cryptogon.com

Sell the name of a station to an advertiser: It’s a business strategy the cash-strapped agency has been developing for years. But no one has been willing to pay up until now.

Strangely enough, it’s a London-based bank that wants first dibs on subway stops at Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street transit hub. If a $4 million deal gets approved today, all of the subway stations at a busy Brooklyn hub will have Barclays added to their names, according to The New York Times.

Why does a British bank with a Manhattan office want its name on Crooklyn subway stations? Barclays Center, the sports stadium intended to be the center of the Atlantic Yards project, will be finished in the next few years. And Atlantic Yards’ developer Forest City Ratner offered the MTA $200,000 annually over the next two decades to change the name of the second most bustling station in Brooklyn to reflect the focal point of its $4.9-billion project.

If one company can buy rights to change the name of subway stations, a New Yorker might ask, what’s next? Coca-Cola 59th Street-Lex? Pepsi 5th Avenue-53rd?

Either and more could be on the horizon if the MTA has its way. In the past, subway stations used to be named based on where they were located, but the MTA is jumping on the chance to raise revenue for the transit system by allowing advertisers to buy in.

Qari Zainuddin, a tribal leader of the South Waziristan region in Pakistan was shot dead on Tuesday by a gunman said to be loyal to Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.

Analysts said that Mr Zainuddin’s murder was a serious blow to the military campaign against the militants, as support of his faction was considered crucial, reports the London Times. “[It] is a warning to other pro government tribal commanders,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier who had served as top official in the tribal region.

Zainuddin had rejected Mehsud’s Taliban tribe, and shifted his allegiance to the Pakistani government, following a string of suicide bombings targeting mosques and civilians.

The Pakistani government also claims that Mehsud was responsible for the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.

One of Qari Zainuddin’s aides, who was also injured in the attack that killed the tribal leader, told the media that a lone gunman was able to enter Zainuddin’s office and open fire, before escaping uninjured.

“It was definitely Baitullah’s man who infiltrated our ranks, and he has done his job,” Baz Mohammad told the Associated Press news agency.

Zainuddin had recently hit out at Mehsud in an interview with the AP.

“Whatever Baitullah Mehsud and his associates are doing in the name of Islam is not a jihad, and in fact it is rioting and terrorism,” Zainuddin said.

Though the BBC and other mainstream sources highlighted this interview with Zainuddin, they neglected to cover the fact that Zainuddin also reportedly denounced Mehsud as “an American agent”.

Both Iranian and Pakistani media independently covered his remarks, adding that Zainuddin also described Baitullah Mehsud as having strong links with both Indian and Israeli intelligence.

In an interview with local media the defector said that Mehsud had established strong links with Israeli intelligence services, which were destabilizing the nuclear armed country, reports the Iranian news service Press TV.

“These people (Mehsud and his men) are working against Islam.” the report quotes Zainuddin as having said.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s largest daily newspaper, The News, carried a report last Sunday that highlighted the remarks:

“In interviews to various media organisations on Thursday, Qari Zainuddin and his deputy Haji Turkistan had alleged that Baitullah was an American and Indian agent, he had killed Benazir Bhutto and that the real Jihad was going on in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan.” the report stated.

“Many diplomats contacted Foreign Office and Interior Ministry officials as well as media persons, seeking answers to their questions. Some Western diplomats were particularly confused over the claim that Baitullah was an American agent and that he had killed Benazir Bhutto. These diplomats were asking a question that if Baitullah was involved in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, does that mean that the American authorities were also involved in the conspiracy.” the report continued.

Of course, whether you put faith in the Iranian and Pakistani media on these reports, is another question, however, there have been suspicions for some time amongst some Pakistanis that Baitullah Mehsud is on the CIA payroll and is being protected by the intelligence apparatus.

According to retired brigadier and former vice president and founder of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, Shaukat Qadir, the Pakistani military has requested US help to kill Baitullah Mehsud on several occasions and provided the US with accurate information of his location. Despite this, he claims, Mehsud was never targeted.

Other analysts hold suspicions that Indian and US intelligence are funneling weapons, financial aid and even fighters to the Pakistani Taliban.

The history of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as we have previously reported, is replete with connections to western controlled intelligence agencies.

These facts were also recently highlighted by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, who admitted that the CIA and his country’s ISI together created the Taliban.

Sanford is the chairman of the Republican Governors’ Association and a prominent fiscal conservative who has been talked about as a potential Republican candidate for the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

Analysts said his mystery retreat to South America could damage his political career if he has presidential aspirations.

When media reported Sanford’s whereabouts were unknown since last Thursday and that even his wife did not know where he was, his aides said he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the eastern United States to get away for a break after a tough state legislative session.

During his absence, some South Carolina politicians accused him of abdicating responsibility for state affairs by leaving without giving details of where he was going and remaining out of contact.

Sanford flew to Atlanta early on Wednesday and told reporters for The State, South Carolina’s biggest newspaper, he had decided at the last minute to go to Argentina and drive along its coastline.

The men, dubbed the “Geritol Gang” by police after an arthritis drug, face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of subjecting German-American James Amburn to the alleged four-day ordeal.

Two of his kidnappers are said to have hit him with a Zimmer frame outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, before he was bound up with duct tape, bundled into the boot of a car and driven 300 miles to the home of two of the abductors on the shores of Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria.

“I was bleeding from my eyes, nose and my mouth,” he said. “But the nightmare had only just started.”

During his alleged confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr Amburn, 56, claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two of his ribs broken was hit with a chair leg and chained up “like an animal.”

The incident began on Tuesday last week as he made his way home after enjoying a drink at an outdoor café with a friend.

Mr Amburn, the boss of an investment firm called Digitalglobalnet, was allegedly attacked by two men – aged 74 and 60 – as he entered his apartment building.

Mr Amburn, who also has a home in Florida, said: “I had no reason to be afraid. But as I went into my home I was jumped from the rear and struck.

“Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath. When they loaded me into the car I thought I was a dead man.”

After being driven through the night he allegedly arrived at the home of one of his captors and his 79-year-old wife in Chieming on the shores of what is one of Germany’s main holiday lakes.

As he was bundled into the cellar another couple, two retired doctors, aged 63 and 66, arrived to take part in the alleged four-day torture and humiliation of the captive financial adviser.

“I was led into the cellar,” recalled Mr. Amburn, “I saw a folding bed and a WC reserved for me. They immediately went on about there money. I told them what I had told them before, that due to market conditions, unfortunately it was gone.

“I was struck. Again and again they threatened to kill me. The fear of death was indescribable. I never thought I would make it out alive.

“I told them that if I sold certain securities in Switzerland they could get their money and for this I had to send a fax to a bank in that country so funds could be transferred.”

They agreed and he sent a fax, but unbeknown to them he scribbled a message on the bottom of the paper for whoever received it to call police.

“It was disguised as a policy,” he said. “I wrote ‘call. po-lice’ and they didn’t notice it but someone at the bank was bright enough to pick up on it.”

He attempted to escape when he was allowed out of the cellar on Friday for cigarette break in the garden while the kidnappers waited on their loot attempted. In the pouring rain he ran down the street pursued by his captors in the Audi A8 they had used to transport him to the house.

Several people saw him but one of the captors shouted: “He’s a burglar!” Held by people who believed him to be a crook, he was dragged back to the cellar.

He then claims to have sustained broken ribs when he was “punished” for the escape attempt.

When the Swiss bank telephoned police in Germany an armed team of commandos was scrambled and the house was stormed in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Forty armed police rescued Mr. Amburn who was naked except for his underwear. A physician had to be on hand to help his captors into police vans because of their various infirmities.

Volker Ziegler, the chief public prosecutor from nearby Traunstein, said: “They were angry because they invested money in properties in Florida and he lost it all. This was black money – they hadn’t declared it to the revenue authorities in Germany.”

Cheney’s work is currently untitled and will cover his long career in government, from chief of staff under President Ford to vice president under Bush, from Vietnam and Watergate to the first Gulf War and the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, the 68-year-old Cheney noted that he had never written a book about his years in government, which dates back to the 1960s.

It’s not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last May’s Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

NOTE: there are TWO high school students who discovered plastic-consuming microorganisms. The first was Daniel Burd (last year). The second was Tseng I-Ching (last month), a high school student in Taiwan.

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn’t considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

That was Daniel’s question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

…

Tired of trying to identify landmarks in your endless folders of travel photos? Google’s image recognition engine could help. Just upload the mystery image to an online album, point the engine at it, and zap — turns out it was the Acropolis, in Athens, Greece.

There’s no product just yet, but Google’s recognition engine has proven capable of identifying more than 50,000 unique landmarks from around the world, and all “without any human intervention,” said Jay Yagnik, head of Google’s Computer Vision Research. His team is scheduled to present its work today at a computer vision conference in Miami, Florida.

Financial markets have repeatedly been spooked this year by concern that triple-A rated governments such as the United States and Britain could face credit ratings downgrades as they borrow heavily to spend their way out of recession.

“The U.S. government triple-A is safe,” Pierre Cailleteau, team managing director of Moody’s Sovereign Risk Group, said at a media briefing on sovereign credit ratings held in Tokyo.

Moody’s has a stable outlook on the U.S. rating, which indicates a change is not expected over the next 18 months.

Replying to a question about the sovereign rating of the United States, Cailleteau said the U.S. rating “remains a solid triple-A.”

But he added that there were possible risks that could lead to a downgrade.

“That will happen for two reasons. Either our assumptions in terms of debt reversibility prove to be wrong. That is, in fact the U.S. government is unable to bring public debt back to a downward trajectory,” he said.

The other reason would be if the United States’ ability to raise a large amount of debt at a low cost were to be put at risk, Cailleteau said.

“It could be put at risk if the U.S. dollar was severely challenged as the main international reserve currency,” he said.

But the possibility of the dollar being replaced as the main international reserve currency in the near future was a “pretty remote risk,” he added.

Debate has flared in the past few months about the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency at a time when the United States’ debt issuance is ballooning to pay for financial and economic rescue programs.

The bulk of the world’s foreign exchange reserves are held in dollars, and Russia, the holder of the world’s third-largest reserves after China and Japan, has repeatedly called for less global reliance on the dollar.

Moody’s Investors Service said in May that it was comfortable with the triple-A sovereign rating on the United States, but it was not guaranteed forever.

Under Canada’s official pandemic plan, the entire population would ultimately be immunized against the H1N1 swine flu.

But the vaccine will become available in batches, meaning the entire population can’t be vaccinated at once. It might take four or five months to get all the vaccine we’re going to get, during which time a second wave of swine flu may well be underway.

The program came under fire from its inception two years ago. Democratic lawmakers said it would lead to domestic spying.

The program would have provided federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery — but no eavesdropping capabilities— to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.

It would have expanded an Interior Department satellite program, which will continue to be used to assist in natural disasters and for other limited security purposes such as photographing sporting events. The Wall Street Journal first revealed the plans to establish the program, known as the National Applications Office, in 2007.

“It’s being shut down,” said a homeland security official.

The Bush administration had taken preliminary steps to launch the office, such as acquiring office space and beginning to hire staff.

The plans to shutter the office signal Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s decision to refocus the department’s intelligence on ensuring that state and local officials get the threat information they need, the official said. She also wants to make the department the central point in the government for receiving and analyzing terrorism tips from around the country, the official added.

Lawmakers alerted Ms. Napolitano of their concerns about the program-that the program would violate the Fourth amendment right to be protected from unreasonable searches-before her confirmation hearing.

Once she assumed her post, Ms. Napolitano ordered a review of the program and concluded the program wasn’t worth pursuing, the homeland official said. Department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa declined to speak about the results of the review but said they would be announced shortly.

The lawmakers were most concerned about plans to provide satellite imagery to state and local law enforcement, so department officials asked state and local officials how useful that information would be to them. The answer: not very useful.

“In our view, the NAO is not an issue of urgency,” Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, wrote to Ms. Napolitano on June 21.

Writing on behalf of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Chief Bratton said that were the program to go forward, the police chiefs would be concerned about privacy protections and whether using military satellites for domestic purposes would violate the Posse Comitatus law, which bars the use of the military for law enforcement in the U.S.

Rep. Jane Harman (D., Calif.), who oversees the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said she was alarmed when she recently saw that the Obama administration requested money for the program in a classified 2010 budget proposal. She introduced two bills that would terminate the program.

“It’s a good decision,” Ms. Harman said in an interview. “This will remove a distraction and let the intelligence function at [the department] truly serve the community that needs it, which is local law enforcement.”

Supporters of the program lamented what they said was the loss of an important new terrorism-fighting tool for natural disasters and terrorist attacks, as well as border security.