The White House on Tuesday made public excerpts of a previously classified report on cybersecurity prepared by the Bush adminisration.

The report prescribes that the president “establish a front line of defense” and better address emerging cybersecurity threats.

It also calls on both White House officials and lawmakers to boost domestic Web security programs, especially with respect to the federal government’s classified networks, while expanding cybersecurity research and education programs.

The Obama White House decided on Tuesday to declassify the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), a 2008 report signed by President George W. Bush that has formed the bedrock of the White House’s cybersecurity policy.

Read more ….

My Comment: Everyone in the business (this blogger included) has known that the US Government has been concerned about cybersecurity issues for years …. I just find it interesting that this White House has decided to make public the initiatives and thinking that has been going on in countering these threats.

They usually keep these things under wraps.

The Whitehouse Has Been Concerned About Cybersecurity For A Very Long Time is a post from: Updated News

From this AP article that we found today at NPR, we read more about the bad news that the recession brought.

It is bad news for the Arab world, where chronic economic stagnation, high unemployment and low-paying jobs have long caused frustration among workers, especially the young.

Overall, the amount of money shipped back home by workers abroad, called remittances, fell by more than 7 percent in 2009 across the Mideast and Arab north Africa, the World Bank estimates. That is the first drop in a decade.

In some countries the impact is worse: Worker remittances into Egypt have already plunged nearly a quarter over the past year, the International Monetary Fund said in October.

Arab workers go to many places for jobs, including Europe. But the oil-rich Gulf has long been the bedrock of Mideast remittances, with Dubai recently its most turbocharged engine.

Dubai built itself into a booming trade and tourism hub on the backs of foreign workers like Tamimi, whose family originally hails from the West Bank town of Hebron. Only about one in 10 of Dubai’s roughly 1.5 million residents is a citizen.

Expatriate Arabs are not the only foreigners hurt by Dubai’s downfall. Low-paid Indians and other South Asians provide much of the hard labor to raise skyscrapers including the world’s tallest, the Burj Khalifa, which opened this week. Filipinos fill many of the service jobs.

But in per-capita dollar terms, it is the Arab world that’s being hit hardest.

Overall, worker wages from the Gulf — including Dubai and other places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — account for a whopping 15 to 20 percent of the economy in countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt that are considerably poorer than the oil-fueled monarchies of the Gulf, said Nasser Saidi, a former Lebanese government minister who is now the chief economist at the Dubai International Financial Center, a state-run banking hub.

The effects of the recession on Dubai is a post from: Updated News

It’s like a huge endoscope, probing the bowels of the world’s second-largest ice mass. Researchers have brought back unprecedented video from deep inside Greenland’s ice sheet.

The footage shows the camera dropping vertically down a natural 100-metre tunnel in the ice, travelling from a 10-metre-wide hole at the surface to the bottom, where ice meets bedrock.

In the early part of the descent, the sides of the tunnel are bright blue. Waterfalls pound their way down across and through the ice, alongside the camera. Then the camera plunges into icy water. This is meltwater from the surface. The water itself carves out such ice tunnels, called moulins.

Under the summer sun, the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melts into pools and lakes. The water is darker than the reflective ice it sits in, so it absorbs more heat from the sun. Eventually, it bores a hole through the ice and sometimes makes it all the way down to the bedrock, where it lubricates the ice sheet, helping it slide towards the ocean.
Dead ducks

For the past few years, a team led by Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado in Boulder has been exploring the anatomy of the moulins. Last year, their camera – which was built by NASA to drop down through man-made holes in the Antarctic sea ice – made it down to bedrock. The team also dropped an army of rubber ducks with built-in trackers into a gaping moulin in the hope of finding out where the water came out.

Steffen, talking at the climate change congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, says they have not yet picked up any signal from the rubber bath toys. They will only transmit their location if they emerge from underneath the ice and Steffen reckons there is a good chance they have been ground to a smithereens by the huge mass of ice.

Later this year, the team will be boldly going where no researchers have gone before. Under the guidance of expert climbers, they plan to descend deep into a moulin in person. They will leave temperature and flow sensors along the way, so they can track how the tunnel changes throughout the year.
Slipping and sliding

The moulins move with the ice, says Steffen. “If the ice shifts, the channels shift.” The plumbing also expands and contracts as the seasons pass. However, radar imagery shows that moulins do not close up entirely from year to year and that each new one adds to a network of channels inside the ice.

Steffen first thought that moulins could be accelerating the flow of glaciers and fueling sea-level rise, but research has shown that their lubrication effect is seasonal.

Nevertheless, Steffen believes the formation of moulins can act to release a glacier’s handbrake, that is a static glacier can move if meltwater helps to lubricate its passage. Over the years, the team has monitored several Greenland glaciers that were not moving at all.

“We called them death glaciers,” says Steffen. Then they suddenly lurched. The team believe that they were not moving because they had no “plumbing”. Until, that is, moulins gave them legs.
Source-www.newscientist.com

Witness a journey to the bottom of an ice sheet is a post from: Updated News

The global economic slowdown will hit the poorest nations hardest. Demand for their exports is falling. Prices of raw materials are plunging. Flows of money from migrant workers to families back home will shrink as unemployment rises elsewhere. In these circumstances it is more important than ever that rich countries deliver on aid promises. That is why the OECD has called on the world’s main donors to join an Aid Pledge to stick by their commitments.

As world leaders head to Doha for a U.N. meeting on financing for development this Saturday (November 29), however, another dimension of the issue needs urgent attention: tax systems.

Efficient tax systems underpin development. Rich countries rely on taxes to finance aid flows. In developing countries, locally generated taxes are a much bigger source of development finance than aid. Effective tax systems, based on cooperative relationships between governments, businesses and individuals, are a bedrock for democracy and growth. When businesses and citizens form part of the formal economy, good tax administration can provide for pensions, social security payments and other instruments of the modern state.

But there’s a dark side. Tax dodgers in developed and developing countries deprive governments of revenues. Many take advantage of the lack of transparency in tax havens. Developing countries are estimated to lose to tax havens almost three times what they get from developed countries in aid. If taxes on assets hidden by tax dodgers were collected in their owners’ jurisdictions, billions of dollars could become available for financing development.

Fighting tax evasion calls for cooperation between developed and developing countries. At home governments must enact fair and effective policies and make it easy for taxpayers to comply with their obligations.

Internationally, they must push for greater transparency in cross-border financial transactions.

As incoming G20 chair, Britain must take up this challenge. It has played a lead role in OECD work on countering tax haven abuse, but more is needed. Ties with Commonwealth countries and dependencies that operate as offshore financial centres make it uniquely well placed to push for improved standards of transparency. At the same time, it can give a lead in helping developing countries improve their tax administration.

We need to be realistic. Developing countries often lack the resources to build effective tax systems. Citizens may be unwilling to pay on the grounds that governments misuse the funds. It can be difficult to implement fair taxation in low-income, agrarian economies. And the poor are often subject to an equivalent of tax, in bribes and informal fees.

But something can be done. The OECD’s decade-long drive against tax havens and evasion is bearing fruit in the form of bilateral treaties aimed at improving transparency and exchange of information. The trend is spreading beyond the OECD, with China and South Africa joining this campaign. At the same time, donor countries are helping poorer nations develop fair tax services.

Significantly, developing countries are joining forces too. An African Tax Administration Forum is being developed under the leadership of Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda. By inviting governments to share good practices, it aims to improve service delivery and taxpayer education. Success will increase accountability, strengthen democracy and combat corruption.

In 2006, only $88m of a total $103bn in official development assistance from OECD countries was dedicated to tax-related tasks. But aid targeted at capacity building in revenue administrations is money well spent. Donor support to the Rwanda Revenue Authority brought a dramatic increase in tax revenue, from 9% of GDP in 1998 to 14.7% in 2005, with an equally significant effect on state accountability. We cannot allow the crisis to undermine such efforts.

The last time we faced a major global downturn, aid budgets fell dramatically — curtailing investment in agriculture, infrastructure, social welfare and political stability. Similar cuts now would be even more damaging, after volatility in commodity prices and a global food crisis have already hit the poor. Cuts may bring short-term savings to donor governments, but they would cost much more in the longer term in extra spending on security and humanitarian aid.

Earlier this week, OECD donors joined in an Aid Pledge to maintain aid flows consistent with promises at Gleneagles and elsewhere. If combined with a joint effort to fight tax evasion, the results for development could be significant. The OECD, as the leading international organisation with a mandate to work on tax policy, is committed to this objective. More effective tax systems in developed and developing countries would help to build a stronger, cleaner and fairer world economy. And they would help the poorest the most.

(Angel Gerri is Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.)

World – Tax evasion threat to development is a post from: Updated News