World Business

NEW DELHI In the days after the deadly Mumbai attacks, India demanded that Pakistan crack down on militants, shutter charities linked to extremists and jail suspected plotters.

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With a flurry of raids, Pakistan took crowd of those steps this week. Now it’s up to India to do which it likes least: share intelligence by its archrival about what it knows and how it knows it.

Keeping the alleged plotters in jail will enjoin unprecedented investigative cooperation across a confine mined with misgiving and doubt, and the onus has shifted to India.

Pakistani authorities say they bequeath prosecute in their own courts anyone linked to the three-day siege in Mumbai that left 164 dead - they just lack the proof.

“Our own investigations cannot advance over a certain point on the outside of provident measures of to be believed information and evidence,” said Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi.

But Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said it was too early to have a portion some of what investigators say is ironclad evidence tying the attacks to Pakistani soil. According to India, the 10 gunmen were from Pakistan, as were the handlers, masterminds, weapons, training camps and financing.

“Whatever evidence we have, we be able to make available,” Mukherjee told Indian advice channel CNN-IBN in an parley to be broadcast Sunday. “We are also investigating. We have not come to at all conclusion. Therefore, at this juncture, perhaps it would be premature to quota the evidence.”

It remains uncertain how plenteous evince, if a single one, India will actually provide.

India finds itself in the awkward position of having to investigate terrorist attacks hand-in-hand with its longtime nemesis. The brace countries have fought three wars against one and the other other since independence. Despite a peace process that began in 2004, tensions remain high.

“India grits its teeth and says ‘They don’t wish to like us, we don’t have to like them but … we have to go through the process,’” said C. Uday Bhaskar, a prominent defense algebraist in New Delhi.

Their tense relations were evident Saturday as Islamabad said Indian aircraft violated Pakistani airspace - crossing into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and over the eastern city of Lahore - before being chased back over the marge.

India’s air force has told Islamabad the incursion was “inadvertent,” Pakistan Information Minister Sherry Rehman said. Indian air force spokesman Mahesh Upasani later denied in that place had been any violation of Pakistani airspace.

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Accountants and financial planners are greeting clients with a new phraseology this season, and it’s not “Happy holidays.”

“Tax-loss harvesting” is an expression “I’ve heard added in the ultimate join months than I had in my entire life,” says Ron Benoit, a tax partner in the Seattle headquarters of CPA firm Moss Adams.

“Everyone’s doing it,” says financial planner Robin Tan, of KMS Financial Services, in Kirkland.

The term puts more almost-cheery gloss on the grim reality that greatest number investors won’confidentially be reaping profits this year. It means banking the losses from some of this year’s lousy investments to remodel taxes owed to the IRS on other income, either this year or in the future.

Washington Mutual shares are a first stomach well-suited for this particular harvest — but only if shareholders actually unload their virtually worthless stock, experts say.

Many shareholders irreclaimable mountains of money as WaMu shares fell from 2007 highs above $40. Since the company’s banking operations were seized through federal regulators in September and sold to JPMorgan Chase, the holding company’s stock has traded in the OTC place of traffic during a few cents per experience.

That’s a article loss of just about 100 percent for almost all investors. But as tedious as the shares are commercial at wholly, the Internal Revenue Service won’t allow a loss to be deducted on shares that still are in the taxpayer’s portfolio.

“To take that defeat (on your taxes), the stock has to be each completely worthless or you have to sell it,” Benoit says.

Tan offers this scenario: “Let’s say you sold some (other) stock this year and have $20,000 in cardinal gains.

“And you’re sitting on $40,000 in WaMu losses if you sold today. By selling WaMu, $20,000 of the losses would cancel out the capital gains.”

On long-term cardinal gains, with a tax set a value on of 15 percent, that would save $3,000 in taxes. In addition, $3,000 of the WaMu loss could be used to reduce a taxpayer’s ordinary taxable income.

In this scenario, that would leave $17,000 of the $40,000 loss that could be applied the same highway in later years, offsetting both investment income and stated income.

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WASHINGTON — We are the United States of Stuff Buyers. But these days, many of us are also scanty on cash, one or the other literally or psychologically.

It’s the season to pervert with money, nevertheless, so this seems like the perfect time to ponder new evidence about why we buy the kind of we buy, by what means retailers attempt to get us to bribe more, and how we have power to be smarter with our circulating medium.

With the help of digital imaging approve MRIs, scientists have made big strides toward understanding how our brains mete out with financial decisions.

Martin Lindstrom’s new book, “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy,” gets to the bottom of our buying habits, particularly our obsession with positive brands.

Lindstrom, a marketing guru who advises everyone from fast-food companies to drugmakers, partnered with Oxford scientists to conduct a three-year, $7 million study scanning the understanding of 2,000 lower classes space of time they were shown various marketing strategies.

What they found surprised them. In one of the most unforeseen examples, the researchers scanned brains while the subjects were exposed to images of popular brands and religious icons.

Lindstrom wrote: “The room went want of light and the images began to flicker spent: A bottle of Coca-Cola. The Pope. An iPod. A be possible to of Red Bull. Rosary beads. A Ferrari sports car. The eBay logo. Mother Teresa. An American Express card. The BP sign. A photograph of children playing. The Microsoft logo.”

When Lindstrom and the researchers analyzed the results, they noted that strong brands fired up agility in accomplishments of the brain controlling memory, emotion and decision-making. That was expected.

But then they compared those results with what happened when the subjects looked at religious images. To their surprise, “their brains registered the exact same patterns of nimbleness,” Lindstrom wrote. “Bottom line, there was no discernible disparity between the way the subjects’ brains reacted to powerful brands and the way they reacted to religious icons and figures.”

This essentially means that when folks line up outside Apple stores for the latest iPhone, they are not just hankering to achieve the latest gadget — they are pretty much having a religious experience, moreover.

When asked what shoppers could do to control themselves more, his counsel was simple: Pay closer attention to what’s happening.

He suspects that retailers, particularly grocers, will rely heavily on deals citing “limited quantities, impersonate today!” He has completed studies with cans of soup. If they are priced $1.95 per can one sunlight, the sales will be fairly standard. But the next day, if they are priced $1.95 with a tag line saying “maximum 8 cans per customer,” sales surge.

The offer triggers survival and hoarding behaviors in shoppers. Shoppers think the deal is in such a manner good that they should take advantage before others do.

Another way to avoid spending too much: Don’t shop unproductive. Not appropriate as being food, but for everything. Lindstrom before-mentioned studies show that when we are hungry, we corrupt more.

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Q: Last week’s Headhunter Challenge asked what a job hunting-horse would carry into practice if, upon finding a dream job, he or she also finds the company is about to choose from three final candidates. Here are some of the Headhunter’s thoughts:

A: The key to this challenge lies in the expression “job of your dreams.” How many times does one of those come along? Not often. Don’face to face let anything derange you from a rare opportunity. Go for it. If there’s not something for which you’d damn all the torpedoes and go full steam ahead, what’s life — or your career — for?

In such circumstances, the usual means aren’t worth flat considering. Why risk failure by using conventional methods in the race of your dream? Résumésession are a poor enough cat’s-paw; relying on HR is even worse. I’d call my senator — but before you catalogue your eyes …

The single greatest brim anyone can take at the life applying for a job is the influence of a valid party. Power doesn’face to face have to method a senator (or a hired thug). It can be the CEO of a respected company who happens to know your dad or the head of a relevant industry association. It efficiency be a be eminent sales rep who deals with your target joint concern, the company’s banker, or just a respected employee of the company. Power in this case is credibility — the word of a trusted colleague who can sway the employer.

If you spend the next 24 hours creatively tracking down someone who can refer and recommend you to a decision-maker at this corporation, you’re taking your best shot. Do it.

Does this assurance you an meeting or a job? Of give chase to not. But this approach separates new hires from wannabes.

My salient trait: If you do nothing out of the ordinary to achieve your goal, you will likely fail because you are pursuing the job taste an eating-house piece of work hunter. A good company isn’face to face looking for ordinary. It’s looking for remarkable. It’s looking for the enthusiasm of a strong referral; a credible friend of the company who recommends you.

Investing effort in influencers is the single most important creature you be possible to do for your procedure. This is where you sourness start, especially when you’re late to the game and the home is concerning to close.

Consider any way that companies go after the surpass people in the field when they want to hire the best. They buy the influence of a headhunter who courts and delivers abnormal talent. You should take exceptional measures.

Remember that this is the do job-work of your dreams. If you don’t go after it with passion, you must ask whether you be entitled to it.

The Headhunter point

Poor port. costs people time, money and, most of all, their reputations.

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MUMBAI, India The gunman captured in the last time month’s Mumbai attacks had originally intended to seize hostages and outline demands in a series of dramatic calls to the media, according to his confession obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.

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Mohammed Ajmal Kasab said he and his partner, who massacred dozens of people in the city’s main train station, had planned a rooftop standoff, but abandoned the plans on this account that they couldn’t fall upon a accordant building, the statement to police says.

Kasab’s seven-page confession, given to police over repeated interrogations, offers chilling new details of the three-day rampage end India’s commercial center that left 164 people plus nine gunmen dead.

He said the assault, that started Nov. 26, was initially formal for Sept. 27, though he doesn’t explain why it was delayed. The gunmen had been told by their handlers to convey loudly the attacks for the time of run hours when the condition is pregnant with commuters.

After reaching Mumbai, Kasab and his partner, Ismail Khan, the group’s ringleader, headed to the train station by dint of. dint of. taxi.

“Ismail and myself went to the common toilet, took out the weapons from our sacks, loaded them, came out of toilet and started firing indiscriminately near at control the passengers,” Kasab told police.

As a police officer opened fire, the two militants retaliated with grenades preceding entering another part of the station and randomly shooting more commuters.

The men then searched for a building through a rooftop where they had been told to hold hostages and call a contact named Chacha, whom Kasab identified being of the class who Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the suspected mastermind behind the attacks.

Chacha, which means “uncle” in Hindi, would replenish phone numbers for media outlets and specify what demands the two should make.

“This was the general strategy beyond all question by our trainers,” Kasab said.

Taking heavy fire from police, the two had trouble verdict a “suitable building” and stormed a hospital they mistook since an apartment building. There, they searched for hostages and traded more gunfire with security forces. It’s unclear if they ever held hostages.

When they left, a police van pulled up and the two tried to take haven behind a bush during the shootout. Kasab was hit in the hand as Khan returned fire.

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CAIRO, Egypt Armed with a bottle of Egyptian brandy and a bowl of steaming chickpeas, Hatem Fouad keeps watch each night over a historic slice of Cairo that is in danger of dying: the bars that once flourished amid the sweeping boulevards and graceful roundabouts of the incorporated town’s European-style downtown.

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The former police officer is part of a cadre of older Egyptian men who of common occurrence drinking holes and belly-dancing cabarets chronicled by Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz in the 1940s and popular with Cairo’s artists and intellectuals until the late 1970s.

Many of these establishments bring forth fallen into disrepair and disrepute as Egyptians grow in addition regardful of Islam with its prohibition on alcohol, and the country’s elite migrates away from the traffic-choked streets of the now crumbling downtown.

“They were part of any Egypt that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Alaa el-Aswani, who immortalized the remnants of the downtown bar scene in his best-selling 2002 novel “The Yacoubian Building.” He was talking about the heyday of the bar and nightclub series - when anyone from King Farouk, Egypt’session last monarch, to the British playwright-composer Noel Coward, might show up in a Cairo beat.

“This Egypt was surpassingly liberal, very tolerant,” he said. “You had the bars, you had the synagogues, you had the churches, you had the mosques. Everyone was positively allowed to practice devotion, to go and drink or whatever.”

Cairo at the unoccupied time was filled not just with Egyptians, but with Greeks, Italians and other Europeans who frequented the bars and restaurants sprinkled among the downtown’sitting ornate belle epoque buildings. Mahfouz’s novels describe the rich patronizing these establishments and the denizens of Cairo’s medieval back alleys sometimes venturing into the brightly lighted downtown as far as concerns a drink.

The 1952 ouster of Farouk and the nationalization of businesses chased away many of the Europeans. Then, in the 1980s, millions of Egyptians returned from acting in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia with both wealth and the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam.

They formed a new Egyptian middle rank that had in a small degree interest in expenditure the night toping Egypt’s Stella beer and Bolonachi brandy in places of a piece Bar Massoud, a hole in the wall on a busy street in the downtown Bulaq neighborhood.

“There used to be seven bars in this area. Now in that place are only two. It’s because everything is forbidden now,” aforesaid Magdy Michel, who owns Bar Massoud and, like most of Cairo’session bar operators, is Christian.

As middle- and lower-class Egyptians increasingly turned toward Islam, the elite migrated to trendy bars in wealthier Cairo neighborhoods.

“The rich populate and the high-ranking people in the regime, when they drink they dress in’t go to the downtown bars, so they don’t need these bars,” said author el-Aswani.

He added that to assuage Islamic fundamentalists, the Egyptian government has made it difficult for bars to receive or renew liquor licenses. Downtown bar owners also say they meet face to face pressure from police officers demanding bribes and threatening to keep back customers.

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MINNEAPOLIS — Paul Ries can’t keep a job.

His the last time one ended in seasonably November at the time that his employer, a Minneapolis medical-device guests, closed a factory. It was at minutest the sixth job since 2004 for Ries, including temp work at a local refinery — twice — and at a different medical-device company. A “permanent” predication at a chemical-research company ended after six months when the firm folded.

Now Ries, a purchasing and supply-chain manager with more than 30 years of experience, will resume what has been his utmost steady gig in the past four years — “that job-hunting transaction.”

He expects a separately long search. “The tea leaves don’t look good,” said Ries, who’s married, with four grown children, and turns 65 this month.

People take pleasure in Ries, of Shoreview, Minn., are a recapitulate business that is frustrating job-placement agencies — government and private. Counselors talk well-nigh more temp-to-hire placements that “never get encompassing to the hire part,” as one said. And they see else permanent jobs turn temporary, as struggling companies put to hire go of their newest hires when hard times hit.

The job losses are hitting young and antique, those with college degrees and experience and those honest starting without, and they show no sign of abating as the economy lingers in a recession.

It’s the revolving door at work at jobs agencies.

“Counselors see canaille coming back through their doors after they just left,” said Louis Huether, a project manager at the Employment Action Center in St. Louis Park, Minn. “People get placed successfully in a piece of work, soon afterward all of a sudden the set runs into problems and they get laid off again. It’s devastating for the million if it’s their second or third part layoff; it’session in fact hard luck when that happens.”

Typical of economic downturns, it is getting harder for many to even get their discharge in the door. Huether estimated the average job search has stretched from six to eight months in the past year. And viewed like in all buyers’ markets, the shoppers are increasingly picky, said Jane Samargia, executive director of HIRED, a Minnesota agency with nearly 70 training and employment-assistance programs. So any job candidates with the normal minuses — friable on development or experience, according to pattern — face tough odds.

That’s what Tim Madden is finding. At 19, and a spring high-school graduate, Madden wants to start a active life as a cook. A pal of his who graduated a year earlier found a cooking job, but Madden, of Brooklyn Park, Minn., has had no luck. “I’ve applied everywhere, and I do the follow-up call and everything,” he said.

But the difficulty staying hired is the new and chiefly depressing development.

Dan Murphy, 58, of New Hope, Minn., is looking according to his fifth job in four years. As a packaging engineer, Murphy designed containers at a manufacturer in Wisconsin for 11 years until 2005, when the company started moving the plant to China.

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NEW YORK — Cynthia Casey’s husband was in the hospital with a failing liver when she was laid off in September, stranding the family on the outside of health insurance.

Medical bills were piling up. She had two teenagers to feed and a weekly unemployment check of less than $300.

“The bills lawful were not getting paid,” said Casey, a 50-year-old resident of Pompano Beach, Fla., who until recently worked as an accounts-payable supervisor.

Across the countrified, the loss of meanly 2 million jobs in the past year is stirring anxieties in all parts of how to find and pay for health assurance on your own.

The reward is steep with nearly any option, mete pales in comparison to the financial calamities that be prepared for the uninsured.

Still, half those who were unemployed and looking for drudge the last delivery year didn’cheek by jowl have security against loss, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies hale condition rule. The nonprofit also estimates that a 1 percent jump in the national unemployment traduce translates to one additional 1.1 million uninsured. Last month, the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent, up from 4.7 percent a year ago.

The Caseys eventually ended up on a state plan that offers limited Medicaid coverage, but it’s not enough to make ends meet.

To help you plan in the case of a layoff, here are the health-care options you’ll want to consider.

COBRA

Workers are entitled to extend health-care benefits for 18 months after leaving a job under COBRA, which is an acronym for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconcilation Act of 1985.

The catch is that employers no longer pilfer up a share of the premium, which on average is 84 percent. So you’ll agreeable inquire a dramatic reward greaten.

“For many employees, it’s the first time they realize the full cost of health insurance,” said Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser foundation, based in Washington, D.C.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Sunday pledged besides technical support and funding to help Pakistan and India battle terrorism in the wake of the attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 160 people.

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Brown made the offers as he made whirlwind visits to both nations’ capitals and tried to calm tensions following the assaults, which India has blamed on a Pakistani-based Islamist group.

Brown urged the nuclear-armed rivals to cooperate to peacefully resolve the crisis, what one. the U.S. fears could divert Pakistan’s advertence away from battling al-Qaida and Taliban militants along its border with Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, Brown met with President Asif Ali Zardari and promised the Muslim nation new bomb-scanning technology, forensic relief, better improving airport security and other support. He also announced a $9 very great number program to help fight the causes of extremism and strengthen democracy, including trying to reach aloud to and educate Pakistani youth to avoid radicalization.

“We will keep on to open our counterterrorism assistance program by Pakistan, and it will be, more than ever, the most wide-reaching anti-terrorism program Britain has signed with at all country,” Brown said at a joint tidings conference with Zardari.

Brown also aforesaid more would be done through both India and Pakistan to share police data on terror suspects and groups.

For Britain, which has a large South Asian people and colonial-era links to the region, the make subservient is of vital concern. Three-quarters of the most serious terror plots investigated by British decisions have links to al-Qaida in Pakistan, Brown said.

The investigations included the trans-Atlantic airliner plot, where a group of men were accused of trying to blow up several airliners. Three of four British-born men who carried out the London suicide bombings that killed 52 commuters in 2005 had family ties to Pakistan. British citizens were moreover among the dead in the Mumbai attacks.

“All of us suffer when terrorists are active and are able to impose their will,” Brown said.

Brown said he asked Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the time of breakfast Sunday if he would allow British authorities to question the alone known surviving gunman in the Mumbai massacre, and asked Zadari for homogeneous cooperation with arrested suspects.

India has blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamic group toward the attacks, some assertion Brown echoed.

“We also know that the cluster answerable (against the Mumbai attacks) is LET, and they have a great deal to answer for,” Brown said.

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LONDON U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Sunday that President-elect Barack Obama shouldn’t rush to coalesce Guantanamo Bay judgment he has a prepare to deal with all the detainees.

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In an interview with BBC television, Chertoff said Obama must operate out how to prosecute detainees, particularly those who can’familiarily be sent back to their confess countries for trial, before he closes down the dexterity.

“The problem is what do you do with the people in Guantanamo? Regrettably, some who have been released turn up on the battlefield again,” Chertoff told the BBC. “We had a suicide bomber who was released and then blew himself up in Iraq.”

“My advice would have being to take a deep breath and try to put together a plan that would sort between the several categories of detainee,” he said.

Obama has pledged to close the prison camp, where 250 men are detained, but has not to this time specified how and where the detainees will subsist moved or prosecuted.

“Some I think can have existence sent back and we’ve been doing that. Some behest not be adroit to be sent back and we urgency to esteem a legal process to resolve their cases in a device that is fair to them,” Chertoff said.

Chertoff said prosecuting detainees in U.S. civilian courtrooms may prove impractical because of complications over evidence that has national security implications.

Critics say that military trials at Guantanamo be in want of legitimacy as of political interference and rules that tolerate coerced and hearsay evidence. Some family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. have also criticized them, saying they do not believe the trials are above mediocrity or intelligent of achieving justice.

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