cryptogon.com

The Labor Department reported Thursday that first-time requests for jobless benefits rose by 24,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 484,000, the highest level since late February. Economists had predicted claims would fall.

Ten children and teenagers died when troops stormed a remote mountain compound near the border with Pakistan in December.

At the time, Nato claimed that the assault force was targeting a “known insurgent group responsible for a series of violent attacks”. Officials said that the victims were involved in making and smuggling improvised explosive devices. But Western sources close to the case now agree that the victims were all aged 12 to 18 and were not involved in insurgent activity.

Nato sources say that the raid should never have been authorised. “Knowing what we know now, it would probably not have been a justifiable attack,” an official in Kabul told The Times. “We don’t now believe that we busted a major ring.”

When reports of the raid first surfaced eight weeks ago, The Times contacted the police chief in Kunar province and then the boys’ head-master and uncle, Rahman Jan Ehsas.

Two men whose children and other relatives were killed agreed to come to Kabul to describe the incident. They provided pictures of their dead sons, a sketched map of the compound and copies of the compensation claim forms signed by local officials detailing their sons’ names, relatives and positions at school. Their story was supported by Western military sources.

Farooq Abdul Ajan, who lost two sons, two brothers, three nephews and a cousin in the raid, said that the soldiers had had no idea whom they were killing. Afghan investigators, local officials and MPs from the province all maintain that the boys were innocent.

Nato’s statement, issued four days after the event, said that troops were attacked “from several buildings” as they entered the village. Yesterday it said that “ultimately, we did determine this to be a civilian casualty incident”.

Anger is growing over civilian casualties. General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander, has warned that Nato risks “strategic defeat” by causing civilian deaths. The Independent Human Rights Commission said that more than 63 civilians had died in the past two weeks, including 27 killed when US special forces ordered an airstrike on a convoy of minibuses in the central Daikundi province. Nato recently introduced a new tactical directive to limit the use of night raids, the coalition’s chief legal adviser, Colonel Richard Gross, said. “General McChrystal realised that this was one of the areas where we had to change the way we do business, or else we would not win this war,” he said.

Exactly who carried out the Narang raid is unclear. Colonel Gross said that US forces were present but did not lead the operation. Nato insists that the troops were not part of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf). US forces based in Kunar denied any knowledge of the raid.

Take Hong Kong as an example. City Telecom made waves a few months ago with its US$13, symmetric 100Mbps connections. Today, the company slashed prices on its much faster 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home offering; a fully symmetric, 1Gbps connection costs HK$199… or US$26 a month.

“We don’t know what it is,” says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.

It would also grant police the power to stop and verify the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being illegal.

The bill could still face a veto from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. A spokesman for Ms. Brewer said she has not publicly commented on the bill. Ms. Brewer, a Republican, has argued for stringent immigration laws.

Under the measure, passed Tuesday by Arizona’s lower house, after being passed earlier by the state Senate, foreign nationals are required to carry proof of legal residency.

Immigrants’ rights groups roundly criticized the bill. “The objective is to make life miserable for immigrants so that they leave the state,” said Chris Newman, general counsel for the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “The bill constitutes a complete disregard for the rights of nonwhites in Arizona. It effectively mandates racial profiling.”

President Obama told delegates from 47 nations at the Nuclear Security Summit on Tuesday that it would be a “catastrophe for the world” if al-Qaeda or another terrorist group got a nuclear device, because so many lives would be lost and it would be so hard to mitigate damage from the blast.

A 10-kiloton nuclear explosion would level buildings within half a mile of ground zero, generate 900-mph winds, bathe the landscape with radiation and produce a plume of fallout that would drift for hundreds of miles, the guide says. It was posted on the Internet and sent to local officials.

The document is designed to help local officials craft plans for responding to a nuclear blast. The prospect is anything but far-fetched, says Rick Nelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Do I think in my lifetime I’ll see the detonation of a nuclear device? I do.”

One challenge he says, will be to persuade survivors to stay indoors, shielded from dangerous radiation until they’re given the all-clear or told to evacuate. “In all likelihood, families will be separated,” he says. “It’s going to be scary to sit tight, though it’s the right thing to do.”

The government’s planning scenarios envision a terrorist strike in an urban area with a 10-kiloton device, slightly smaller than the roughly 15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb. A 10-kiloton device packs the punch of 10,000 tons of TNT.

The chaos that would inevitably follow such a blast would make it difficult for the federal government to react quickly. “Emergency response is principally a local function,” the document says, though “federal assistance will be mobilized as rapidly as possible.”

The “Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation” was developed by a task force headed by the White House Homeland Security Council. It was circulated to state and local government officials and first responders in January 2009.

The report has never been formally released to the public, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro says.

It offers practical guidance to first responders and advice on radiation measurement and decontamination.

Disaster experts say local governments aren’t prepared for a nuclear attack. “There isn’t a single American city, in my estimation, that has sufficient plans for a nuclear terrorist event,” says Irwin Redlener of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Continued legal appeals will delay or block the first public look at details of the central bank’s $2 trillion in emergency lending during the 2008 financial crisis. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group that includes Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., joined the Fed in defense of a lawsuit brought by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, seeking release of records related to four Fed lending programs.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled March 19 that the central bank must release the documents. A three-judge panel of the appellate court rejected the Fed’s argument that disclosure would stigmatize borrowers and discourage banks from seeking emergency help.

“Our member banks are very concerned about real-time disclosure of information that could cause a run on the banks,” said Paul Saltzman, the group’s general counsel, in an interview yesterday. “We’re not going to let the Second Circuit opinion stand without seeking a review.”

This latest filing is up 19% from March 2009’s number which occurred at the absolute nadir of the economic decline, when everyone thought the world was ending. It’s also up 35% from last month’s (February 2010) number.