNE 1 luvpennies
DKAMD 1 trading_wiz
CYPW 1 grajekk
CIST 1 luvpennies
CALVF 1 thegerb49
BLAP 1 luvpennies
Top Ticker Mentions in Chat
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Highest Percentage Gainer Penny Stocks
SYMB Last %Chg Volume
PTRZ 0.05 150.0% 8,400
NRTLQ 0.02 100.0% 3,429,800
NASV 0.02 100.0% 956,700
THMG 0.35 66.7% 6,000
AIMH 0.02 57.4% 65,900
EHMI 0.09 50.0% 2,138,600
TWDL 0.06 50.0% 4,300
URCO 0.03 50.0% 807,900
ECOS 0.03 50.0% 417,100
LJPC 0.03 50.0% 173,900
BSGC 0.03 50.0% 11,000
Penny Stock Price Jumps
SYMB Last %Chg Volume
EHMI 0.09 50.0% 2,138,600
SVMI 0.02 33.3% 5,088,106
CRYP 1.59 27.2% 2,509,216
TAON 0.01 25.0% 6,009,521
AIB 1.28 23.1% 32,528,972
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SYMB Last %Chg Volume
ADPAS 0.02 0.0% 223,125,696
ACTC 0.16 22.4% 59,319,688
IRE 2.64 22.2% 53,358,512
ALTO 0.03 12.3% 35,653,284
VCTY 0.0016 -36.0% 35,324,248
Penny Stocks (Most Active)
SYMB Last %Chg Volume
ADPAS 0.02 0.0% 133,125,700
CGFIA 0.0019 5.6% 71,729,500
ACTC 0.16 23.1% 61,794,200
CBAI 0.004 0.0% 51,617,800
ALTO 0.03 0.0% 35,943,100
VCTY 0.0016 -36.0% 35,324,200
AWYI 0.0017 -15.0% 33,409,100
LFBG 0.0054 -6.9% 30,183,900
USOG 0.0027 35.0% 30,118,200
ABWTQ 0.03 -25.0% 24,982,200
BLAP 0.009 45.2% 14,469,500
Penny Stocks (Most Active)
SYMB Last %Chg Volume
ADPAS 0.02 0.0% 133,125,700
CGFIA 0.0019 5.6% 71,729,500
ACTC 0.16 23.1% 61,794,200
CBAI 0.004 0.0% 51,617,800
ALTO 0.03 0.0% 35,943,100
VCTY 0.0016 -36.0% 35,324,200
AWYI 0.0017 -15.0% 33,409,100
LFBG 0.0054 -6.9% 30,183,900
USOG 0.0027 35.0% 30,118,200
ABWTQ 0.03 -25.0% 24,982,200
BLAP 0.009 45.2% 14,469,500
Swiss supporters: WikiLeaks server goes down
AP - Sun Dec 05, 2:09AM CST
FILE - In this March 17, 2010 file photo, a PayPal employee walks past the PayPal logo at the international headquarters in Singapore. The online payment service provider PayPal has cut off the...
GENEVA (AP) — A Swiss group that supports WikiLeaks says the website's main server in France has gone offline.
Denis Simonet of the Swiss Pirate Party says his group is currently redirecting the domain wikileaks.ch to another server based in Sweden.
Simonet told The Associated Press by phone Sunday that the switch could take several hours but that the site that publishes leaked classified documents is still reachable through the numerical address of its Swedish server.
He was unable to immediately say why the French server stopped working.
WikiLeaks has come under attack from governments and private individuals since releasing thousands of classified U.S. State Department messages last month.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Brazils Vale says HK shares to start trading
KELVIN CHAN - AP - Sun Dec 05, 12:41AM CST
Related Stocks
VALE - Vale S.A.
Sym Last Chg Pct
VALE 34.32 +0.75 +2.23%
HONG KONG (AP) — Brazil's Vale mining company, the world's biggest producer of iron ore, says that a secondary listing of its shares will start trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Wednesday as it seeks greater access to investors in China's booming economy.
Vale SA said Sunday the shares will be in the form of two classes of Hong Kong Depositary Receipts.
They will be the first Hong Kong Depositary Receipts to trade on the city's stock exchange since the framework was set up more than two years ago.
Vale officials said the company will not actually be raising any money by selling new shares. Each depositary receipt will instead represent one Vale share traded in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Vale's primary listing is.
Company executives said they hope to attract more investors from Asia, especially China, which was its biggest source of revenue in 2009 at 37 percent.
"Our commitment to Asia is for the long term so I'm not worried whether it (the Hong Kong Depositary Receipts) will be successful six months from now," said Chief Financial Officer Guilherme Cavalcanti.
Vale is counting on growth from China and other developing Asian countries to make up for slowing growth from developed Western countries, Cavalcanti said.
China has been investing in large infrastructure projects such as roads, airports, railways, factories, bridges and housing, which all require vast amounts of steel.
Steel's main ingredient is iron ore.
China's neighbors such as India are also investing in infrastructure projects, which will also help demand outpace supply for the minerals it produces, Cavalcanti said.
Hong Kong's stock market is trying to diversify its business as it faces increasing competition from its rivals in China.
Allowing overseas companies to list their shares in Hong Kong through depositary receipts is part of the stock exchange's strategic plan to diversify the types of companies traded.
Vale studied other Asian markets but chose Hong Kong because the market is large, has many individual investors and draws investors from China and other Asian countries, said Roberto Castello Branco, the company's director of investor relations.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
US cable: China leaders ordered hacking on Google
GILLIAN WONG - AP - Sun Dec 05, 3:46PM CST
In this photo taken Monday, March 22, 2010, a Chinese woman cleans the Google logo outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing, China. A leaked U.S. government cable shows sources told...
Related Stocks
GOOG - Google Inc.
Sym Last Chg Pct
GOOG 573.00 +1.18 +0.21%
BEIJING (AP) — Contacts told American diplomats that hacking attacks against Google were ordered by China's top ruling body and a senior leader demanded action after finding search results that were critical of him, leaked U.S. government memos show.
One memo sent by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to Washington said a "well-placed contact" told diplomats the Chinese government coordinated the attacks late last year on Google Inc. under the direction of the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of Communist Party power.
The details of the memos, known in diplomatic parlance as cables, could not be verified. Chinese government departments either refused to comment or could not be reached. If true, the cables show the political pressures that were facing Google when it decided to close its China-based search engine in March.
The cable about the hacking attacks against Google, which was classified as secret by Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Goldberg, was released by WikiLeaks.
The New York Times said the cable, dated early this year, quoted the contact as saying that propaganda chief Li Changchun, the fifth-ranked official in the country, and top security official Zhou Yongkang oversaw the hacking of Google. Both men are members of the Politburo Standing Committee.
The cable notes that it is unclear if Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao were aware of the reported actions before Google went public about the attacks in January.
The Times, however, said doubts about the allegation have arisen after the newspaper interviewed the person cited in the cable, who denied knowing who directed the hacking attacks on Google. The Times did not identify the person it interviewed.
Another contact cited in that cable said he believed an official on the top political body was "working actively with Chinese Internet search engine Baidu against Google's interests in China."
Google's relations with Beijing have been tense since the U.S.-based search giant said in January it no longer wanted to cooperate with Chinese Web censorship following computer hacking attacks on Google's computer code and efforts to break into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists. Google closed its mainland China-based search engine on March 22 and began routing users to its uncensored Hong Kong site.
Google's spokeswoman in Tokyo, Jessica Powell, said the company had no comment on the cables released by Wikileaks, and on the hacking attacks, referred to a January statement that said it had evidence that the attack came from China. Google at the time declined to say whether the government was involved.
A man who answered the phone at the spokesman's office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said no one was available to comment Sunday. Calls to the Foreign Ministry and the State Council Information Office, which is responsible for regulating Internet contact, rang unanswered.
The hacking that angered Google and hit dozens of other businesses was part of a rash of attacks aimed at a wide array of targets, from a British military contractor to banks. Experts said then the highly skilled attacks suggested the military or other government agencies might be breaking into computers to steal technology and trade secrets to help state companies.
In February, Peng Bo, a high-ranking official with the Internet bureau of the State Council Information Office, said the Chinese government was not involved in or supportive of cyber attacks, and called such accusations "sheer nonsense."
A separate cable released by WikiLeaks showed a Politburo member demanded action against Google after looking for his own name on the search engine and finding criticism of him.
In the version of the May 18, 2009, cable released by Wikileaks, the identity of the official was apparently removed. But the Times reported it was Li, the propaganda chief.
The cable, classified as confidential, cited a source as saying the Chinese official had realized that Google's worldwide site is uncensored, capable of Chinese language searches and search results, and that there is a link from the home page of its China site, google.cn, to google.com.
The official "allegedly entered his own name and found results critical of him," and asked three government ministries to write a report about Google and "demand that the company ceases its 'illegal activities,' which include linking to google.com," the cable said.
The cable said American officials could neither confirm nor deny the details given by the contacts about the Chinese leadership's action.
A contact also said that China asked its three state-owned telecommunications companies to stop working with the search giant, the cable showed. China's main state-owned phone carriers are China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Michael Jackson glove brings $330,000 at auction
AP - Sun Dec 05, 3:47PM CST
In this Saturday Dec. 4, 2010 photo provided by Julien’s Auctions, auctioneer Michael Doyle auctions Michael Jackson memorabilia at the "Icons and Idols" at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills. A...
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Items from the Michael Jackson's stage wardrobe, including one of the King of Pop's famous gloves, attracted furious bidding at an auction of celebrity memorabilia in Beverly Hills.
Julien's Auctions says a lone glove worn by Jackson during the "Bad" tour in the late 1980s sold for $330,000 at the "Icons & Idols" auction Saturday night. A jacket signed by Jackson brought in $96,000 and a fedora he wore on stage went for $72,000 at the Julien's Auctions event.
Other highlights from the auction were an x-ray of Albert Einstein's brain, which brought $38,750, and a pair of Marilyn Monroe's empty prescription bottles sold for $18,750.
A military-style jacket worn by John Lennon for a 1966 Life Magazine photo shoot sold for $240,000.
Julien's Auctions says the two-day event brought in more than $3 million.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Vt. city stumbles in effort to do telecom itself
DAVE GRAM - AP - Sun Dec 05, 2:17PM CST
In this photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 2, 201, fiber-optic cables are seen at Burlington Telecom in Burlington, Vt. City-owned Burlington Telecom offers Cadillac service _ fiber-optic broadband _...
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — Tired of waiting for state-of-the-art communications technology, voters of Vermont's biggest city decided in 2000 to form their own company to provide telephone, Internet and cable TV service.
Nearly 11 years later, city-owned Burlington Telecom offers Cadillac service — fiber-optic broadband — to nearly every home and business in the city. But it has signed up far fewer customers than hoped, it's $50 million in debt, its main creditor is threatening to repossess equipment and it is under state and federal criminal investigations.
The saga may be a cautionary tale for cities around the country that are fed up with waiting for their onramp to the information superhighway and contemplating getting into the telecom business themselves.
"I understand that sort of thought process, that people would feel better about having something that's community-driven and not delivered by an outside corporation," said David O'Brien, commissioner of the Vermont Public Service Department, which regulates utilities.
Burlington would seem a likely place for residents to come down in favor of a public enterprise over private ones. The city of just under 40,000 is home to the University of Vermont and is famous for left-leaning politics. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the only self-described small-s socialist in the U.S. Senate, is its former mayor. The city electric utility is well regarded.
And many who have signed up for BT are happy with it. "It's terrific. It's great in every way. I'm a big supporter. I'd love to see this work," said Suzi Wizowaty, a Vermont House member from Burlington. But she added, "I know there are a lot of people who are worried about it."
Telecom is not for the faint of heart. It's a competitive business.
"If you decide you are going to do this, understand that you are going to have to deliver customer service in a way that your municipality has never done before," said Gary Evans, CEO of Hiawatha Broadband Communication, which manages both municipal and its own for-profit telecom networks in Minnesota and Wisconsin and has been advising Burlington Telecom.
He and others who follow municipal telecom efforts around the country say the record for them has not been perfect, but generally has been good.
"There are some municipal systems that have done very well," said Michael Render, president of Tulsa, Okla.-based RVA Market Research, which follows development of fiber-to-the-home systems like Burlington's.
He noted, though, that the roughly 70 municipalities offering fiber-to-the-home have a combined market share of about 3 percent of the industry. More than two-thirds of fiber-to-the-home customers in the U.S. get their service from Verizon Communications, Render said.
Success in a competitive telecom markets is measured in "take rates"— what percentage of customers that could be served by a system actually sign up for it. Render said some municipalities have take rates in the high 50s. Burlington's is about 30 for residential customers and much lower for commercial users, said Michael Flora, BT's network planning and construction manager.
The consensus among a range of people watching Burlington Telecom is that it suffers from a combination of factors that doom many businesses, chief among them too much debt and not enough revenue. That was also the conclusion of a special commission appointed to look at BT last winter.
Some $17 million of that debt is especially problematic from a legal standpoint. When the Vermont Legislature approved the Burlington charter change that allowed setting up BT, it required that the venture be a stand-alone entity and that it not use taxpayers' money to support its operations.
In September 2009, BT notified the Vermont Public Service Board that it had used $17 million in city funds in violation of its state license. State officials have been mum about the details of their investigation, and an FBI spokesman, through an assistant, would not confirm or deny a Burlington Free Press report that that agency had stepped in. It's widely believed that apparent license violation may be at the center of the criminal probes.
The other $33.5 million of BT's $50.5 million debt is owed to an arm of New York-based Citicorp. BT was notified in October that due to its failure to make recent scheduled payments, Citi Capital Advisors was terminating the lease covering BT's equipment.
A Citicorp spokesman said the giant finance company would not comment. A Nov. 3 letter to O'Brien from Kevin Fitzgerald, a lawyer for Citicorp, said the lease terms say that if Burlington doesn't make its payments, the lease is "automatically terminated and the City of Burlington is obligated to return to Citi the property and equipment financed."
O'Brien said the BT experience should be a flashing yellow light for the East-Central Vermont Community Fiber Network, a consortium of 22 mostly small, rural towns that are trying to develop a fiber-optic-based provider of phone, Internet and TV service.
He said two of the larger communities where customers would be expected to make such a system go — Montpelier and White River Junction — already have providers of all three services in place, a competitive situation similar to what BT has faced.
Not everyone has given up on BT, least of all Mayor Bob Kiss. The second-term mayor said the city is looking for new financing for BT's equipment, for possible private-sector partners, and is even weighing a proposal from a group of investors to buy the system outright.
Kiss, a member of the left-leaning Progressive Party, which has played a leading role in Burlington politics for three decades, said city officials are convinced more residents and business will sign up for BT services, and that its fiber optic network will come to be seen a key to economic development.
"It has enormous value to the city of Burlington," he said.
But questions over its financing loom:
— A criminal investigation by the Vermont State Police that began last winter after the revelation about the $17 million is expected to be completed in the coming weeks, with the results sent to a county prosecutor for a decision about whether any charges will be filed.
— The FBI has joined in the probe, the Burlington Free Press reported Wednesday.
— An audit by a consultant hired by the Vermont Public Service Department likely will be released later this month.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Coal truck overturns at Massey site; driver killed
AP - Sun Dec 05, 11:43AM CST
Related Stocks
MEE - Massey Energy Company
Sym Last Chg Pct
MEE 50.42 +0.17 +0.34%
SCARBRO, W.Va. (AP) — Federal mine regulators say a coal-hauling truck overturned at a Massey Energy Co. mine site in West Virginia, killing the driver.
Amy Louviere, a spokeswoman for the Mine Safety and Health Administration, says the truck overturned around 5:30 p.m. Saturday on a haul road in Scarbro, which is about 50 miles southeast of Charleston.
Louviere said in an e-mail Sunday that two inspectors were sent to investigate the wreck, which may have been caused by faulty brakes and icy roads.
The truck was operated by a contractor, Medford Trucking. Massey said in a news release Sunday that the crash happened at the company's Republic Energy operation. Massey says it will investigate the crash and work to ensure its haul roads are safe.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Schaeuble: markets testing the eurozone
AP - Sun Dec 05, 11:42AM CST
BERLIN (AP) — Germany's finance minister says financial markets are currently testing whether the eurozone will survive but the 16-nation monetary union won't break up.
German mass-circulation tabloid Bild quoted Wolfgang Schaeuble as saying Sunday that dissolving the eurozone would be "immensely more expensive" than the current support measures.
The German public has been skeptical about bailing out troubled eurozone members such as Greece and Ireland.
Schaeuble also was quoted as saying that a breakup of the eurozone would have "unforeseeable economical consequences" and lead to more unemployment and troubled banks.
He says the euro is the world's second most important currency but that markets are questioning a monetary union that lacks a common financial policy.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Bermuda signs tax treaty with China
AP - Sun Dec 05, 11:40AM CST
HAMILTON, Bermuda (AP) — Bermuda has signed a tax information-exchange treaty with China.
Bermudian Premier Paula Cox says the treaty is a "significant step forward in cementing political and economic ties" between the Asian giant and the tiny British territory — a low-tax haven where thousands of global companies have set up shop since the 1980s.
Bermuda issued a statement Sunday saying that the tax pact was signed Thursday.
In recent years, Bermuda has been recognized for substantially implementing an international tax standard monitored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
It was previously on the organization's "gray list" for not being more transparent with its banking information.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Cuomo gets rare fight from Wall Street car czar
DAVID B. CARUSO - AP - Sun Dec 05, 11:35AM CST
FILE - In this file photo of Oct. 1, 2010, Andrew Cuomo responds to questions during a news conference in New York during his gubernatorial campaign. Cuomo, New York's governor elect, and Steven...
NEW YORK (AP) — In his four years as New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo had his way with Wall Street, muscling banks and bankers into paying fines, making reforms and eating crow for their errors during the financial crisis.
Few bothered to fight back. Most figured it was smarter to take their lumps than risk a public showdown, even in instances where Cuomo appeared to lack clear authority to investigate or regulate.
But finally, Cuomo has a battle on his hands — just as he is leaving office.
Steven Rattner, the financier who led the Obama administration's restructuring of the auto industry and is connected to the city's most rich and powerful people, called Cuomo a bully and said he'd see him in court after the two men failed to reach a deal to resolve civil wrongdoing charges in an influence-peddling scandal.
For months, the two had been at odds over what kind of penalty Rattner should pay for being among a number of money managers who tried to curry favor with state officials while trying to land lucrative government pension fund investment deals in 2004 and 2005.
The juiciest allegation was that he helped the brother of a state official get a DVD distribution deal for his stalled film project.
Whatever negotiations the two sides had finally failed this autumn, when Cuomo — as he campaigned to become governor — demanded that Rattner pay a far stiffer fine than anyone else involved in the case.
When Rattner resisted — as he promoted his book about overhauling the auto industry — the attorney general got a chance to wield the stick he often brandishes, but rarely uses. He sued Rattner for $26.2 million and sought to have him banned from the securities industry for life.
At that point, Rattner, who had settled identical allegations with the SEC for $6.2 million, abandoned the safe course, first saying in a press release that he "wouldn't be bullied" into paying a fine he considered extortive, and then accusing Cuomo of behavior unbecoming to the state's highest elected official.
"Over the past 15 months ... I have been subjected to every kind of threat of prosecution and punishment known to man practically," he told journalist Charlie Rose — a personal friend — in a program broadcast Nov. 22.
"I don't think as a prosecutor you should let emotion get in the way. You should deal with facts. The SEC looked at facts and came to a set of conclusions. Andrew Cuomo chose instead to rely on his emotions."
He added, "This is not the kind of behavior I think we want out of an attorney general or a governor."
Cuomo hasn't commented, but spokesman Richard Bamberger said anyone familiar with the facts of the case would find Rattner's claim that he had done nothing wrong, "ridiculous."
In calling Cuomo a bully, Rattner was merely repeating a charge that has been lobbed against New York's governor-elect since his earliest days in politics.
As an aide to his father, Mario, Cuomo was nicknamed "The Prince of Darkness" for serving as the campaign's enforcer. Wall Street types have grumbled about Cuomo's sharp elbows, too, but not publicly — in part because that for all his toughness, Cuomo also had a reputation for being willing to settle his regulatory actions quickly, on terms far less expensive than a court fight.
Even federal officials have had issues with Cuomo's aggressiveness.
In a report, the SEC's inspector general revealed that the commission delayed its fraud lawsuit against Goldman Sachs by a day to avoid stealing thunder from a Cuomo announcement of a settlement in the pension fund kickback case. SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro said she was worried Cuomo would be "very upset" if the commission trumped his announcement.
As attorney general, the tough-guy approach served Cuomo well. It is unclear how it will fare in Albany. The last crusading attorney general to take the office, Eliot Spitzer, bragged that he was a political "steamroller," but his style as an intimidator doomed his initiatives, even before he lost his office in a prostitution scandal.
Cuomo's legal battle with Rattner is filled with subtleties about where to draw the line between legal influence-building and outright corruption.
Regulators said that in addition to the DVD distribution deal, Rattner's firm, The Quadrangle Group, also agreed to pay $1 million in unnecessary "placement agent" fees to the state comptroller's top campaign aide.
Neither side has an easy argument, and while Cuomo's office and the Securities and Exchange Commission have filed civil suits and criminal charges against several financial advisers and state officials, everyone involved in the matter has sought to keep it out of a courtroom.
Financial firms collectively paid more than $150 million in penalties to put the matter behind them. Everyone facing a criminal charge has pleaded guilty, though usually to lesser counts unlikely to carry jail time.
It is unclear how much Cuomo will be engaged in the case going forward.
In a matter of weeks, he will turn over the attorney general's office to Eric Schneiderman, another Democrat
The big question may be whether Schneiderman is willing to break from Cuomo's view and adopt the more moderate stance taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Rattner, a former New York Times reporter who made a fortune on Wall Street and counts his former newspaper's publisher and billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg among his closest friends, has the money to fight indefinitely if he chooses.
"I am more in a fighting mode today than I was two weeks ago," he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Nov. 29, although he added that he was ready to settle at any time — for a fine within reason.
Rattner has also brandished a stick of his own, threatening to raise Cuomo's conduct in the case as an issue in the litigation.
Already, the financier's lawyers have sought records from people involved in the case, including former state officials who have pleaded guilty to criminal charges. They have filed a lawsuit accusing partners at his former firm, the Quadrangle Group, of selling him out and taking his money, and asked a judge to force Cuomo's office to turn over any correspondence his staff had with journalists.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
New Resorts owner: All ailing casino needs is love
WAYNE PARRY - AP - Sun Dec 05, 11:03AM CST
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Asked about his plans to save Resorts Atlantic City, the first casino in the United States to open outside Nevada, new owner Dennis Gomes briefly touches on spruced up hotel rooms, guest suites and a snazzier casino floor.
But what the place really needs, he says, is a whole lotta love, with some positive spiritual energy thrown in.
Despite his buttoned-down appearance, Gomes is not your typical casino executive.
"There's something in the martial arts called 'chi,' the life energy that guides you ... I think I give energy," said Gomes, a veteran casino executive who got approval on Wednesday to buy the struggling casino with partner Morris Bailey for the fire-sale price of $31.5 million from lenders who had taken it over a year ago.
"I think love is the most powerful force in the universe. If you do everything from love, you can tap into that energy," he told the Casino Control Commission, drawing big laughs by adding, "those Wall Street guys hate that."
In his 30-plus years as a casino executive and regulator — his tenure as Nevada's top casino corruption investigator was chronicled in the 1995 Martin Scorsese film "Casino" — Gomes has marched to the tune of a different drummer.
As head of Atlantic City's Tropicana Casino and Resort, he pitted a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken against customers, and used billboards of Fidel Castro to hype a Cuban-themed shopping and dining mall.
To promote the opening of an Indiana racetrack casino, he hired a Barack Obama lookalike who pitched the gambling hall as a fiscal stimulus package, knowing the White House would object and generate free publicity.
But his latest challenge will be his biggest. The purchase of Resorts from a consortium of lenders is due to be finalized on Monday.
At 6 a.m. Tuesday, Gomes will be at his desk in the casino, starting work on promised upgrades to hotel rooms, new restaurants, the addition of suites on the top floor of the casino's second hotel tower, and sexy 1920s-style flapper costumes for female employees.
He's re-branding the casino with a roaring '20s theme, in part to capitalize on the popularity of "Boardwalk Empire," the hit HBO show about Prohibition-era Atlantic City. Highlights include a strolling violinist in a zoot suit, and a singing bartender "who can sit at the bar and sing in this angelic voice and mix drinks and make change and never miss a beat and never get out of tune."
Those changes will come around New Year's Eve; of more immediate concern is putting more people into more hotel rooms and getting them to spend more money at Resorts.
The casino reported a gross operating loss of $2.9 million for the third quarter compared with a gross operating profit of $706,000 a year ago. The casino took in an average of $446,011 a day in October, ranking it 10th out of Atlantic City's 11 casinos. By comparison, the city's top-earning casino, the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa averaged more than $1.8 million a day the same month.
For the first 10 months of this year, Resorts has taken in $135.5 million, down 18.2 percent from the same period last year.
Gomes says the 942-room Resorts needs to immediately increase its hotel occupancy rate, which is averaging 65 percent compared to the citywide average of 85 percent. By concentrating on midweek convention and meeting business, Resorts should be able to show quick results in raising that number and increasing its overall revenues by spring, he said.
He said he has already heard from people interested in opening restaurants, a sports bar and a new nightclub at Resorts.
Of course, New Jersey regulators heard those same promises from Resorts' prior owners, Los Angeles hedge fund Colony Capital LLC, when they got their last license renewal in January 2008.
Why, they asked Gomes, should we believe you?
"We're committed that we're going to make capital improvements," Gomes told them. "You have our word. It's going to happen."
For that to happen, his partner Bailey will have to write some checks. The New York developer is the money behind the Resorts deal. A man who started out delivering newspapers in Atlantic City as a child, he became rich buying Burger King franchises in New Jersey (he once had 52 of them), before branching out to the hotel business.
His New York holdings once included Halloran House (now the Marriott East Side) and the Grand Bay Hotel, along with real estate holdings in Montreal and Scottsdale, Ariz.
"I'm bringing financial stability," Bailey said. He's also bringing $10 million in cash to keep the casino operating after the ownership switch happens, and an additional $10 million for capital expenses.
Gomes and Bailey project that Resorts will turn a profit in 2011 — even as the Atlantic City market continues to struggle. They base their optimism on plans to hire new player development executives, sponsor slot tournaments, and increase room comps, according to paperwork filed with the state Division of Gaming Enforcement.
Resorts has long catered to elderly gamblers who ride the bus here to play slots for a few hours, eat at a buffet and then go home the same day. But Gomes says the casino must adopt Atlantic City's mantra of offering more non-gambling attractions in order to survive.
"It's not about gambling anymore," he said. "The convenience gamblers are gone. You need to create other things for people to do. Resorts is going to embody a lot of those things."
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Hairy vs. Harry: Tangled wins weekend box office
DAVID GERMAIN - AP - Sun Dec 05, 11:50AM CST
In this film publicity image released by Disney, Rapunzel, voiced by Mandy Moore, right, and Flynn, voiced by Zachary Levi are shown in a scene from the animated feature, "Tangled." (AP...
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hair has won out over Harry Potter at the weekend box office.
Mandy Moore's animated musical "Tangled," a new take on long-haired fairy-tale princess Rapunzel, sewed up the No. 1 spot with $21.5 million in its second weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday. That raised the Disney release's domestic total to $96.5 million.
"Tangled" had debuted in second-place over Thanksgiving behind "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1," which had been at the top of the box office the two previous weekends.
"Harry Potter" slipped to No. 2 this weekend with $16.7 million. The next-to-last chapter in the Warner Bros. franchise about the teen wizard lifted its domestic haul to $244.2 million.
Playing largely to family crowds, "Tangled" should hold on well through the holidays, said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney.
"It's not very often the second week of a movie that it ends up the No. 1 movie," Viane said. "This will be one of those leggy movies that just keeps playing and playing."
Business was off sharply after a brisk Thanksgiving weekend, which is one of the busiest periods of the year at movie theaters.
With just $88 million in overall receipts, this was Hollywood's second-worst weekend of the year, behind the meager $81.8 million haul the weekend after Labor Day, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com.
"It was a bad weekend," said Paul Dergarabedian, analyst for Hollywood.com. "It just shows that people got a lot of their movie-going out of the way over that five-day Thanksgiving weekend, and this weekend, they went, 'Ahh, we've seen it.'"
Overall revenues also were down from last year. The $88 million in revenue was off 11.5 percent compared to the same weekend in 2009, when "The Blind Side" led the box office with $20 million, according to Hollywood.com.
The weekend's only new wide release, Rogue Pictures' action tale "The Warrior's Way," was a dud with just $3.1 million. Playing in 1,622 theaters, "The Warrior's Way" averaged a weak $1,881 a cinema, compared to $5,967 in 3,603 cinemas for "Tangled."
Starring Kate Bosworth, "The Warrior's Way" is a martial-arts adventure about an assassin hiding out in the Old West.
Natalie Portman's ballet drama "Black Swan" had a huge debut in limited release, taking in $1.4 million in just 18 theaters, for a whopping average of $77,459 a theater.
Released by Fox Searchlight, "Black Swan" stars Portman as a dancer who begins to lose herself in delusion amid the pressures of preparing for the lead in Swan Lake. The film gradually expands into nationwide release through Christmas week.
Also in limited release, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor's gay romance "I Love You Phillip Morris" opened solidly with $113,200 in six theaters, averaging $18,886.
Carrey stars as a scam artist who finds the love of his life (McGregor) in state prison. The movie gradually expands into wide release through early January.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "Tangled," $21.5 million.
2. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1," $16.7 million.
3 (tie). "Burlesque," $6.1 million.
3 (tie). "Unstoppable," $6.1 million.
5. "Love & Other Drugs," $5.7 million.
6. "Megamind," $5 million.
7. "Due Date," $4.2 million.
8. "Faster," $3.8 million.
9. "The Warrior's Way," $3.1 million.
10. "The Next Three Days," $2.7 million.
___
Online:
http://www.hollywood.com/boxoffice
___
Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Vantage are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney's parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox Atomic are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a consortium of Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corp., Comcast Corp., DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and Quadrangle Group; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.; Rogue Pictures is owned by Relativity Media LLC; Overture Films is a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Lawyer: Nigerian soldiers killed civilians
JON GAMBRELL - AP - Sun Dec 05, 10:36AM CST
Women who fled following a deadly army attack on Ayakoromor village, take refuge with other members of the community at a microcredit organization in the nearby town of Warri, Nigeria, Saturday,...
WARRI, Nigeria (AP) — Nigerian soldiers who launched a raid on militants hiding in the nation's oil-rich southern delta killed civilians and purposely destroyed homes, a human rights lawyer who visited the attacked region said Sunday.
Preye Onduku told The Associated Press he saw the site of one grave containing six civilians allegedly killed by the military during a brief visit Saturday to the village of Ayakoromor. While soldiers blocked journalists from the AP from seeing the Niger Delta village, they allowed Onduku to visit as his father owns a home there.
The fresh grave sits near the ruins of a local court in Ayakoromor, with many other homes destroyed by what appears to be fire and heavy weapons fire, the lawyer said. Onduku said local people told him that soldiers made them bury other bodies in graves around the village and others are feared dead.
The Nigerian military has denied civilians died during the attack to capture a wanted militant leader called John Togo. The general in charge of the military's operations in the delta has said soldiers only opened fire when someone fired upon them as they neared Ayakoromor's shoreline at the start of the raid Wednesday.
However, human rights activists say as many as 150 people died as the military used heavy machine gun fire and aerial bombing on the village. Onduku said he saw five people suffering from gunshot wounds during his brief visit.
The military raid came after an unknown number of soldiers died days ago in an effort to apprehend Togo.
"They were angry that (the militants) had gone and killed their officers and they went to bomb the community. That is the simple reason," the lawyer said. "I don't know whether it is anger or how to put it, but it is cowardice."
The military has yet to capture Togo. The militant's lawyer has said his client is "on the high seas" far away from Ayakoromor.
Mamadou Sow, a leader in the Niger Delta with the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the attack displaced more than 200 people, who are now living inside a local schoolhouse.
"When the fighting started, they rushed into the forest," Sow said. "When they got back, their homes were destroyed."
Sow said the Red Cross is providing food and medical treatment to villagers, as is the Nigerian military.
Militant and military attacks are nothing new to the Niger Delta, a region of creeks and mangroves about the size of South Carolina. The attacks from an insurgency that began in 2006 cut drastically into crude production in Nigeria, an OPEC-member nation that is one of the top suppliers of crude oil to the U.S.
Production has risen back to 2.2 million barrels of oil a day, in part because many militant leaders and fighters accepted a government-sponsored amnesty deal last year.
But as militants over the years profit from kidnapping and oil theft, the military has launched several reprisal massacres against villages. Often, civilians find themselves caught in the middle of a war over oil they never profit from.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Product Recalls: canned chicken salad
The Associated Press - AP - Sun Dec 05, 10:06AM CST
The following recalls have been announced:
—About 72,000 pounds of Bumble Bee brand canned chicken salad products distributed nationwide because they might contain pieces of hard plastic. Consumers have reported finding the foreign material; no injuries have been reported. Recalled were 8.2-ounce packages of Bumble Bee Lunch on the Run Chicken Salad Complete Lunch Kit with a best-by date of 08/11 and 3.5-ounce packages of Bumble Bee Chicken Salad with Crackers with a best-by date of 02/12. The products were manufactured by the Suter Company Inc. of Sycamore, Ill. Details: Call 815-895-9186 .
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
French court: Continental guilty in Concorde crash
ANGELA DOLAND - AP - 32 mins ago
Continental Lawyer Olivier Metzner arrives at the Air France Concorde crash court case in Pontoise, north of Paris, Monday Dec. 6, 2010. The court will rule today on who should be held responsible...
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PONTOISE, France (AP) — A French court found Continental Airlines Inc. and one of its mechanics guilty of manslaughter Monday in the crash of a supersonic Concorde jet outside Paris a decade ago that killed 113 people.
The court in the Paris suburb of Pontoise ruled the Houston-based airline must pay a euro200,000 ($265,000) fine, and one of its mechanics, John Taylor, must pay euro2,000 ($2,650) over the July 2000 crash of an Air France Concorde. The victims were mostly German tourists.
Taylor was also handed a 15-month suspended prison sentence. All other defendants, including Taylor's now-retired supervisor Stanley Ford, were acquitted in the verdict.
A message left with Continental's communications department was not immediately answered.
The presiding judge confirmed investigators' long-held belief that titanium debris dropped by a Continental DC-10 onto the runway at Charles de Gaulle airport before the Concorde took off was to blame. Investigators said debris gashed the Concorde's tire, propelling bits of rubber into the fuel tanks and sparking a fire.
Three former French officials also facing manslaughter charges were acquitted.
While France's aviation authority concluded the crash could not have been foreseen, a judicial inquiry said the plane's fuel tanks lacked sufficient protection from shock and said officials had known about the problem for more than 20 years.
On July 25, 2000, an Air France Concorde spewed flames as it took off from Charles de Gaulle, then slammed into a nearby hotel. All 109 people aboard and four on the ground died.
The families of most victims were compensated years ago, so financial claims were not the trial's focus — the main goal was to assign responsibility. It is not uncommon for such cases to take years to reach trial in France.
Continental is now part of Chicago-based United Continental Holdings Inc., which was formed in October as the holding company owner of United and Continental airlines, which will eventually be combined into a single airline.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WikiLeaks uses Swiss Web address as options narrow
JOHN HEILPRIN - AP - 2 hrs 45 mins ago
Swiss Denis Simonet, right, president of the Pirate Party, and vice president Pascal Gloor left, pose prior to a press conference in Biel, Switzerland, Friday, Dec. 3, 2010. Simonet announced the...
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GENEVA (AP) — WikiLeaks' elusive founder, his options dwindling, has turned to Switzerland's credit, postal and Internet infrastructure to keep his online trove of U.S. State Department cables afloat.
Supporters say Julian Assange, an Australian living in Britain, is considering seeking asylum in Switzerland. He told a Spanish newspaper that he faced "hundreds of death threats," including some targeting his lawyers and children, aside from the pressure he is getting from prosecutors in the U.S. and other countries.
After a number of web companies dropped WikiLeaks, much of the site's traffic was coming through the wikileaks.ch Web address Sunday. The address is controlled by the Swiss Pirate Party, a group that formed two years ago to campaign for freedom of information. The site's main server in France went offline but it remained reachable through a Swedish server.
The site showed Assange had begun seeking donations to an account under his name through the Swiss postal system in Bern, the Swiss capital, while also using a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and other accounts in Iceland and Germany. He lost a major source of revenue when the online payment service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account over the weekend.
Assange has been widely praised and criticized. Supporters view him as a savior of the media and free speech; critics vilify him for brazenly unleashing diplomatic secrets, as well as for earlier leaks involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called Assange "a high-tech terrorist." He told NBC's "Meet the Press" he hopes Assange will be prosecuted for the "enormous damage" the disclosures have done to the country and to its relationship with its allies.
But even as governments put pressure on Assange, WikiLeaks lives on. The Swiss Pirate Party said Sunday that wikileaks.ch was receiving about 3,000 visitors a second.
The party also said supporters are creating "mirrors" of the WikiLeaks site on their own servers, meaning the diplomatic cables will remain available even if WikiLeaks loses its own site.
"Even if you take down the server in Sweden, it's too late," Swiss Pirate Party Vice President Pascal Gloor told The Associated Press on Sunday.
"There are hundreds of mirrors of WikiLeaks now," he said. "It's a test for Internet censorship. Can governments take something off the Net? I think not. There are copies of the website everywhere."
PayPal, a subsidiary of U.S.-based online marketplace operator eBay Inc., said it cut off the WikiLeaks website because it was engaged in illegal activity.
Assange is now in Britain, according to his British lawyer. Marc Andrey, a spokesman for the financial services arm of Swiss Post, told the Swiss weekly NZZ am Sonntag that Assange stated when opening an account with the postal system that he had a residence in Geneva.
Andrey said the Swiss Post was reviewing its "relationship" with Assange. He would have to prove he obtained Swiss residency, lives near the Swiss border, or owns property or does business in Switzerland to keep the Postfinance bank account that he opened last month.
The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Donald Beyer, told NZZ am Sonntag that Switzerland "should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone who is on the run from the law." The SonntagsZeitung quoted Beyer as saying he told the Swiss government that WikiLeaks would likely post more than 250 cables from the American Embassy in Bern.
The Swiss Web address wikileaks.ch became the site's main access point on Friday after EveryDNS, based in Manchester, New Hampshire, stopped accepting traffic to the site's principal address — wikileaks.org — saying cyber attacks threatened the rest of its network.
Amazon previously stopped hosting WikiLeaks' Web site and governments and hackers were continuing to go after the organization.
French web hosting company OVH, which owns a server wikileaks.ch had been using, didn't immediately respond to calls Sunday. France's Industry Minister Eric Besson had warned Friday that it was unacceptable to host a site that "violates the secret of diplomatic relations."
The Swiss Pirate Party convened an impromptu news conference late Friday in a high-tech media building in Biel, Switzerland. Its leaders said they had no special knowledge of Assange's whereabouts or ability to contact him, but had spoken with him weeks ago to help seek asylum in Switzerland. That was during Assange's visit to Geneva last month when he spoke to reporters at the United Nations.
In an online chat with El Pais in Spain, Assange said the hunt for him was tough.
"We have hundreds of specific death threats from U.S. military militants. That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on," he said.
"Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending out to our lawyers and my children," he added. "However, it is the specific calls from the elites of U.S. society for our assassination, kidnapping and execution that is more concerning."
Assange is wanted in Sweden to face allegations of sexual offenses against two women, charges he denies, but the United States nor any other country has lodged any charges against him over the leaked documents.
Australia would give consular help to Assange if he is arrested abroad and he is entitled to return home as well, Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland said Monday. But he also condemned the leaks as harming security and said Australia is obligated to help the criminal investigation of Assange's activities.
"Free speech is one thing, we all respect that, but we also respect the freedoms and the rights of people to live without fear," McClelland told reporters.
In the Swedish case, Assange is the target of a European extradition process which normally takes months to produce an arrest.
___
Frank Jordans contributed from Geneva.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Senates GOP leader says tax cuts will be extended
AP - Sun Dec 05, 8:59AM CST
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Republican leader says it's become clear now that taxes will not be raised for anyone during the current economic downturn.
Sen. Mitch McConnell's assessment comes a day after Senate Republicans voted down Democratic efforts to limit any extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the top-earning Americans.
President Barack Obama then signaled a willingness to give in to Republican demands that the tax cuts that expire at the end of the year be extended at all levels.
McConnell, R-Ky., tells NBC's "Meet the Press" that the question on tax cuts is how long they might be extended.
On the issue of aid to jobless Americans, McConnell says he believes that unemployment compensation will be extended again.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
UN official glad about new Somali force but wary
KATHARINE HOURELD - AP - Sun Dec 05, 10:53AM CST
NAKURU, Kenya (AP) — A senior U.N. official cautiously welcomed news that an anti-piracy force is being created in Somalia but he and U.S. officials say they're concerned about secrecy surrounding the undertaking.
An unidentified Muslim country is backing the project and is paying an ex-CIA man and a former senior U.S. diplomat, The Associated Press reported last week. The military force for the presidential palace in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, and for Puntland, a northern semiautonomous region, is expected to number up to 1,050 men.
"It's a good thing that Puntland is training an anti-piracy force," said Alan Cole, the head of the anti-piracy program at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. But he said he wants to know the identity of the donor, the laws governing the force, how recruits are screened and the chain of command.
"Those who are providing equipment have a responsibility to make sure those who are going to use it understand the limits of their authority and are properly trained," Cole said.
The U.S State Department said the identity and aims of the donor are unclear and raised concerns that the training may break a U.N. arms embargo on Somalia, which has been fractured by civil war for nearly 20 years.
The U.S. says it is not funding the project, although the donor country is employing two Americans — a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues and a former CIA deputy station chief — to help advise the Somali government on the training and other issues.
Lt. Col. Tamara Parker, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the U.S. is aware Puntland authorities are contracting with a private security company to assist them in counter-piracy.
"However, we have not been consulted," Parker emphasized. "We are concerned about the lack of transparency regarding the program's funding, objectives and scope. We're also concerned this program could potentially violate the 1992 U.N. Security Council arms embargo on Somalia."
Puntland officials did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment.
Ten years ago, a different Puntland government hired a British security company, Hart Security, to train a coast guard in a program that was ultimately unsuccessful. Some analysts believe graduates of the course deserted and became pirates, pointing to incidents like the 2008 hijacking of a Japanese vessel in which some pirates wore coast guard uniforms. Others say there is not enough evidence to show that Hart graduates became pirates and the current program should not be discouraged.
"It's too easy to criticize security contractors," said Graeme Gibbon-Brooks, the head of Dryad Maritime Intelligence, which provides information about piracy to shipping companies. "But the answer to piracy has to be regional engagement."
Pierre Prosper, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, earlier told AP he is being paid by a Muslim nation he declined to identify to be a legal adviser to the Somali government on the project. He said Saracen International is the contractor that is being paid by the unnamed Muslim nation to do the training.
Uganda-based Saracen International was also identified in a letter and a statement from Puntland's government and the Somali president's former chief of staff. But Bill Pelser, the chief executive of Saracen International, denied his company is involved.
Pelser told AP he made introductions for another company called Saracen Lebanon. Lebanese authorities have no record of a company called Saracen and Pelser did not provide details.
A multinational naval force patrolling the waters off East Africa has limited capabilities to end Somali piracy. Experts, along with the force's own commanders, have said the only long-term solution is to go after pirate havens on land.
An effective Puntland coast guard could dramatically cut down on attacks, Gibbon-Brooks said. There many pirate groups based in southern Somalia but the northern gangs remain the most experienced and dangerous, Gibbons-Brooks said.
Somali pirates currently hold 22 ships and 521 crew, according to the European Union Naval Force.
The Puntland administration, which nominally falls under the Mogadishu-based government, is generally seen as stable and efficient. Puntland also has rich marine resources — a possible source of lucrative fishing licenses. A consortium of companies are also exploring for oil and gas but instability has largely prevented these resources from being exploited.
___
Associated Press writer Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Spains airports recovering from controller strike
HAROLD HECKLE - AP - Sun Dec 05, 7:32AM CST
A passenger looks for her bag at Barajas Airport in Madrid Saturday Dec. 4, 2010. Spain placed striking air traffic controllers under military authority Saturday in an unprecedented emergency...
MADRID (AP) — Spanish airports were back operating at normal levels Sunday after a 24-hour wildcat strike by air traffic controllers caused travel chaos for hundreds of thousands of people on one of the country's busiest holiday weekends.
The government quashed the strike Saturday, announcing an emergency measure calling on the controllers to get back to work or face the threat of jail time. Shortly after the measure was implemented, controllers started trickling back to their posts.
More than 4,000 flights were scheduled and out of 296 controllers supposed to be working, 286 were at their posts, enabling airports to "operate fully," Spain's civil aviation authority said.
The government implemented a "state of alarm," normally reserved for catastrophes such as earthquakes or floods, to get planes back in the skies and clear chaotic airports clogged with irate travelers who had seen their holiday hopes dashed by the unannounced strike.
Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the "state of alarm" will be in place for 15 days, but could be extended to include the busy Christmas period if parliament agrees.
Aena calculated more than 600,000 passengers faced travel disruptions and a backlog of flights meant that long lines of disgruntled travelers were still commonplace around the country, including Barcelona and the popular winter destination of the Canary Islands.
Rubalcaba said the traffic controllers are likely to face legal penalties for having left their posts.
"It is evident that people are going to be called to account for this. The controllers now know for sure that they are going to have to answer for their irresponsible actions," Rubalcaba said.
Rubalcaba said that Aena was planning to take action against employees who left their posts and that they could also be punished under the military penal code that came into force with the "state of alarm." He said that many travelers were also taking individual legal action against the controllers seeking damages.
Eduardo Esteban, Madrid's regional prosecutor, said in a statement Saturday that controllers would be called to testify during the week, "to evaluate if there is evidence of a crime."
Development Minister Jose Blanco, who is in charge of the country's airports, said charges were being prepared against at least 440 controllers. The penalties currently being considered, he said, include fines or firing controllers.
The controllers launched their wildcat strike in the culmination of a long-running dispute with the government over working conditions, work schedules and benefits.
Spanish air traffic controllers get triple time pay for overtime hours, for instance, and made much of their salary from this, earning an average yearly salary of €350,000 ($463,600).
In February the government slashed their allowed overtime hours drastically, infuriating the controllers who saw their pay nearly cut in half, although that is still roughly three times what Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero makes. The average yearly salary in Spain is about €20,000 ($26,500).
The final straw seems to have been a decree approved by the Cabinet on Friday under which controllers who miss work because of illness must make up lost hours and can be subject to medical checkups immediately if they call in sick.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Spains airports recovering from controller strike
HAROLD HECKLE - AP - Sun Dec 05, 7:32AM CST
A passenger looks for her bag at Barajas Airport in Madrid Saturday Dec. 4, 2010. Spain placed striking air traffic controllers under military authority Saturday in an unprecedented emergency...
MADRID (AP) — Spanish airports were back operating at normal levels Sunday after a 24-hour wildcat strike by air traffic controllers caused travel chaos for hundreds of thousands of people on one of the country's busiest holiday weekends.
The government quashed the strike Saturday, announcing an emergency measure calling on the controllers to get back to work or face the threat of jail time. Shortly after the measure was implemented, controllers started trickling back to their posts.
More than 4,000 flights were scheduled and out of 296 controllers supposed to be working, 286 were at their posts, enabling airports to "operate fully," Spain's civil aviation authority said.
The government implemented a "state of alarm," normally reserved for catastrophes such as earthquakes or floods, to get planes back in the skies and clear chaotic airports clogged with irate travelers who had seen their holiday hopes dashed by the unannounced strike.
Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the "state of alarm" will be in place for 15 days, but could be extended to include the busy Christmas period if parliament agrees.
Aena calculated more than 600,000 passengers faced travel disruptions and a backlog of flights meant that long lines of disgruntled travelers were still commonplace around the country, including Barcelona and the popular winter destination of the Canary Islands.
Rubalcaba said the traffic controllers are likely to face legal penalties for having left their posts.
"It is evident that people are going to be called to account for this. The controllers now know for sure that they are going to have to answer for their irresponsible actions," Rubalcaba said.
Rubalcaba said that Aena was planning to take action against employees who left their posts and that they could also be punished under the military penal code that came into force with the "state of alarm." He said that many travelers were also taking individual legal action against the controllers seeking damages.
Eduardo Esteban, Madrid's regional prosecutor, said in a statement Saturday that controllers would be called to testify during the week, "to evaluate if there is evidence of a crime."
Development Minister Jose Blanco, who is in charge of the country's airports, said charges were being prepared against at least 440 controllers. The penalties currently being considered, he said, include fines or firing controllers.
The controllers launched their wildcat strike in the culmination of a long-running dispute with the government over working conditions, work schedules and benefits.
Spanish air traffic controllers get triple time pay for overtime hours, for instance, and made much of their salary from this, earning an average yearly salary of €350,000 ($463,600).
In February the government slashed their allowed overtime hours drastically, infuriating the controllers who saw their pay nearly cut in half, although that is still roughly three times what Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero makes. The average yearly salary in Spain is about €20,000 ($26,500).
The final straw seems to have been a decree approved by the Cabinet on Friday under which controllers who miss work because of illness must make up lost hours and can be subject to medical checkups immediately if they call in sick.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
French, Indian leaders in talks on nuclear power
NIRMALA GEORGE - AP - Mon Dec 06, 12:36AM CST
NEW DELHI (AP) — India and France were likely to move toward adding two nuclear power plants to meet burgeoning Indian energy demand as the countries' leaders met for talks Monday.
Visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy is hoping the nuclear deal will earn billions of dollars for the French company that would build the plants.
The talks between Sarkozy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also were scheduled to include plans for the structural reform of the international monetary system through the Group of 20 countries, currently headed by France.
An agreement between French nuclear power company Areva SA and India's Nuclear Power Corp. on building power plants in India was likely to be signed at Monday's talks, said T.P. Seetharam, a top official in India's Ministry of External Affairs.
Under the agreement, Areva will build two European pressurized reactors of 1,650 megawatts each at Jaitapur in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Indian officials have assured France that liability laws in India are in keeping with international laws and have ensured the security of nuclear operators.
India is planning to build about 20 new nuclear power plants to help supply its burgeoning energy needs. It has 20 now and four more under construction. The country's nuclear power industry is expanding rapidly to increase output from its current 4,500 megawatts to 64,000 by 2032.
Sarkozy, who arrived Saturday, is accompanied by his defense, foreign and finance ministers and nearly 60 business leaders.
No defense agreements are expected during the visit, but Sarkozy is likely to push for French companies to win contracts to supply India with military hardware.
French companies are negotiating to upgrade 51 Mirage-2000 jet fighters in the Indian air force. India is also in the market to buy 126 fighter jets, a deal worth $11 billion, and about 200 helicopters worth another $4 billion.
According to defense experts, India is expected to spend $80 billion between 2012 and 2022 to upgrade its military.
Sarkozy's visit also coincides with at least two important meetings with Indian business leaders. The president is eager to attract Indian companies to invest in France, even as French companies are seeking a slice of India's booming economy.
Bilateral trade declined in 2009 due to global economic woes but is on the upswing this year, said Vishnu Prakash, India's external affairs ministry spokesman. The two countries have set a trade target of 12 billion euros ($15.8 billion) for 2012, Prakash said.
Sarkozy was scheduled to visit Mumbai, India's financial and entertainment capital, before returning home Tuesday.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Iraq hunting for foreign terror suspects
AP - Sun Dec 05, 6:58AM CST
BAGHDAD (AP) — An Iraqi military spokesman says security forces are searching for six foreign fighters who helped launch a number of attacks this year that left more than 140 people dead.
Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said Sunday the six suspects — who are on Baghdad's most-wanted list — are behind the Oct. 31 siege of a church that left 68 people dead.
He said they also participated in two summertime attacks on an Iraqi army headquarters in central Baghdad. Those attacks killed a combined 73 people.
Al-Moussawi said five of the suspects are hiding in two Sunni Muslim-dominated provinces bordering Syria, while the sixth suspect has fled to that country.
Counterterror officials believe most foreign fighters cross into Iraq from Syria.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Italys Eni boosts production in Iraqi oil field
AP - Sun Dec 05, 6:39AM CST
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BAGHDAD (AP) — A consortium led by Italy's Eni SpA says it has achieved a 10 percent increase in output from one of Iraq's most promising southern fields.
Eni, Occidental Petroleum Corp. and South Korea's KOGAS said in a statement Sunday that current production from the Zubair field stands at 201,000 barrels per day. That's up from the 183,000 barrels per day production level in February when their deal to develop the field went into effect.
Zubair was one of 15 oil and gas fields awarded during three bidding rounds since last year.
Under the 20-year contract, the Eni-led consortium must boost production to 1.2 million barrels a day in seven years and sustain that level for another seven years.
Oil sales make up 95 percent of the country's annual budget.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
US works to secure networks as hackers advance
LOLITA C. BALDOR - AP - Sun Dec 05, 7:26AM CST
In this Sept. 24, 2010, file photo the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) prepares for the Cyber Storm III exercise at its operations center in Arlington, Va....
WASHINGTON (AP) — It will take several more years for the government to fully install high-tech systems to block computer intrusions, a drawn-out timeline that enables criminals to become more adept at stealing sensitive data, experts say.
As the Department of Homeland Security moves methodically to pare down and secure the approximately 2,400 network connections used every day by millions of federal workers around the world, experts suggest that technology already may be passing them by.
The department that's responsible for securing government systems other than military sites is slowly moving all the government's Internet and e-mail traffic into secure networks that eventually will be guarded by intrusion detection and prevention programs. The networks are known as Einstein 2 and Einstein 3.
Progress has been slow, however. Officials are trying to complete complex contracts with network vendors, work out technology issues and address privacy concerns involving how the monitoring will affect employees and public citizens.
The WikiLeaks release of more than a quarter-million sensitive diplomatic documents underscores the massive challenge ahead, as Homeland Security labors to build protections for all of the other, potentially more vulnerable U.S. agencies.
"This is a continuing arms race and we're still way behind," said Stewart Baker, former Homeland Security undersecretary for policy.
The WikiLeaks breach affected the government's classified military network and was as much a personnel gap as a technological failure. Officials believe the sensitive documents were stolen from secure Pentagon computer networks by an Army intelligence analyst who downloaded them onto a CD.
The changes sought by Homeland Security on the government's nonmilitary computers would be wider and more systemic than the immediate improvements ordered recently by the Departments of Defense and State as a result of the WikiLeaks releases. Those changes included improving the monitoring of computer usage and making it harder to move material onto a portable computer flash drive or CD.
"There are very few private sector actors who depend on information security who think that installing intrusion prevention systems is sufficient protection against the kinds of attacks that we're seeing," Baker said.
Navy Rear Adm. Michael Brown, Homeland Security's director for cybersecurity coordination, said that slightly more than half of the government's 2,400 network connections are already protected by Einstein 2 — the automated system that monitors federal Internet and e-mail traffic for malicious activity.
Those, however, cover fewer than 20 of the 110 federal agencies.
Einstein 2 is installed and working at 13 of the 19 agencies that plan to police their own networks, with two others close to completion. The remaining 91 departments will go through one of four major communications companies for the monitoring. So far just four to six agencies have put the program in place, he said.
In the end, all network traffic with flow through 72 sites called Trusted Internet Connections, including eight operated by the four communications companies and 64 operated by individual agencies.
A more sophisticated system known as Einstein 3, which will detect and automatically block intrusions, has just completed testing and will take several years to fully implement, Brown said.
Brown insisted that the government is not lagging behind private industry in its efforts to secure computer networks. He said each agency is responsible for setting up safe cybersecurity practices. Criminals these days "are more targeted, are more professional, and have greater sophistication and capabilities," he said.
Einstein will add a valuable safeguard to government agencies but "there still is not a magic bullet" to defeat the increasingly sophisticated threats, said Jerry Dixon, former director at Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team.
"We're always playing catch-up or reacting to the last major cyberincident or event but not doing a lot to think about what the future might hold," said Dixon, who is now director of analysis at the Internet security firm Team Cymru.
Complicating the Einstein installation process is that federal agencies have offices and personnel strewn around the globe, from post offices to nuclear labs and national parks. They can be small outposts with a handful of workers or huge complexes employing thousands, and they are operating under many contracts with different Internet vendors.
Baker said legal questions bog down the process. There are concerns that the monitoring programs could violate privacy safeguards for federal workers, members of the public who communicate with them, or other individuals whose e-mail might accidentally get caught in the system.
"The search for legal certainty and legal guarantees may be part of the problem," he said.
U.S. officials and security experts have warned that government networks are persistently scanned and attacked millions of times a day. The recent discovery of the Stuxnet worm, which experts say appeared to target Iranian nuclear plants, stunned and worried U.S. officials, who said it could be modified to wreak havoc on industrial control systems around the world.
Those systems control vital facilities like the electric grid, water plants, traffic systems and industries that produce everything from deadly chemicals to baby formula.
___
Online:
Homeland Security: http://www.dhs.gov/files/cybersecurity.shtm
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Oil extends gains to move closer to $90 in Asia
EILEEN NG - AP - Sun Dec 05, 11:14PM CST
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Oil prices extended gains to move closer to $90 a barrel Monday in Asia after rallying to a 26-month high last week, fueled by hopes of rising demand amid an unusually cold snap in Europe.
Benchmark oil rose 15 cents to $89.34 a barrel at midday Kuala Lumpur time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract added $1.19 to settle at $89.19 on Friday, the second time in less than a month that oil has reached the level where it was in the fall of 2008.
There are widespread expectations that the price will hit $90 a barrel by year's end and head toward $100 a barrel by next spring, when traders begin looking ahead to the summer driving season.
"There is generally rather bullish sentiment in the oil market. What is powering gains today is the momentum behind the rally on Friday and the cold weather across Europe," said Victor Shum, an energy analyst at consultancy Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.
The oil market defied a rebound in the dollar early Monday, he said. A weak dollar had backed oil's rally Friday. Oil and other energy products are priced in dollars, which means buyers who use other currencies can get more for their money when the dollar weakens.
"The $90 level is now becoming a magnet. The bulls in the market will try to push it across $90 but the question is, can it be sustained?" Shum said, citing risks amid the shaky global economic recovery and weak fundamentals in crude markets.
The euro fell to $1.3358 against the dollar in Asian trade, from $1.3415 late Friday in New York.
In other Nymex trading in January contracts, heating oil rose 0.67 cent to $2.4941 a gallon, gasoline added 0.66 cent to $2.3587 a gallon and natural gas gained 0.68 cent to $4.417 per 1,000 cubic feet.
In London, Brent crude rose 7 cents to $91.49 a barrel on the ICE futures exchange.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
AP IMPACT: US fails to tackle student visa abuses
HOLBROOK MOHR - AP - 2 hrs 45 mins ago
In this Aug. 24, 2010 photo, Iuliia Bolgaryna sits for an interview in Surf City, N.C. Bolgaryna came to work on a J-1 visa at a souvenir store in Surf City, N.C. The store manager offered to let...
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (AP) — Lured by unsupervised, third-party brokers with promises of steady jobs and a chance to sightsee, some foreign college students on summer work programs in the U.S. get a far different taste of life in America.
An Associated Press investigation found students forced to work in strip clubs instead of restaurants. Others take home $1 an hour or even less. Some live in apartments so crowded that they sleep in shifts because there aren't enough beds. Others have to eat on floors.
They are among more than 100,000 college students who come to the U.S. each year on popular J-1 visas, which supply resorts with cheap seasonal labor as part of a program aimed at fostering cultural understanding.
Government auditors have warned about problems in the program for 20 years, but the State Department, which is in charge of it, only now says it is working on new rules. Officials won't say what those rules are or discuss on the record the problems that have plagued J-1 visas.
John Woods, deputy assistant director of national security for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, told the AP there were at least two federal investigations under way into human trafficking related to J-1 visas. He would not provide details.
The AP interviewed students, advocates, local authorities and social service agencies, and reviewed thousands of pages of confidential records, police reports and court cases. Among the findings:
— Many foreign students pay recruiters to help find employment, then don't get work or wind up making little or no money at menial jobs. Labor recruiters charge students exorbitant rent for packing them into filthy, sparsely furnished apartments so crowded that some endure "hotbunking," where they sleep in shifts.
Students routinely get threatened with deportation or eviction if they quit, or even if they just complain too loudly. Some resort to stealing essentials like food, toothpaste and underwear, according to police.
"The vast majority of participating students in this program find it a rewarding experience and return home safely," the State Department said in an e-mail to the AP.
But it's not hard to find exceptions. Most of the nearly 70 students the AP interviewed in 10 states, hailing from 16 countries, said they were disappointed, and some were angry.
"This is not what I thought when I paid all this money to come here," said Natalia Berlinschi, a Romanian who came to the U.S. on a J-1 visa hoping to save up for dental school but got stuck in South Carolina this summer without a job. She took to begging for work on the Myrtle Beach boardwalk and sharing a three-bedroom house with 30 other exchange students.
"I was treated very, very badly," Berlinschi said. "I will never come back."
— The State Department failed to even keep up with the number of student complaints until this year, and has consistently shifted responsibility for policing the program to the 50 or so companies that sponsor students for fees that can run up to several thousand dollars. That has left businesses to monitor their own treatment of participants.
The program generates millions for the sponsor companies and third-party labor recruiters.
Businesses that hire students can save 8 percent by using a foreign worker over an American because they don't have to pay Medicare, Social Security and unemployment taxes. The students are required to have health insurance before they arrive, another cost that employers don't have to bear.
Many businesses say they need the seasonal work force to meet the demand of tourist season.
"There's been a massive failure on the part of the United States to bring any accountability to the temporary work visa programs, and it's especially true for the J-1," said Terry Coonan, a former prosecutor and the executive director of Florida State University's Center for the Advancement of Human Rights.
The issues are serious enough that the former Soviet republic of Belarus told its young people in 2006 to avoid going to the U.S. on a J-1, warning of a "high level of danger" after one of its citizens in the program was murdered, another died in what investigators in the U.S. said was a suicide, and a third was robbed.
— Strip clubs and adult entertainment companies openly solicit J-1 workers, even though government regulations ban students from taking jobs "that might bring the Department of State into notoriety or disrepute."
"If you wish to dance in USA as a J-1 exchange visitor, contact us," ZM Studios, a broker for topless dancers, advertised on its website this year. The ad said ZM Studios is "affiliated with designated visa sponsors" and can get women J-1 visas and jobs at topless clubs in cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
ZM Studios president Julian Andreev denied employing J-1 students in an e-mail to the AP, but the company's site on Friday still guaranteed help getting visas for prospective dancers, noting that they need a J-1 or one of two other types of visas to work legally.
J-1 students have been recruited to smuggle cash that authorities said was stolen from U.S. bank accounts, court records show, and their identities have been used in a million-dollar income tax scam.
"It's difficult to prosecute these cases because the workers usually leave the country within a few months. That's why the J-1 is the ideal visa to exploit," Coonan said.
In the worst cases, students get funneled into sexual slavery.
The J-1 Summer Work and Travel program, which allows college students to visit for up to four months, is one of the State Department's most popular visas. Participation has boomed from about 20,000 in 1996 to a peak of more than 150,000 in 2008.
The visas are issued year-round, since students come from both hemispheres on their summer breaks. They work all over the country, at theme parks in Florida and California, fish factories in Alaska and upscale ski destinations in Colorado and Montana.
The influx has been especially overwhelming for some resort towns.
In Maryland, the Ocean City Baptist Church served more than 1,700 different J-1 participants from 46 countries who sought free meals this summer, sometimes upward of 500 in one night, said Lynn Davis, who leads the food ministry.
Down the coast in Virginia Beach, Va., a homeless shelter that typically feeds 100 people a day was serving twice that many this summer as the site became overrun with J-1 students. The Judeo-Christian Outreach Center began running out of food on some days and was forced to limit how often the students could eat there, said Tony Zontini, the shelter's assistant director.
Hotels, restaurants and other businesses often hire third-party labor recruiters to supply the J-1 workers. Many of those brokers are people from the students' native countries, often former Soviet bloc nations.
These middlemen commonly dock students' pay so heavily for lodging, transportation and other necessities that the wages work out to $1 an hour or less, according to George Collins, an inspector at the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Department in the Florida Panhandle who has worked cases involving J-1 students since 2001.
Collins, who once notified the State Department that "J-1 abuse is epidemic here," told the AP the same companies often exploit students year after year despite his reporting them.
For years, the State Department has refused to publicly discuss problems in the program in any kind of detail.
The AP asked the State Department in a Freedom of Information Act request in March 2009 for a full list of complaints related to the program. In May, more than a year later, the department finally responded that it kept no such list, and that it keeps records related to the program for only three years.
Last month, the department said it had finally created a database of complaints.
"It turns out that until this year, we did NOT keep a record of complaints. Now, we do," Marthena Cowart, a senior adviser for the department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, said in a Nov. 10 e-mail.
Cowart did not provide a copy of the complaint database to the AP or indicate how many complaints it included. And the department declined to discuss the AP's findings on the record.
"We are deeply concerned by any allegations involving the poor treatment of participants as this potentially undermines our goal of promoting mutual understanding and goodwill between the people of the United States and the people of other countries," the department said Friday in declining an interview request.
For the many J-1 women who end up working in strip clubs, whether by choice or force, the changes can't come soon enough.
In Florida, a 19-year-old Russian told the AP she went to work as a cocktail waitress this summer at a topless bar in Fort Walton Beach because the souvenir shop where she worked didn't pay much and the shop owner had her living in a crowded, run-down apartment.
She gave the AP only her first name, Oleysa, because she hadn't told her parents.
"My father doesn't know where I work," she said, lowering her gaze to a tray of beers and mixed drinks.
A Ukrainian woman who said she was forced to strip in Detroit asked the AP to identify her only as Katya, because she fears for her life.
Katya, who used the same alias when testifying to Congress in October 2007 about how sex trafficking brought her to the U.S., said she was studying sports medicine in Kiev back in 2004 when her boss told her about the J-1 program.
Instead of waitressing for a summer in Virginia as she'd been promised, however, Katya and another student were forced to strip at a club in Detroit. Their handler confiscated their passports and told them they had to pay $12,000 for the travel arrangements and another $10,000 for work documents, according to court records.
Katya said he eventually demanded she come up with $35,000 somehow, by dancing or other means.
"I said, 'That's not what I signed here for. That's not right.' He said, 'Well, you owe me the money. I don't care how I get it from you. If I have to sell you, I'll sell you.'"
The women were told that if they refused, their families in Ukraine would be killed, Katya said.
Over the next months, the two men beat the women, threatened them with guns and made them work at Cheetah's strip club, court records state. Katya said one of the men also forced her to have sex, a memory she still struggles with.
The two men are now in prison, and Katya's old boss in the Ukraine is a fugitive.
Even J-1 students who avoid physical or sexual abuse often face other challenges.
Exchange student Munkh-Erdene Battur said he and four others were fired from their fast-food jobs last year in Riverton, Wyo., after complaining about living in what looked like a converted garage and paying $350 apiece per month for the accommodations.
"In my whole life, I've never lived in that kind of place and that kind of conditions," said Battur, who is from Mongolia.
Iuliia Bolgaryna came to work this summer at a souvenir store on the outskirts of Surf City, N.C.
The store manager offered to let her and two other women from the Ukraine stay with him for $120 a week. But he wouldn't let them eat at the table, so they huddled together for meals on the floor. They worked loads of overtime but were only paid for 40 hours a week.
The store manager declined to comment.
"It was almost normal that he screamed, that we worked 14 hours, that we ate on the floor," she said. "That was our America."
___
Mohr reported from along the Florida Panhandle. Weiss reported from Myrtle Beach and Columbia, S.C. Baker reported from Surf City, N.C. Associated Press writers Michael Kunzelman in New Orleans and Mike Schneider in Orlando contributed to this report. AP videojournalist Jason Bronis contributed from Detroit and the Florida Panhandle.
___
The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate(at)ap.org.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
South Korean trade minister defends deal with US
KELLY OLSEN - AP - Sun Dec 05, 10:45PM CST
Anti-government supporters shout slogans and hold banners during a rally against the governments policies and financial plans, Sunday, Dec. 5, 2010 in Seoul , South Korea. South Korea's top trade...
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea's top trade official defended a hard-fought compromise with the United States to salvage a stalled free trade agreement, rejecting accusations that his government gave up too much to seal the deal.
Trade Minister Kim Jong-hoon and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk reached a final agreement Friday after four days of negotiations focusing on U.S. demands that South Korea rework the accord to address its big trade surplus in automobiles.
The South Korea-U.S. free trade agreement was originally signed in June 2007, but steps to ratify it stalled amid changes in government in both countries, the global financial crisis and American demands that South Korea take steps to reduce their imbalance in auto trade and ease restrictions on imports of American beef.
South Korea, which long said it would not budge on the initial deal, ultimately compromised and addressed key U.S. concerns on cars, though it also received benefits in return such as a two-year delay in the elimination of its tariffs on American pork. Beef was not included in the deal.
"I cannot agree with some views that (the agreement was the result) of our unilateral concession," Kim, the trade minister, told reporters Sunday, calling it a "win-win" deal.
Kim returned to South Korea on Saturday after participating in the talks near Washington. Before becoming trade minister he was South Korea's chief negotiator for the original agreement.
The pact, which requires approval by the U.S. Congress and South Korea's National Assembly, is the largest for the U.S. since the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico in 1994.
Among key provisions of the revised deal, Seoul would allow the U.S. to lift a 2.5 percent tariff on South Korean passenger cars four years after the agreement takes effect, instead of immediately. South Korea, meanwhile, would halve its tariff on U.S. cars to 4 percent from 8 percent and eliminate it after four years. Also, each U.S. automaker would be able to export up to 25,000 cars in any given year to South Korea as long as they meet U.S. safety standards. U.S. vehicle exports beyond that figure would have to meet South Korean safety standards. Disputes over safety standards had stood as a barrier to U.S. auto exports to South Korea.
Figures compiled by auto industry groups in South Korea show that it exported 449,403 vehicles to the U.S. last year, while South Koreans purchased 6,140 vehicles made by American manufacturers, based on vehicle registrations.
The South Korean figures do not include the some 200,000 vehicles sold in the U.S. last year by Hyundai Motor Co. that were made at its American plant nor the more than 100,000 sold in South Korea by GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co., the South Korean unit of General Motors Co.
The Korea Automobile Manufacturers Association welcomed the agreement, saying it eliminated uncertainties in the U.S. market and that South Korean automakers were forecast to increase their market share, Yonhap news agency reported.
The new agreement, however, does not address South Korean restrictions on American beef. The U.S. has sought greater access to the market in South Korea, which imposes controls on shipments of U.S. meat from older animals over fears of mad cow disease.
The renewed push to move the deal forward came after talks last month in Seoul between President Barack Obama and his South Korean counterpart Lee Myung-bak failed to achieve a breakthrough.
Last week's negotiations also took place after a deadly North Korean artillery barrage on a small South Korean island, though Kim said the attack did not affect the talks and that he engaged in them completely from an economic point of view.
Hours before Kim spoke in Seoul, Obama praised the deal as a landmark agreement that promises to boost the U.S. auto industry and support tens of thousands of American jobs.
"This agreement shows the U.S. is willing to lead and compete in the global economy," he told reporters Saturday at the White House, calling it a triumph for American workers.
The breakthrough can be seen as an achievement for Obama, who has drawn criticism over the slow U.S. economic recovery and stubbornly high unemployment rate. He had long criticized the original deal as being bad for the U.S.
South Korea's president, meanwhile, has drawn flak at home for an allegedly weak and indecisive response to the North Korean artillery attack. His government has come under further scrutiny over the trade deal, with opposition parties seeing it as a capitulation to Washington.
Lee Chun-seok, spokesman for the main opposition Democratic Party, accused the government of making "massive concessions against our national interests," his party said. "We cannot find the principle of reciprocity anywhere in the agreement."
Protesters, including Kang and other opposition lawmakers, shouted slogans and held up signs Sunday in central Seoul criticizing the president and his policies. Police said the crowd numbered about 2,200 and the protest was peaceful.
___
Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul and Erica Werner, Julie Pace and Ken Thomas in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Biographical information on Pfizer CEO Ian Read
The Associated Press - AP - Mon Dec 06, 12:09AM CST
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NAME — Ian Read
AGE-BIRTH DATE — 57;
EDUCATION — Bachelor of science, London University Imperial College, 1974. Chartered Accountants certification, Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, 1978.
EXPERIENCE — Pfizer, hired as operational auditor, 1978. Worked in various financial and management positions in Latin America through 1995. Named president of Pfizer's International Pharmaceutical Group, 1996. Became executive vice president for Europe in 2000. Added responsibility for Canada in 2002. Became head of global pharmaceutical business, 2006.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
French, Indian leaders in talks on nuclear power
NIRMALA GEORGE - AP - Mon Dec 06, 12:30AM CST
NEW DELHI (AP) — India and France were likely to move toward adding two nuclear power plants to meet burgeoning Indian energy demand as the countries' leaders met for talks Monday.
Visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy is the nuclear deal will earn billions of dollars for the French company that would build the plants.
The talks between Sarkozy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also were scheduled to include plans for the structural reform of the international monetary system through the Group of 20 countries, currently headed by France.
An agreement between French nuclear power company Areva SA and India's Nuclear Power Corp. on building power plants in India was likely to be signed at Monday's talks, said T.P. Seetharam, a top official in India's Ministry of External Affairs.
Under the agreement, Areva will build two European pressurized reactors of 1,650 megawatts each at Jaitapur in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Indian officials have assured France that liability laws in India are in keeping with international laws and have ensured the security of nuclear operators.
India is planning to build about 20 new nuclear power plants to help supply its burgeoning energy needs. It has 20 now and four more under construction. The country's nuclear power industry is expanding rapidly to increase output from its current 4,500 megawatts to 64,000 by 2032.
Sarkozy, who arrived Saturday, is accompanied by his defense, foreign and finance ministers and nearly 60 business leaders.
No defense agreements are expected during the visit, but Sarkozy is likely to push for French companies to win contracts to supply India with military hardware.
French companies are negotiating to upgrade 51 Mirage-2000 jet fighters in the Indian air force. India is also in the market to buy 126 fighter jets, a deal worth $11 billion, and about 200 helicopters worth another $4 billion.
According to defense experts, India is expected to spend $80 billion between 2012 and 2022 to upgrade its military.
Sarkozy's visit also coincides with at least two important meetings with Indian business leaders. The president is eager to attract Indian companies to invest in France, even as French companies are seeking a slice of India's booming economy.
Bilateral trade declined in 2009 due to global economic woes but is on the upswing this year, said Vishnu Prakash, India's external affairs ministry spokesman. The two countries have set a trade target of 12 billion euros ($15.8 billion) for 2012, Prakash said.
Sarkozy was scheduled to visit Mumbai, India's financial and entertainment capital, before returning home Tuesday.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Asian shares mixed after Bernanke comments
AP - 2 hrs 8 mins ago
BEIJING (AP) — Global stocks were mixed Monday after U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said the Fed might buy more bonds, while a stronger yen weighed on Japanese exporters.
Japan's Nikkei 225 lost 0.1 percent to 10,167.23. Exporters including automakers lost ground after a disappointing U.S. jobs report Friday weakened the dollar, which would make Japanese exports more expensive abroad.
China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index gained 0.5 percent to 2,587.17.
In Europe, London's FTSE 100 lost 0.4 percent to 5,745.32, while Germany's DAX gained 0.2 percent to 6,962.84. France's CAC40 was unchanged at 3,750.43.
South Korea's Kospi fell 0.2 percent to 1,953.64, and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 slipped .12 percent to 4,688.6. Benchmarks in New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan advanced.
Asian investors were encouraged after Bernanke said the U.S. central bank is prepared to buy even more than $600 billion in Treasury bonds over the next eight months if necessary to boost economic growth. That might trigger an influx of money into the markets of developing Asian economies as investors seek better returns.
Hopes for such a move "will have a good impact, at least in sentiment, because there would be further 'hot money' that will chase tangible assets," said Peter Lai, investment manager for DBS Vickers in Hong Kong.
In New York on Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average spent much of the day in the red but closed up 0.2 percent, to close at 11,382.09 — not far from its post-recession high.
The U.S. Labor Department reported November unemployment climbed to a seven-month high of 9.8 percent. Employers added just 39,000 jobs, far below what economists had forecast.
In currencies, the dollar was trading at 82.83 yen from 82.61 yen late Friday. It had hovered around the 84-yen line for most of last week before the U.S. jobs data was released. The euro stood at $1.3357 from $1.3380.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Pfizer CEO Kindler, 55, unexpectedly replaced
LINDA A. JOHNSON - AP - Mon Dec 06, 12:08AM CST
FILE - In this Jan. 26, 2009 file photo, Jeffrey Kindler, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, speaks at a news conference in New York. Kindler, the head of the world's biggest drugmaker, Pfizer Inc., has...
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Pfizer Inc. abruptly replaced its CEO and chairman Sunday, saying Jeffrey B. Kindler was retiring after 4½ years leading the world's biggest drugmaker to "recharge."
Analysts saw the unexpected departure as an ouster, however, coming amid repeated failures from Pfizer's labs to produce new, much-needed blockbuster drugs, multiple patent expirations that threaten its income and a questionable strategy of relying on acquisitions and cost cutting to overcome those mammoth problems.
The move, announced unexpectedly late Sunday night, may be an attempt to palliate investors unhappy with Pfizer's languishing stock price, which is well below that of its peers and down about 30 percent since Kindler took the helm.
Ian Read, 57, a 32-year Pfizer employee who has run Pfizer's worldwide pharmaceutical operations since 2006, took over immediately as chief executive and president. The board appears to want a tighter rein for now, saying it will elect one of its members as a non-executive chairman within the next two weeks.
Kindler, who reorganized most of the New York-based company's operations in an effort to maintain sales, said he plans to "recharge my batteries" and spend more time with his family while preparing for new challenges, according to a company statement. It gave no further details.
"I think what you're seeing is board frustration," said analyst Steve Brozak of WBB Securities.
He said Kindler's latest big acquisition, a pending $3.6 billion deal for pain drug maker King Pharmaceuticals, may have been the last straw for the board. He noted Pfizer also mysteriously backed out of at least one partnership with a small biotech company whose experimental drug subsequently did well in an important clinical study.
Kindler, a Harvard Law School graduate and former McDonald's Corp. executive who joined Pfizer in 2002, revamped its sprawling pharmaceutical sales operation into five divisions that gave their leaders more control and responsibility. That shift boosted revenue in emerging markets — currently the industry's key target — and stabilized sales of older medicines hit by generic competition in wealthy countries by promoting them heavily elsewhere.
Kindler also arranged a huge acquisition that ensures Pfizer remains the pharmaceutical industry's revenue leader for a while, buying Wyeth for $68 billion in October 2009.
The deal transformed Pfizer overnight from a maker of blockbuster pills such as cholesterol fighter Lipitor, the world's top seller at nearly $13 billion a year, to a highly diversified company. It gained a lucrative biologic drug business, veterinary medicines and consumer health products including Centrum vitamins and Advil and Anacin pain relievers.
But that deal and Kindler's other moves have not been enough to compensate for Pfizer's biggest problem: Lipitor loses U.S. patent protection in a year and will see billions in sales evaporate almost overnight.
Les Funtleyder, health care portfolio manager at Miller Tabak, said he thinks managers of pension and other institutional funds were as frustrated as Pfizer's board, given that other drugmakers have generally performed better. Most of Pfizer's peers have stock prices two or three times its current $17.62.
The company also halved its coveted dividend to help pay for Wyeth, which infuriated investors and drove down the stock price. It has only risen $1.10 in the 23 months since the deal was announced.
"He was dealt a difficult hand when (a promising cholesterol drug called) torcetrapib failed and there was no successor to Lipitor," Funtleyder said, adding, "He might have done a better job."
He called the sudden move suspicious in an industry known for orderly transitions announced well in advance.
By comparision, No. 2 drugmaker Merck & Co. last week said that Kenneth C. Frazier, head of its pharmaceutical business since 2007, will take over Jan. 1 as CEO from Richard T. Clark, who reaches mandatory retirement age early next year. Frazier's succession was telegraphed last May, when he was made company president, adding responsibility for Merck's research labs and manufacturing operations as well as pharmaceutical sales.
The company declined Associated Press requests for interviews with Kindler and Read.
"Now that we are about to complete a full year of operating Pfizer and Wyeth together, with our world-class team fully in place, I have concluded the time is right to turn the leadersip of the company over to Ian Read," Kindler said in a statement.
As the chairman of the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Kindler was instrumental in lining up drugmaker support for this year's health care overhaul in a deal that ultimately will bring those companies more customers and sales. The industry had helped defeat the Clinton adminstration's attempt to reform health care in 1994.
Constance J. Horner, the lead independent director of Pfizer's board, said in the company statement that Kindler had recruited talented new leaders and made the company stronger and more focused.
But in recent years, Pfizer has suffered multiple failures of promising experimental drugs in the very-expensive late stages of testing, plus other problems. In September 2009, the company got hit with a record $2.3 billion government fine for illegally promoting a number of medicines for unapproved uses that were inappropriate for some patients — a widespread industry practice.
"This is probably a wake-up call for every other CEO that thinks they can buy their way out of a problematic health care market" with acquisitions, Brozak said.
Read was promoted in 2006 to head the global pharmaceutical business, which brings in about 85 percent of Pfizer's revenue, or $61 billion a year. It sells everything from pain drug Lyrica and impotence pill Viagra to cancer drugs and specialty medicines, generally pricey injected drugs for complex, chronic diseases.
Horner said Read's track record shows he understands global markets and can quickly adapt to competitive pressures.
Read began his career at Pfizer as an operational auditor in 1978, but his undergraduate training was in chemical engineering.
He moved up through leadership positions in Pfizer's Latin America operations, then oversaw operations in Europe, Canada and other areas. By 2002, he was head of operations in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Madoff trustee sues HSBC for $9B in NY court
TOM HAYS - AP - Sun Dec 05, 8:55PM CST
NEW YORK (AP) — HSBC prolonged disgraced financier Bernard Madoff's ability to burn investors by "engineering a labyrinth" of international sources of funding for his epic Ponzi scheme, a court-appointed trustee alleged Sunday.
Trustee Irving Picard announced a lawsuit in federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan that seeks to recover $9 billion in illicit earnings and damages from the Britain-based bank.
The suit alleges that HSBC ignored warnings from its own accountants that Madoff's phenomenal investment record was suspect.
"Had HSBC and (its executives) reacted appropriately to such warnings and other obvious badges of fraud outlined in the complaint, the Madoff Ponzi scheme would have collapsed years, billions of dollars, and countless victims sooner," Picard said in a statement. "The defendants were willfully and deliberately blind to the fraud, even after learning about numerous red flags surrounding Madoff."
A HSBC spokeswoman declined comment late Sunday.
Madoff, 72, is serving a 150-year sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina after admitting that he ran his scheme for at least two decades, using his secretive investment advisory service to cheat thousands of individuals, charities, celebrities and institutional investors. Losses are estimated in the tens of billions, making it the biggest investment fraud in U.S. history.
The complaint against HSBC, affiliates and executives alleges they helped funnel more than $8.9 billion to Madoff through a dozen so-called feeder funds based in Europe, the Caribbean and Central America.
"The defendants engineered a labyrinth of hedge funds, management companies and service providers that, to unsuspecting outsiders, seemed to compose a formidable system of checks and balances," said Oren Warshavsky, a lawyer for Picard. "Yet the purpose of this complex architecture was just the opposite: the defendants wanted to provide different modes for directing money to Madoff in order to avoid scrutiny and generate more fees."
Picard, appointed in 2008 to unravel the fraud and help victims recover losses, has filed similar complaints in recent weeks demanding billions of dollars from UBS AG and JP Morgan Chase. Both deny any wrongdoing.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Calling Congo: Skype slims software for aid expats
FRANK JORDANS - AP - Sun Dec 05, 6:01PM CST
GENEVA (AP) — Internet phone company Skype announced a bare-bones version of its software Monday designed to work over very low bandwidth connections that often are the only links aid workers in far flung places have to the outside world.
Skype S.A. chief executive Tony Bates said the company redesigned its application after being approached by the U.N. refugee agency to help staff working in remote locations communicate with loved ones back home.
Such calls have previously been a rare treat for aid workers, who in addition to enduring harsh climates and the threat of violence also struggle with loneliness when they are catapulted at short notice into emergency situations where regular cell phone networks, let alone landlines, don't reach.
"It's a technology breakthrough in terms of what we can do with Skype, because we're doing this at a very low bandwidth," Bates told The Associated Press.
The regular version of Skype is banned from some of UNHCR's field stations because it is too data hungry, competing with mission-critical applications for bandwidth over precious satellite and microwave connections.
The new version — actually based on an older incarnation of Skype that is now obsolete — can carry voice calls over Internet hookups no faster than the dial-up connections used in the early 1990s.
Bates said the slimmed-down version is being rolled out to more than 1,000 aid workers in places such as Afghanistan, Darfur and Somalia, where war and dire poverty mean U.S.-style broadband connections are rare.
In future, the software also could be made available to the refugees assisted by UNHCR, as well as to other aid agencies, he said, though there are no plans to release it publicly.
Antoine Bertout, who worked on the project with four other Skype volunteers, said engineers took a "back to basics" approach with the software, making many of the newer features dependent on the connection speed and stripping out others such as desktop sharing.
"Skype will recognize whether the bandwidth is strong enough to place a video call," he said, adding that the aid worker version also opts out of Skype's peer-to-peer system, which normally requires users to share their bandwidth with others.
One of those testing the software was UNHCR technician Sylvian Tiako. Speaking over a fragile but audible Skype line from Goma, in eastern Congo, Tiako said he had successfully used the application to call friends and family in west Africa, Europe and North America.
Luxembourg-based Skype said it also would help UNHCR's fundraising efforts, by showing banner ads to users in the United States, Australia and Japan.
The refugee agency has embraced technologies such as Google Maps, YouTube and Twitter in recent years to showcase its work helping tens of millions of people fleeing war, poverty and persecution.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.