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Sides in Verizon Strike Trade More Accusations

August 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Verizon said on Monday that there had been 143 acts of sabotage to telephone facilities since 45,000 of its workers went on strike Aug. 7.

Verizon officials did not offer definite proof that any particular act was sabotage. But they said it was suspicious that there had been three times the number of incidents in the last eight days as in the previous six months.

“It just isn’t feasible that there is not a connection because there’s been such an uptick since the calling of the strike,” Mike Mason, Verizon’s chief security officer, said. “Whoever is doing it, I consider it un-American and unpatriotic to attack critical infrastructure.”

Verizon officials said phone lines had been deliberately cut in Washington, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, New York and other places. Washington’s police chief has urged residents to keep an eye out for such acts of sabotage.

Among the places affected were a nursing home and two police departments.

Verizon officials said the huge storms on the East Coast last weekend also caused some damage and failures, without specifying where or how many, but they said the company was fully focused on repairs.

Union officials said they opposed all sabotage and had repeatedly told their members not to engage in such acts. They also said that Verizon was exaggerating the number of incidents.

At the same time, the unions have their own complaints about Verizon, saying that several strikers have been struck by managers’ cars.

Candice Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Communications Workers of America, said Verizon was highlighting the sabotage to turn the public against the strikers, who are members of the C.W.A. and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

“This really does take away from what is the big issue in this strike: that Verizon is refusing to bargain and instead is demanding $1 billion in concessions from workers who earn middle-class wages,” she said.

Verizon is pushing the unions to accept far-reaching concessions, including a pension freeze, fewer sick days and having workers contribute far more toward their health coverage.

With the negotiations barely inching forward, the sides have accused each other of refusing to bargain in good faith. Verizon’s top spokesman, Peter Thonis, said the union’s $1 billion figure for concessions was exaggerated.

The communications workers union said a picketer in Massapequa, N.Y., had been hit by a private security guard leaving a Verizon facility, and another striker had been hit in the head by the side mirror of a manager’s van in Howell, N.J.

Mr. Mason said he had never asserted that the unions were responsible for the sabotage, suggesting that individual strikers may have acted on their own. “What’s important is the impact isn’t to a faceless company,” he said. “The impact is to the customers we serve, to government facilities, to individuals.”

Michael Ward, special agent in charge of F.B.I.’s Newark office, said the agency was “looking at this matter” because “critical infrastructure has been affected.” He said the F.B.I. was not taking sides in the strike.

David Zielenziger, whose 88-year-old mother lives in the assisted living facility at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, said he was unable to reach his mother on Friday. Employees there later told him that sabotage had cut off service to many residents, although one suggested it may have been tree- cutters gone awry. Verizon officials later said it had been sabotage, providing photos of a neatly sliced three-inch-thick cable nearby.

“There was no service Friday, Saturday or Sunday morning,” Mr. Zielenziger said, “It was really annoying.”

Robert Varettoni, a Verizon spokesman, said the company had obtained court injunctions in New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania that set rules for picketing to make it easier and safer for managers and other workers to enter and leave Verizon facilities.

Mr. Mason said Verizon had repeatedly told its managers and other employees to respect the strikers and certainly not to hurt them. He said many picketers had banged on employees’ car hoods as they approached Verizon facilities and that some picketers then pretended the vehicles had hit them.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7fbdfb6ac2b3aa075bd0c136781c3fed

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Europe Considers Ban on Short Selling

August 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

BRUSSELS — A European market regulator is considering recommending a temporary ban on negative bets against stocks across the Continent in an effort to stop the tailspin in the markets.

The European Securities and Markets Authority, a body that coordinates the European Union’s market policies, has been requesting information from member states about such bets against stocks, known as short-sales.

In such deals, a trader sells borrowed shares in hopes that they will decline in value before he has to buy them back to close out his loan. The difference in price is his profit, or loss. Critics say short-selling encourages speculation and pushes stock prices down, sometimes feeding on itself in a panicked market, while advocates say it keeps the market honest and maintains liquidity.

“We are discussing with national authorities and together we will decide whether we need coordinated action,” Victoria Powell, a spokeswoman for the authority, said Thursday. She declined to comment on the timing of any decision or its possible scope.

Two people with knowledge of the discussions, who declined to be identified by name because the talks are confidential, said that the authority might propose a ban on betting against all stocks or just financial stocks. It also may propose a ban on a certain type of short-selling, known as a naked short, in which the party making the negative bet does not borrow the share it is shorting first. The bans would likely be temporary, just to calm the markets.

Such a policy would add to the list of comparisons that commentators are making between the current market unrest and the financial crisis of 2008.

Back then, governments around the world, including Britain and the United States, banned short-selling on financial stocks temporarily. The ban was meant to help bank stocks from falling further, but in time, stocks fell anyway. Hedge funds, in particular, were hurt by the ban because it interfered with trading strategies that pair negative bets with positive ones. This week, Greece banned short-selling for the next two months on all of its stocks. Ms. Powell said that the authority began consulting national regulators when it was informed by Athens about the impending move.

South Korea also began a three-month ban this week, and Turkey, where the main index has fallen nearly 20 percent in the past month, moved on Thursday to curb short-selling as well, Bloomberg News reported.

The ban on short-selling in 2008 has been widely criticized ever since and blamed for driving investors out of the market altogether, further hurting stock prices. It is impossible to know whether the panic would have been worse without the ban, which protected companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, but general studies of short-selling have found that bans on that activity can lead to more volatility in the market and lower trading volume, according to Andrew W. Lo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Lo said banning short-selling also removes important information about what investors think about the financial health of companies, and suggested the bans serve mainly political purposes.

“It’s a bit like suggesting we take heart patients in the emergency room off of the heart monitor because you don’t want to make doctors and nurses anxious about the patient,” Mr. Lo said.

The European authority does not have the authority to impose a policy on short-selling but it can make recommendations and coordinate cooperation among the European Union’s 27 governments. The European Parliament is considering legislation to give authority additional powers.

Some investors are already anticipating that such a ban may occur, said Robert Sloan, managing partner of S3 Partners, a firm that helps hedge funds manage their relationships with their brokers. Mr. Sloan said that for the past two months many investors have been getting out of their short positions in part out of fear that such a ban might be introduced. He also said if there were more short-sellers in the market now, the markets might be falling less than they are. That is because as markets fall, short-sellers often close their positions to cash in profits and in doing so, they have to purchase shares to cash out.

The markets could use these sorts of buyers now, said Mr. Sloan, who wrote a book after the 2008 crisis called “Don’t Blame the Shorts: Why Short Sellers Are Always Blamed for Market Crashes and How History Is Repeating Itself.”

Arturo Bris, a professor of finance at the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, studied financial stock prices in 2008 before and after a short-selling policy was put in place. On Wednesday, Mr. Bris said that he did not think such a ban in Europe would help in the long run. “If there is a ban in the European markets in the next couple weeks it would stop the blood, but it’s not going to solve the problem,” Mr. Bris said. “It would just delay the problem.”

Even if Europe does ban short-sales of some stocks, investors who are negative on companies may still find ways to bet against them in the derivatives market, if those sorts of trades remain allowed.

Louise Story reported from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/business/global/europe-considers-ban-on-short-selling.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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S.& P. Cuts U.S. Debt Rating for First Time

August 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The company, one of three major agencies that offer advice to investors in debt securities, said it was cutting its rating of long-term federal debt to AA+, one notch below the top grade of AAA. It described the decision as a judgment about the nation’s leaders, writing that “the gulf between the political parties” had reduced its confidence in the government’s ability to manage its finances.

“The downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenge,” the company said in a statement.

The Obama administration reacted with indignation, noting that the company had made a significant mathematical mistake in a document that it provided to the Treasury Department on Friday afternoon, overstating the federal debt by about $2 trillion.

“A judgment flawed by a $2 trillion error speaks for itself,” a Treasury spokeswoman said.

The downgrade could lead investors to demand higher interest rates from the federal government and other borrowers, raising costs for governments, businesses and home buyers. But many analysts say the impact could be modest, in part because the other ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have decided not to downgrade the government at this time.

The announcement came after markets closed for the weekend, but there was no evidence of any immediate disruption. A spokesman for the Federal Reserve said the decision would not affect the ability of banks to borrow money by pledging government debt as collateral, a statement that could set the tone for the reaction of the broader market.

S. P. had prepared investors for the downgrade announcement with a series of warnings earlier this year that it would act if Congress did not agree to increase the government’s borrowing limit and adopt a long-term plan for reducing its debts by at least $4 trillion over the next decade.

Earlier this week, President Obama signed into law a Congressional compromise that raised the debt ceiling but reduced the debt by at least $2.1 trillion.

On Friday, the company notified the Treasury that it planned to issue a downgrade after the markets closed, and sent the department a copy of the announcement, which is a standard procedure.

A Treasury staff member noticed the $2 trillion mistake within the hour, according to a department official. The Treasury called the company and explained the problem. About an hour later, the company conceded the problem but did not indicate how it planned to proceed, the official said. Hours later, S. P. issued a revised release with new numbers but the same conclusion.

In a statement early Saturday morning, Standard Poor’s said the difference could be attributed to a “change in assumptions” in its methodology but that it had “no impact on the rating decision.”

In a release on Friday announcing the downgrade, it warned that the government still needed to make progress in paying its debts to avoid further downgrades.

“The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics,” it said.

The credit rating agencies have been trying to restore their credibility after missteps leading to the financial crisis. A Congressional panel called them “essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction” after their wildly optimistic models led them to give top-flight reviews to complex mortgage securities that later collapsed. A downgrade of federal debt is the kind of controversial decision that critics have sometimes said the agencies are unwilling to make.

Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/business/us-debt-downgraded-by-sp.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Verizon Workers Vote to Support Strike

July 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The main union representing Verizon’s workers announced on Thursday that its 35,000 members at Verizon had voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike once their three-year contract expires on Aug. 6.

Officials with the union, the Communications Workers of America, said the vote was no surprise because, in their view, Verizon was seeking the largest concessions ever from its unionized workers.

Candice Johnson, a spokeswoman for the union, said 91 percent of the workers who voted approved the strike authorization. Such a strike vote does not necessarily mean there will be a strike — negotiators usually settle the contract dispute before the contract expires.

The Verizon contracts that expire on Aug. 6 cover nearly 45,000 workers stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia, including thousands of Verizon employees in another union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. That union is holding a separate strike authorization vote.

Verizon officials say they need to have more flexibility and to hold down costs as customers increasingly move from landline to mobile phones. To achieve those goals, the company is proposing to make it easier to fire workers, tie raises more closely to job performance and require workers to contribute to their health insurance premiums.

Union officials say Verizon has also demanded more freedom to contract out work, a pension freeze for current workers and the elimination of traditional pensions for future workers.

“Verizon has put on the table the most aggressive set of contract demands we’ve ever seen,” said Robert Master, legislative and political director for the communications workers in the Northeast. “From our perspective, this hugely profitable company that made $20 billion over the last four years, despite the worst economy in 75 years, seems determined to turn tens of thousands of secure middle-class jobs into lower-wage, much less secure jobs.”

Nearly one-third of Verizon’s 200,000 workers are unionized and many of them are linesmen, phone installers and call center workers.

Verizon officials say they need concessions because the industry is changing so rapidly and because they are competing against some nonunion rivals.

Verizon’s landline businesses had revenue of $41.2 billion last year, down 2.9 percent from the previous year. At Verizon Wireless, a joint venture with Vodafone Group, a British company, revenue was $63.4 billion, a 5.1 increase over the previous year.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=11e670036ffe5878e4edd41b327caa9d

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Bits: Hackers Say They Attacked C.I.A. Site

June 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Twitter

7:05 p.m. | Updated Adding background on denial of service attacks, update on availability of C.I.A. site.

Lulz Security, a group of hackers who have been responsible for a number of recent online data breaches, took aim at some United States government agencies on Wednesday.

The group said via Twitter that it had brought down the Central Intelligence Agency Web site, presumably with a so-called denial of service attack. This involves hitting the site with so much traffic that it cannot handle the load. On Wednesday evening the site was sometimes unavailable but at other times loaded slowly.

The group also set up a series of hacks that allowed people who dialed a phone number to prank-call an office at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “F.B.I. in Detroit just got hundreds of calls. That woman was mad,” the group wrote.

The F.B.I and C.I.A did not respond to requests for comment. A C.I.A. spokeswoman told CNBC that the agency was looking into the report.

On Monday, Lulz Security claimed two victims. It posted an internal file from the Senate Web site and data that it said was from the internal network of Bethesda Softworks, a gaming company.

Lulz Security has also claimed responsibility for hacking a number of other Web sites and companies, including the sites of PBS and Sony Pictures and a Web site associated with the F.B.I.

A distributed denial of service attack involves using many computers to bombard a Web site with an overload of traffic, knocking it offline. These types of attacks do not result in data being stolen or servers being breached.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=22e43d67d78ef2bbdfe37a933cd2e552

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Watchlist : Second City’s Testing Ground in Cyberspace

May 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

O.K., maybe short-form humor doesn’t belong on a list of ecological scourges. But sometimes it appears to be proliferating as quickly as any of them.

Web sites like Funny or Die, College Humor and My Damn Channel post hundreds of short comic videos. On television, “Saturday Night Live” chugs along, “The Whitest Kids U Know” is in its fifth season on IFC, and “In the Flow With Affion Crockett” arrives in August on Fox. And new sketch and improv groups keep popping up, filling out the lineups of live events like SketchFest next month in New York.

In this overgrown landscape, it might seem as if there wouldn’t be space for an institution as venerable as the five-decade-old Second City. But the troupe, which long ago expanded from the stage into television and film, hasn’t budged. Last year it took the fight to the Internet, establishing its own YouTube channel and then a dedicated Web site, both labeled the Second City Network.

“Second City’s desire to get into video was based on a desire to interact in an online format to develop the brand, as well as test-pilot character and plot concepts,” Robin Hammond, a spokeswoman for the group, which is headquartered in Chicago and Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail. “We were focused on developing a site which curates well-produced online content to stay true to our style and brand — rather than just let anyone upload content.”

That “anyone” can be read as a jab at sites like Funny or Die, which allow users to upload their own videos (which may later be removed if not deemed worthy). It seems only logical that the popularity of the relatively new comedy-video sites would steal some of the oxygen from veterans like Second City, but Ms. Hammond disputed the notion of a direct competition, at least in a financial sense.

“We aren’t trying to compete with Funny or Die with our Web site,” she wrote. “Our business model is primarily based on selling TV shows, feature films, commercials and product placement deals.”

Product placement? Yes, that’s another way in which Second City is embracing the modern world of comedy.

Among the roughly 190 videos uploaded to the YouTube channel so far, the most popular are episodes of “Sassy Gay Friend!,” a series of one- to two-minute skits starring Brian Gallivan as the sassy friend of the title. Two of the earliest installments, in which S.G.F. materialized in Shakespeare plays to talk doomy-gloomy characters like Juliet and Ophelia out of killing themselves, have registered well over four million views.

As Mr. Gallivan branched out from Shakespeare — earlier this year he produced “Sassy Gay Friend: Black Swan” (“Kill yourself? It’s ballet. Ballet! I’m gay and I don’t even care!”) — his hits, and his buzz, declined. Then Kraft Foods decided to use the series to promote a new product called MiO, a “water flavor enhancer.”

Mr. Gallivan, still in character, now conducts man-and-woman-on-the-street interviews while clutching a vial of MiO and reciting product plugs so quickly that they’re almost unintelligible. His numbers have sunk even further, but his show is safe, for now.

“The product placement deal we have with MiO enables us to keep producing the series,” Ms. Hammond wrote. She added, “Fan feedback has been very positive — many of them are even thanking MiO for bringing back ‘Sassy Gay Friend.’ ”

There’s a lot more to see at Second City Network beyond the 12 episodes of “S.G.F.,” and as amusing as Mr. Gallivan and his “What, what, what are you doing?” tag line are, some of the lesser-known videos are more substantial and substantially funnier. (Others, as you might expect, are complete misfires.)

Worth checking out are Danielle Uhlarik’s “Advice for Young Girls” episodes, fairy-tale rules for living delivered from the perspectives of the Little Mermaid (“Never be comfortable in the body that you’re given”), Belle of “Beauty and the Beast” (“You don’t need to have fancy people friends, things around your house can be your friends”) and Snow White (“If you’re wandering alone, you should walk into the first house that looks open”).

Second City is not alone among long-lived, nationally known sketch troupes with YouTube channels. Videos from the Upright Citizens Brigade can be found under UCBComedy; the Brigade has had its channel since 2007, but trails Second City in subscribers, 76,000 to 27,000, and in total views, 31 million to 23 million. (The brigade’s views are bolstered by the popularity of its oil-spill satire “BP Spills Coffee,” which has nearly 12 million views on its own.) The IFC television network’s channel includes videos by the Whitest Kids U Know.

‘Miyuki’

The Brooklyn filmmaker Will McCord’s 10-minute “Miyuki,” shown at New Directors/New Films this year and winner of an audience award for short films at the recent Scene: Brooklyn festival, can be streamed online at the Shooting People networking site (shootingpeople.org).

Mr. McCord’s uncomfortable poker-faced comedy is one segment of a planned five-part ensemble feature in which each story involves Internet personal ads. But “Miyuki” is less about modern love than the squirmy, toxic subject of Asian fetishism, which it treats in an interesting way.

The young, attractive and lonely Miyuki (Dana Shiraki) is more sympathetic than the white people she encounters, an abrasive roommate and a friendly-creepy guy she makes a date with online (they meet at the Milk and Roses cafe in Greenpoint, Brooklyn). But while her tormentors come off looking like jerks and buffoons, Miyuki isn’t spotless. Mr. McCord uses her inability to speak more than rudimentary English, and her resulting cluelessness, to comic effect, but he doesn’t make them charming — we feel some of the same irritation as the characters in the film who are trying to communicate with her.

‘My Future Girlfriend’

Steven Tsapelas’s five-episode serial, “My Future Girlfriend,” completed this month at YouTube and myfuturegirlfriend.com, is a cheap, cheesy, charming science-fiction romance about two hot women from the future fighting over a floppy-haired Angeleno as part of a larger battle over the future of the planet. (“Two incredibly attractive females have shown interest in me in the past 24 hours,” he says, “and for that to make any sense, there has to be a sci-fi component.”) Brigitte Hagerman has a quirky, sexy presence as the geeky-sexy terminator, and Dan Ingala’s songs are infectious. Over all, about 40 minutes of harmless fun.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8c10211cacfdd40badea2e9cfd2e2edb

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