plus 4, Israeli troops kills 6 Palestinians - CNN |
- Israeli troops kills 6 Palestinians - CNN
- Gaza’s Shrinking Borders: 16 Years of the Oslo Process - Dissident Voice
- Fair Finance's history gave investors, regulators false comfort - Ibj.com
- GreetingsVirginia.com to Focus on Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC ... - TMCnet
- Hackers' attacks rise in volume, sophistication - San Francisco Chronicle
| Israeli troops kills 6 Palestinians - CNN Posted: 26 Dec 2009 08:10 AM PST Jerusalem (CNN) -- Israeli forces killed six Palestinians in separate incidents in the West Bank and Gaza early Saturday, acts that quickly drew Palestinian condemnation. The first incident happened in the West Bank city of Nablus, where the Israeli military killed three Palestinians it said were responsible for the death of an Israeli civilian in the West Bank this week. Israeli forces entered Nablus overnight to locate the suspects and killed them Saturday morning, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said. Palestinian medical officials and witnesses confirmed the deaths. The strike was a joint operation by the Israeli military and Israeli security services, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military said. She said all three men were known militants associated with Fatah militant groups. Israeli forces found four guns at the place where one of the suspects was killed, the IDF said. "The Israel Defense Forces will act firmly against those who aspire to harm citizens of the state of Israel and Israeli security forces, and will not rest until those involved in the murderous act are brought to justice," said Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrachi of the IDF. The IDF blamed the men for the killing Thursday night of Israeli settler Meir Avshalom Hai, who lived in the settlement of Shavei Shomron in the northern West Bank. The 54-year-old father of seven was shot and killed in his car near the entrance to the settlement, said Col. Avi Gill of the Israeli military. The Israeli military spokeswoman could not say what proof or evidence they had against the three Palestinian suspects, who all lived in Nablus. Two of the Palestinians, both 40, had been imprisoned in Israel in the past; one of them had been a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the militant wing of the ruling Fatah party in the West Bank, according to the IDF. The third man, who was 36, had been involved in widespread militant activity and had been an arms dealer and supplier, the IDF said. Palestinian medical officials in Nablus said two of the men suffered gunshots to both the upper body and the head. Witnesses near the site of the operations told CNN more than 50 Israeli military vehicles supported dozens of soldiers and that the city became a closed military zone. The witnesses also said it appeared the men could have been arrested rather than killed. "All three were killed in cold blood," said Dr. Ghassan Hamdan, director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Committee in Nablus, who visited all of the locations where the military operation took place. "The Israeli military could have easily arrested them but it shows that this was not the intention," Hamdan told CNN. "This was clearly assassination and liquidation of Palestinian people in cold blood. ... My experience and what I saw on the bodies describes that they have been killed in cold blood." The Israeli military said it could not immediately comment on the allegations. Hamdan said there was evidence on one of the bodies that the man had been interrogated before being killed, though he did not say what that evidence was. The operation in Nablus followed a separate incident Saturday morning, in which three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike along the northern border between Gaza and Israel. The three men were observed moving along the Palestinian side of the border fence, a spokesman for the Israeli military told CNN. The Israelis fired warning shots but the men continued to move along the fence, at which point an Israeli military aircraft fired at and killed the men, the spokesman said. The military believed the three men had "intention to carry out a terrorist attack" but could not confirm whether the men were observed carrying weapons or explosives, the spokesman said. An adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, condemned the two incidents. "The Israeli escalation in the West Bank and Gaza and the return to the policy of assassinations and random killings in virtual excuses shows that the the Israeli government decided to destroy the independence and security of the Palestinian people and is pulling our people into a bloody circle of violence," Rudeineh told CNN. "The Israeli government should bear the responsibility for the killings and also bear the responsibility for the dead end in moving the peace process forward because of Israel's refusal to stop the policy of settlement and to commit to the references of the peace process," he said. Rudeineh called on the international community, and especially the U.N. Security Council, U.N. General Assembly and the Middle East quartet of Russia, the United States, European Union and United Nations, to intervene immediately "to stop the crimes of the Israeli occupation." CNN's Kevin Flower contributed to this report. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Gaza’s Shrinking Borders: 16 Years of the Oslo Process - Dissident Voice Posted: 26 Dec 2009 07:56 AM PST Forty-two years of military occupation and sixteen years of the Oslo Process have made Gaza a smaller place. Already one of the most densely-populated strips of land in the world, its population has grown during this period from less than 360,000 in 1967 to 1.5 million today. Meanwhile, its borders have not only become more impermeable, but they have been progressively closing in on what some have called "the world's largest open air prison." In the early years following Israel's seizure of the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War in June 1967, Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals routinely crossed the border between Israel and Gaza without much difficulty. Palestinian fishermen routinely sailed as far out to sea as necessary to secure a good day's catch. International freighters continued to arrive at Gaza Port to unload their goods and take on Palestinian fruits, flowers, and other products. Among the first casualties of the Israeli occupation was the loss of trade and tourism with Egypt, but life went on for most Gaza residents. Over the years, many would eventually find employment in Ashdod, Ashkelon, Be'er Sheva, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere inside Israel, mostly in construction and services – 130,000 workers commuting from Gaza to Israel at its peak. However, owing to the heightened tensions of occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank, illegal Israeli settlement activity, successive breakdowns in the peace process, and the Palestinian Intifadas, the situation of Gaza residents continued to deteriorate. Employment inside Israel for Gaza residents was largely cut off by Israel during the Second Intifada beginning in September 2000, and completely eliminated with the economic siege imposed on Hamas in Gaza in January 2006. As part of the Oslo Process that began in 1993, the Gaza-Jericho Agreement of May 1994 established a fishing limit for Gaza fishermen at 20 nautical miles from the shore. A "Maritime Activity Zone K" 1.5 nautical miles wide was established as a "security" buffer from the Israeli sea boundary inside Gaza's territorial waters and extending out from shore to the 20-nautical-mile fishing limit. It would be a "closed area" patrolled by the Israeli Navy. A similar "Maritime Activity Zone M" one nautical mile wide was demarcated as a buffer on the sea border with Egypt. Zone M would be patrolled not by the Egyptian Navy, but exclusively by the Israeli Navy. The offshore area in between these security zones was designated "Maritime Activity Zone L" within which Palestinian fishermen were allowed to fish. In the context of a surge in suicide bombings inside Israel and the comprehensive Israeli military assault on all the occupied Palestinian territories launched at the end of April 2002, Israel demanded tighter limits on Gaza fishermen, as if unarmed fishermen could be any sort of realistic threat to Israel's security. In August 2002, the Bertini Agreement restricted Gaza's fishing limit to 12 nautical miles from shore. When the Israeli government forcibly evicted thousands of Israeli settlers from Gaza and then withdrew its own troops by September 2005, it labelled the move "disengagement." Many thought that the occupation of Gaza was coming to an end. But on 25 January 2006, the day of Palestinian elections, Israel sealed off Gaza by closing the last open crossing at Erez citing "security concerns" relating to the anticipated strong polling for Hamas. The six functional crossings into Gaza have never been fully opened to anything but a trickle of people and goods since that time. The final election results gave Hamas an absolute majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council, 74 seats out of 132. After the elections, Israel continued to severely limit the flow of people and goods into and out of Gaza in an attempt to destabilize popular support for Hamas and block Hamas' participation in the Palestinian government headquartered in Ramallah in the West Bank. It systematically arrested most of the newly-elected Hamas members. By default, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas took the reigns of government as president and appointed a Fatah colleague, Salam Fayyad, as prime minister, despite Hamas having won the parliamentary right to form a new government.  Map of ever more restrictive fishing limits unilaterally imposed by Israel on Gaza. In April 2006, as part of the ever-tightening noose around Hamas-ruled Gaza, the Israeli Navy began enforcing a 10 nautical mile limit on Gaza fishermen. In October 2006, it changed its mind and reduced the limit to 6 nautical miles. The drastic lack of employment, and the obstacles placed on the supply of food, drinking water, medicines, fuel, and electricity became a chronic collective punishment on all Gaza residents under occupation in full violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Gaza is a strip of land approximately 40 kilometres long by 7 kilometres wide. It includes cities, towns, 8 major refugee camps and several minor ones, agricultural land, and uncultivatable sand dunes and saline intrusion areas. With nearly 1.5 million people, Gaza has an overall population density twice that of a typical suburban U.S. city. Gaza cannot possibly feed itself. It has no developed natural sources of energy – neither fossil fuel extraction, hydroelectric potential, nor alternative energy sources. It has no natural aquifers to provide renewable fresh water. As a relatively unindustrialized territory, it is completely dependent on the outside for nearly all of its consumption needs. Lacking inputs and cut off from export markets, Gaza's two industrial export zones at the Erez and Karni crossings are now idled. Israeli "disengagement" from Gaza changed nothing with respect to the wall and fence that completely encircle Gaza from its northern boundary with Israel to its southern boundary with Egypt. Even the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt (primarily for people) is effectively controlled by Israel through remotely-controlled video cameras, European Union monitors, and Egyptian immigration authorities who have acceded to Israeli demands to exercise veto power over any person or baggage moving through the Rafah crossing. The Kerem Shalom crossing for goods from and to Egypt is controlled directly by Israel because trucks must cross Israeli territory to and from the al-Auja crossing far to the south on the Egyptian-Israeli border. The remaining checkpoints not only are opened by Israel very sparingly, but are each opened by Israel for very specific purposes. The Erez crossing in the north is the primary gateway for people, but not for goods. Nahal Oz crossing is the primary entry point for liquid fuels. Karni crossing is the main gateway for food, medicines, and manufactured goods. Sufa crossing was primarily for bulk aggregates and building materials, but like Kissufim and Ele Sinai crossings are now effectively closed. Meanwhile, the border itself has been progressively expanding. What started as a border fence became a wall. A second parallel security barrier eventually enclosed a security patrol zone containing in some places two parallel security roads. After disengagement, a 500-metre-wide buffer zone was implemented by the Israeli Defence Forces on the Gaza side of the border, within which any Palestinian is frequently shot at. This deprives Palestinian farmers holding lands within the buffer zone of the ability to cultivate their lands. After the January 2009 Israeli invasion, the buffer zone was expanded to two kilometres. Gaza had a commercial airport southeast of Rafah, but Israel severely bombed its runway. All Palestinian air traffic has been banned under Israeli occupation and after "disengagement." That leaves the sea. The Israeli Navy controls all waters around Gaza and does not allow any vessels in or out of Gaza's fishing limits. There are over 700 registered boats, mostly fishing boats, registered in Gaza. The boats provide a livelihood for 3000 Palestinian fishermen according to a United Nations survey. The wooden boats operate out of four wharfs at Gaza Port, Deir al-Balah, Mawasi Khan Yunis, and Mawasi Rafah. Of these, only the larger fishing boats at Gaza Port can sail far from shore; the smaller boats at the latter three wharfs are only capable of navigating along the coast. But after the Israeli military assault on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, even the larger fishing boats cannot venture more than 3 nautical miles from shore owing to the Israeli Navy enforcing a draconian new limit.  Israeli Navy water cannon blasts into the wheelhouse of a Palestinian fishing boat operating well within the 6 nautical mile fishing limit in effect in October 2008 (photo courtesy of Darlene Wallach). Not only has Gaza effectively become the world's largest open-air prison, but the walls of the prison have been progressively closing in on its inmate population. The only way to avert a humanitarian catastrophe is to lift the siege of Gaza and restore the ability to travel freely and engage in viable economic activity — fundamental human rights presently denied. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Fair Finance's history gave investors, regulators false comfort - Ibj.com Posted: 26 Dec 2009 06:23 AM PST James Coco would seem to be the last person to fall victim to an alleged investment fraud. The 49-year-old Medina, Ohio, resident is a certified public accountant, has no debt, and tries to be careful with his money. He'd scoff when he saw ads in his local newspaper for investment certificates sold by Fair Finance Co., an Akron firm owned by Indianapolis businessman Tim Durham. He liked their outsized interest rates, but not that the certificates lacked the government guarantee that comes with certificates of deposit. "I saw their ads a number of years before I invested," Coco said. "I would think, 'What's this scam? Who would put their money in there totally on faith?'" Coco would, it turns out. He made his first investment in 2004 and when that worked out well, he kept adding more. He now holds certificates valued at $200,000—much of which he fears he will never get back. Similar anxiety is playing out across Ohio, now that company offices sit dark and federal prosecutors are calling the business a Ponzi scheme. Some investors initially thought the rates—as high as 9 percent for two-year certificates—seemed too good to be true. But reassured by the company's longevity, they cast aside those reservations. Fair Finance, founded in 1934, had been meeting its obligations for decades, building legions of loyal investors along the way. Many of Ohio's Amish families grew so comfortable with Fair that they bought the certificates as their sole investment, said Beverly Keller, the local-edition editor of The Budget, a weekly Amish newspaper based in Sugarcreek, Ohio. "It's a generational thing," she said. "They have been investing with Fair for years, and things have just now gone sour. It's something their parents did, and their grandparents did." But what Coco and other investors in Ohio—the only state where Fair was authorized to sell—failed to fully grasp was how drastically Durham and partner Jim Cochran changed the business after buying it from Donald Fair seven years ago, business observers said. As IBJ reported in an investigative story in October, the pair and related parties have tapped the business for more than $168 million in loans, with much of the money going to fund Durham-controlled businesses that struggled. Failure to repay the loans would imperil Fair's ability to repay the purchasers of investment certificates, who are owed more than $200 million. The story noted that what had been Fair's core business—buying and collecting on consumer-finance loans—has been in steady decline since the company changed hands. Interest rates offered to purchasers of the company's investment certificates, meanwhile, have risen sharply. In a Nov. 24 federal court filing, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Indianapolis alleged that, instead of using investors' money for the core business, "it was used to make interest and redemption payments to earlier victims of the scheme, thereby lulling the earlier victims into believing the money was being [handled] responsibly." Offering circulars reviewed by securities regulators and provided to prospective investors documented the ballooning related-parties debt. But investors said they didn't spend much time scrutinizing the documents after their early investments paid off as expected. Securities regulators may have fallen into a similar trap, said James Klimek, an Indianapolis attorney critical of the Ohio Department of Commerce's Division of Securities for giving the company clearance in recent years to sell additional certificates. "Maybe the Securities Division got lulled into this, too," said Klimek, a former chief counsel to Indiana's securities commissioner. What might have started as plain vanilla investments "began changing a little bit, then a little bit more and a little bit more, and pretty soon half the assets were in related-party loans." Dennis Ginty, a spokesman for the Division of Securities, noted that the state has not reached a determination on Fair's pending request to register an additional $250 million in investment certificates. He noted that prior registrations, most recently in July 2008, occurred before his office became aware of concerns about the company's management. "Fair Finance has been filing securities offerings with the division since at least 1959, one of the longest series of filings by any Ohio company in division history," Ginty said in an e-mail. Durham, 47, did not respond to e-mail or voice-mail questions. Through an attorney, he has denied doing anything wrong. Tumultuous stretch The fate of Fair Finance has been murky since Nov. 24, when FBI agents seized records and computer equipment at Fair's Akron headquarters and at Durham's office on the top floor of Chase Tower in downtown Indianapolis. Fair's previous, 16-month registration expired that same day, and offices have not reopened since. Rather than signing off on a new securities registration, Ohio regulators have responded with a torrent of questions far more detailed than any of their prior correspondence with Fair. In a seven-page letter sent to the company Dec. 3, the Securities Division's Mark Heuerman noted that the company often doled out loans to borrowers who provided unaudited financials or no financials at all. Further, he said, Durham, Fair's CEO, "appears to have unfettered discretion" to change loan terms without anyone else's approval. Heuerman asked the company to provide detailed documentation on loans and told it to submit audited financials—something prior ownership included in offering circulars but Durham hasn't. Heuerman also balked at language in Fair's proposed offering circular comparing the company's lending criteria to that of a "standard bank." Randy Wilson, a retired banking attorney in Indianapolis, agreed a bank wouldn't have the leeway to extend so many related-party loans. "It is very tightly regulated and examined regularly," Wilson said. "Even if you tried to do that kind of thing at a bank, it would be found out shortly." Regardless of government oversight, Wilson said, investors themselves should be diligent. He said investors who see the opportunity for outsized returns often let their guard down and become gripped by greed. "Generally, whenever you get aggressive interest rates that are inordinately high compared to the rest of the market, you better watch out," he said. Sorting things out Fair investors have stopped receiving their interest payments, and the company's Web site is down. Investors don't know what the future holds. A Dec. 11 press release said "Fair still has not determined when or if it will be able to resume regular business with regard to the sale and redemption of investment certificates." Vandals have altered the name on signs at the company's headquarters, rechristening it "UnFair Finance." If Fair can successfully resolve investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission—and prove to Ohio securities regulators that it is on solid financial footing—it could resume business as usual. But if that doesn't happen, investors may be in for a long wait for whatever money attorneys working on their behalf can scrounge together. Indianapolis attorney Hugh Baker knows the challenges firsthand. He fought for more than a decade to recover money for the 2,500 investors who purchased unsecured notes in the financial-services firm Firstmark Corp. before it slid into bankruptcy in 1998. Typically, assets that might be seized and sold have liens against them giving other parties first dibs on cash. Baker ended up recovering one-third of the $57 million due investors, in part by suing professional-services firms that did work for Firstmark. "There is just no easy way," Baker said. "The legal system is very long and laborious, and you end up with lots of different proceedings in different venues." Coco said he's beginning to accept he might never see the money. "At first, it was like a body blow," he said. "I feel I was just hammered. I am getting on with my life, but for a few days there it was hard to digest."•
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| GreetingsVirginia.com to Focus on Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC ... - TMCnet Posted: 26 Dec 2009 07:56 AM PST
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Hackers' attacks rise in volume, sophistication - San Francisco Chronicle Posted: 26 Dec 2009 02:55 AM PST While the year didn't see many technological leaps in the techniques hackers employ, they continued to expand their reach to every corner of the Internet by leveraging social media, infiltrating trusted Web sites, and crafting more convincing and tailored scams. Although there were a handful of firsts - like the first iPhone worm - most attacks in 2009 were near-identical to tactics used in prior years, changing only in the victims they targeted and their level of sophistication. One of the most preoccupying trends was personalized attacks designed to steal small and medium business owners' online banking credentials. The scheme was particularly damaging because banks take less responsibility for the monetary losses of businesses than of individual consumers in identity theft cases. In October, the FBI estimated small and medium businesses have lost at least $40 million to cyber-crime since 2004. Attacks continued to plague larger organizations. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the FBI was investigating the online theft of tens of millions of dollars from Citigroup, which has denied the incident. Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, said criminals shifted the focus of their tactics from developing attack techniques to improving the social engineering of their scams. "It's not the tools but the skills. That's a new idea," he said. One example is rogue antivirus schemes, which often trick computer users with a fake infection. Criminals then obtain their victims' credit card information as they pay for a false product, all the while installing the very malicious software they were seeking to repel. Even though these scams have been around for several years, they have become more a popular tactic among criminals because they pressure potential victims into making on-the-spot decisions. "People have been told to look out for viruses and want to do the right thing. There's security awareness now, but the criminals are taking advantage of their limited knowledge," said Mike Dausin, a researcher with network security firm TippingPoint's DVLabs. Chester Wisniewski, senior adviser for software security firm Sophos, said social networks also continued to be an important target for attackers. Despite Facebook and Twitter's efforts to beef up their security, it has become a common tactic for scammers to hijack Facebook accounts and post malicious links on the walls of the victim's friends or distribute harmful content through tweets. "We haven't had this before - a place where all kinds of people go and dump their information, which makes it very valuable for criminals," Wisniewski said. "It's kind of a gold mine for identity thieves to get on people's Facebook account." Using PDFsAnother common ploy was malicious software that piggybacked on common third-party applications like Adobe PDFs and Flash animations. Although Adobe scrambled this year to improve its software update procedures and roll out patches more frequently, criminals have increasingly exploited the coding flaws in Adobe products in particular because of their ubiquity and the abundance of vulnerable old code, said Roel Schouwenberg, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab. By using ad networks or taking advantage of exploitable Web programming errors to insert malicious content, criminals cemented their presence in legitimate Web sites and made 2009, according to anti-malware firm Dasient, the year of the "drive-by download," in which users only have to visit a compromised Web site to become infected. An October report from the San Jose company estimated that 640,000 legitimate Web sites became infected in the third quarter of 2009, compared with 120,000 infected sites during the same period of 2008. Damaging reputationsThe trend was not only a security threat for consumers, but also stood to damage the reputation and traffic of the victimized Web sites. In September, a fake antivirus pop-up made its way into the New York Times' Web site by infiltrating the company's ad network. Researchers also noted a high volume of attacks disguised as content related to popular news items - anything from Michael Jackson to the swine flu - to coax Web users into downloading malicious content. This closing year also saw a handful of notorious politically motivated online attacks, and the issue of national cybersecurity continued to gain prominence. On Dec. 18, Twitter's home page was defaced by hackers calling themselves the "Iranian Cyber Army," although authorities said there was no evidence they were in fact connected to Iran. An August attack on a Georgian blogger also indirectly affected the popular microblogging site and brought it down for several hours. In July, several U.S. and South Korean government Web sites went offline after being hit by a denial-of-service attack that South Korea has attributed to a North Korean ministry. U.S. defense officials revealed in April that hackers have stolen thousands of files on one of the military's most advanced fighter aircrafts. "Now it's in the agenda of every government to pay attention to the cyberworld," Schouwenberg said. Security coordinatorOn Tuesday, the White House announced the appointment of Howard A. Schmidt as the Obama administration's new cybersecurity coordinator. Schmidt occupied a similar post under the Bush administration. Even though crime continued to evolve into a more organized and compartmentalized operation this year, experts believe a new White House administration conscientious of threats and partnerships between law enforcement agencies and security firms offer encouraging signs for next year. An example is the Conficker Work Group, an international industry coalition that joined to mitigate the spread of the Conficker worm. The group also collaborates with law enforcement agencies by providing them with forensic information. "It's the first time I've seen such partnership between countries. Typically it's the Wild West and nobody is in charge of anything. Now it's clear there's a lot more international collaboration," Dausin said. E-mail Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera at amartinez-cabrera@sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page DC - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.  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