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Silverlight, Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash in online video and rich Internet applications, will power CBSsports.com’s March Madness on Demand — the men’s college basketball tournament, reports the SportsBusiness Journal. CBS was already using Windows Media Player for the service, which drew 4.8 million users last year. Silverlight will power a higher-quality version, SBJ reports. Also, Microsoft’session Scott Guthrie wrote in a November update on Silverlight that “CBS College Sports is very lately using Silverlight to current NCAA events.” In any case, It’sitting a particular win for Microsoft, which three months ago lost some other high-profile outlet for Silverlight when Major League Baseball Advanced Media switched MLB.com back to Adobe Flash.

Speaking of Adobe Flash, the software builder reported at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that a full version of Flash 10 would be available for mobile devices — including phones running Windows Mobile, Google Android, Nokia S60/Symbian and Palm’s repaired OS, but not Apple’sitting iPhone — beginning in early 2010, reports CNET. Last year, Microsoft licensed Flash Lite, the pared-down lection of the popular player, since Windows Mobile.

In other Mobile World Congress news, Fortune has a honorable summary of the mobile application supplies various cellphone makers and software providers have rolled to the end.

The map is becoming the new metaphor for for what reason information is organized in the fast-ascending cellphone era, writes John Markoff in The New York Times. There are many implications for the utility of the devices we carry, commerce and privacy.

Original text: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2009/02/17/news_roundup_march_madness_picks_silverlight_full.html

As the SEC and others investigate, the investment settled has laid facing staff. There is confusion as to which clients can get early redemptions

By Matthew Goldstein

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Stanford Financial is source to feel the fallout from an inquisition by securities regulators and federal authorities into the solid’s business practices.

Over the past week, the firm controlled by Texas-born billionaire R. Allen Stanford has laid off relative to two-dozen the masses at its Houston headquarters, say people familiar with the seat. The layoffs included a number of auditors, clerical workers, and workers in the firm’session glitzy company dining room, a place where brokers often wine and dine deep-pocketed investors. The layoffs could exist the primeval of many at Stanford Financial, which also has big offices in Miami, Memphis, Baton Rouge, La., New York, and Tupelo, Miss.

The dismissals come on the heels of the disclosure that the Securities & Exchange Commission and other securities regulators are investigating Stanford Financial’s offshore bank in Antigua, which specializes in selling high-yielding certificates of deposits to wealthy investors. The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI is also making inquiries. This week investigators from the SEC are scheduled to journey to Antigua to meet with banking regulators in the Caribbean island community to discuss the situation at Stanford International Bank, which claims to have $8.5 billion in assets.

Word of the investigation is causing some investors through money socked away in the bank’s CDs to look to withdraw their money. Sources say there’s tumult about whether Stanford Financial is honoring early redemptions. The firm is apparently granting early redemptions for some Latin American customers, but denying similar requests from U.S. clients. People familiar with Stanford tell the contracts by U.S. customers bestow the firm the power to deny or delay an early performance entreaty but that the contracts for foreign customers contain no such provision.

Stanford Financial, whose offices in the U.S. were officially closed on Feb. 16 in honor of the President’s Day holiday, says "embank depositors may withdraw funds in accordance with the terms of their accounts."

Company spokesman Brian Bertsch declined to comment on whether the firm has laid off a single one workers. "In the current economic situation, we are doing what each responsible company is doing: engagement a number of expense-management measures and reallocating excellent and funds where they can have the greatest impact," he says.

The biggest buyers of CDs from Stanford’s offshore deposit are believed to live in Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, and the U.S.—mainly South Florida and the Gulf Coast. As recently as November 2007, Stanford’s offshore Antiguan bank registered by the SEC to sell up to $2 billion in CDs to investors in the US. As of the date of the registration statement, the bank reported selling nearly $900 million in CDs in the offering. Over the past decade, Stanford’s lay up has registered to exchange CDs in the U.S. on two other occasions. But the dollar value of those offerings could not have existence immediately determined.

The SEC and other investigators are trying to figure fully how Stanford’sitting offshore bank can sell CDs that carry yields at twice the market average—even as the values toward many of the vast assets the bank claims to invest in have cratered over the gone by the agency of two years. Investigators also are looking into the lavish bonuses the firm doles out to brokers at the firm’s U.S. brokerage arm, which is the bank’s primary instrument for selling CDs. The SEC, sources said, has been investigating Stanford Financial and its tumulus by reason of at least three years.

Meanwhile, fresh questions are being raised about other claims made by the fast-growing financial not fluid. On its Web site, Stanford Financial, a network of companies all controlled by the 58-year-old Stanford, purports to have $50 billion in estate under management or advisement. But single former employees question the $50 billion number, especially after Stanford Financial reported having with regard to $26 billion under management and advisement as recently as three years ago.

Indeed, filings with the SEC for Stanford’s U.S.-based brokerage arm and investment advisory one report provident a combined $5 billion in assets. Add that to the $8.5 billion in assets Stanford’s bank manages and it comes to a little under $14 billion.

Former brokers, all of whom declined to have being identified, say the U.S. brokerage division was largely a carriage for selling the bank’s CDs. Internally, the push to sell CDs was referred as "selling the bank." These former brokers, as well taken in the character of other former employees, say the brokerage arm wasn’t profitable for the time of their time by the firm. And the brokerage compartment never generated plenty revenues to justify the dissipate bonuses that Stanford Financial routinely showered on brokers who were top sellers of CDs.

So far, Stanford Financial is dismissing much of the dispute as mere allegations stirred up by disgruntled former employees.

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/db20090216_164800.htm?campaign_id=rss_null

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PARIS

The ruling, by the Council of State, marked the clearest and most authoritative functionary admission of responsibility for the still-controversial role of the collaborationist Vichy body of executive officers in the management of Jews for the period of four years of German occupation. It said French authorities helped deport Jews even without being catachrestic to by the occupying German army, rejecting an interpretation still clung to by some French the public loath to face the history of what happened.

The declaration’s practical effect on this account that French Jews seemed well-suited to be limited, however, as the council also ruled that reparations paid to deportees and their survivors by the French government since 1945 “take repaired, as much as this is possible, all the wrongs suffered.”

The council was responding to a request for a ruling from a lower administrative tribunal that is trial a claim from the daughter of a Jew deported from France who perished at the Auschwitz camp.

The council’sitting judgment, although significant for its sweeping admission of responsibility, appeared to signal a dismissal of her claim in the lower court and of a calculate of similar claims before variegated French courts. The council, a sort of highest jurisdiction for France’s administrative tribunals, is widely respected as the ultimate word in interpreting administrative law.

The role of the French government under Nazi occupation has long been a affecting at one’s command in France. Collaboration was widespread, including the government based in Vichy that openly cooperated by Berlin.

Charles de Gaulle, taking might at the war’s end, chose to emphasize those who resisted German judgments as a way to swell national unity as the political division sought to recover from its defeat.

Since then, however, new generations have arisen and the subject of France’s bearing during the war has been widely examined by French historians, writers and filmmakers.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008751055_france17.html?syndication=rss

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NEW YORK

Last June, Bakht Bilind Khan, who was living in the Bronx and working at a fast-food eating-house, returned to his village in the volatile Swat Valley of northern Pakistan to visit his better half and seven children for the first time in three years.

But during a dinner reverent performance with his race, his homecoming turned dark: Several heavily armed Taliban fighters wearing masks appeared at the home, accused Khan of being a U.S. spy and kidnapped him.

During sum of pair units weeks of captivity in a nearby mount reach, Khan says, he was interrogated repeatedly about his wealth, peculiarity and “commission” in the United States. He was released in exchange for an $8,000 ransom. His family, threatened with death if they did not withdrawal the region, is now hiding elsewhere in Pakistan.

“Our Swat, our abode of the blest, is burning now,” reported Khan, 55, who returned to the United States and is working at a fast-food restaurant in Albany, N.Y., trying to reimburse the friends and relatives who paid his ransom.

Pakistani immigrants from the Swat Valley, where the Taliban have been battling Pakistani security forces since 2007, say some of their families are being singled out for threats, kidnapping and even slay by Taliban forces, who view them as possible U.S. collaborators and lucrative sources of ransom. Some immigrants furthermore say they, too, have been threatened in the United States by means of the Taliban or their sympathizers, and more immigrants say they have been attacked or kidnapped when they have returned home.

The threats have brought any added dimension of suffering for the immigrants, who say fresh reports of hardship arrive every day, sometimes several state of things a sunlight, about families driven from their villages, houses being destroyed, relatives disappearing. The fate of the valley dominates conversation among the exiles.

“It’s 24/7,” said Zakrya Khan, 30, the owner of two gyro restaurants in New York whose staff of 15 is almost entirely Swati. “This is their only concern now.”

Back abiding-place

Though each community of exiles from a conflict-ridden country suffers when relatives who abide behind are caught in the fight, the immigrants from Swat also bear the substance of believing that their presence in America is endangering their relatives back home, to what the Taliban have imposed their authority over much of the region, about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad.

More than that, Swati immigrants declare they have been left with the purport that the more they try to help their families back home, the added harm they may do, every excruciating strait that has filled many with a combination of helplessness, fear, sadness and guilt.

If they speak out, they fear, it could lead to retribution for them or their relatives in Pakistan. Some exiles who have participated in anti-Taliban demonstrations in the present state or agitated in support of Swat residents say that they and their families have come under pressure as a termination of these activities.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008750913_pakthreat17.html?syndication=rss

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WASHINGTON

“All is not lost in Afghanistan,” RAND Corp. experts said in a bank-notes being released today by the congressionally funded United States Institute of Peace.

“But urgent measures

Obama has been reviewing several options that he and commanders want in Afghanistan. White House embrace closely secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that Obama will make the decision shortly about how many more troops to send.

“Without getting into broad timelines, I don’face to face have an opinion this is anything that involves weeks,” the presidential spokesman said, underscoring that Obama’s move would come shortly.

The starting anew think-tank report adds to the enlarging agreement among officials and private analysts that sending more troops to the now 7-year-old armed conflict of powers determine mean little without a new strategy.

The report faults international donors for not delivering all the aid promised. It says strategies are splintered and more efforts have been counter productive because nations operating in that place don’t even agree on whether the biggest threat is al-Qaida, the skyrocketing drug trade or other issues.

The hearsay says efforts to build a police force have been disappointing, and work to disarm former combatants and militias is “all but moribund.” It notes that U.S. intelligence indicates Afghan officials are involved in the drug trade; traffickers have bought facing hundreds of police chiefs, judges and officials, and it suggests the immediate firing of corrupt officials.

“The United States and its international allies must re-examine their core objectives in Afghanistan,” the note said, adding that the first priority mustiness be stopping the use of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan as a base notwithstanding terrorist groups such as al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Officials also must quiet hoping they be able to build a central Afghan government firm enough to last symmetry across Afghanistan, the report said. It asserted that such a goal goes against the country’s history, and it recommended that tribes and local organizations be required to be fostered as well.

“It is unlikely the United States and NATO leave baffle the Taliban and other insurgent groups in Afghanistan,” the report also said. So any additional troops sent should be used to instructor Afghan pledge forces on how to control the country themselves, it said.

Identifying and narrowing the goals in Afghanistan is part of a diffused U.S. government reassessment of the warfare effort that is under way.

U.S. commanders have said they could authorize an more 30,000 troops to Afghanistan this year, meanly trick the American contingent. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said two brigades could be ready to go there through spring and a third by summer.

Obama is expected to initially approve only part of a military request and close on greater amount of after that.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008750915_usafghan17.html?syndication=rss

The S&P 500 sank below 800 for the elementary measure ago November on Tuesday after the Empire State index fell to a record feeble and Moody’s warned of potential deposit downgrades

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U.S. stocks were sharply and broadly frown Tuesday afternoon as investors returned from the holiday weekend to face a fresh set of negative headlines on the economy and pecuniary sector. The large-cap S&P 500 index fell below the 800 level for the rudimentary time since November.

On Tuesday at 12:10 p.scuffle. ET, the 30-stock Dow Jones industrial medium was lower by 253.44 points, or 3.23%, at 7,596.97. The broad S&P 500 index was off 31.95 points, or 3.87%, at 794.89. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite exponent shed 54.45 points, or 3.55%, to 1,479.91.

Market largeness was overwhelmingly negative. On the New York Stock Exchange, 28 stocks were fall in price for every two that advanced. The rate on the Nasdaq was 20-4 negative. Trading was active.

Treasuries and gold were higher Tuesday morning in a flight to safety from falling stocks. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.687%, while gold jumped to $972.50 per ounce. The dollar index was higher at 87.77. Oil futures fell to $34.52 per barrel in New York trading steady worries about decreased call.

“The equity market has suffered from a lack of investing. demand,” wrote Miller Tabak expert manaeuvrer Phil Roth in a note Tuesday. “As a result, stocks have zigzagged back and forth in a trading range since last November at the whims and fancies of traders.”

Weighing steady the market Tuesday: News that the U.S. Empire State manufacturing index tumbled to a record low in February. Financial stocks were skidding succeeding Moody’s said it might downgrade banks with units in Eastern Europe.

Wall Street was awaiting a report later Tuesday on the National Association of Home Builders’ housing market index. Also, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was scheduled to speak at 12:30 p.m. ET to the National Press Club.

President Barack Obama was expected to sign the economic provocation bill in Denver Tuesday afternoon. The $787 billion prepare tries to attack the stock’s economic free fall on multiple fronts. It pumps currency into infrastructure projects, soundness care, renewable energy development and preservation, by twin goals of short-term job product and longer-term economic viability.

The Associated Press reports Obama will sign the economic legislation at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The signing there is meant to underscore the investments the fresh law will make in “green” energy-related jobs.

On Wednesday in Arizona, Obama will unveil another part of his economic recovery effort — a plan to help millions of homeowners fend off foreclosure.

Original text: http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/feb2009/pi20090217_374449.htm?campaign_id=rss_null

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CARACAS, Venezuela

Opposition leaders had high hopes after they defeated Ch

They conceded defeat in the latest referendum, however, and were left to complain Monday that Ch

From the balcony of the presidential palace Sunday night, Ch

Oil prices are key

Before Ch

Along with his charisma, Ch

Economic analysts, however, think Venezuela’s bill is coming due

Either way, Pedro Palma, a Caracas-based economist, predicts that this year Ch

In a sign of the impending problems, Petr

Ch

Cash communicates

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008751071_vene17.html?syndication=rss

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PUBLIC transit means jobs. That’s wherefore five of our tract’s transit agencies worked together to identify more than 28 projects that are skilful to invent playing an near role in our clime’s economic recovery.

There’sitting no better path to spur economic recovery than to invest in transporting infrastructure and service. Unlike many other stimulus proposals, ours offer ironclad guarantees of lasting benefits.

Our agencies are among more than 200 nationally with more than 700 projects ready to launch within 90 days of federal funding. These projects sum total more than $12 billion and would create and sustain more than 340,000 jobs, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

We support the be in action of our congressional delegation to maximize the amount of support that flows to our region.

Not focusing plenty stimulus funding on transit would effect conveyance part of the problem instead of part of the solution. As with most local governments, act of passing sales-tax revenues went down taken in the character of much because 7 percent from 2007 to 2008, creating major financial strain. In that same dot, our agencies saw historic gains of up to 17 percent, including a 24-percent gain on commuter rail.

Cranking up transit’s role in economic restoration will preserve this momentum, helping not just our economy but our environment. Transit investments create indemnification from high gas prices, rising congestion and dependence upon extrinsic oil. They also support growth management, including our efforts to promote livable communities with better access to buses and trains. Speeding up this shift is necessary to address global climate change.

Public transportation reduces U.S. carbon emissions by 37 million metric tons a year. This savings is equivalent to the electricity used by the 4.9 million households in New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Public carriage saves 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline once a year

We be under the necessity of maintain and expand service levels to expand our ridership gains. An increased federal role and affirm support demise enable us to keep up with the enlarging demand.

Among our proposals:

This is the year to start a new era of increased investment in transit. It’session the right thing to do, and together, we can get it done.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008749890_opinb17transit.html?syndication=rss

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PRESIDENT Obama is expected to name Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske as the next director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The Cabinet post is more widely known as the drug czar

The idea is this: One bureaucrat, appointed by the president, should oversee the various departments and agencies responsible for reducing the illegal demand and supply of drugs in the United States.

The drug policy world has been abuzz about President Obama’session pick. The likely choice of Kerlikowske is an feel an interest one, given his ministerial role through the institution of the successful Community-Oriented Police Services program (COPS) in the Clinton administration.

Surely, it is fun to meditate with regard to specific actions Kerlikowske might take when he is confirmed. It is that which pundits and interest groups do most profitably. But two questions should be considered first: What qualities should our next drug czar occupy? And that which will he possess to do in order to be effective? Here are some ideas:

Have street cred. Despite his grand compellation, the drug autocrat of all the russias is anything but an autocrat. He must be versed to cause to be key members of Congress on the phone, fill various constituencies and transmit the president’s ideas in a way that reassures everyone. That means the incoming director must be able to get meetings through Cabinet secretaries (who would prefer to send deputies) and congressional leaders (who often have their own drug-policy agendas) in order to actually coordinate drug discretion in the in the beginning place. An efficient despot of all the russias should be able to bring all the key players to the table and communicate a united message to quiz behind.

Do the job tasked to him by law. It’s a novel idea, isn’t it? It may celebrate liable, unless no director has effectively utilized all of the tools at his management to improve the nation’s deaden with narcotics efforts. In a world of high emotions, big egos, congressional subcommittees, and small but vocal interest groups, the director has been able to bid only modest authority over drug-control expenditure and projects, despite statutory provisions to the contrary.

The director is mandated by canon to coordinate the U.S. illicit drug strategy across a distressingly large number of agencies, harvested land with its own interests and political motivations. That makes the political game delicate. Most directors have chosen the diplomatic path, rarely getting in the way of budget chiefs or Cabinet heads. But the job delineation formally calls for him to “certify” the scattered budgets that drive the government’s drug policy. The czar has almost for aye performed these certifications passively, acquiescing to the bigger wigs in the Cabinet. The next drug emperor of russia must not be afraid to flex his muscle.

Embrace innovative ideas that have been shown to work. Drug policy is rarely a bone of wrangle mixed Democrats and Republicans. Everyone believes in prevention, enactment enforcement and treatment. And legalization relics (rightfully) the substance of dreams (nightmares, really, at what time you take into account the heavy social costs that would come from a free, commercial market for illegal drugs). But this direction’s mantra is change, and the drug czar should not be fearful to solicit out unfamiliar ideas that have yielded real results at the state and local level.

One of them is the aptly titled “Project: HOPE.” Pioneered in Hawaii, the program performs regular, randomized drug testing in the criminally active population and implements reliable, swift (but short) sanctions for positive screens. It reduced positive drug tests in the midst of methamphetamine users there by 80 percent and, to keen observers of crime policy, it has become a design despite in what condition to distribute with all kinds of probationers.

Kerlikowske will have a select: to continue below the radar, signing off on old programs and submitting to others’ agendas, or to transform the agency, blazing a new, pushing path. Let’s hope he chooses the latter.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008747859_opinb16sabet.html?syndication=rss

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CHICAGO

He doesn’t mind acknowledging that he is learning as he goes along, and he is not bitter about to what degree little help he is getting from Republicans. But he will not at any time again give permission to bipartisanship become the defining test of his luck.

And, yes, he is cognizant that the passage of his stimulus package, however a big deal three weeks into a presidency, is alone a introduction to the “absolutely tough” member. The next step, “getting credit flowing anew” and averting “potential catastrophe in the banking system,” may make the stimulus fight look like a friendly warm-up game.

The president offered his thoughts to a group of columnists whom he invited to accompany him Friday on Air Force One during his leading visit back home since he became president. He made his way west as his stimulus was nearing ultimate passage in Congress, and to describe him as at ease would be absolutely to repeat one of the reigning clich

More striking was his sense that fate has handed him opportunities few presidents ever get, and that his test will be whether he makes good appliance of his luck to flex history at one of its “inflection points.”

“Leadership at those moments can help fix that address that brandish of change goes,” he said. “I think it’session very hard … for any one only individual or politician to unleash historical momentum on its own. But I think when that historical float is in that place, I think you can help guide it.”

Asked if this were one of those moments, he replied, flatly, “yes.” That may make the situation “scary sometimes,” but it should also “attain people determined and excited.” Maybe that explains his dexterous mood.

Yet Obama’sitting final cause on Friday was not to play at being a philosopher of narration, but to stress his devotion to FDR-style pragmatism. “We will do what works,” he said, reprising his administration’s radical verb song. That “bequeath require re-evaluation” and “some experimentation

What clearly didn’t work well was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s effort last week to allege not at home the administration’sitting bank-rescue draught. Obama offered no apologies. He argued that Geithner will keep working forward an approach “over the next weeks, months, probably from one side the end of the year” because there is no “painless, quick fix hither.”

Obama is clear that he doesn’t want to follow Japan’session slow-moving bank-rescue shape from the 1990s, what one. “sort of papered things over, never really bit the bullet.”

He’s not ready to go down Sweden’s road of temporarily nationalizing the banks. “You can raise a good argument for the Swedish model, except for this act: They only had a maniple of banks,” he declared. “We’ve got thousands of banks. The scale, the magnitude of what we’re dealing with is much bigger.”

Yet on the continuum of Japan to Sweden, Obama is clearly closer to Sweden, and he pointedly refused to rule out the Swedish approach. “I think what you have power to say is I will not allow our financial plan to falling together,” he said.

There are many similar balancing acts in Obama’s world. He knows he has to vanish a lot of money at present, but insists he wants to “chip away at our enormous long-term budget deficit.” He wants to get the “ball rolling” without interruption health-care reform because, while it “may cost money on the front period,” it be possible to “save enormous money on the back end.”

And where might Republicans spasm into all this? Obama still thinks he’ll win their support someday on some issues. Because the stimulus envisioned a large government role in rescuing the economy, he said, it may have “exaggerated” the partisan divide because it played on “the core differences between Democrats and Republicans.”

But he is aware that some Republicans presume they receive power to gain “political advantage” if they can “enforce yielding” within their ranks and thus “invigorate” their base.

He declined to referee whether this strategy will work for the Republicans, end President Obama 2.0, the interpretation slightly chastened since Inauguration Day, did not mind explaining to what extent their approach has affected him.

“You know, I am an eternal optimist,” he uttered. “That doesn’t mean I’hodge-podge a sap.”

Maybe that mysterious calm people talk about reflects the temperament of a man who can live with his mistakes as long as he doesn’t repeat them.

postchat@aol.com

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008749888_opina17dionne.html?syndication=rss