US might add additional security measures to keep a track of immigrants and prevent fake documentation and identity. Obama administration considering addition of detailed personal information to E-verify tool ( an immigration enforcement tool that is vulnerable to fake, stolen or borrowed documents.) .
E-verify tool used to check information like Social Security and immigration records. It can't verify that documents belong to same person who presented it. The agency will add driver's licence data to help better identifying the person. The administration has said that it will add driver's license data from the state of Mississippi to E-Verify as early as June 8.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has tried to make up for E-Verify's shortcomings by adding photos from U.S. passports, green cards given to legal permanent residents and work permits. But those only cover some workers.
About 80 percent of workers present driver's licenses to establish their identity when filling out paperwork at new jobs, including papers — known as I-9 forms— asking whether they are citizens or permitted to work in the U.S., said Bill Wright, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees E-Verify.
"This initiative is a major step forward in allowing (Citizenship and Immigration Services) to more effectively combat identity theft and protect against fraud in the employment verification process," Wright said. Only data such as birth dates and driver's license numbers will be shared by Mississippi, not photos.
Other states will be watching the experiment with Mississippi information to see how it affects American's privacy. No other states have agreed to share data yet, although some others were asked.
Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed using the driver's license data in a May 9 Federal Register notice. The public can comment on the proposal through June 8.
The addition of driver's license data raises concerns with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been a leading opponent of E-Verify, created in 1996 but little used until after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"You are creating an enormous database filled with information on what would be, if it's mandatory, information on every American worker. That's a honey pot for identity thieves," said Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the ACLU in Washington.
He noted a recent Minnesota case in which names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and other information were not kept secure by a company the state hired to check employers' new workers through E-Verify.
The Federal Trade Commission announced earlier this month it had reached a settlement with Texas-based Lookout Services Inc., the Minnesota contractor, on charges of failing to safeguard the sensitive information. The FTC said because of the lax security, an employee of one of Lookout's customers was able to get access to sensitive information in the company's database, including Social Security numbers of about 37,000 people. Lookout did not admit wrongdoing.
The use of E-Verify could figure prominently in any immigration debate in Congress this session.
Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, cheered a Supreme Court ruling on Thursday sustaining Arizona's state law requiring businesses to use E-Verify. The 2007 law was signed by then-Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, now the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Mississippi law requires employers in that state to use E-Verify.
Smith said he would soon introduce a bill expanding E-Verify and making it mandatory for businesses, many of which have been expecting it this congressional session and have been meeting with Smith and his staff to discuss their concerns. E-Verify will help "turn off the jobs magnet that encourages illegal immigration," Smith said Thursday.
The Obama administration has made cracking down on employers who hire non-citizens without permits to work as a key part of its immigration enforcement policy..
More than 200,000 of the estimated 7 million employers in the U.S are using E-Verify.
Online: Citizenship and Immigration Services: http://www.uscis.gov
( Source: AP )
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
When Bob Haygooni paid a midflight visit to a cockpit at his new employer, Air India, he was shocked. The pilots, he said, had completely covered the windows with newspaper to keep out the sun.
“All you had in the cockpit was this yellowish glow, as the light permeated the newspaper,” Mr. Haygooni recalled, saying it was a visibility hazard he had never seen before in 30 years of flying.
But “this was a normal thing at Air India,” said Mr. Haygooni, a former United Airlines pilot who flew for the Indian airline for 16 months. In April 2010, however, he decided that the paycheck was not worth his concerns over what he considered the government’s haphazard approach to running its state-owned airline.
Interviews with more than a dozen experienced pilots hired in the last three years by Air India to work new international routes describe an airline with problems. But theirs are not the only complaints.
Passengers have abandoned Air India in droves, shunning the airline because of its reputation for poor customer service and late flights.
Formerly this nation’s monopoly carrier, Air India has been surpassed by three commercial Indian airlines — Jet Airways, Kingfisher and IndiGo — among those that have sprung up since India deregulated the domestic industry nearly two decades ago. Air India now has less than 15 percent of India’s domestic air travel market, with many empty seats on the flights that do take off.
As a result, Air India lost more than $1 billion in taxpayer money in the last fiscal year. And now there is a growing public clamor for the government to get out of the airline business.
“Instead of throwing good money after bad, the time has come to stand up and say: yes, Air India must be shut down,” The Indian Express newspaper said in an editorial earlier this month. While few government airlines in the developing world have stellar reputations, the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a research group in Sydney, Australia, singled out Air India as an example of government mismanagement.
“There are other state-owned airlines in other emerging-market countries that have similar problems, but I can’t think of one as bad as Air India,” said Peter Harbison, the center’s executive chairman.
Well-run state airlines tend to be a product of “enlightened and intelligent leadership,” Mr. Harbison said.
He cited Indonesia’s national carrier, Garuda, which once was an airline with heavy debts and a fleet of unsafe old planes that regulators in Europe refused to let land there. But under a businessman, Emirsyah Satar, who was named chief executive in 2005, Garuda Indonesia has been transformed into a profitable company that raised $350 million in a public offering this year.
Spokesmen for Air India defend the airline as safe and say it is working to correct its problems.
And the nation’s new civil aviation minister, Vayalar Ravi, vowed in an interview Wednesday not to close or sell the airline. “There is no question of Air India being shut or privatized,” he said. He said vested interests who “want to exploit the people for their own profit” were behind suggestions that India’s government give the airline up.
Still, Mr. Ravi said the airline had been mismanaged in the past — including the merging in 2007 of India’s domestic and international state-run airlines. “Nothing positive came out of the merger,” he said, and Air India has bought too many planes.
But the airline does “not make any compromises with maintenance and security,” Mr. Ravi said.
Air India’s image was not helped by a recent 10-day pilots’ strike over salaries. It ended with a government pledge to raise pay — but not before the work stoppage had caused cancellation of nearly 1,500 flights and added almost $50 million to Air India’s mounting losses.
Hoping to win back customers, Air India is slashing fares and planning to expand, even though it loses money on 95 percent of its flights. Analysts say the prospect of a fare war threatens to destabilize the entire Indian airline industry, and to erase the previous predictions by private carriers of profits this year.
Even some once-loyal customers are giving up on Air India.
“I think all Indians should just boycott the airline,” said Harjiv Singh, co-founder of Gutenberg Communications, a public relations company with offices in New York and Delhi.
Mr. Singh said he used to fly Air India’s business class regularly. But now he flies Continental’s direct flight to Newark, or one of a host of European carriers that stop in Europe before going on to New York.
Even inside the company, some executives are quietly calling for the end of government control. But Air India is popular with India’s central government because ministers and politicians can demand routes to connect their home states with the capital, New Delhi, even if they lose money.
“I feel like a woman with 1,000 husbands,” one male Air India executive complained, referring to the constant demands from government officials.
As in many other emerging-market countries, India had a severe pilot shortage about five years ago, as the number of passengers and airlines grew faster than the country could churn out new pilots. Airlines here responded to the pilot shortage by hiring expatriates, including hundreds from the United States, where — until the rules changed in 2007 — commercial pilots were forced to retire at age 60. In India, as most everywhere else, the retirement age has long been 65.
For many of those who joined Air India, the culture clash has been severe. Dozens left before their three-year contracts expired. Of the 186 foreign pilots hired since April 2007, Air India has just 36 left, the company said.
Pilots interviewed for this article expressed safety concerns about basic operations at Air India — particularly its training procedures, which many said were not adequate for teaching the hundreds of new pilots the airline needs for its expansion. Some, like Mr. Haygooni, spoke freely. Others insisted that their identities not be revealed because they said the industry did not reward whistle-blowers.
Air India is “just so far behind the ball I don’t know how they will ever catch up,” said Alexander Garmendia, 64, who joined Air India in 2009 after retiring from American Airlines. He trained at Air India’s headquarters in Mumbai for six weeks, but said he left in part because he was worried about safety.
One safety concern noted by the interviewed pilots was that veteran Air India captains often left cockpit doors unlocked — a practice most carriers around the world abandoned after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. They also said captains tended to leave the cabin during flights, leaving co-pilots alone for long periods. They said pilots’ smoking in cockpits was also common.
Mr. Rattan acknowledged that such things might occur, but “to say it was a trend would be to stretch things too far.”
Expatriate Air India pilots said they were most worried about an inadequate training system that they said created co-pilots with excellent book knowledge but little real-life flying experience.
“The biggest problem is if I have a heart attack, this kid isn’t going to be able to get the plane on the ground,” said one current Air India pilot, who has more than 25 years of commercial airline experience.
At Air India, some pilots say, young co-pilots get few hands-on opportunities in the cockpit. Veteran captains handle the landings and takeoffs, often leaving co-pilots little to do but operate the radio and fill out paperwork.
Most of the pilots interviewed for this article recalled incidents when they let young co-pilots take the controls — a common practice in America and Europe to give inexperienced pilots a chance to learn — but then had to seize back command of the aircraft to prevent a disaster.
An Air India spokesman in Mumbai, K. Swaminathan, said in an e-mail that India’s airline regulator did allow assisted takeoffs and landings by co-pilots, when they were flying with commanders who were authorized to do such training. But “as the airline is in the midst of a fleet expansion, all commanders may not have the necessary experience to allow co-pilots to conduct supervised takeoffs and landings,” he said.
Air India was free of major accidents for a decade — until a May 2010 crash in Mangalore that killed 158 people. The captain, a Serbian, came into the landing too high, and did not abort it when he should have, the Indian government’s investigation report said.
The co-pilot, the report found, “failed to challenge any of the captain’s errors.”
Just four days later, Air India had another serious incident, when a co-pilot, while adjusting his seat, accidentally knocked the controls off their settings as the captain was heading for the bathroom. The plane dropped 7,000 feet before the captain could return to the cockpit and right it.
A government investigation concluded the co-pilot “probably had no clue how to tackle this kind of emergency.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
( Source: The New York Times )
Egyptian ex-housing minister Ahmed Maghrabi convicted in corruption and sentenced five year prison. Maghrabi was accused of illegally selling 18 acres of state land at cut-rate prices to Ghabbour.
The official Middle East news Agency said Thursday that Ahmed Maghrabi was found guilty of intentionally damaging public finances by allowing a businessman to illegally acquire state land.
The businessman, Mounir Ghabbour, received a one-year suspended sentence. The verdicts can be appealed.
The court ordered them to repay a total of $12 million (72 million Egyptian pounds) and fined them the same amount.
Some two dozen Cabinet ministers and businessmen linked to the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak face corruption charges.
( Source: AP )
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
MGM China, the venture between MGM Resorts International and casino mogul Stanley Ho's daughter Pansy Ho, priced its initial public offering of 760 million shares at HK $15.34 a share, the top of its indicative range of HK$12.36 to $HK$15.34 a share, two sources with direct knowledge of the deal told Reuters on Friday. Company raised HK$11.66 billion ($1.5 billion) from th IPO.
The sources declined to be identified because the information was not yet public.
The offering will catapult Ho near the top of Asia's billionaire list, surpassing her father with an estimated wealth of nearly $5 billion, taking into consideration her stake in MGM China and other holdings. The elder Ho, known as Macau's casino King because of his longstanding monopoly that ended in 2002, has a fortune estimated at about $3 billion.
MGM China is seeking to benefit from a boom in Macau, the only place in China where casino gambling is legal.
Casino revenue in the tiny enclave an hour from Hong Kong surged 44.6 percent in April to 20.5 billion patacas ($2.56 billion), with the market set to double in size to $50 billion between 2013 and 2015, according to Goldman Sachs estimates.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley will act as joint global coordinators for the offering.
( Source: Reuters )
Lenovo, the world's No 4 PC brand looking for merger and acquisitions as company facing supply shortages for its LePad tablet , that was launched in China. As such company's quarterly earnings surged three-fold and beat analysts' expectations.
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| Lenovo |
PC companies have been aggressively looking to mobile devices and IT services to diversify out of personal computers, for which net margins can fall to low single digits.
Apple's iPad has worsened things for brands such as Lenovo and Taiwan's Acer, cannibalizing the low-cost netbook PC segment that had proven immensely successful with consumers during the global financial crisis.
"Lenovo still has a long way to go with tablet PCs," said Vincent Chen, an analyst with Yuanta Securities in Taipei. "They are only in China now, and there may be pricing pressure as more brands push out their own tablet PCs this year."
Acer this week launched its Iconia tablet PC running on Google's Android operating system , with a retail price of $449.99, lower than similar products from rivals such as LG Electronics and Research in Motion.
Pressure
"Price pressure will definitely rise as the year goes on, and the challenge right now for Lenovo and other PC brands is how they maintain margins in the tablet PC segment," said Chen.
Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing declined to disclose exact shipment figures for the LePad.
"We're pretty confident of taking up more than 20 percent market share with LePad," Chairman Liu Chuanzhi said.
Lenovo more than tripled its fourth-quarter net profit, beating forecasts on robust demand from commercial customers and making up for a slowdown in the consumer sector.
It reported net profit of $42.13 million in the January-March quarter, up from $12.8 million a year earlier, according to Reuters' calculations based on full-year results.
This was better than expectations for $36.7 million in a survey of 23 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
"Momentum in commercial PC demand has gradually picked up, benefiting from the corporate refresh cycle, while consumer PC demand weakened due to a worsening macroeconomic environment and increasing competition from tablet products," the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
For the fiscal year to end-March, Lenovo's net profit was $273.2 million, beating a consensus forecast for $267.8 million.
Last week rival Dell delivered stellar quarterly results while Hewlett-Packard disappointed markets by slashing its 2011 earnings forecasts.
China continued to be the star performer, accounting for 46.4 percent of Lenovo's sales.
However, operating margins fell 0.5 percentage points to 5.1 percent due to higher marketing costs from the LePhone and LePad mobile products, the company said.
Feature phone shipments grew 40 percent from the preceding year, Lenovo said, helping it grow market share to 4.7 percent in China.
Lenovo shares fell 11 percent in January-March, lagging a 2.1 percent gain in the benchmark Hang Seng Index.
On Thursday, Lenovo's shares were up 0.7 percent before the results were announced, in line with the Hang Seng.
( Source: Reuters )
( Source: Reuters )
For those, who own a website, publishing advertisements and generate revenues, there is a good news for all. online advertising market has reported a record revenue of $7.3 billion in the first quarter of 2011, up 23 percent on YoY basis means online advertising business is growing, so publishers revenue will also be maintained.
Below is the news release: ( Source: AP )
U.S. Internet advertising revenue hit $7.3 billion in the first quarter of 2011, up 23 percent from $5.9 billion in the first quarter of last year, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Pricewaterhouse Coopers reported Thursday.
That's a first-quarter record.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents media and technology companies, releases online advertising revenue numbers each quarter. Management consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers compiles the similar data independently based on information from companies that sell advertising on the Internet.
For all of 2010, U.S. Internet advertising revenue totaled $26 billion, IAB reported last month.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Sex Scandals are being exposed in recent days. If we see the headlines since last 2 weeks, they are either DSK ( The IMF head ) or Sex party as a compensation for Sales Executives in German Insurer Munich Re. There is another scandal that has been exposed recently in London. A famous strip club called White Gentleman's Club in London was raided and investigated for about 2 months and finally city police shuts down the club.
Police squad ( vice squad ) found that bankers and other high end people were paying almost $1400 for threesomes in a stretch limo. They hired white limo for site seeing tour around the city and at the beginning of the tour, they were offered " full sex with two busty hookers and champagne on board ".The Sun reported the news
Inside the club, wealthy visitors—who had already spent big on lap dances—were offered sex for about $1000.
The manager of the club was arrested "on suspicion of controlling prostitution."
Bankers, sportsmen and TV hosts make up much of the clientele at the strip joint.
This story originally appeared on Business Insider
UNIPHOS (Fut)
(Last closed 161)
This will be strong bullish 160 above…!
Good level to Grab it 159.5-160.5
Don't hold your long 159 below…?
Go for Targets intraday 163.5-164
After crossing 165 or closing above 162…then Hold your Position for targets 167-170-176 (2-5Days only)
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| Fibertower Corp. |
there is no any specific news or announcements from the company. As volumes are quiet stronger and bullish movement might continue. Trader might take buy positions for intra day gains. It may be a cautious call to carry forward position.
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