| AT&T Launches Mobile Banking Nationwide
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) today announced the launch of a comprehensive, easy-to-use mobile banking platform that will enable consumers to view account balances and history, transfer funds and pay bills from their AT&T mobile handsets. Through an innovative relationship, AT&T, Wachovia Corp. (NYSE:WB), SunTrust Banks Inc. (NYSE:STI) and mobile banking and payment enabler Firethorn Holdings LLC � and Firethorn�s strategic partner, CheckFree Corp. (Nasdaq: CKFR) � are providing a mobile banking solution that is accessible to millions of Wachovia and SunTrust customers. "The ability to perform banking functions using a wireless handset is attractive for people who need to make financial decisions on the go � business travelers, college students and anyone who desires the flexibility that wireless delivers,� said Mark Collins, vice president, Consumer Data, for AT&T�s wireless unit.
Klapisch: A-Rod heading for home?
You live long enough, or at least spend enough time in baseball's orbit, and you learn nothing is impossible. Ten days ago, Alex Rodriguez opted out of his Yankee contract, apparently ending his career in pinstripes. Hank Steinbrenner, in his first decree as the Bombers' new head of state, vowed to never again negotiate with A-Rod. Turns out both sides were telling a little white lie. A-Rod didn't really want to leave, not after he realized his agent, Scott Boras, had turned him into America's most reviled athlete. And Steinbrenner figured out you never say never when it means recouping 156 RBI, or more importantly, the $30 million the Yankees are about to pocket from Rodriguez's failed attempt at free agency. .
Was bank job a heist or a hoax?
It was almost dinnertime when Hollywood police flooded Tyler Street, just blocks from downtown. A bank employee sat motionless in the Wachovia bank drive-through with a wild tale: Two masked gunmen and a masked woman abducted him and his girlfriend at home, strapped a bomb to his chest, and demanded he hold up the bank. The bank was missing more than $25,000. The bomb looked real. Police brought in a bomb-detonating robot. The next day, Sept. 26, police said the robbery was real -- but the bomb was a hoax. Now, almost two months later, investigators still have lots of questions but few answers about the case. No charges have been filed against the bank employee, Christopher William Ferreira, 23, or anyone else. Initially, police found no witnesses to the abduction.
Essay: The taking of the ABC
John Howard's legacy will include an Australian Broadcasting Corporation Board packed with rightwing radicals, linked to industry funded think tanks hostile to public enterprise. Howard's nepotism has encouraged a flowering of a web of influence. loaded information, and jobbery seeking to eliminate perceived leftist influences in the arts, the universities and most of all, the ABC. .
He held up Atlantic City
A Maryland man who paralyzed part of the casino district of Atlantic City overnight Tuesday by threatening to blow up the Showboat Hotel & Casino is a convicted bank robber who was released from federal supervision two years ago. For five harrowing hours, David Kilkeary, 37, kept 100 police officers at bay from inside a parked casino shuttle bus while he demanded $3 million, federal authorities said yesterday. Talking to police via a cell phone, a black mask over his face at times, Kilkeary claimed to be wearing an explosive device made of "C-4 on steroids" and to have planted four other bombs on timers inside the Showboat, they said. In the end, he surrendered peacefully, no one was injured, and a device discovered in a bathroom inside the casino was found to be a fake.
Currency Quakes
Foreign exchange markets in the Gulf are on the edge after a succession of events have escalated the risks of imminent, seismic changes in the Gulf's currency peg regimes. One, Kuwait abandoned its four-year dinar peg to the dollar in May 2007, moving to a basket of currencies in which the weighting of the dollar is rumoured to be 70 per cent, not coincidentally the proportion of the dollar held in international central bank hard currency reserves. Kuwait's decision to abandon the dollar peg was prescient because it preceded the credit crunch, the bank runs and failures that forced an emergency Fed lending of the last resort and ignited inflation psychology in the financial markets. This meant a worldwide run on the dollar, particularly against the Euro, Swiss franc and gold. The Kuwaiti dinar has appreciated 2 per cent against the dollar since the peg was abandoned.
'Racetrack Girls' founder says stock scheme sank video venture
NOTE: Click on numbered footnotes to view sourcing for this report. KEMP, Texas – In this Kaufman County ranching town between Gun Barrel City and Styx, up a gravel driveway at a baseball field, amid the flies and the July heat, John Eckerd digs through a burnt orange Dumpster. 1 .
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