Remember that iStruct robotic ape
Related Topics: Marquez vs Bradley Tony Gonzalez eddie aikau veep raven symone
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Watch This Robo-Ape Evolve Into a Robo-Human In Just a Few Seconds
Related Topics: Marquez vs Bradley Tony Gonzalez eddie aikau veep raven symone
Mexico's crackdown on drugs spurs extortion wave
A police vehicle is parked next to the clinic owned by Dr. Roman Gomez Gaviria on the outskirts of Mexico City, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013. Security has been posted outside of Dr. Gavirira's clinic after he was threatened by a criminal gang demanding protection money. Shakedown rackets, which have long targeted bars, casinos and shadier businesses linked to drug traffickers, are increasingly going after legitimate businesses like Gaviria’s clinic as extortions across the country are rising. Targets include everything from multinational businesses to corner pharmacies and unsuspecting tourists. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
A police vehicle is parked next to the clinic owned by Dr. Roman Gomez Gaviria on the outskirts of Mexico City, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013. Security has been posted outside of Dr. Gavirira's clinic after he was threatened by a criminal gang demanding protection money. Shakedown rackets, which have long targeted bars, casinos and shadier businesses linked to drug traffickers, are increasingly going after legitimate businesses like Gaviria’s clinic as extortions across the country are rising. Targets include everything from multinational businesses to corner pharmacies and unsuspecting tourists. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)
MEXICO CITY (AP) — When the threatening phone calls demanding $20,000 in protection money began in December, Dr. Roman Gomez Gaviria shrugged them off, believing his clinic on the outskirts of Mexico City couldn't possibly be of interest to criminal gangs. A few months later, his sense of security was shattered when three armed men barged into his office screaming "Dr. Roman, you bastard, where are you?"
"They tried to tackle me, to take me out of the clinic, when I saw that each one had a pistol tucked into his belt," said Gaviria, recounting the ordeal. "They thought that, because I'm a doctor, I wasn't going to resist."
Such shakedown rackets have long targeted businesses in the most violent corners of Mexico. Now the practice is spreading. One anti-crime group estimates that kidnapping across the country has jumped by one-third so far this year compared to 2012. And as the extortion industry expands, it has drawn both experienced criminals and imitators.
Experts say the increase is a byproduct of Mexico's crackdown on the nation's drug gangs. As authorities nab cartel bosses and break up chains of command, hundreds of lower-level gunmen and traffickers are desperate for income and looking for income in new places.
Targets include everything from multinational businesses to corner pharmacies and unsuspecting holidaymakers. The gangs are less organized, but more ubiquitous than the drug cartels, affecting broad swaths of the country.
"It affects all economic activity. It discourages investment," said security expert Jorge Chabat.
In the first eight months of 2013, there were 5,335 reported extortion attempts nationwide, equal to the number for all of the previous year. If the current pace continues, the total could surpass 8,000 this year, almost twice as many as in 2007.
The tourism industry, Mexico's third-largest source of foreign revenue, has been one of the hardest hit. Largely untouched when the U.S.-backed drug war began in late 2006, the state of Oaxaca had quietly become the turf of the Zetas cartel. In recent months, guests of at least a dozen hotels in scenic, colonial Oaxaca city have started receiving calls from strangers saying they would be kidnapped if they didn't pay between $380 and $1,500, hotel industry and security officials said.
"The way they operate is to call the hotel, ask to speak to a particular room and then start threatening" the guest, said Joaquin Carrillo Ruiz, an assistant state prosecutor in Oaxaca. Many of the tourists, all from Mexico, reported the crime instead of paying up, but that hasn't calmed worries in Oaxaca, where tourism is a vital source of outside income.
"We have to stop this in its tracks," said Juan Carlos Rivera, the head of the Oaxaca Hotel Association. "If we don't, it could escalate."
As if to prove his point, a group of Spanish musicians were hit by a telephone extortion scheme in Mexico City this month, though none was kidnapped or harmed.
But even authorities acknowledge that the vast majority of extortions go unreported — as many as 92 percent according to a survey of crime victims by the National Statistics Institute. The same survey from April indicated that extortion is now the second most common crime after street robberies, with 7.6 percent of those surveyed in 2012 saying they were extortion victims, up about two percentage points from the year before.
President Enrique Pena Nieto's government says the rise in extortions is a paradoxical effect of its success in the anti-drug fight. As such, it mirrors a trend in Colombia, where smaller-scale extortion rackets have mushroomed since security forces in the past decade broke the backs of Marxist rebels, paramilitary groups and major drug cartels with a national presence.
"When cartel activity diminishes, house-break-ins, muggings and other crimes increase," federal security spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said.
Sanchez said he doesn't know whether reports of extortion have increased because there are more such crimes, or whether people feel more comfortable going to police as previously lawless areas are brought under greater government control. What's not in doubt is the crime's lasting damage.
"The person who is a victim of extortion lives in a state of permanent kidnapping," Sanchez said. "They live in fear."
Gaviria now has police officers stationed outside his clinic following his close call on Feb. 6. But men he believes to be members of the gang that stalked him still lurk outside his office, and he believes they are being protected by corrupt police officials.
"From that day on, my life has been an imprisonment in my own home," said the 53-year-old Colombian-born physician, who managed to break free from his kidnappers, grab one of their guns and shoot two of them to death at close range.
Dr. Oscar Zavala, president of the National Union of Pharmacy Owners, a trade group of about 5,600 small drug stores, said that almost one out of four reported being hit by an extortion demand in 2012. The real number is probably double that — almost half of independent drug stores — because people are too afraid to report the crimes, he said.
Gangs usually call up and demand an average of $2300 per month, saying "'put the money in my account, or I'll kidnap you,'" Zavala said.
"Before, we pharmacists were spared, because we are such a legal business," he said. "Now, the criminals are hitting everyone."
In early October, the Monterrey-based newspaper El Norte reported that armed bandits stopped one of its delivery trucks and beat its driver at gunpoint while demanding he pay them 3,000 pesos ($230) a week for the right to deliver newspapers on their turf. That's more than the driver makes in a week.
At the other end of the country, in the state of Michoacan, everyone from market vendors to cattle ranchers and lumber mill operators have reported being assigned fixed monthly "quotas" by the Knights Templar drug cartel, which has become so bold that in 2012 its gunmen attacked facilities belonging to the Sabritas snack company, a Mexican subsidiary of PepsiCo.
For those refusing to pay, punishment is as certain as the sight of burned-out delivery trucks and warehouses that dot the Michoacan landscape. More recently, armed vigilante groups funded by business have emerged to kick the extortionists out, though so far with mixed success. The army has also been sent into some areas, but even that hasn't prevented the cartel from threatening truck drivers trying to deliver fuel to holdout towns.
"We've got the federal government and the military here, and despite that, we can't get a gas truck in," said Ramon Contreras Orozco, the local government representative in the village of La Ruana. "These guys don't give a damn about any of that."
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-10-14-Mexico-Extortion%20Wave/id-97712bafa77b4562a560ee11af83d132Tags: philip rivers act liberace labor day twerk
Monday, October 14, 2013
BlackBerry Ad Campaign Seeks To Reassure Customers
TORONTO (AP) — BlackBerry is publishing an open letter in major publications around the world in a bid to reassure customers that they can count on the distressed smartphone company.
The letter was released Monday on Twitter and will be published in 30 publications in 9 countries Tuesday. It acknowledges "these are no doubt challenging times for us and we don't underestimate the situation" but says "you can continue to count on BlackBerry." The missive notes that BlackBerry has substantial cash and is debt free but makes no mention of the fact that the company is for sale and could be broken up and sold in pieces.
BlackBerry announced last month that Fairfax Financial Holdings, which owns 10 percent of the company, signed a letter of intent that "contemplates" buying BlackBerry for $9 a share, or $4.7 billion. Fairfax, BlackBerry's largest shareholder, is trying to attract other investors.
The stock is trading well below Fairfax's tentative offer on fears that the deal won't go through or that the final price will be lower. Shares of the company closed up 7 cents to $8.14 Monday.
The BlackBerry, introduced in 1999, was once the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people and other consumers. But then came a new generation of competing touchscreen smartphones, starting with Apple's iPhone in 2007. The BlackBerry suddenly looked ancient. The company's sales and market share shrank and it lost billions in market value.
This year's much-delayed launch of BlackBerry 10 system and fancier devices that use the software was supposed to rejuvenate the brand and lure customers. It did not work. Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry recently announced 4,500 layoffs, or 40 percent of its global workforce, and reported a quarterly loss of nearly $1 billion.
The letter says BlackBerry continues "to offer the best mobile typing experience - no ifs, ands or buts about it." It also acknowledges "there is a lot of competition out there and we know that BlackBerry is not for everyone."
Related Topics: dodgers Cecily Strong Niall Horan Sunny Ozell George Duke
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Business groups see loss of sway over House GOP - CNBC.com
Such an effort would thrust Washington's traditionally cautious and pragmatic business lobby into open warfare with the Tea Party faction, which has grown in influence since the 2010 election and won a series of skirmishes with the Republican establishment in the last two years.
"We are looking at ways to counter the rise of an ideological brand of conservatism that, for lack of a better word, is more anti-establishment than it has been in the past," said David French, the top lobbyist at the National Retail Federation. "We have come to the conclusion that sitting on the sidelines is not good enough."
(Read more: Obama seeks opening with GOP leader)
Some warned that a default could spur a shift in the relationship between the corporate world and the Republican Pary. Long intertwined by mutual self-interest on deregulation and lower taxes, the business lobby and Republicans are diverging not only over the fiscal crisis, but on other major issues like immigration reform, which was favored by business groups and party leaders but stymied in the House by many of the same lawmakers now leading the debt fight.
Joe Echevarria, the chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, said, "I'm a Republican by definition and by registration, but the party seems to have split into two factions."
While both parties have extreme elements, he suggested, only in the G.O.P. did the extreme element exercise real power. "The extreme right has 90 seats in the House," Mr. Echevarria said. "Occupy Wall Street has no seats."
(Read more: Stocks seem to be signaling a debt deal)
Moreover, business leaders and trade groups said, the tools that have served them in the past — campaign contributions, large memberships across the country, a multibillion-dollar lobbying apparatus — do not seem to be working.
"There clearly are people in the Republican Party at the moment for whom the business community and the interests of the business community — the jobs and members they represent — don't seem to be their top priority," said Dan Danner, the head of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which spearheaded opposition to President Obama's health care law among small businesses."They don't really care what the N.F.I.B. thinks, and don't care what the Chamber thinks, and probably don't care what the Business Roundtable thinks."
The lawmakers seem to agree. Representative Randy Neugebauer, Republican of Texas and a Tea Party caucus member, said in an interview on Wednesday that if American corporations wanted to send their money elsewhere, that was their choice.
"We have got to quit worrying about the next election, and start worrying about the country," said Mr. Neugebauer, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee and is a recipient of significant donations from Wall Street.
Few of the most conservative House lawmakers draw substantial support from business political action committees, and business lobbyists acknowledged that the mere suggestion they were considering backing primary challenges next year could enhance grass-roots support for the very lawmakers they want to defeat. But the dysfunction in Washington has now turned so extreme, they said, that they had few other options.
(Watch: Does Obama want to break the GOP?)
"What we want is a conservative business person, but someone who in many respects will be more realistic, in our opinion," said Bruce Josten, the top lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the single biggest lobbying organization in Washington.
In the two previous battles over the debt limit many chief executives were reluctant to take sides, banding together in groups like Fix the Debt, which spent millions of dollars on a campaign urging Democrats and Republicans to work toward a "grand bargain" on the budget. But with shutdown a reality, and the clock ticking toward default,some of those same executives now place the blame squarely on conservative Republicans in the House.
"It's clearly this faction within the Republican Party that's causing the issue right now," said David M. Cote, the chief executive of Honeywell and a steering board member of Fix the Debt.
The rift, these industry executives acknowledge, reflects longstanding tensions that sometimes emerge between the agendas of corporate executives and those embraced by the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
"We ask them to carry our water all the time," said one corporate sector lobbyist, who demanded anonymity in order to speak frankly about the relationship with Republicans. "But we don't necessarily support them 100 percent of the time.And what has happened is the rise of an ideological wing that is now willing to stand up to business interests."
Despite their diminished leverage, business leaders said they would step up their appeals for an agreement.
(Read more: Europe stocks higher on US budget progress)
Most of the officials said they agree in principle with conservative lawmakers about the need to cut federal spending or roll back parts of Obamacare, but said using the threat of shutdown — or worse, of a debt default — to extract those concessions was both ineffective and dangerous.
Mr.Josten said he had been on Capitol Hill every day this week counseling compromise.
"The name calling, blame gaming — using slurs like jihadist, terrorist, cowards, that kind of language — it does not get you to a deal," Mr. Josten said of the advice he is giving to Democrats and Republicans. "The problem is everybody is in the same corner here and everybody has to try to save some face."
To some extent, the Chamber itself, along with other lobbying groups, helped create the conditions for Washington's impasse.
(Read more: Boehner to ask House for short-term debt deal)
Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101102615Tags: The Goldbergs Joy Covey Nfl Fantasy alyssa milano The White Queen
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Monday, June 24, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
Opry to hold public funeral for George Jones
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) ? A public funeral will be held at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville for country music superstar George Jones, who died Friday at the age of 81.
Publicist Kirt Webster said in a statement that the public funeral will be held Thursday starting at 10 a.m. Webster says Jones would have wanted his fans everywhere to be able to pay their respects along with his family.
A private visitation for family, friends and fellow performers will take place Wednesday evening. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that contributions be made to the Grand Ole Opry trust fund or the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/opry-hold-public-funeral-george-jones-223242295.html
ufc 144 results acura nsx all star weekend 2012 giada de laurentiis howard hughes nationwide race wanderlust
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)