Archive for the ‘U.S’ Category
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold them for unspecified periods the Washington Post reported on Friday.
Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without suspicion of wrongdoing, the newspaper said, quoting policies issued on July 16 by two DHS agencies.
Agents are empowered to share the contents of seized computers with other agencies and private entities for data decryption and other reasons, the newspaper said.
DHS officials said the policies applied to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens, and were needed to prevent terrorism.
The measures have long been in place but were only disclosed in July, under pressure from civil liberties and business travel groups acting on reports that increasing numbers of international travelers had had their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices removed and examined.
The policies cover hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes — as well as books, pamphlets and other written materials, the report said.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New estimates show that least 56,000 people become infected with the AIDS virus every year in the United States — 40 percent more than previous calculations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Saturday.
The CDC stressed that actual infection rates have not risen but said better methods of measuring newly diagnosed infections and extrapolating these to the general population led to the higher estimates.
“CDC’s first estimates from this system reveal that the HIV epidemic is — and has been — worse than previously known. Results indicate that approximately 56,300 new HIV infections occurred in the United States in 2006,” the CDC said in a statement.
“This figure is roughly 40 percent higher than CDC’s former estimate of 40,000 infections per year, which was based on limited data and less precise methods.”
The CDC said the epidemic has been stable since the late 1990s, “though the number of new HIV infections remains unacceptably high.”
“The analysis shows that new infections peaked in the mid-1980s at approximately 130,000 infections per year and reached a low of about 50,000 in the early 1990s,” it said.
Dr. Kevin Fenton, who heads the CDC’s AIDS branch, said 15,000 to 18,000 Americans die every year of AIDS.
“The data really confirm that there is a severe impact of this epidemic among gay and bisexual men in the United States … as well as black men and women,” Fenton said in a telephone interview. Continued…
Korean War’s Lost Chapter: South Korea Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians
Posted on: August 19, 2008
North Korean troops surrendered to American soldiers on Wolmi Island on Sept. 22, 1950.
WOLMI ISLAND, South Korea — When American troops stormed this island more than half a century ago, it was a hive of Communist trenches and pillboxes. Now it is a park where children play and retirees stroll along a tree-shaded esplanade.
From a hilltop across a narrow channel, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, memorialized in bronze, appears to gaze down at the beaches of Inchon where his troops splashed ashore in September 1950, changing the course of the Korean War and making him a hero here.
In the port below, rows of cars, gleaming in the sun, wait to be shipped around the world — testimony to South Korea’s industrial might and a reminder of which side has triumphed economically since the conflict ended 55 years ago.
But inside a ragged tent at the entrance of the park, some aging South Koreans gather daily to draw attention to their side of the conflict, a story of carnage not mentioned in South Korea’s official histories or textbooks.
“When the napalm hit our village, many people were still sleeping in their homes,” said Lee Beom-ki, 76. “Those who survived the flames ran to the tidal flats. We were trying to show the American pilots that we were civilians. But they strafed us, women and children.”
Village residents say dozens of civilians were killed.
The attack, though not the civilian casualties, has been corroborated by declassified United States military documents recently reviewed by South Korean investigators. On Sept. 10, 1950, five days before the Inchon landing, according to the documents, 43 American warplanes swarmed over Wolmi, dropping 93 napalm canisters to “burn out” its eastern slope in an attempt to clear the way for American troops.
Though suing file-sharing sites has no effect on the proliferation of file sharing, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)- and its lawers- sure feel better about themselves for doing it. However, there is a section of the film world that isn’t yet positioned to take organized legal action.
That’s right, the porn industry. Made up of a few well-established companies and who knows how many independent producers (and “producers”), porn production cannot really act collectively. However, one man is trying to change that.
Jason Tucker has formed the PAK Group, complete with a catchy mission statement (“committed to taking actino against thieves”) and logo. Unless you read the client list, you wouldn’t realize that the group focuses on protecting adult content.
The PAK Group was founded in September 2007 by a coalition of producers angry with the spread of piracy online. It originally set out to attack individual file-sharers online, much like the RIAA.
Tucker’s new target refers largely to the deluge of “tube” websites that have sprung up in the past few years: styled after the ever-so-popular YouTube, there are now hundreds of these sites offering free streaming video complete with search engines, indexed content, tagging, and in some cases even a download option. Much of their content, however, is pirated.
Source: dailytech.com
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http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6cbjr_eva-mendes-secret-obsession-banned_shortfilms
New Calvin Klein It Girl Eva Mendes’ new titillating ad for Secret Obsession perfume is soooo racy that it’s been banned on TV!
In the 30-second TV spot, Mendes caresses herself, rolls around in an unmade bed and flashes one of her nipples. She then whispers in a husky voice: “Between love and madness lies obession. Love … madness it’s my secret.”
Calvin Klein prez Tom Murry says he’s not surprised by the ban.
We believe the commercial is exceptional and hits the mark for Secret Obsession,” he told the Daily News. “We are anticipating a very successful global launch.”
An edited version of the racy TV spot will run on cable TV while the original ad will run abroad.
Afghan and Indian officials removed a body from the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, after a bombing there on July 7.
American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.
The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.
The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Concerns about the role played by Pakistani intelligence not only has strained relations between the United States and Pakistan, a longtime ally, but also has fanned tensions between Pakistan and its archrival, India. Within days of the bombings, Indian officials accused the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, of helping to orchestrate the attack in Kabul, which killed 54, including an Indian defense attaché.
This week, Pakistani troops clashed with Indian forces in the contested region of Kashmir, threatening to fray an uneasy cease-fire that has held since November 2003.
The New York Times reported this week that a top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled to Pakistan this month to confront senior Pakistani officials with information about support provided by members of the ISI to militant groups. It had not been known that American intelligence agencies concluded that elements of Pakistani intelligence provided direct support for the attack in Kabul.
American officials said that the communications were intercepted before the July 7 bombing, and that the C.I.A. emissary, Stephen R. Kappes, the agency’s deputy director, had been ordered to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, even before the attack. The intercepts were not detailed enough to warn of any specific attack.
The government officials were guarded in describing the new evidence and would not say specifically what kind of assistance the ISI officers provided to the militants. They said that the ISI officers had not been renegades, indicating that their actions might have been authorized by superiors.
GENEVA (Reuters) – Global trade talks collapsed on Tuesday after a clash over agriculture between the United States and emerging powers, including China, India and Indonesia.
The breakdown came on the ninth day of marathon talks. The United States and India failed to find a compromise on measures intended to help poor countries protect their farmers against import surges, a diplomat said.
“We were so close to getting this done,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters at World Trade Organisation headquarters in Geneva. Global negotiators have worked on the Doha trade round for seven years.
“The U.S. remains committed to the Doha round. This is not a time to talk about a round collapsing,” said Schwab, who looked frustrated. “The U.S. commitments remain on the table, awaiting reciprocal responses.”
The collapse also prompted disappointment in other countries that had stood to gain from another round of trade opening.
“It’s really bad news. It’s sad to have lost so many years of work. For an emerging market, it is worrying to see a WTO that is not strong,” said Soraya Rosar, director of international negotiations with Brazil’s National Industry Confederation.
Failure to find agreement on the core agriculture and industrial goods chapters of the Doha trade round could delay any final accord on trade liberalisation for several more years.
Washington had opposed a push from India, China and Indonesia to secure measures to protect their farmers if faced with sudden surges of cheap farm
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Cook, 25, a Missouri guitarist who was tending bar before auditioning for the most watched show on U.S. television, also said his best musical advice came from Frank Sinatra.
Cook won the seventh season of the singing competition and a recording contract on Wednesday, beating 17-year-old crooner David Archuleta by a 12 million-vote margin in the record 97.5 million votes cast by viewers by telephone and text message.
Cook’s first single “The Time of My Life” and the three songs he sang in this week’s “American Idol” finale were the top four downloads on Apple Inc’s iTunes music store on Friday.
Cook said he would not be putting out an album of standards even though he won fans on the show, which is broadcast on the Fox network, a unit of News Corp, with alternative versions of pop classics such as “Billie Jean” and Lionel Richie’s “Hello.”
“I think it’s going to be a mixture of my writing and hopefully writing with other people. I just want to come out of the gate with a solid record,” he told reporters in a telephone conference call.
Senator: Let’s Monitor All P2P
Posted on: May 17, 2008
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Comprehensive software monitors the internet for kiddie porn
Senator Joe Biden, a democrat from Delaware, has a new plan for combating kiddie porn on the internet: implement a nationwide P2P monitoring system.
It’s “pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation,” said Biden, because all you have to do is look at the filenames. He cites a piece of software, known as “Operation Fairplay,” which currently sees use around the world and at regional Internet Crimes Against Children task forces in the U.S.
Operation Fairplay is a “comprehensive computer infrastructure” that gives law enforcement officers a view of the “big picture” of child pornography transfers around the country. Biden says Special Agent Flint Waters of the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office developed the program, and describes him as an expert in the field.
A description of the software as is witnessed by CNET says the software works similar to anti-P2P measures used by Hollywood enforcers: investigators patrol peer-to-peer networks for suspicious-looking for suspicious files, downloading anything they find of interest. Fairplay’s software retrieves the IP address for the investigator and is sometimes able to locate the offender’s computer on a map. Agents then track the offender on a “daily” basis, identifying them by their IP address and, in some cases, a “unique serial number” sourced from offender’s computer.
Special Agent Waters wouldn’t elaborate on what the serial number is comprised of, for fear of giving perpetrators information they could use to circumvent it. “It’s unique to the computer, that’s as far as I’ll go,” he said, noting that “we’re able to get it when they’re transferring child pornography.”
Investigators have recorded almost 1.3 million of the unique serial numbers thus far, with about half of them residing in the United States – and that number is steadily increasing each month due to “extensive capturing” conducted since October 2005.
Fairplay is also capable of tracking the files themselves, monitoring where a file goes by its hashcode – often generated by the P2P client itself as a means of identifying identical files with different filenames.
The American economy lost 20,000 jobs in April, the fourth consecutive month of decline, in what many economists took as powerful evidence that the United States is almost certainly now ensnared in a recession.
But the number of jobs reported lost by the Labor Department on Friday was significantly smaller than most analysts had predicted, and the unemployment rate nudged down to 5 percent, raising hopes that the economy may not suffer as severely as once feared.
“It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as businesses hold the line on their layoffs, the economy will weaken, but it won’t unravel.”
On Wall Street, investors bought into that thinking, bidding stocks up sharply in morning trading before pulling back in the afternoon, pushing the Dow Jones industrial average up 0.4 percent for the day, to close at 13,058.40, a new high for 2008.
But economists emphasized that a substantial pullback in consumer spending could yet force American companies to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers in coming months if business prospects do not improve swiftly.
The Federal Reserve increased its direct lending to financial institutions on Friday, in an effort to overcome the banks’ reluctance to lend money.
Despite the comparatively modest number of jobs lost last month, economists found clear signs of widening distress for millions of American workers.
Companies are cutting working hours, even as many avoid layoffs. The number of people working part time because of slack business or because they could not find full-time work swelled to 5.2 million in April from 4.9 million in March. In percentage terms, employees working part time involuntarily were the most since 1995.
The average weekly pay for rank-and-file workers — about 80 percent of the American work force — has risen by a mere 3 percent over the last year, to $602.56. But that increase has failed to keep pace with the rise in the cost of living, driven primarily by the soaring costs of food and energy. In inflation-adjusted terms, these weekly wages have slipped by 1.3 percent since late 2006.
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