Wall Street expects Google to post net revenue of $6.06 billion on earnings-per-share of $7.14. The search engine is firing on all cylinders, save the social Web. – Wall Street analysts expect Google to post net revenue of $6.06 billion on
earnings-per-share of $7.14 when it reports fourth quarter earnings Jan. 20.
Those figures are a nice bump from the year-ago quarter, when Google
revealed revenues of $4.95 billion on an EPS of $6.79. Google also notched a…
The speed of Motorola’s new Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic will raise the bar in smartphone performance later this year. Will consumers jump for the speed bump? – Tablets may have defined the geeky gestalt of the 2011 Consumer Electronics
Show, but the show will also be undoubtedly viewed as the coming-out party for
smartphones and a tablet with dual-core processors.
Motorola’s Atrix 4G handset, Droid Bionic smartphone and
Motorola Xoom tablet will all ru…
Either we’re on Candid Camera or kooky couple Randy and Evi Quaid truly are “CooCoo for Coco Puffs.” If you thought you’d already heard the best of The Quaids ramblings about those pesky StarWhacker, who are out to kill them — leaving a trail of unpaid hotel bills in their wake, pull up a chair. [...]
A Pakistani-American man has been arrested on charges he planned to bomb subway stations near Washington. He also is charged with sharing information with people he believed were affiliated with al-Qaida.
An Islamist plot to launch simultaneous armed raids in major cities in Britain, France and Germany has been uncovered, media reports said on Wednesday.
The attacks – planned from Pakistan and being tracked by anti-terrorism agencies – are said to have advanced to a planning stage, according to British broadcaster Sky News and the US-based newspaper the Wall Street Journal.
France is on full terror alert after security services say they received a tip-off about a possible suicide bomb plot. Parts of Paris’ transport network and the city’s iconic Eiffel Tower are thought to have been among the prime targets of an unknown female attacker sometime last week.
English supermodel Kate Moss is eyeing a plot on the Italian island of Stromboli for her perfect getaway. The 36-year-old model feels that the volcanic island is a perfect escape. “Kate’s keen on one plot of land and has offered the fisherman owner a hefty sum. When she wants something, she won”t give up,†The [...]
Ezion Holdings says wholly-owned subsidiary, Teras Australia Pty Ltd has agreed to lease of a plot of land in Australia for the development of a second marine supply base to support the offshore oil and gas industry in the vicinity.
The deal relates to the lease of an initial 36ha seafront land situated in the Northern Territory of Australia, with rental fees that are payable monthly, an initial lease period of 10 years with the option to extend for up to 50 years.
ISLAMABAD – Since the Obama administration is said to have presented to Pakistan a dossier on terrorism suspect Faisal Shahzad, including a detailed chart describing his contacts with the Tehreek-I-Taliban Pakistan before his attempt to detonate an explosives-laden vehicle in New York City’s Times Square, Foreign Office said on Wednesday it was not in knowledge of the dossier.
“You better put this question to officials of the Interior Ministry, however, I confirm it to you that Foreign Office has not been consulted so for in this regard,” a spokesperson of Foreign Office told TheNation when asked if the US has presented a dossier on terrorism suspect Faisal Shahzad to Pakistan.
According to American media reports, Senior US officials had held an urgent meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari last week and presented him a dossier on terrorism suspect Faisal Shahzad.
Pakistan denied that TTP was involved in the May 1 bombing attempt in New York. However, authorities in Islamabad took a U-turn from their earlier statement soon after American top officials including Jones and Panetta met with President Asif Ali Zardari and other leaders, and begun to acknowledge that the group provided support to Shahzad.
The evidence was part of a vigorous American warning that there would be “inevitable pressure” on the United States to take action if there was an attack traceable to Pakistan that resulted in US casualties, officials familiar with the talks said.
It is believed that the same warning was delivered last week in a visit to Islamabad by White House National Security Advisor James L. Jones and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta, who said Pakistan needed to intensify its crackdown on the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban.
It is important to mention here that, TTP had initially claimed responsibility for the Time Square (failed) bomb plot, however, it backed away from the claim and denied even knowing Shahzad.
According to American media reports, US officials have become convinced that the TTP, after primarily focusing on attacks against the Pakistani government, is increasingly seeking ways to strike US targets. The group has formed closer links with Al-Qaeda and has seemed to adopt the terrorist networkÂ’s goal of striking the United States on its own territory.
“We have been lucky in the past, but our luck will run out and in the future, we are likely to face successful attacks,” said a senior US intelligence official, who, like several others, was not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, stated Los Angeles Times.
The evidence, which included photographs of militants suspected of assisting Shahzad, was shown to Zardari and Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the Chief of Army Staff, along with other Pakistani officials, US officials said, according to the newspaper.
According to a news report of the same US newspaper, Jones and Panetta were attempting to convince the Pakistanis that the US had hard evidence that Shahzad had received support from the Pakistani Taliban, the officials said.
The chart, which was assembled by US intelligence agencies, “showed who all he had contacts with,” one official said, and drew “clear links between Faisal Shahzad and the TTP leaders in Pakistan.”
The White House originally considered warning Pakistan about the consequences of another attack in a confidential letter from President Obama to Zardari, but it decided to dispatch Jones and Panetta to deliver the message in person.
In addition to that visit, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned publicly in the days after the Times Square attempt that Pakistan faced “very severe consequences” in the event of another plot originating in Pakistan. Her comment provoked a strong backlash in Pakistan.
It is pertinent to mention here that on May 14, US and Pakistan had agreed that individual incidents like New YorkÂ’s Time Square Bomb incident would not affect the ties between the two countries and both sides would continue working together for the elimination of terror.
The affirmation to this effect was made during a telephonic call made by US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a week earlier.
US officials investigating the failed car bombing in Times Square are still far from certain about the role Pakistani Taliban may have played in orchestrating the attempt, the Senate intelligence committeeÂ’s top Republican said, reported Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Senator Christopher S Bond said he has seen no hard evidence that a Pakistani group – or groups – planned or directed the May 1 attempt, allegedly carried out by Faisal Shahzad. He added that White House statements suggesting a central role by the Pakistani Taliban were based on ‘suspicions and tenuous connectionsÂ’.
“We need to find out, as quickly as possible, what his connections were and how he was trained,” Bond said, referring to Shahzad, after a closed-door committee briefing by senior intelligence and law-enforcement officials involved in the investigation. Referring to recent comments by Obama administration officials about a strong Taliban link, the Senator said: “I am not convinced by the information I’ve seen so far that there was adequate, confirmable intelligence to corroborate the statements that were made on Sunday television shows.”
On Sunday, Attorney General Eric Holder told NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ that the Pakistani Taliban was ‘intimately involved’ in directing the attempt to blow up a sport-utility vehicle on a crowded Times Square street corner.
The British newspaper Guardian quoted Pakistani investigators Tuesday as saying they had found no evidence to support US claims that Shahzad had acted on Taliban orders.
Senate officials declined to describe details of Tuesday’s classified briefing. A US counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there had been an ‘independent stream of information’ that corroborates Shahzad’s account about contacts between the suspect and the Pakistani Taliban.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who joined Bond in speaking to reporters after the briefing, said there is a ‘high likelihood’ that Shahzad received some kind of terrorist training in Pakistan. But she said committee members had not been provided with specifics about how the Taliban might have aided the attempted bombing.
Reuters adds: Republicans have been openly and repeatedly critical of the handling of terrorism cases by the administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
US officials initially doubted the TTP claim over the New York plot. But after ShahzadÂ’s arrest, Holder came out publicly to say there was a connection.
Under pressure from Democrats in the Senate, the State Department said on Tuesday it was looking at adding TTP to the US list of ‘foreign terrorist’ groups.
In New York, the cityÂ’s police commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters Shahzad knew authorities were pursuing him and tried to leave the country after federal officials leaked information about the investigation.
Kelly said Shahzad was tipped off by media reports that authorities were hunting for a Pakistani-American identified as the buyer of the sport utility vehicle used to carry a crude bomb made of fuel and fireworks into Times Square.
“There was an inordinate amount of information given out by somebody in this case,” Kelly said. “He already knew that we were looking for him. That is not helpful and I think the government has to look internally to see that doesn’t happen.”
Kelly said the information was not leaked by New York police. The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment. Since his arrest, Shahzad has been talking with authorities and waived his legal rights.
“Over the past week-and-a-half we have been working to understand everything we can about Shahzad,” Kelly said, adding his story was ‘another classic case of home-grown terrorism’.
At an appearance in Oakland, California, Holder told reporters the incident was ‘troubling but also indicative of what we’ve seen over the past year’.
NEW YORK – Senior Obama administration officials on Sunday blamed the failed attempt to blow up a bomb in Times Square on the Pakistani Taliban, in what was seen as part of a move to step up pressure on the Pakistan military to attack the militant group in North Waziristan.
“We’ve now developed evidence that shows the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview on ABC television’s news programme ‘This Week’.
Later, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the Taliban in Pakistan ‘directed this plot’ and may have also financed it. The Pakistani Taliban, he said, was ‘intimately involved’ in the attempt on May 1 by Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, to blow up gasoline and propane tanks secreted inside a vehicle.
John Brennan, President ObamaÂ’s chief counterterrorism adviser, echoed HolderÂ’s statements Sunday morning, saying it appeared that Shahzad, a resident of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who spent five months in Pakistan until February, was working for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
Political observers noted that Obama administration officials were now speaking out more firmly and publicly than before in an obvious attempt to build up pressure on Pakistan. Following Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warning regarding ‘severe consequences’, the US Commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McCrystal, spoke to Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, in Rawalpindi, urging him to launch an offensive in North Waziristan.
“The conclusion that the Pakistani Taliban is behind the attempted bombing underscores the serious threat that we face from a very determined enemy,” Brennan said on CNN’s “State of the Union”.
Shahzad, who was arrested at Kennedy International Airport aboard an Emirates Airlines airplane bound for Dubai little more than two days after the bomb was discovered, soon told police that he trained in Waziristan, the main base for the Pakistani Taliban and Al-Qaeda, according to US media reports.
Neither Holder nor Brennan indicated what new information led them to the firmer conclusions about the role of the Pakistani Taliban.
Brennan said Pakistan was being very cooperative in the investigation but that the US wanted to know exactly who might have been helping Shahzad.
“There are a number of terrorist and militant groups operating in Pakistan,” he said. “And we need to make sure there’s no support being given to them by the Pakistani government.”
Brennan would not say whether Shahzad may be connected to American-Yemenese Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, other than to acknowledge that his Internet sermons are popular among extremist Muslims.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Pakistan had recently stepped up efforts to root out extremists.
“The Pakistanis have been doing so much more than 18 months or two years ago any of us would have expected,” Gates told reporters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
He referred to Pak Army offensives, dating to spring 2009, against Taliban extremists in areas near the Afghan border, including in South Waziristan.
Gates said the Obama administration was sticking to its policy of offering to do as much training and other military activity inside Pakistan as the Pakistani government was willing to accept.
“It’s their country,” Gates said. “They remain in the driver’s seat, and they have their foot on the accelerator.”
Irish police arrested seven Muslims for planning to kill a Swedish cartoonist who drew a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad with a dog’s body. In response, several Swedish papers reprinted the cartoons on Wednesday.
Pyongyang accused Seoul yesterday of plotting to topple its regime, souring relations again as a top Chinese official visited North Korea in a new drive to bring it back to nuclear disarmament talks. In another blow for inter-Korean ties the two sides failed to agree on restarting a tourism
Hiap Seng Engineering, the specialist engineering group for the oil and gas, petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries, says it has clinched a three-year term integrated plot contract by Singapore Refining Company for plant maintenance works on Jurong Island on a cost-plus/unit rate basis.
Two more men have been arrested in the U.S. in connection with an alleged plot to bomb New York City last year. The two, named as Adis Medunjanin and Zasrein Ahmedzay, were detained as part of an “ongoing investigation”, an FBI spokesman told reporters.
A young Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a US airliner boasted during his interrogation that some 20 others were being trained to carry out similar attacks, CBS reported on Friday. British intelligence officials said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had “boasted that close to 20 other
It’s been a long, strange and expensive trip for Oracle in its quest to add Sun Microsystems to its list of company acquisitions. And the final chapter isn’t yet written.
This started in early 2009 when word got out that Sun was up for sale. At the time, IBM was first in line as a buyer, and that scenario nearly happened. The transaction was only a few days from fruition in mid-April when some major issues got in the way and the deal fell through. A few days later, on April 20, Oracle surprised a lot of people by announcing that it would acquire Sun for about $7.4 billion, less Sun’s cash on hand.
Since April 20, it’s been a rocky road for Oracle and for Sun, which is losing a lot of potential sales due to the uncertainty of the situation. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said he believes Sun is losing about $100 million per month, and that’s a lot of money for anyone — even the billionaire Oracle CEO.
The major sticking point is an open-source database that Sun bought for $1 billion two years ago: MySQL. The EC is withholding its blessing on the deal until it is satisfied that MySQL will be allowed to innovate and compete fairly in the IT marketplace. The fact that Oracle’s own proprietary database often competes directly against it is seen as a huge conflict of interest; obviously, this has been the crux of the problem. Ellison has said that MySQL does not compete with his company’s bread-and-butter databases. This eWEEK slide show covers the 15 most important plot points in this lingering international IT saga, with the final chapter still to be written.
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AT T labels Dan Lyons’ (aka the Fake Steve Jobs) call to swamp the carrier’s data network on Friday irresponsible. Lyons is calling on all Apple iPhone owners to activate bandwidth-intensive applications for an hour.
–
AT amp;T claims Apple cult hero Dan Lyons (aka the Fake Steve Jobs)
perpetrated a reckless act of digital disobedience with a blog entry
calling on all iPhone owners to overwhelm the carriers much-maligned
data network on Friday, Dec. 18th as part of what he
terms “Operation Chok…
Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born man charged with plotting to carry out bomb attacks on the US, has pleaded not guilty in a New York court.
Prosecutors accused the 24-year-old Colorado resident of buying large quantities of bomb-making chemicals.
They say Zazi had explosives training in Pakistan and may have been planning an attack on New York commuters.
“The [...]
