Bank Transfer Day: Technologists Say Thousands Already Switching
October 22nd, 2011Via: CU Times:
While Bank Transfer Day, and the dump-your-bank sentiment that serves as its backdrop, has earned a lot of media coverage and promotional dollars among credit unions, are people really switching?
The folks whose job it is to facilitate that move behind the scenes, who manage the so-called “switch kits” of electronic banking, say it’s so.
Several big credit unions and the vendors who supply their technology told Credit Union Times this week they have seen a surge of new memberships that began when Bank of America declared its $5 a month debit fee in late September.
“We’ve more than doubled our usual rate of membership growth in the past 17 or 18 days,” said Howie Wu, vice president of virtual banking at the $9.5 billion, 700,000-member BECU in Tukwila, Wash.
“We usually average about 6,000 to 7,000 new members a month, but from the date of Bank of America’s announcement to today, we’ve totaled 10,400 new members,” Wu said Thursday.
A half a nation away, “We’re on track to open more accounts in one month than we ever have before,” said Mary O’Rourke, vice president of electronic services at the $4.4 billion, 357,000-member Randolph-Brooks FCU in Live Oak, Texas.
Several major and regional banks already had begun raising fees in anticipation of losing income to the new interchange cap, but it seems to be Bank of America’s move that set the stage for a Facebook post by a Los Angeles art dealer to go viral and launch the ad hoc, anti-bank holiday that debuts Nov. 5.
Six-Figure Salaries, But Homeless
October 22nd, 2011Working for oil companies by day, sleeping in a WalMart parking lot by night.
Via: CNN:
They’re pulling in fat paychecks, but now they’re also homeless.
In the town of Williston, N.D., America’s newest oil boomtown, more than 6,000 job seekers have come from every corner of the country looking for work. Yet, oil companies and other developers haven’t been able to build housing units fast enough.
BP Gets Approval to Resume Drilling in Gulf of Mexico
October 22nd, 2011Via: BBC:
BP has won approval to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, 18 months after a well blowout killed 11 workers and caused an environmental disaster.
Regulators approved plans for drilling to depths of up to 6,000ft about 200 miles off the coast of New Orleans.
US officials said in a statement: “Our review of BP’s plan included verification of BP’s compliance with the heightened standards.”
And Coming Up Next: Pakistan?
October 22nd, 2011Via: New York Times:
An unusually powerful American delegation arrived here on Thursday to deliver the starkest warning yet to Pakistan, according to a senior American official: that the United States would act unilaterally if necessary to attack extremist groups that use the country as a haven to kill Americans.
…
“This is a time for clarity,” Mrs. Clinton declared in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she met President Hamid Karzai before leaving for Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. “No one should be in any way mistaken about allowing this to continue without paying a very big price.”
“There’s no place to go any longer,” Mrs. Clinton added, referring to Pakistan’s leaders, whom the administration has accused of equivocating by supporting the Afghan insurgency.
U.S. Troops to Leave Iraq by Year’s End, Obama Says [wink]
October 22nd, 2011I was surprised that this New York Times piece actually contained the punchline, for those who kept reading long enough:
There will also be 4,000 to 5,000 private State Department security contractors, as well as a significant C.I.A. presence. In Afghanistan, about 95,000 American troops remain.
*chortle*
Remember the Superbase?
Anyway, this is a good one for your voluminous If Obombya’s Lips Are Moving… and Translations of New York Times Headlines file folders.
Via: New York Times:
President Obama announced on Friday that the last American soldier would leave Iraq by the end of this year, drawing to a close a divisive eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 4,400 troops, defined the presidency of George W. Bush, and helped ignite his own political rise.
The decision leaves only a vestigial presence of Marine embassy guards and liaison officers staying on where more than a million troops, in all, have served.
…
“Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year,” the president said in a midday appearance at the White House. Anticipating what he called “another season of homecomings,” he declared, “Our troops will definitely be home for the holidays.”
U.S. Navy Discharging 49 Sailors from Aircraft Carrier that ‘Buried Osama Bin Laden at Sea” for Using or Distributing Drugs
October 21st, 2011Mmm hmm.
Via: Reuters:
The U.S. Navy said on Thursday it was discharging 64 sailors, 49 of them from the aircraft carrier that buried Osama bin Laden at sea, for using or distributing drugs.
Most of the sailors, who were assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, nuclear submarine USS San Francisco and a floating fueling dock, were caught using , possessing or selling the designer drug Spice, the Navy said.
Bin Laden was buried at sea from the Carl Vinson in May after the al Qaeda leader was killed in a raid by U.S. Navy Seals on his Pakistan hide-out.
The ship normally has 5,000 sailors on board during deployment and a spokesman for the Third Fleet, Capt. Greg Hicks, said it was unknown if any of the sailors facing discipline were involved in the bin Laden operation.
Qaddafi Was Captured Alive—Who Killed Him?
October 21st, 2011Via: The Atlantic:
What did happen to Qaddafi after the video above cut away? No one can seem to say for sure. Libyan interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril admitted late on Thursday that Qaddafi had been found alive but insisted he had been killed accidentally. “There was cross-fire and he was shot while they were carrying him to a truck,” Jibril said. It’s of course possible that this is accurate, but it’s difficult to imagine what crossfire there might have been. The above video showed dozens of rebels crowded around Qaddafi and no pro-Qaddafi troops in sight. How, exactly, do two bullets of “crossfire” happen to wiz their way through such a dense crowd and just happen to strike Qaddafi in the head and chest?
Jibril told NPR, “Nobody can tell if the shot was from the rebel fighters or from his own security guard.” By his own security guard? At least they’re not claiming suicide.
The $1 Trillion Student Loan Rip-Off: How an Entire Generation Was Tricked into Taking on Crushing Debt That Just Enriches Banks
October 21st, 2011Via: AlterNet:
The impossibility of escaping student loan debt is why an industry sprang upto foist useless, overpriced degrees on vulnerable people. It’s a scam, but a profitable one, and respectable enough for major establishment players to feel comfortable making a killing on it.
Britain: CIA Lobbies for Secret Courts
October 21st, 2011Via: Independent:
Secret justice looks set to be a regular feature of British courts and tribunals when the intelligence services want to protect their sources of information.
Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner’s inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to national security.
The proposals, which run counter to a centuries-old British tradition of open justice, were introduced to a sparsely attended House of Commons yesterday by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke – and met almost no opposition. The planned changes to the British justice system follow lobbying of the Government by the CIA.
Civil rights groups warned a serious potential threat to individual liberty lurked behind the all-party consensus.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Duqu: Son of Stuxnet Hits European Computer Networks
October 21st, 2011Update: ‘Duqu’ Virus Likely Handiwork Of Sophisticated Government, Kaspersky Lab Says
Via: Deutsche Welle:
Wüest is one of the experts at Symantec, who is currently analyzing the source code behind Duqu. Symantec says it was alerted to the new threat on October 14 by a laboratory that has “international connections.”
Since then, Symantec’s investigations suggest that a “few hundred systems have been infected at a handful of companies,” many of which are in Europe.
Another IT security firm, McAfee, is also working on the virus. McAfee and Symantec both believe that Duqu shares strong similarities with the Stuxnet virus.
Some of its source code matches that of Stuxnet and because the Stuxnet code is not known to be available online, they say it is likely that Duqu was created by the same people or that they sold the code to another group. While it remains unclear where Stuxnet came from, the New York Times reported in January 2011 that Stuxnet was developed by the American and Israeli governments.
But there are significant differences as well between Duqu and Stuxnet.
“Duqu is not spreading like Stuxnet,” said Wüest, “Duqu was carefully placed and can be controlled remotely.”
Experts believe that Duqu has been used to target only a limited number of organizations for the specific assets.
“Its warhead is not aimed at the technology industry, it’s being used to steal information, so it’s more like industrial espionage,” Wüest added.
