Kuwaiti firm: Carlyle Group acted without license

KUWAIT CITY (AP) ? A Kuwaiti company suing the Carlyle Group over a $25 million investment that went bad is now accusing the private equity firm of marketing the deal without a license as it seeks to have its case heard in Kuwaiti courts.

The latest claim by Kuwait's National Industries Group adds a new twist to its more than two-and-a-half year legal challenge to Carlyle, and could complicate the American company's relationships with other wealthy Mideast investors.

NIG's lawsuit focuses on a Carlyle investment fund that was one of the earliest casualties of the financial crisis when it collapsed in 2008. The fund has been the subject of multiple lawsuits against Washington-based Carlyle.

In a motion filed this month with a Delaware court hearing the case, NIG argues that the dispute should be heard in Kuwait because Carlyle lacked the legal basis to pitch the deal there in the first place.

Selling foreign securities or shares in investment funds in Kuwait requires a license from local authorities, according to a declaration by lawyer Ahmed Zakaria Abdel-Magied filed by NIG attorneys. He added that marketing such investments without a license makes the underlying deal invalid.

NIG said Sunday it believes it is entitled to the return of its $25 million investment under Kuwaiti law.

"Carlyle was more than happy to conduct its sales presentations in Kuwait and close its deals in Kuwait," NIG's general manager, Ahmed Hassan, said in a statement. "But now that the moment has come to deal with the ugly aftermath ... Carlyle would prefer to try its luck in Delaware."

Carlyle has tried hard to woo clients in the oil-rich Gulf Arab states. It opened an office in the Mideast financial hub of Dubai in 2006, and its shareholders include Mubadala Development Co., an investment company owned by the United Arab Emirates capital, Abu Dhabi.

The Carlyle fund involved in the Kuwait case, known as Carlyle Capital Corp. Ltd., went bust in March 2008. It used high levels of debt to invest in securities backed by bundles of home mortgages that had been given a seemingly safe AAA rating by credit rating agencies.

Carlyle declined to comment on the case Sunday. It has previously said it will fight NIG's suit.

"We believe these claims are without merit and intend to vigorously contest all such allegations and are currently unable to anticipate what impact they may have on us," Carlyle said in its most recent quarterly report, filed on Aug. 14.

Private equity firms such as Carlyle raise money from big investors and then use that money to invest in companies or other investments. The industry is under close scrutiny because of the U.S. presidential election and presumed Republican nominee Mitt Romney's former role as an executive at another private equity firm, Bain Capital.

Kuwait's NIG started out in the 1960s as a building materials company and later began investing across a range of industries.

It is partly backed by the Kharafi clan, one of Kuwait's most prominent merchant families. A branch of the Kuwaiti government, the Public Institution for Social Security, is a minority investor.

Like many Gulf companies, it has struggled to meet its debt obligations in the wake of the financial crisis. Faced with a looming $475 million loan repayment due earlier this month, it approached its lenders about reworking the terms on the debt so it could repay over a longer period.

Just days before the Aug. 16 repayment deadline came due, NIG announced it was calling off the effort to adjust the repayment terms because it had managed to line up new financing.

___

Schreck reported from Baghdad.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kuwaiti-firm-carlyle-group-acted-without-license-072905378--finance.html

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Cool iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch Apps: Translator for All

Developer Quote: "Translator for All is fast, talking and multilingual. It not only shows you how to write the translation, but also utters it aloud in a professional, synthesized voice."
- COST: ? ? 99 cents ??? - APP STORE STARS: ? ? 4-1/2
- Categories: Education, Languages, Lifestyle, Native, Reference, Translator, Universal

We can't all speak 6 languages like some of my friends, but instead must rely on books or language translator gadgets to turn our conversations into something sensible when talking with one from a different country. You could also use Translator for All on your iOS device. It is a sleek and useful language translator iPhone app that will help with increasing your knowledge of foreign languages, as well as give you confidence in your business or personal communications. Here are a few of the key features of Translator for All:

? The database contains 50 languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Danish, Bulgarian, Estonian, Polish, Korean, Greek, Indonesian, Latin, Afrikaans, Hebrew and others.

? Easily change direction of translation
? Ability to maintain transfers to Favorites
? Professional voice translation
? Full-screen view mode
? Ability to copy the translation into another application
? Share your translation to Twitter, Facebook, EMail or iMessaging

The display is pleasantly clean, polished and easy to read. Simply pick your native tongue from the left, and then pick your preferred language (from among 50) to which you want it translated on the right. Your native sentence will be written on top and the translation will be written below. Your phrase will also be spoken so you can hear pronunciation, or use your device to play the audio to someone else. The convenience and uses of such a translator is unlimited.

COOL CONCLUSION: Translator for All is a polished, sleek and effective language convertor that should be carried with you at all times for quick spoken or written translations.

style> --Date/Version: Released 8/1/12 - Version 1.0
--iOS/Age Rating:? This app requires iOS 4.3 or later. Rated 4+.
--Device: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad.
--Developer: App Industries
style>
Visit the iTunes App Store for more details, and to download:style>
Translator for Allstyle>

Source: http://www.cooliphoneipadapps.com/2012/08/translator-for-all.html

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On the Stump: 'Up for Grabs' Voters (WSJ)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/243345284?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Why Mars Is Not the Limit For Human Space Flight

"Mars is not just the next or most accessible human destination, it is the ultimate one," writes Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society. He says the concept of manned spaceflight is progressing so slowly, and robotic developments so swiftly, that Mars will be the first and last planet humans set foot on. "By the time human spaceflight technology is theoretically capable of journeys beyond Mars, humans in modern space systems will be virtual explorers interacting with the environments of distant worlds, but without the baggage of physical transportation or presence." Mark Whittington disagrees, saying Friedman is demonstrating Clarke's First Law, and that the history of human exploration is rife with periods of stagnation interrupted by technological achievement that led to swift progress.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/UV-KbJevbME/why-mars-is-not-the-limit-for-human-space-flight

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Angels give extra, top Red Sox

By HOWARD ULMAN

AP Sports Writer

Associated Press Sports

updated 12:24 a.m. ET Aug. 24, 2012

BOSTON (AP) - The Los Angeles Angels' wild comeback win over the Boston Red Sox could provide the boost they need to close the gap in the AL wild-card race.

Kendrys Morales led off the Angels' two-run 10th inning with a solo homer, and Los Angeles completed a three-game sweep by outlasting the Red Sox 14-13 on Thursday night.

Los Angeles overcame deficits of 6-0, 9-8 and 11-9 and ended the night 2 1-2 games behind the second-wild card spot in the AL.

"This team still has some fight in it," outfielder Vernon Wells said. "We know we have a unique opportunity to do something special and, hopefully, we can continue to take advantage of it."

Wells hit a solo homer to cut Boston's lead to 11-10 in the ninth and then doubled in the run that proved to be the difference after Morales' 16th homer of the season snapped a 12-12 tie in the 10th.

But Wells admitted that his high shot that appeared to bounce off the top of the left field wall shouldn't have been a homer.

"I saw the way it bounced off so I assumed it was a home run," he said, "but once I got in (the clubhouse) they told me otherwise, but we'll take it. It was a great game to be a part of. We've come out on the wrong end of a lot of those games in the last couple of weeks."

Boston manager Bobby Valentine appeared surprised when told at his postgame news conference that the home run call was wrong.

"I didn't know that," he said, then sighed and lowered his head.

Why didn't he ask the umpires to review the call?

"None of the outfielders told me any different," he said.

The Red Sox wasted a 6-0 lead, then rallied from deficits of 8-7 in the sixth and 12-11 in the ninth. But closer Alfredo Aceves struggled after Boston was one out away from victory in the ninth. Aceves (2-8) gave up five runs and six hits in one inning, and the Red Sox lost for the 11th time in 15 games.

Ernesto Frieri (2-0) got the win after giving up a tying solo homer in the ninth to Cody Ross, his 19th of the season, and an RBI single in the 10th to Dustin Pedroia, who drove in five runs.

Frieri was charged with a blown save, but secured the win when he struck out Adrian Gonzalez to end the 4-hour, 34-minute game.

"Wild game," Pedroia said. "We need to try and find a way to win these. You felt like whoever was hitting last was going to win. We are playing hard, but we need to find a way to be one run better."

With the score tied at 12, Morales jumped on an 0-1 pitch from Aceves for his 16th homer - just over the low right field fence. Erick Aybar followed with a single, knocking out Aceves. Wells hit an RBI double off Craig Breslow for the final run.

The Angels swept the Red Sox after being swept at home in four games by Tampa Bay before coming to Boston.

The Red Sox took an 11-9 lead in the eighth on RBI singles by Jacoby Ellsbury and Pedroia, but the Angels rallied in the ninth and regained the lead with Wells' eighth homer and two-out, run-scoring singles by Torii Hunter and Mark Trumbo.

Angels starter C.J. Wilson, 0-5 in his last 11 starts, struggled again.

The Red Sox took a 1-0 lead in the first on a double by Pedroia and an RBI single by Gonzalez. They made it 6-0 in the second on run-scoring singles by Scott Podsednik and Ellsbury, and Pedroia's 11th homer, a three-run shot.

But Franklin Morales couldn't hold the lead, giving up six of the Angels' eight third-inning runs. Los Angeles had six hits, three walks and an error in the inning. Chris Iannetta and Hunter had two hits each, and every member of the Angels lineup except Trumbo got on base.

Two runs scored on bases-loaded walks to Kendrys Morales and Wells. Seven consecutive batters reached base after two were out.

"We get down early (by) six runs and guys came in and said, `let's just start chipping away."' Angels manager Mike Scioscia said. "I guess we didn't really chip away. We put up an eight spot to get back into it.

"We definitely feel good about the ability of our offense to come back even though there were some rough spots on the pitching side."

Wilson retired eight straight batters before Pedroia reached on an error by third baseman Alberto Callaspo in the fifth and scored on a single by Ross.

Boston went ahead 9-8 with two runs in the sixth on Mike Aviles' 12th homer and consecutive doubles by Pedro Ciriaco and Ellsbury. But Los Angeles tied it in the seventh on Trout's RBI single.

Notes: The last Angels pitcher to go 11 starts without a win was Jim Abbott, whose streak reached 13 games from May 7 to Aug, 10, 1996. ... Angels first baseman Albert Pujols missed the game with tightness in his right calf. ... Red Sox left fielder Carl Crawford underwent Tommy John surgery on Thursday to reconstruct the ulnar collateral ligament in his left elbow. He is expected to be sidelined six to nine months. ... Jon Lester (7-10) pitches for the Red Sox on Friday against Bruce Chen (9-10) in the opener of a four-game series with the Kansas City Royals. ... The Angels return home for a three-game series against the Detroit Tigers with Zack Greinke (1-2) going for Los Angeles against Rick Porcello (9-8).

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/48774512/ns/sports-baseball/

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Home Improvement and Furniture ? Blog Archive ? Organizing Your ...

Lengthy hours of sitting inside the office chair can lead to many different health circumstances particularly connected to the spine, the wrists, and also the eyes. There are actually two methods to stop this; 1 is carrying out stretching physical exercise every now and then. Despite the fact that this is an powerful method to avoid back again pains along with other aches within the body because of sitting for long hrs, a much more effective technique is applying ergonomics in picking out and arranging office furniture.

Since your body is in speak to with it most of time, it?s only logical to spend additional focus towards the office chair. An office chair that?s not designed ergonomically is the reason for most people experiencing pain in the neck and back again. When deciding upon a chair, choose 1 that permits you to sit together with your knees bending at a ninety degree angle and both the soles of your feet touching the floor. It ought to also allow you to lean entirely with out stressing your back muscle tissues.

Move forward to choosing the best desk to come with the chair. Typically, these two furnishings arrive with each other. Having said that, in the event you purchased a chair separately, pick a desk that will compliment it. The ideal height with the desk ought to be a little greater compared to waistline although not stage together with the chest. You ought to have the ability to relaxation your elbows and arms on the desk correctly with out straining them.

The way you setup your personal computer method can also be a vital when arranging the workplace desk. See to it the personal computer keep track of and the keyboard are positioned and aligned with all the square of the body. This can avoid you from getting to turn your neck from facet to aspect all of the time. Pick a keyboard as well as a mouse which are ergonomically constructed as well to reduced your danger for repetitive movement and carpal tunnel syndrome.

You might also need to pay out attention to other office furnishings. When accessing paperwork, see to it that you are straining your back muscle tissues an excessive amount of. Within your office cubicle, location critical products which include the phone in a spot where it is possible to reach it very easily. Putting items in diverse portions of the desk or the cubicle will only require you to exert much work especially in your upper back again.

Ergonomics, no matter if at residence or within the office, plays an essential function in maintaining the health of various components of the body, particularly the spinal column, the back again muscular tissues, the wrist, along with the eyes. It can be also crucial if you want to remain efficient in executing your office work.

Source: http://www.yakult-gz.com/home-improvement/organizing-your-workplace-furniture-for-an-ergonomically-designed-space/

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QOTW #33 ? Communications infrastructure after a nuclear - Blogs

A few weeks ago, I was sat pondering nuclear bombs. To any of you who frequent the DMZ, this shouldn?t be much of a surprise, as it?s pretty much par-for-the-course for my imagination on a Wednesday night. I started thinking about the electromagnetic pulse released from a nuclear explosion, and how it might affect electronic devices. ?But surely,? I thought, ?a nuclear bomb would negate any interesting post-blast resilience implications by turning all local electronic devices into glowing dust!?. How wrong I was.

After a bit of research, I came across High-Altitude Nuclear Explosions (HANE). No, this isn?t the title of the latest Michael Bay movie, but rather the concept of detonating a nuclear bomb at an altitude greater than 30km. Whilst this might sound rather ridiculous, certain countries have actually done it. In the early 60s, the USA and Russia performed a series of HANE tests, in order to better understand the potential for anti-satellite weaponry. These tests showed that the electromagnetic pulse and ensuing radioactive fallout was capable of destroying or damaging satellites in space rather indiscriminately. The tests caused numerous satellites to fail after a short period of time, due to severe radiation damage. What?s really interesting about HANE, though, is that the explosion releases a giant electromagnetic pulse, without the hassle of re-enacting that dream scene from Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor?s skeleton is left clinging onto a chain-link fence.

To quote the Wikipedia article:

This high-altitude EMP occurs between 30 and 50 kilometers (18 and 31 miles) above the Earth?s surface. The potential as an anti-satellite weapon became apparent in August 1958 during Hardtack Teak (a HANE test). The EMP observed at the Apia Observatory at Samoa was four times more powerful than any created by solar storms, while in July 1962 the Starfish Prime test damaged electronics in Honolulu and New Zealand (approximately 1,300 kilometers away), fused 300 street lights on Oahu (Hawaii), set off about 100 burglar alarms, and caused the failure of a microwave repeating station on Kauai, which cut off the sturdy telephone system from the other Hawaiian islands.

That?s one hell of an electromagnetic pulse!

After I?d got over the initial excitement of learning that it is actually theoretically possible to sizzle microchips from space using nukes, I decided to post a question on Security SE. In short, I wanted to know how worldwide communications infrastructure, especially the Internet, was protected from such attacks. This is where our resident nuclear weapons ?enthusiast? Thomas Pornin came in, with a wonderfully detailed answer.

It turns out that the Internet is, like a condom machine in the Vatican, amazingly redundant. Obviously not quite the same kind of redundant, but redundant nonetheless. If a network link goes down, packets are routed through other links. It?s a self-healing network. This means that you would have to knock out multiple inter-continental network links in order to cause severe disruption. Furthermore, it has plenty of redundant channels that are likely to still function after a large EMP:

An interesting issue with radio and satellite communication is temporary disturbance of the ionosphere. The electromagnetic pulse would cause electrons to be jiggled about in the upper atmosphere, creating areas of increased and decreased electron density. A lot of long-range radio communication relies on ?bouncing? radio waves off of the ionosphere, which means that such communications are likely to suffer strong interference. Longer wavelength signals are likely to be disrupted more than short wavelength (GHz) signals, due to some interesting physics wizardry I won?t go into.

Of course, in the case of a real war, we?d have to worry about anti-satellite weapons knocking out communications too. Thankfully though, under-sea cables are shielded by a big blanket of water, which absorbs electromagnetic radiation. This is why submarines send up a radio mast or buoy. The good news is that our fastest and most reliable network links will actually end up being our most resilient, because they?re on the sea bed. Furthermore, optical fiber cable is not affected by electromagnetic induction, like copper wiring is. So, if all hell does break loose, the phat-pipes should still be able to serve you your daily dose of StackExchange! Yay!

But not everything relies on hardware interlinks. We also have to take into account the systems that facilitate the core functionality of the internet. An interesting example of this is DNS. There are thirteen root nameservers that facilitate the absolute top tier of DNS functionality. Without the root name servers, we wouldn?t be able to reliably translate domain names into IP addresses. Think of them as a set of mirrors for a global directory, where top-level domains (TLDs) are indexed. These entries point to other DNS servers, which point to other DNS servers, etc. We?re left with a large hierarchical map of DNS resolution. Now, whilst thirteen servers sounds rather flimsy, the actual number of servers involved is much larger. A neat technique called anycast allows multiple physical servers across the world to represent a single root name server. This is not the same as cloud computing, which is often touted as a panacea for uptime-critical solutions. Guess what? The cloud is not redundant! But I digress. In order to take down the entire DNS system, you?d need to nuke Japan, England, France, Germany, most of eastern Europe and the entire east and west coasts of America into oblivion. At that point, I don?t think the remaining radiation-resistant insects would be particularly interested in whether the DNS system is functioning or not.

The biggest threat HANE poses to our infrastructure is to our power grid. The world is coated with a mesh of power wiring, stretching over hundreds of miles of land. Since the cables are so long, and are very likely to cut through the magnetic lines of flux in a perpendicular manner, the induced currents could be massive. Local substations would burn out, street lighting would fry, circuit breakers would pop, and fuses would blow. Without power, our worries about communications infrastructure being disrupted would be rather pointless. The servers that host anything worth accessing would be down anyway, and it?d be likely that you couldn?t boot your PC or charge your laptop, due to lack of power. Even when sections of the power grid come back online, the demand would be massive, causing further outages and brown-outs.

So, how can we protect ourselves? Here?s a few ideas:

• Wrap everything important in a giant Faraday cage. Not exactly practical for power plants or datacenters, though.
• Ensure that significant chunks of the world?s communications infrastructure is built around trans-oceanic cables and optical links.
• Ensure that nation-critical services are distributed globally, with the ability to self-heal if remote systems become unreachable.
• Be prepared to switch to lo-tech communications in the event of such a disaster.

Perhaps the thing to take away from this analysis is that nukes are dangerous, and there?s not much you can do to prevent their aftermath. The best policy is to not detonate nukes at high altitude, or if possible, not to detonate nukes at all.

Nukes are bad, m?kay.

Liked this question of the week? Interested in reading it or adding an answer? See the?question?in full. Have questions of a security nature of your own? Security expert and want to help others? Come and join us at?security.stackexchange.com.

Source: http://security.blogoverflow.com/2012/08/comms-infrastructure-after-nuclear-blast/

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