Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/177417753?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Friday, December 23, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Eric Church Shows Off Adorable Photo of Baby Boone
Born Oct. 3, Boone is the couple's first child. Eric admits fatherhood has been beyond anything he could have ever imagined. "Everybody always tells you what an awesome and unique experience being a parent is," he says. "But words can never do the feeling justice. The way our life changed in that 24-hour period alone after he was born -- just by putting a little boy in the house --was awesome."
But while Eric may be getting in touch with his softer side for the first time, now that he's a dad, don't expect his notoriously rockin' music to change too much. "I can promise you this: I'm not going to be writing lullabies at any point in time, unless they're like bad-ass, kick-ass lullabies," he tells The Boot with a laugh. "There's maybe a market for that out there somewhere!"
Still, we're betting Boone will find his way into some of Dad's lyrics. "I've always made music that was representative of real life," says Eric. "Life doesn't get more real than having a newborn at home."
Eric and Katherine will spend their baby's first Christmas at home. The country star kicks off his headlining Blood, Sweat & Beers Tour on Jan. 19. See his concert schedule here.
Source: http://www.theboot.com/2011/12/21/eric-church-baby-picture/
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Monday, December 19, 2011
Security forces, protesters clash again in Cairo (Reuters)
CAIRO (Reuters) ? Protesters and security forces fought in Cairo on Sunday, the third day of clashes that have killed 10 people and exposed rifts over the army's role as it manages Egypt's promised transition from military to civilian rule.
Soldiers and police manned barriers on some streets around Tahrir Square, the hub of the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak and again convulsed by violence as protesters demand the generals who took charge in February quit power.
Police in riot gear made brief forays beyond their barriers and were met by a surge of protesters pelting them with rocks. Police appeared to have taken over the frontline from soldiers.
Troops in riot gear were filmed on Saturday beating protesters with long sticks even after they had fallen to the ground. A Reuters picture showed two soldiers dragging a woman lying on the ground by her shirt, exposing her underwear.
The violence has overshadowed a staggered parliamentary election, the first free vote most Egyptians can remember, that is set to give Islamists the biggest bloc.
Some Egyptians are enraged by the army's behaviour. Others want to focus on voting, not street protests.
The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will retain power even after the lower house vote is completed in January, but has pledged to hand over to an elected president by July.
"Down with Tantawi," about 1,000 protesters chanted late on Sunday, referring to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi who heads the army council and who was Mubarak's defence minister.
Some youths had earlier hulred rocks and petrol bombs at lines of security forces. Riot police appeared to have moved to the frontline instead of soldiers.
An army source said 164 people had been detained.
Hundreds of protesters were in Tahrir on Sunday, although traffic was flowing through the square coming from streets not blocked and away from the violence. Most of the clashes have been in streets leading off the square.
BOUTS OF VIOLENCE
One group of activists approached those hurling stones to urge them to stop, but they refused, citing the deaths of 10 people as a reason not to "negotiate." Other activists handed over to the army people they said were making petrol bombs.
A hardcore of activists have camped in Tahrir since a protest against army rule on November 18 that was sparked by the army-backed cabinet's proposals to permanently shield the military from civilian oversight in the new constitution.
Bouts of violence since then, including a flare-up last month that killed 42, have deepened frustrations of many other Egyptians, who want an end to protests. They see the military as the only force capable of restoring stability.
"There are people who wait for any problem and seek to amplify it ... The clashes won't stop. There are street children who found shelter in Tahrir," said Ali el-Nubi, a postal worker, adding the army should have managed the transition better.
Reuters television footage showed one soldier in a line of charging troops firing a shot at fleeing protesters on Saturday, though it was not clear whether he was using live rounds.
The army said it does not use live ammunition. It has also said troops had tackled only "thugs," not protesters.
A building near Tahrir with historic archives was gutted on Saturday by a fire. Some people tried to gather up any remaining, partially charred documents to save them.
The Health Ministry said 10 people had been killed in the violence since Friday and 505 were wounded, of which 384 had been taken to hospital. Most of the deaths happened on Friday or early Saturday. No deaths were reported on Sunday.
CONCRETE BARRIER
The latest bloodshed began after the second round of voting last week for parliament's lower house. The staggered election began on November 28 and will end with a run-off vote on January 11.
The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties repressed in the 30-year Mubarak era have emerged as strong front-runners.
The Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party said it had received about 40 percent of votes cast for party lists in the second round of voting last week. The strict Salafi al-Nour Party said its list received about 35 percent.
Despite their commanding position built, it is unclear whether the two rival Islamist groups will form an alliance in parliament, as they have each spoken warily of the other.
The leadership of the Brotherhood is cautious of a wholly Islamist ruling coalition, which Egyptians from other political trends might view as divisive and polarising in a period when they think broader national unity is needed. Nour politicians accuse the Brotherhood of compromising Islamic values.
(Additional reporting by Marwa Awad, Alexander Dziadosz and Shaimaa Fayed; Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Sophie Hares)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/africa/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111218/wl_nm/us_egypt
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Sunday, December 18, 2011
Subprime scandal: ex-Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac execs accused of fraud
The SEC filed a civil fraud lawsuit Friday against six former top executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying they misled investors about the subprime-loan risks they faced.
Six former top executives at the housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac misled investors about the subprime-loan risks they faced, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in a civil fraud lawsuit Friday.
Skip to next paragraphThose charged include the men who were chief executives of these government-chartered mortgage enterprises. Daniel Mudd headed Fannie Mae and Richard Syron led Freddie Mac as the housing boom ended and the financial crisis began.
The lawsuit is significant because some finance experts have sharply criticized the federal government for failing to prosecute more executives who may have contributed to the financial meltdown, and because the future of Fannie and Freddie is now a matter of hot political debate.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives told the world that their subprime exposure was substantially smaller than it really was," said Robert Khuzami, SEC's enforcement director, in filing the suit in New York. "These material misstatements occurred during a time of acute investor interest in financial institutions' exposure to subprime loans, and misled the market about the amount of risk."
Fannie and Freddie play a major role in the US housing market, providing guarantees for the safety of loans that conform to their standards. Banks and other mortgage lenders are able to issue so-called conforming loans and resell them in bundles to investors (who then reap a stream of income from monthly mortgage payments).
By doing this, the companies have cultivated a broad supply of credit for housing, keeping the mortgage market moving even as other private firms were pulling back during the crisis.
But the firms are oddball entities. Before the crisis, they were publicly owned companies, seeking to show profits and strength to their private shareholders. But they also operated with a Congress-derived mandate to play their unique role in the US mortgage business.
The lawsuit alleges that, when it came to talking to their own shareholders, the six executives played down the financial risks. In the end, by late in 2008, Fannie and Freddie were placed under federal conservatorship. They continue to operate, but their long-term future is a matter that Congress will need to address in the coming year or so.
Fannie and Freddie both entered into agreements with the government on Friday, accepting responsibility without admitting or denying the charges. The government-controlled companies also agreed to cooperate with the SEC on the cases against the former executives.
The Justice Department has opened up probes into Fannie and Freddie but has not charged anyone with a crime.
In a statement released through his attorney, Mr. Mudd said the lawsuit "should never have been brought" and said the government reviewed and approved all the financial disclosures of the company.
"Every piece of material data about loans held by Fannie Mae was known to the United States government to the investing public," Mudd said. "The SEC is wrong, and I look forward to a court where fairness and reason ? not politics ? is the standard for justice."
Mr. Syron's lawyers said the case was "without merit" and said the term "subprime had no uniform definition in the market" at that time.
According to the lawsuit, Fannie told investors in 2007 that it had roughly $4.8 billion worth of subprime loans on its books, or just 0.2 percent of its portfolio. The SEC says that Fannie actually had about $43 billion worth of products targeted to borrowers with weak credit, or 11 percent of its holdings. The suit cites similar numbers for Freddie.
SEC documents on Friday quoted a Freddie Mac legal counsel warning the firm's CEO in May 2007, "We should reconsider making as sweeping a statement as we have 'basically no subprime exposure.' " In a speech, Syron still used the line, "basically no subprime exposure," according to the SEC.
So far, the companies have cost taxpayers almost $150 billion ? the largest bailout of the financial crisis. They could cost up to $259 billion, according to its government regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
In July, Citigroup paid just $75 million to settle similar civil charges with the SEC. The company's chief financial officer and head of investor relations were accused of failing to disclose more than $50 billion worth of potential losses from subprime mortgages. The two executives charged paid $100,000 and $80,000 in civil penalties.
Such lawsuits are just part of America's coming to terms with the financial crisis.
Finance experts say that fraud played a role in the housing bubble and crisis, but that other causes were also prominent.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, tasked by Congress to determine the causes of the crisis, reached a split verdict.
Its report cited failures of corporate governance and ethics. But it also cited broader problems such as failed risk-management practices.
"The crisis was a result of human mistakes, misjudgments, and misdeeds," the report said in part.
? Material from wire services was used in this report.
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House passes spending bill to avert government shutdown (Los Angeles Times)
Saturday, December 17, 2011
This Is Comet Lovejoy (or The Silver Surfer) About to Plunge Into the Sun [Video]
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Computing: Improving security in the cloud
ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2011) ? Less and less of today's computing is done on desktop computers; cloud computing, in which operations are carried out on a network of shared, remote servers, is expected to rise as the demand for computing power increases. This raises some crucial questions about security: Can we, for instance, perform computations on data stored in "the cloud" without letting anyone else see our information? Research carried out at the Weizmann Institute and MIT is moving us closer to the ability to work on data while it is still encrypted, giving an encrypted result that can later be securely deciphered.
Attempting computation on sensitive data stored on shared servers leaves that data exposed in ways that traditional encryption techniques can't protect against. The main problem is that to manipulate the data, it has to be first decoded. "Until a few years ago, no one knew if the encryption needed for this sort of online security was even possible," says Dr. Zvika Brakerski, who recently completed his Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Shafi Goldwasser of the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department. In 2009, however, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University named Craig Gentry provided the first demonstration of so-called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). But the original method was extraordinarily time consuming and unwieldy, making it highly impractical. Gentry constructed his FHE system by using fairly sophisticated math, based on so-called ideal lattices, and this required him to make new and unfamiliar complexity assumptions to prove security. Gentry's use of ideal lattices seemed inherent to fully homomorphic encryption; researchers assumed that they were necessary for the server to perform such basic operations as addition and multiplication on encrypted data.
Brakerski, together with Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan (who was a student of Goldwasser's at MIT), surprised the computer security world earlier this year with two recent papers in which they described several new ways of making fully homomorphic encryption more efficient. For one thing, they managed to make FHE work with much simpler arithmetic, which speeds up processing time. And a surprise discovery showed that a mathematical construct used to generate the encryption keys could be simplified without compromising security. Gentry's original ideal lattices are theoretical collections of points that can be added together -- as in an ordinary lattice structure -- but also multiplied. But the new research shows that the lattice does not have to be ideal, which simplifies the construction immensely. "The fact that it worked was something like magic, and it has challenged our assumptions about the function of the ideal lattices in homomorphic encryption," says Brakerski.
Their result promises to pave a path to applying FHE in practice. Optimized versions of the new system could be hundreds -- or even thousands -- of times faster than Gentry's original construction. Indeed, Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan have managed to advance the theory behind fully homomorphic encryption to the point that computer engineers can begin to work on applications. These might include, for instance, securing medical information for research: A third party could perform large medical studies on encrypted medical records without having access to the individuals' information.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Weizmann Institute of Science.
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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111215095454.htm
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