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Globe and MailU.S. Open fight – 'Hey, Security!'San Francisco Chronicle (blog)Here's something you wouldn't see at Wimbledon-a fight in the upper stands at US Open tennis on Thursday evening during the featured match between Serbia's …US Open Fight VIDEO: Fans Brawl In Stands (VIDEO)Huffington Post (blog)US Open Fight Stops MatchTerra.comFight night – at the US [...]

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Sydney Morning HeraldJobs: Facebook terms for iTunes Ping 'onerous'San Jose Business JournalApple Inc. and Facebook Inc. talked about incorporating the social network into iTunes new Ping service but couldn't come to terms, according to Steve Jobs. …Apple TV, 'Ping' and iTunes — what it meansComputerworldApple's Ping – a capsule reviewThe GuardianiTunes Ping: Apple's Security For [...]

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You are confusing the different types of alarm systems and what kind of user status more? Once, home alarm systems were fairly simple and straightforward

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Home Alarm System Security Levels

As online merchants accept payments by credit card, there are numerous security problems that you should be aware that the security of your company and your customers.

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Credit card security concerns

Walking in a school was the most dangerous day of school for your child. The panel presents safety of pedestrians in the list of topics to write with the whole family in front of the Metro Nashville Public Schools opened for a half day of class this Thursday, August 12. There are several causes of road accidents involving child pedestrians.

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Distracted Driving School Zone

SANTA FE SPRINGS — Police have released dramatic surveillance video as they search for a pair of suspects involved in a botched robbery at a medical marijuana dispensary.

It happened at AP Natural Solutions located in the 9800 block of Alburtis Avenue in Santa Fe Springs on August 10, as first reported by the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

The suspects posed as customers to gain entry to the business. The surveillance video shows the men signing a guest sheet. Once inside, one of the suspects pulled a gun and pointed it at the security guard. The second suspect grabbed the guard’s gun and the two began to struggle, according to Whittier police.

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Pot Dispensary Robbery Caught On Tape

The chip and PIN security features, credit cards offer a simple is a very safe and easy integration of credit makes the use of a map and more secure. This security update works so that the user enter a PIN (Personal Identification Number) during the checkout process allows.

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Credit Card Security

Afghanistan’s embattled president Hamid Karzai said on Sunday that U.S. taxpayers were indirectly funding “mafia-like groups” and terrorist activities with the American government’s support of private contractors inside his country.

In a rare U.S. media appearance, Karzai continued to press for the removal of the vast majority of U.S. private contractors by the end of this year. He argued that their continued presence inside Afghanistan was “an obstruction and impediment” to the country’s growth, a massive waste of money, and a catalyst for corruption among Afghan officials.

“The more we wait the more we lose,” Karzai said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “Therefore we have decided as an Afghan government to bring an end to the presence of these security companies… who are not only causing corruption in this country but who are looting and stealing from the Afghan people.

“One of the reasons that I want them disbanded and removed by four months from now is exactly because their presence is preventing the growth and development of the Afghan security forces — especially the police force — because if 40, 50,000 people are given more salaries than the Afghan police, why would an Afghan … man come to the police if he can get a job in a security firm, have a lot of leeway without any discipline? So naturally our security forces will find it difficult to grow. In order for our security forces to grow these groups must be disbanded.”

Karzai’s campaign against U.S. contractors is, undoubtedly, compelled by his own domestic political concerns. The killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians has not only deeply soured the country’s view of America’s mission, but damaged Karzai’s standing as well.

U.S. officials have warned that Afghanistan’s army and police are nowhere near close to being ready to fill the void left by private contractors. If anything, the corruption that Karzai ties to the contractor community could be exacerbated if the Afghan army (itself plagued with scandal) were to play a bigger role.

Recognizing the reluctance of U.S. officials to endorse his approach, Karzai openly acknowledged that he was using his ABC sit down to make a direct pitch to the American public.

“I’m appealing to the U.S. taxpayer,” he said, “not to allow their hard earned money to be wasted on groups that are not only providing lots of inconvenience to the Afghan people but are actually, god knows, in contract with mafia-like groups and perhaps also funding militants, and insurgents and terrorists with those funds.”

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Hamid Karzai: U.S. Taxpayer-Funded Private Contractors Engaging In Terrorist, Mafia-Like Activity

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber blew himself up Tuesday among hundreds of army recruits who had gathered near a military headquarters in an attack officials said killed 60 and wounded 125, one of the bloodiest bombings in months in the Iraqi capital.

The massive strike just outside a major division headquarters and recruitment center is an embarrassment to Iraqi security forces and casts doubts on their ability to protect themselves and the nation just two weeks before all but 50,000 U.S. troops head home.

Iraqi military spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi blamed al-Qaida in Iraq for enlisting the bomber, whose upper body he said was found at the scene of the blast.

Yasir Ali, who had been waiting outside the military headquarters since 4 a.m. with about 1,000 other hopeful recruits, said he saw the bomber, describing him as a blond young man. Ali said the bomber was sitting quietly among the recruits, then walked up to an officer collecting I.D. cards and blew himself up.

“Severed hands and legs were falling over me,” said Ali said, adding he was about 54 feet (15 meters) away from the bomber. “I was soaked with blood from the body parts and wounded and dead people falling over and beside me.”

Insurgents have threatened to step up attacks ahead of the U.S. troop departure and violence has increased in recent weeks. Iraqi army, police and other security forces have been targeted, but civilians also have been killed by the hundreds.

Tuesdays’ blast took place around 7:30 a.m. outside the former Iraqi Ministry of Defense building that now houses the army’s 11th division headquarters. The site receives about 250 new recruits each week as Iraqi security forces try to bolster their ranks to prepare for the U.S. military’s looming withdrawal after seven years of war.

Bodies of young men, some still clutching job applications and other documents in their hands, could be seen scattered about at the blast site, which Iraqi soldiers closed off. U.S. helicopters hovered overhead as frantic Iraqis showed up to search for relatives.

At least two recruits who witnessed that attack raised the possibility that a car had also exploded at the scene, which could account for the high death toll. But al-Moussawi blamed the deaths on a single suicide bomber.

“We were sitting there, and somebody began shouting about a parked car,” said one of the recruits, Ali Ibrahim, 21, who suffered minor shrapnel wounds in the blast. Ibrahim said he had been waiting to get into the headquarters to secure a job since around 3 a.m.

The recruits had been gathering, many of them since long before dawn, in an open and unprotected area next to Maidan Square in central Baghdad as they waited for hours to be allowed through the main gates of the headquarters in small groups, according to two Iraqi police officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. At least three soldiers were among the dead and eight among the wounded, the police officials said.

Officials at four Baghdad hospitals confirmed the casualties. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Al-Moussawi, the military spokesman, told The Associated Press that the blast was caused by a single suicide bomber who detonated his explosives vest among the packed crowd. He put the casualty count at 39 killed and 57 wounded. Varying casualty counts are common in the chaotic aftermath of attacks.

As many as 1,000 army recruits were gathered at the division headquarters, he added, because Tuesday was to be the last day for soldiers to sign up.

“We couldn’t get another place for the recruits,” al-Moussawi said. “It was difficult to control the area because it’s an open area and because of the large number of recruits.”

Iraqi security forces have been trying to boost their numbers as the U.S. military begins to leave the country. All but 50,000 U.S. troops will go home by the end of August, with the rest to follow by the end of 2011 under a security agreement between Baghdad and Washington.

This summer in particular has seen a spike in violence in Iraq. Data from the Iraqi defense, interior and ministry officials show that July marked the bloodiest month since May 2008, with more than 500 killed, although tallies compiled by The Associated Press and the U.S. military were lower.

In a similar attack last month, a suicide bomber ripped through a line of anti-al-Qaida Sunni fighters waiting to collect their paychecks near an Iraqi military base, killing 45 people in the mostly Sunni district of Radwaniya southwest of Baghdad.

August, which saw the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has also been deadly. Two bombs that set off a power generator and ignited a fuel tank on Aug. 7. killed 43 people in a downtown market in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city.

___

Associated Press Writers Lara Jakes, Bushra Juhi, Hamid Ahmed and Barbara Surk contributed to this report

(This version CORRECTS number of wounded in long headline to 125.)

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Baghdad Suicide Bomb Targets Army Recruits, Kills 60

As Gen. David Petraeus kicks off an extended media blitz intended to make Americans feel better about the war in Afghanistan — or at least give him some more time to fight it — he faces a foe more implacable than al Qaeda, or even the Taliban: Reality.

That reality, increasingly obvious to national security experts and the general public alike, is that no amount of good intentions or firepower is going to advance our fundamental interests in Afghanistan — and that as much as Petraeus might be able to achieve in the next six months, or a year, little to none of it is sustainable and most of it is, even worse, counterproductive.

U.S. taxpayers are spending vast amounts of money on the war — over $200 million a day for military operations alone. Our troops work tirelessly, fight and die to protect and build up the people and institutions of Afghanistan.

But how that turns into success remains wildly unclear. And even more importantly, the relationship between what we’re doing on a day to day basis and our ostensible goal — keeping America safe from al Qaeda — seems increasingly tenuous.

In the first of many planned interviews, Petraeus will tell NBC’s David Gregory on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that his intention is “to show those in Washington that there is progress being made” and to persuade decision-makers “that we’ve got to build on the progress that has been established so far.”

But what Petraeus can’t do is say with any confidence that this “progress” can be sustained. Nor can he connect it to an actual threat to our national security.

By contrast, in a reflection of an emerging new consensus in the national security community, a self-styled “Team B” on Afghanistan strategy is advocating much narrower goals and reduced military commitment in the region.

According to an advance copy of the group’s forthcoming report, “the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical crossroads. Our current path promises to have limited impact on the civil war while taking more American lives and contributing to skyrocketing taxpayer debt. We conclude that a fundamentally new direction is needed.”

The report represents the views of about 40 influential national security figures from academia, think tanks and the business community. Organizer Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation said the group is varied in its makeup, but unified by its doubts about the current course.

Its survey of the landscape concludes: “We are mired in a civil war in Afghanistan and are struggling to establish an effective central government in a country that has long been fragmented and decentralized. No matter how desirable this objective might be in the abstract, it is not essential to U.S. security and it is not a goal for which the U.S. military is well suited. There is no clear definition of what would comprise ‘success’ in this endeavor, and creating a unified Afghan state would require committing many more American lives and hundreds of billions of additional U.S. dollars for many years to come.”

“General Petraeus is a smart man and he attracts smart people and I know that since he’s been given this onerous duty, he’s been looking at at least tactical and operational shifts,” said Patrick Cronin, a South Asian expert at the Center for a New American Security and one of the contributors to the report. “But what he isn’t addressing is the need for a new political strategy.”

Cronin said Petraeus’s target audience “shouldn’t buy into this military incrementalism. ‘Six months more’ is not a strategy.”

Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress, said he is worried that members of the Obama administration have lost sight of what he calls the fundamental question: “Are we actually keeping Americans safe?”

“Are we actually preventing people from flying planes into our buildings?”

“Some of the most striking arguments for continuing the conflict are actually sunk costs and national pride and honor,” Katulis said. We keep going because “we’ve spent so much and it would be such an awful thing not to justify the costs and lives.”

The war’s goal at this point seems to be establishing overall stability in the country. But among the many other problems, Katulis said, there’s no good way to measure that; officers on the ground are reduced to tallying things like the number of stores open at night, or the number of shoppers at a market.

That sort of metric leads Katulis and other national security experts to wonder: What does that have to do with the security of our own country? And to the extent that it does, is it really the best use of our resources? What about the threats to our homeland developing in other parts of the world?

Cronin said Petraeus should be forced to explain not just what he intends to do, but how it can be sustained. If he drives the Taliban out of one region — “if we do sacrifice those lives to do that” — it still “doesn’t put us on a sustainable glidepath,” he said.

“Petraeus wants to buy more time, because he needs time to demonstrate that what he’s doing can have a positive effect,” Cronin said. “But it doesn’t have a large enough positive effect, and it’s too costly in terms of blood and treasure.”

“Yes, there are different views of this war,” he added, “but if you look at enough of the evidence, you can’t be sanguine that we are indeed winning hearts and minds” — which is a critical goal of Petraeus’s counter-insurgency strategy. In fact, Cronin said, the evidence suggests that we are making ourselves “even less popular than the Taliban… we are making them stronger, and what we’re doing is not effective enough.”

With al Qaeda essentially gone from Afghanistan, “the original purpose has largely dissipated,” Cronin said. “This strategy is actually being counterproductive for our interests.”

Katulis also notes that the administration’s plan still lacks a clear, positive goal. “If you go through all of the senior administration officials’ talking points, they often define the goal as a negative.”

The most senior administration official is fond of saying things like: “I’ve set a clear and achievable mission — to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies and prevent their return”

But, said Katulis, “that doesn’t actually tell us what it is we actually have to leave behind.”

Petraeus is said the be starting to hedge on President Obama’s promised deadline of July 2011 for withdrawing American troops.

That’s hardly surprising. As I reported two weeks ago, the timeline for an American troop withdrawal has steadily been growing longer for some time, with Obama’s deadline looking more and more hollow, and the real timeline for significant troop withdrawal — barring a change in course — now extending at least to 2014, if not far beyond.

But from Cronin’s perspective, Obama had a year to turn things around, and it’s already over. “That’s enough empirical evidence to know if there is something that can be salvaged here,” he said.

Cronin said the “Team B” solution is “something in between what we’ve been doing and complete abandonment. It’s not that it’s a guarantee of success, but we’ve got to recognize that what we’re doing now is not succeeding, either.”

Cronin said U.S. national security does not depend on the military defeat of the Taliban, or on a strong central government. The plan instead calls for power-sharing, and for a smaller military presence that focuses on keeping al Qaeda at bay.

So if it’s increasingly clear outside the military and the executive branch that a radical reassessment of the war is necessary, why isn’t it clear inside?

“If there’s one thing that drives the current officer corps in our military it’s that they want to avoid the sense of a loss, and perception of another Vietnam,” Katulis said.

As for inside the White House, “there’s the political and rhetorical box that they themselves have set,” Katulis said.

It’s also possible that Obama is thinking things he just can’t say out loud.

“Our Afghan partners are just not up to the task of what we would like to see,” said Cronin. “You can’t say that as a government when you’re knee deep in a war. But at the end of the day, you have to be realistic about U.S. interests.”

And as long as the war is being fought, “the president can’t afford to look incoherent on this,” Cronin said. “This president in particular, because he’ll be attacked from the right, has to look strong on this issue.”

Obama “can’t afford to have Joe Biden and others leading an ongoing critique of the war” which is why he “put a lid on that last year,” Cronin said. Nevertheless, “I think the reality is that inside the administration there continue to be serious people with serious doubts about where this is heading.”

But there’s yet another force preventing Obama from pivoting, according to Katulis: The possibility that, after he reduces the military footprint in Afghanistan, someone from that country then comes to the U.S. and commits and act of terror.

Staying in Afghanistan for that reason, however, is strikingly reminiscent of former Vice President Cheney’s notorious “One Percent Doctrine,” as described in the Ron Suskind book by that name. Cheney’s basic view was that if there’s even a one percent threat of a “high-impact” terrorist event, then the government should respond as if it were a certainty. That led to a lot of overkill.

Cronin said he thinks the president doesn’t have much choice. “I think there are fewer and fewer people who are willing to give just a blank check for what’s going on,” he said.

And Cronin said he thinks Obama “can find a way to make this politically more palatable” by following through with his promised July 2011 drawdown, continuing to make the case for a pivot toward a more diplomatic, less military-intensive strategy. And he can make the case that “there are plenty of other threats out in the world that we’re ignoring because of this.”

Afghanistan is overkill in the wrong place, Katulis said. “We’re really running a risk of having a national security strategy that is not in balance globally.”

Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail, bookmark his page; subscribe to RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get e-mail alerts when he writes.

More on Afghanistan

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Why Petraeus Can’t Make The Sale