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| Related Articles |
| CWT appoints VP global sales for North America |
28 November 2007 |
| Internal promotion fills role |
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| It was right to extradite NatWest Three |
28 November 2007 |
| ANDREW FASTOW’S allegation that the NatWest Three were involved in the
financial deceits which brought down Enron does not mean the men are guilty.
But it does mean that they have a case to answer — a case which is rightly
being tried in the US. <br/>
<br/>
The US has had no particular beef with British businessmen. It seeks out
suspects of white-collar crime whoever they are, wherever they are. Kobi
Alexander, the chief executive of Comverse Technology, was apprehended this
week in Namibia, ending his two-month flight from American law enforcers
seeking to prosecute him for the back-dating of stock options. The “perp
walk” — the US practice of hand-cuffing and frog-marching a
multi-millionaire American executive out of his office and into a waiting
police car in full view of the waiting, tipped-off camera crews — has become
a regular feature of the nightly news in the US. Foreigners who do business
in America know full well that the Land of the Free is not nice to
criminals, nor even criminal suspects. <br/>
<br/>
The public outcry over the extradition of the NatWest Three — Gary Mulgrew,
David Bermingham and Giles Darby — has from the outset felt like a
misplaced, sometimes mendacious venting of national frustration at
Washington. <br/>
<br/>
The fact is that this case has nothing to do with the war in Iraq, with the
presidency of George W. Bush, with Tony Blair’s Atlanticist inclinations.
Even the esteemed British chief executives and chairmen who signed up to the
letter calling for fair trials abroad looked like suckers: their campaign
seemed to put patriotism, even a huffy anti-Americanism, before the due
process of law. <br/>
<br/>
Certainly, they had a just complaint: the British Government agreed an
extradition treaty without securing reciprocity from the US. But, for that,
more fool the British Government. It knows a pledge from the Administration
will not necessarily be honoured by Congress, particularly involving the
issue of extradition. <br/>
<br/>
Fastow’s claims against the three British men may be suspect. The quiet chief
financial officer of Enron has made a second career for himself shopping his
old acquaintances. In 2002, he was indicted on 78 counts of fraud,
money-laundering and conspiracy. Thanks to his “co-operation with the
authorities”, he has been sentenced to six years in prison. <br/>
<br/>
Nonetheless, Fastow’s legal deposition describes a “close, personal
relationship” with Mulgrew. Enron collapsed in 2001, undone by an intricate,
ingenious web of financial fraud. Fastow claims that, in his financial
dealings with the men as late as 2000, they “knew what I expected”. The
deposition seems to skewer the argument that the men should be tried in
Britain. They may have to face allegations of defrauding their former
British employers too, but if they played a part in Enron’s downfall, then
they have a case to answer in America as well. There is a principle at
stake, one which underpins global capitalism and one which is as dear to
every Briton as it is to every American: respect for the due process of law. |
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| 300 new jobs at aerospace firm |
28 November 2007 |
| Aerospace company Shorts Bombardier says it is create 330 new jobs at its Belfast plant. |
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| Higher Royalty Rates Are Killing AOL and Yahoo's Web Radio Stations |
28 November 2007 |
| The recent hike in royalty rates for internet radio stations put many smaller stations out of business. Now it looks as though it will also kill AOL and Yahoo's radio services, which the two companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire. |
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| Dell's plan for Zing |
28 November 2007 |
| The PC maker bought the small audio streaming company in August and recently applied to trademark the name of an online portal. What does Dell have up its sleeve? |
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| Web pioneer discusses science of the Internet |
28 November 2007 |
| Video: Web pioneer discusses science of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee, considered to be the father of the Web, speaks with scientists and Silicon Valley executives at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., about where he sees the Internet going in the next five years. |
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| Google: Jolly green giant? |
28 November 2007 |
| The search and advertising company is a force to be reckoned with across the Web. Now it's looking to do the same in alternative energy (along with many others, large and small). |
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| Intel upgrades tools for Apple Leopard developers |
29 November 2007 |
| Intel upgraded its software development tools for Apple's Mac OS X Leopard operating system, keeping a promise to Apple and pushing Mac applications to its brand new Penryn chips.Intel announced on Wednesday that the Intel Software Development Products for Mac OS X includes Version 10.1 of its C++ Compiler and Fortran Compiler. The tools have been optimized for Apple's Leopard and Xcode 3.0 development environment, which was launched last month, said James Reinders, a product evangelist at Intel. The tools, which also include libraries, have been upgraded to use features in Intel's latest 45-nanometer Penryn microprocessor, he added."We had the opportunity to update with some new enhancements to take better advantage of multicore, but the other big thing is Leopard," said Reinders. "We've got full support for 64 bit because Leopard added 64 bit top to bottom. We've had pretty good support before, but the release of Leopard and the update to our tools completes that picture, giving them an easier way to write programs."He also noted that when Apple started using Intel chips, the company looked to Intel to provide software developers with the tools they would need to make writing Mac applications easier."When Intel and Apple got together, they were very specific in their interest in our tools. At that time, we did promise that we would have a C++ and a Fortran compiler in our libraries," said Reinders. "We made good on that promise. In this day and age, software developers have come to believe that some of the most basic tools -- compilers and libraries -- just need to be there. The more sophisticated microprocessors get, the more people look to Intel to supply these basic tools like compilers and libraries to take advantage of these processors."Intel said that its new SSE4 instruction set is designed to increase multimedia performance. The set first came out with the launch of the Penryn chip family earlier this month.Reinders noted that many of the upgrades to the tool set focus on optimizing applications for dual- and quad-core systems. He noted that Intel's compilers have autoparallelizing capabilities and libraries for Mac OS X."This is a significant step in that it brings full Intel support to the Mac operating environment," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting. "It will help application developers modernize their applications with multithreading so their applications can take better advantage of current and future multicore Intel processors. This is very important, as applications that can't use multicore processors won't be able to provide better performance in the future."Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate |
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