Riyadh, Saudi Arabia David Rosenberg – Saudi Arabia’s latest effort at getting more of its citizens to work is running into opposition everywhere from boardrooms in Jedda to the living rooms in Cairo amid fears that masses of trained and inexpensive expatriate workers will be sent packing and replaced by inexperienced and high-priced locals.

Labor Minster Adel Fakieh reignited the controversy over the weekend when he told business executive in Jedda, the country’s commercial capital, that companies would be able to keep an expatriate employee on their payrolls for no more than six years and that some businesses might lose the right to hire foreigners altogether.

The comments set off a firestorm of criticism in the press by businessmen, who said they would struggle without their expat employees. In Cairo, Saleh Nasr, an official with the Chamber of Commerce, warned that the rule would increase unemployment if Egyptian guest workers are sent home. The Labor Ministry was forced a day later to “clarify” the minister’s remarks.

The kingdom’s 8 million expats – in a population of about 26 million – keep the Saudi economy running. But they also deprive locals of jobs. Even as the economy booms on the back of high oil prices, the official unemployment is 10.5 percent and will likely grow as waves of university students enter the job market.

“Saudization” of the labor force has been a topic of discussion for a long time, but the campaign has taken on more ramifications because of the Arab Spring. Fearful that unrest may spread to the kingdom, the government has boosted spending and created jobs. In Egypt, expat jobs and the money they send home is an important crutch as the economy slows in the face of domestic political turbulence.

Clearing office cubicles and factory floors to make room for Saudis isn’t as simple as it seems. While there are a half million Saudis looking for work and tens of thousands more graduating from institutions of higher education at home and abroad, there’s a mismatch between their skills and the needs of the economy.

“The poor quality of labor has to be lifted to meet the demand businesses in the private sector,” said Nancy Fahim, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank in the United Arab Emirates. “That’s a long-term challenge. While they are investing in educational systems the fruit will only appear later. It’s about striking a balance between long-term features of labor market and current needs of population.”

Just over two weeks ago, the government and the South Korean company Samsung inaugurated the $100 million Samsung Naffora Techno Valley in Jubail, which will serve as a recruitment, education and training hub for Saudi engineers and includes dormitories, dining facilities and a sports center.

Another problem is cost. Private sector employers don’t offer the same pay and conditions as the public sector, so Saudis naturally gravitate to government jobs. Of the 8 million or so expats working in Saudi Arabia, about 6.9 million are employed by private businesses. By comparison, only about 680,000 Saudi nationals work in the private sector.

“The public sector provides higher pay and compensation and more comfortable working conditions,” Fahim told The Media Line. “This creates huge distortions between the private and public sector. But the public sector has become saturated with workers, so Saudi nationals have to move into the private sector.”

Businessmen complain that Saudization will boost their costs. The money they have invested in training expat employees will evaporate if they are forced to leave after six years. Meanwhile, the government made it tougher for businesses this week to close the public-private wage gap after King Abdullah approved increasing the minimum salary of Saudi civil servants to 3,000 riyals a month and ordered a 15 percent inflationary allowance.

The government’s newest effort to address the problem, unveiled early in May, would rate companies as green, yellow and red, according to their level of compliance with Saudi employment quotas. Red companies will be barred from renewing the work visas of their expat workers while green companies will be entitled to take foreigners from the other two categories and transfer their sponsorship without the approval of their current employers.

“Saudization has become a national necessity rather than a choice,” Labor Minster Fakieh told reporters, who estimated as many as 40 percent of all business would be classified as yellow or red under the so-called nitaqat (Arabic for “limits”) program.

Further details, including incentives to green employers, are to be announced June 11 so that businesses, employees and expats are still unclear about what lies in the future. It was in this context that Fakieh’s remarks this week set off protests.

In Egypt, Saudization could end up forcing large numbers of the estimated 2.5 million Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia back home to a country of already high unemployment. Nasr of the Chamber of Commerce estimated that 70 percent of them have worked in Saudi Arabia beyond the six-year maximum.

Egypt’s jobless rate jumped three percentage points in the first quarter of the year to 11.9 percent as hundreds of thousands of expats fled the fighting in Libya and the tourism industry, a major employer, is in the doldrums. Worse still, the Saudi program might become a role model for other Gulf states, sending more Egyptians packing.

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United States (ProPublica) – by Marian Wang

While federal and state officials investigating flawed foreclosures have largely focused on holding the banks accountable and bringing relief to wronged homeowners, officials in a few states have begun targeting the more obscure middlemen of the foreclosure scandal.

Prosecutors in California and Illinois have sent subpoenas to Lender Processing Services, one of the largest firms that processed mortgage documents for the banks. (Read more about LPS in our guide to who’s who of the foreclosure scandal.)

As we’ve noted, the firm—which helps handle more than half of all U.S. mortgages—has been accused of using the same “robo-signing” practices as the major banks, such as signing and notarizing documents that appeared inaccurate or invalid. Bank employees have testified under oath that they relied on LPS to vet the information in foreclosure documents.

LPS has had its share of legal troubles over its mortgage processing. Michigan’s attorney general announced an investigation last month into potentially fraudulent mortgage documents processed by an LPS subsidiary. (LPS has said that it discontinued the practices used by the subsidiary.) Along with the big banks, the firm recently received an order from federal regulators to correct problems with its processing of mortgage documents. (Read that consent order.)

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan also sent a subpoena to Nationwide Title Clearing, another firm contracted to provide mortgage services to banks. As we’ve noted, Nationwide Title Clearing employees have testified to robo-signing thousands of mortgage documents—known as assignments—that establish the ownership of a mortgage loan and are key to establishing who has the right to foreclose on a homeowner.

Nationwide Title Clearing said in a statement that its procedures have been “thoroughly audited and examined for accuracy” and that it would cooperate with any investigation. LPS declined to comment.

The latest actions on foreclosure problems as an attempted comprehensive settlement by all 50 state attorneys general has hit a few roadblocks. As we noted in our cheat sheet on bank investigations, the negotiations have been hampered by disagreement with the banks over the size of penalties as well as some disagreement among the attorneys general—at least eight of whom have opposed any settlement that would require banks to cut borrowers’ mortgage debt.

Bloomberg reports today that Bank of America has also received independent scrutiny from the attorneys general of Utah and Connecticut accusing the firm of invalid foreclosures and insufficient loan modifications. Utah warned that it would sue.

– Provided by ProPublica.org

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The U.S. State Department on Tuesday barred seven firms from trading with the U.S. because they supplied oil to Iran in violation of 1996 sanctions against the Islamic country.

Sanctioned were Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, Ofer Brothers Group of Israel, Petrochemical Commercial Company International (PCCI) of the United Kingdom, Royal Oyster Group and Speedy Ship of the United Arab Emirates, Tanker Pacific of Singapore and Associated Shipbroking of Monaco.

Petroleos was found to have delivered $50 million worth of petroleum products to Iran between December 2010 and March this year.

Under the sanctions, the firms cannot bid for government contracts, obtain export licenses, and obtain export-import financing.

The department also sanctioned more than 15 people and companies in China, Iran, North Korea, Syria and elsewhere for illicitly trading in missile technology and weapons of mass destruction. They were banned from vying for U.S. government contracts and from buying and selling U.S. defense articles.

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Ankara, Turkey David Rosenberg – Turkey’s long-running government probe into Ergenekon, an alleged clandestine network of nationalists plotting to bring down the government, is casting an increasingly dark shadow over the Turkish media, human rights activists and journalists charge.

The Turkish Journalists Association says 61 journalists are currently in jail – among them Ahmet Sik, who specializes in covering human rights abuses, who was one seven reporters arrested March 4 on charges they belonged to Ergenekon. As many as 1,000 face trial. Sik’s arrest was followed by a confiscation of drafts of his forthcoming book, “The Army of the Imam,” which reportedly contained new facts about the Ergenekon and the Gülen movement, an Islamic group with alleged ties to the ruling AKP party.

Johann Bihr, who is in charge of the Europe and Central Asia desk for Reporters Without Borders, said the blurring between media figures reporting on the affair and those who are suspected of belonging to the group lies at the heart of the crackdown on media freedom in Turkey, a country that otherwise ranks high on global indices of freedom and democracy.

Turkey’s problems with press freedom could complicate its bid to join the European Union, which regards human rights as a key criterion for membership. It also may undermine the country’s place as the role model of a Muslim country that enjoys freedom and democracy.

Human rights activists initially hailed the Ergenekon probe, which began in 2007, as a strike against the country’s military and its history of interfering with democratic institutions. But gradually investigators have used it to go after journalists, alleging that reporters covering the probe and in possession of documents are part of it.

“More and more it seems that this case has been used for political struggle and diverted from a real cleaning up of the state apparatus,” Bihr told The Media Line. “It’s been used to bring to trial anyone who disagrees the AKP being in power. It has been a very efficient way to silence dissent by accusing people of having links to Ergenekon organization.”

Turkey has always had a spotty record on press freedom, but until the mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, the red lines were usually drawn on coverage of Kurdish separatists and the army. Those still remain problematic areas for the media, but journalists and rights activists say the no-write zones have widened and in many cases become murkier.

“What’s true is that 80 percent or 60 percent if what goes into the newspapers is reliable and good. It’s what doesn’t get reported – the way the news is packaged — that is really damaging,” said Andrew Finkel, who has covered Turkey for foreign and local media for more than two decades.

Rather than risk a confrontation with the government or state prosecutors, media engage in self-censorship, he said. Coverage of issues such as the environment are ignored so editors can “keep their powered dry” for the ones that matter most to them and are worth a fight.

Last month, Finkel himself was a victim of that chilling effect. A columnist for the English-language edition of the Zaman daily, a newspaper supportive of the government, he filed a piece defending Sik’s book and his right to publish it. Finkel said he filed the column at noon and was given notice four hours later.

Zaman’s editor, Bulent Kenes, defended the decision. “Newspapers have the right to work with whoever they want and they have the right to part ways with writers they feel are no longer suitable with the paper’s editorial policy and the nation’s democratization endeavor,” he wrote a week later.

Finkel’s column was subsequently reprinted in the major Turkish daily Hurriyet. But the bigger picture is a media industry under threat.

Freedom House, the U.S.-based human rights organization, last week ranked Turkey 112th in the world for 2010, assigning it the same score as Bangladesh, Congo, Kenya, Senegal and Uganda. Turkey’s ranking fell the most of any European country, it said, because of heightened harassment of journalists under a number of laws, including Articles 301 and 216 of the penal code and anti-terrorism legislation.

Two conferences last week called attention to the situation in Turkey. At a European Union conclave “Speak Up! Freedom of Expression and Media in the Western Balkans and Turkey,” Stefan Fule, the EU Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy, warned that Turkish laws “have not been harmonized” with the Convention on Human Rights.

“The laws do not protect freedom of expression sufficiently,” he told the Brussels conference. “Further concern is fuelled by the ongoing detention of journalists in the scope of trials where access to evidence is denied. There is no transparency what the imprisonment is actually based on. These are important questions that need to be answered.”

Earlier in the week, some 200 journalists and human rights advocates from Turkey and abroad called for a series of reforms at a Freedom for Journalists Congress in Istanbul. Among them, they urged that provisions of the Anti-Terror Law restricting press freedom and freedom of expression be rescinded as should some 20 articles of the Turkish criminal law. It called for an end to the seizure of documents and tools used to detain or prosecute journalists.

“In Turkey it seems you have a compete disregard for the demands for investigative journalism,” said Reporters Without Borders’ Bihr. “Confidentiality of sources isn’t respected at all. If you interview someone in a case, you are accused of being party to the conspiracy.”

In fact, many journalists and activists doubt the government will do much. Although the lion’s share of the measures against the press has been undertaken by the judiciary, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has criticized the press in public remarks. Indeed, rights activists are now battling on a new front on the government’s plans to require all Turks to install Internet filters.

Under new regulations by the Turkish Telecommunications Directorate, or TİB, under the banner of “Safe Use of the Internet,” by August all Internet users will have to choose from one of four filter profiles provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs.) The filters proposal came after TİB made an abortive effort to convince ISPs to ban websites containing one or more of 138 words, including the Turkish words for enlarger, skirt, teen and crispy.

The filters to be imposed this summer are divided into “family,” “children,” “domestic” and “standard,” but the list of websites filtered by each package will be decided by the BTK and will not be made public.

“It’s incredibly primitive,” said Finkel. “The filter system they are trying to apply would put Turkey in to the China class.”

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Arlington, TX, United States (AHN Sports) – Curtis Granderson hit two home runs and rookie pitcher Ivan Nova delivered a gem of an outing to lift the New York Yankees to a 4-1 victory over the Texas Rangers Friday night at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington.

Granderson went deep in both the first and seventh innings, each time into the upper deck, and added three RBI for the American League East-leading Yankees, who snapped a three-game losing streak. Granderson now has 10 home runs on the year, which leads the AL.

For the Rangers, who didn’t get back in town until 6 am after a 3-1 loss at Seattle Thursday night and fell out of first place in the AL West for the first time since April 21, it was their ninth loss in their last 12 contests.

It was the first meeting here since the Rangers defeated the Yankees in Game 6 of the ALCS back on Oct. 22, en route to their first World Series appearance.

Nova (3-2) was outstanding, taking a one-hitting into the sixth inning and keeping the Rangers off balance all night, tossing a career-high 7.1 innings, allowing one unearned run on just two hits while striking out one and walking one.

After Rafael Soriano relieved Nova, Julio Borbon drove home Mike Napoli with a single to right field to snap the shutout and pull to within 4-1.

Texas starter Matt Harrison (3-4) struggled early, surrendering three runs in the first two innings, but rebounded to retire 13 of the next 15 batters, finishing with just three earned runs allowed on four hits, while walking five and fanning three.

The Yankees continued their early-inning success, which has seen them outscore their opponents 55-21 through the first two innings this season, by bolting out to a 3-0 lead.

After Derek Jeter led off the contest with a bloop single to right, Granderson launched a blast into the upper deck in right-center field to give the Yankees a very early 2-0 lead.

Harrison got into more trouble in the second inning, walking the first two batters. Then, one out later, after stopping Jeter’s hard grounder at the mound, Harrison proceeded to toss the ball away into right field, allowing Russell Martin to score from second.

To his credit, though, after walking Granderson to load the bases with one out, Harrison retired former Rangers Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez in succession to minimize the damage.

Harrison settled down after that, retiring 10 in a row before Rodriguez singled in the fifth, but still lost his fourth straight start.

Reliever Ryan Tucker took over in the seventh and surrendered Granderson’s second of the night, a one-out solo shot to right.

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ContributorNetwork – COMMENTARY | Earlier this week, Sony announced publicly that portions of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity service account databases were illegally accessed by hackers and would be down for servicing. While Sony acknowledged in the company’s online blog and in account holder notifications that encrypted credit card information was not believed to have been placed at risk, the personal information of its 75 million plus users was compromised. What does this mean for affected PlayStation and Qriocity account holders – and what lessons should other online account holders learn from the Sony security breach?

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Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh (AHN) – Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, who dreamed of transferring poverty to museums by 2020, has been removed as head of the microfinance bank he founded.

Yunus, who created the celebrated microfinance Grameen Bank (Village Bank) yielded to months of political intimidation by the government.

The central bank issued a letter Wednesday evening announcing that Yunus had been relieved of his duties as managing director of Grameen Bank.

The deputy general manager (protocol) of the Bangladesh Bank governor’s secretariat, AFM Asaduzzaman, confirmed the sacking of Yunus, according to online wire service bdnews24.com.

Early on Tuesday, finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith confirmed to journalists that his ministry had received a letter from the Bangladesh Bank saying the continued employment of 70-year-old Yunus as managing director of Grameen Bank was illegal.

Reports published in various newspapers claimed that the letter cited Article 14(3) of the Grameen Bank Ordinance-1983 and stated that the Nobel laureate should not stay on as the bank’s managing director. The article referred to specifies the retirement age and deems as ineligible people above 60 years of age.

On Feb. 15, the finance minister told BBC radio that Yunus should resign from his position at Grameen Bank. “He has even reached the (retirement) age limit for holding the office of a private bank chief.”

The squabble began after Norwegian television network NRK broadcast a documentary on Nov. 30 titled “Fanget i Mikrogjeld” or “Caught in micro debt.” According to the documentary, Yunus transferred funds destined for Grameen Bank to Grameen Kalyan, which was in no way involved with micro-credit operations.

A five-member committee headed by Professor Manowar Uddin Ahmed of the economics department at Dhaka University was formed in early January to look into the allegations raised by the documentary.

Responding to the allegations, Grameen Bank claimed there was no wrongdoing in the agreement between the bank and Grameen Kalyan, under which it received BDT 3,917 million from Grameen Bank.

For weeks the Bangladesh Bank, the Finance Ministry and the Law Ministry were in disagreement with each other about the methods to sack Yunus from his position.

The government’s continued attempts to find a way to force Yunus out of the Grameen Bank are occurring despite the United States government ramping up pressure on the Bangladesh government to back down.

Earlier in the week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, that they would stop all high-level diplomatic interactions with Bangladesh unless the government resolved the crisis amicably.

The Bangladesh government has a 25 percent stake of the private Grameen Bank, which could be traced back in 1976 when it began as a project at Jobra village in Chittagong.

The bank for the poor has empowered nearly 8 million mostly rural women, who were able to break the threshold of poverty and hopelessness.

The microfinance concept developed by Yunus has been replicated across the globe.

Yunus, a Fulbright scholar at Vanderbilt University and a professor at the University of Chittagong, launched a research project to examine the possibility of designing a credit delivery system to provide banking services targeted to the rural poor. In October 1983, the Grameen Bank Project was transformed into an independent bank by government legislation.

The organization and its founder, Yunus, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

Development analysts critiquing the bank said it has “landed poor communities in a perpetual debt-trap,” and that its ultimate benefit goes to the corporations that sell capital goods and infrastructure to the borrowers. Reanalyzing the bank’s claims, critics found that 5 percent of the Grameen borrowers get out of poverty every year.

The bank has also attracted brickbats from Prime Minister Hasina, who argued that, “There is no difference between usurers [Yunus] and corrupt people.”

Hasina touches upon one criticism of Grameen Bank: the high rate of interest it demands from those seeking credit. Similar to all microfinance institutes, the interest charged by Grameen Bank is high compared to that of traditional banks, as Grameen’s interest (reducing balance basis) on its main credit product is about 20 percent.

Maulana Ibrahim, a reactionary imam in Bangladesh, attacked the Grameen Bank in 1993 for fostering “un-Islamic ways,” alleging that women were taking a vow not to obey their husbands and not to live in poverty anymore.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – A study released 12 months after Congress passed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act found that the law had stopped credit card companies from increasing interest rates on cardholders’ existing balances, cut penalties and practically removed overlimit charges.

However, credit card companies continued to use new tactics designed to go around the CARD Act, which prompted recommendations for a new approach to regulate the industry.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey of nine of the largest card issuers in the U.S. representing 90 percent of the market, because of the Act the number of accounts that had interest rate hikes on existing balances dropped to 2 percent from 15 percent. One bank regularly reviews accounts to check on new purchases on which higher interest rates can be imposed, while five banks instead hiked rates on delinquent accounts.

Because of the Act’s cap on $25 on the first violation and $35 on the second violation on late fees, total late fees paid by delinquent cardholders dropped to $427 million in November from $901 million in January 2010.

Despite the drop, Consumers Union asked the CFPB, which will administer the CARD Act, to further lower penalties for late fees to $10 for first violation and $15 for the second offense.

Bank of America said Monday that the Act had such an adverse impact on the credit card industry that the bank had to double its write-down funds on its FIA Card Services unit to $20.3 billion to reflect industry regulation and the deterioration of credit quality. The write-down covered 2009 and 2010, but Bank of America said it does not affect the institution’s consolidated financial results or capital reserves.

The CFPB study also found that fewer than 50 percent of consumers are very or somewhat familiar with the CARD Act, while 30 percent admitted they were not familiar with the one-year-old law at all.

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Due to scheduled maintenance, some online applications will not be available on Saturday, January 29 from 6am until 11pm EST.

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Bobby King, 18, faces charges of 2nd degree burglary, property theft and credit card theft.

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