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Arizona’s effort to secure the state’s border with Mexico has generated enough cash donations to require the establishment of a special fund.

State Treasurer Dean Martin and State Representative Doris Goodale (R-Dist. 3) have set up the Border Fence Support Fund aimed at helping the state and its border protection efforts.

Martin spokeswoman Kimberly Yee said letters containing checks as well as e-mails requesting information about how to donate have been pouring into state offices since the immigration controversy began. While officials still are tallying the total, it’s estimated that at least several hundred dollars will be deposited into the account immediately, she said.

The fund was created through two state laws, A.R.S. 41-1105 and A.R.S. 35-149, and will serve as a depositing account for contributions written to the state of Arizona to help finance capital costs associated with building a secure fence along the border between Arizona and Mexico.

“We have waited long enough for the federal government to build viable protection along our border. If the government won’t secure our border, we will. This fund will be used to create security barriers and provide grants to local law enforcement that bear the brunt of the government’s open border policy,” said Martin.

Yee also said the account helps to ensure a trusted outlet for contributions. Officials believe that the establishment of this type of fund is a nationwide first.

Donations may be made directly to: http://www.aztreasurer.gov/borderFenceSupportFund.html.

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In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a certain flaw that sometimes caused online outages by misdirecting data. In 2003, the administration of President George W. Bush concluded that fixing this flaw was in the nation’s "vital interest."

Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation. The flaw still causes outages every year. Although most of the outages are innocent and fixed quickly, the problem still could be exploited by a hacker to spy on data traffic or take down websites. Meanwhile, our reliance on the Internet has only increased. The next outage, accidental or malicious, could disrupt businesses, the government or anyone who needs the Internet to run normally.

The outages are caused by the somewhat haphazard way that traffic is passed between companies that carry Internet data. The outages are called "hijackings," even though most of them are not caused by criminals bent on destruction. Instead the outages are a problem borne out of the open nature of the Internet, a quality that also has stimulated the Net’s dazzling growth.

"It’s ugly when you look under the cover," says Earl Zmijewski, a general manager at Renesys Corp., which tracks the performance of data routes. "It amazes me every day when I get into work and find it’s working."

When you send an e-mail, view a Web page or do anything else online, the information you read and transmit is handed from one carrier of Internet data to another, sometimes in a long chain. When you log into Facebook, your data might be handed from your Internet service provider to a company such as Level 3 Communications Inc., which operates a global network of fiber-optic lines that carry Internet data across long distances. It, in turn, might pass the data to a carrier that’s connected to Facebook’s servers.

The crux of the problem is that each carrier along the way figures out how to route the data based only on what the surrounding carriers in the chain say, rather than by looking at the whole path. It’s as if a driver had to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh without a map, navigating solely by traffic signs he encountered along the way — but the signs weren’t put up by a central authority. If a sign pointed in the wrong direction, that driver would get lost.

That’s essentially what happens when an Internet route gets hijacked. Because carriers pass information between themselves about where data should go — and this system has no secure, automatic means of verifying that the routing information is correct — data can be routed to some carrier that isn’t expecting the information. The carrier doesn’t know what to do with it, and usually just drops it. It falls into a "black hole."

On April 25, 1997, millions of people in North America lost access to the Internet for about an hour. The hijacking was caused by an employee misprogramming a router, a computer that directs data traffic, at a small Internet service provider.

A similar incident happened elsewhere the next year, and the one after that. Routing errors also blocked Internet access in different parts of the world, often for millions of people, in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009. Last month a Chinese Internet service provider halted access from around the world to a vast number of sites, including Dell.com and CNN.com, for about 20 minutes.

In 2008, Pakistan Telecom tried to comply with a government order to prevent access to YouTube from the country and intentionally "black-holed" requests for YouTube videos from Pakistani Internet users. But it also accidentally told the international carrier upstream from it that "I’m the best route to YouTube, so send all YouTube traffic to me." The upstream carrier accepted the message, and passed it along to other carriers across the world, which started sending all requests for YouTube videos to Pakistan Telecom. Soon, even Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and skateboarding dogs for hours.

In 2004, the flaw was put to malicious use when someone got a computer in Malaysia to tell Internet service providers that it was part of Yahoo Inc. A flood of spam was sent out, appearing to come from Yahoo.

"Hijacking is very much like identity theft. Someone in the world claims to be you," said Todd Underwood, who worked for Renesys during the Pakistan Telecom hijacking no fax pay day loans. He now works for Google Inc., trying to prevent hijacking of its websites, which include YouTube.

In 2003, the Bush administration’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board assembled a "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" that concluded that it was vital to fix the routing system and make sure the "traffic signs" always point in the right direction.

But unlike Internet bugs that get discovered and fixed relatively quickly, the routing system has been unreformed for more than a decade. And while there’s some progress being made, there’s little industry-wide momentum behind efforts to introduce a permanent remedy. Data carriers regard the fallibility of the routing system as the price to be paid for the Internet’s open, flexible structure. The simplicity of the routing system makes it easy for service providers to connect, a quality that has probably helped the explosive growth of the Internet.

That growth has also increased the risks exponentially. Fifteen years ago, maybe 8,000 people in the world had access to computers that use the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, which defines how carriers pass routing information to each other. Now, Danny McPherson, chief security officer at Arbor Networks, believes that with the growth of Internet access across the world and the increase in the number of carriers, that figure is closer to 1 million people.

Peiter Zatko, a member of the "hacker think tank" called the L0pht, told Congress in 1998 that he could use the BGP vulnerability to bring down the Internet in half an hour. In recent years, Zatko — who now works for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — has said the exploit would still work. However, it would likely take a few hours rather than 30 minutes, partly because a greater number of carriers would need to be hit.

Plenty of solutions have been proposed in the Internet engineering community, going back as far as 1995. The U.S. government has supported these efforts, spurred in part by the Bush administration’s 2003 statement. That has resulted in some trials of new technology, but adoption by carriers still appears distant. And the government doesn’t have any direct authority to force changes.

One reason is that the weaknesses are in the routing between carriers. It doesn’t help if one carrier introduces a new system — every one it connects with has to make the change as well. "It’s kind of everybody’s problem, because it impacts the stability of the Internet, but at the same time it’s nobody’s problem because nobody owns it," says Doug Maughan, at the Department of Homeland Security.

Pieter Poll, the chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, says he would support some simple mechanisms to validate data routes, but he argues that fundamental reform isn’t necessary. Hijackings are typically corrected quickly enough that they don’t pose a major threat, he argues.

One fix being tested would stop short of making the routing system fully secure but would at least verify part of it. Yet this system also worries carriers because they would have to work through a central database.

"My fear is that innovation on the Internet would slow down if there’s a need to go through a central authority," Poll says.

Jeffrey Hunker, a former senior director for critical infrastructure in the Clinton administration, says he’s not surprised that little has happened on the issue since 2003. He doesn’t expect much to happen in the next seven years, either.

"The only thing that’s going to drive adoption is a major incident, which we haven’t had yet," he says. "But there’s plenty of evidence out there that a major incident would be possible."

In the meantime, network administrators deal with hijacking an old-fashioned way: calling their counterparts close to where the hijacking is happening to get them to manually change data routes. Because e-mails may not arrive if a route has been hijacked, the phone is a more reliable option, says Tom Daly, chief technical officer of Dynamic Network Services Inc., which provides Web hosting and other Internet services.

"You make some phone calls and hope and pray," Daly says.

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The parent company of Hawaiian Electric Co. and American Savings Bank posted lower earnings for fiscal 2009 compared to 2008.

Hawaiian Electric Industries (NYSE: HEI) reported a profit of $102.3 million for fiscal 2009, an 18.7 percent decrease from the $125.9 million it earned in fiscal 2008.

That figure, however, includes $19.3 million in after-tax charges related to a previous sale of the bank’s mortgage-related securities portfolio.

Total revenue was down for the year to $2.3 billion, compared to $3.2 billion the previous year.

HEI attributed the decrease to lower kilowatt-hour sales at its electric utilities, increases in utility operations and bank credit expenses.

“It was a challenging year and we made difficult decisions to curb spending and reduce risk, while continuing to progress forward with long-term strategic initiatives to move Hawaii toward a clean-energy future and improved performance and profitability at both our utility and bank,” said Constance Lau, HEI president and CEO, in a prepared statement payday advance.

Electric utility earnings were $79.4 million for the year, compared to $92 million the previous year. Kilowatt-hour sales were off 2.5 percent while operating expenses increased by $5.3 million.

Income from American Savings Bank was up 22 percent for the year to $21.8 million. But, the company said adjusted net income from the bank was $41.1 million and $53.4 million in 2009 and 2008, respectively, a 23 percent decrease for the year. The non-adjusted figures include the after-tax charge in 2009 and a balance sheet restructuring charge in 2008.

“Like many banks across the country, our bank was affected by the economic pressures in 2009,” Lau said. “However, as we have done throughout the economic crisis, we kept capital healthy and depositors’ money safe.”

Shares of Hawaiian Electric Industries stock were up 1.4 percent to $42.78 on Thursday.

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When officials at the St. Patrick Center hatched the idea of shifting some of the center’s resources from the homeless to a support group for the recently unemployed, they estimated an effort serving perhaps 600 people for maybe a few months.

That was a year ago.

Today, the result of the center’s brainstorm — the Go! Network — boasts a membership database of 2,400 names (and counting). It has an open-ended commitment to continue serving the unemployed until the so-called jobless recession runs its course. And its organizers hope to expand it to other cities.

"To me, it’s been life-changing," said Caren Libby of Wildwood, who started attending Go! Network meetings after leaving her part-time job more than a year ago.

"Go! Network has given me the opportunity to utilize social media and make contacts."

Libby had been doing promotions for UniGroup Inc. in Fenton when she started seeing hints that her job was about to be eliminated or its hours sharply cut. Now, she has almost enough freelance marketing work to qualify as a full-time businesswoman, she says. Her business grew substantially after she volunteered to do marketing work for Go! Network.

"That helped me tremendously to grow my skills," she said, and helped her meet business contacts she wouldn’t otherwise have encountered.

In fact, Go! Network’s concept has proven so successful that St. Patrick and the internal subsidiary overseeing it, Celtic Creative, are actively pursuing public and private funding that would expand the program to six other U.S. cities: Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Columbus and Memphis.

Dan Buck, the executive director of the center, said the model — giving employees displaced from professional positions a place to meet and address the myriad problems associated with joblessness — will work elsewhere.

"Outside of professional organizations, there (are few) community-driven comprehensive networks for out-of-work professionals," he said.

Buck and Chuck Aranda, the head of Celtic Creative, acknowledge they were unsure what lay ahead as they set the groundwork for the Go! Network on a budget of $200,000 in late 2008.

What they did know is that the recession, then reaching full speed, demanded some sort of response.

"Personally, we all knew somebody who was hurting," Buck said.

And he figured St. Patrick Center, with its track record of creating employment opportunities for the homeless, was in a good position to do something about it.

"We were finding a lot of people in this position who didn’t know where to go or what to do," Aranda said.

"They needed a professional environment."

Buck and Aranda figured on 100 or so showing up at the group’s first meeting, in early February 2009 — barely a month after the idea for the support group was first broached.

The 200-plus who spilled into the St. Patrick auditorium were the first clue of what lay ahead.

Aranda and Buck are quick to deflect credit for the Go! Network’s popularity and successes.

Much of the funding, they note, has come from corporate sources (including Anheuser-Busch) with a big boost from the United Way.

In the same manner, it is the members themselves who determine the focus of each Tuesday’s meetings and the topics addressed — many dealing with the financial and emotional toll of unemployment — in small group settings.

"St. Patrick Center didn’t drive the train," Buck said. "We just created the track."

Since last February, that line has brought 118 human resources executives from 46 area companies to Go! Network functions. Academics, mental health professionals and others have also paid visits.

So far, what Buck calls a "connector system for multi-skilled professionals" has played a part in helping 26 percent of the group’s members land jobs.

"What’s unique about this is the community response," Aranda said. "It shows what can happen when a combination of stakeholders in a community come together to help this population."

It’s time, he and Buck say, that other communities hard-hit by the economy have the same opportunity.

Buck flew last month to Washington where he met with Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, and U.S. Department of Labor officials about establishing Go! Networks — or variations there-of — in Kansas City and the five other cities.

Aranda and Buck said the St. Patrick Center would provide the wherewithal, the infrastructure and the existing Go! Network website (GoNetworkSTL.com) as a template.

The government would provide funding, perhaps from the Federal Recovery Act. The United Way, Buck said, has already expressed a willingness to join forces with St. Patrick in setting up programs in the six other urban areas.

Aranda stressed the networks in all cities will follow the lead of St. Louis by emphasizing the creation of new jobs by promoting start-up entrepreneurial efforts.

Whether the Go! Network lands one other city or all six on the wish list, Aranda said the objective will remain as clear as it is simple: "It’s responding to the needs and helping the people themselves respond to those needs in a difficult time."

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Gold prices plunged Thursday as the dollar surged against the euro amid concerns about the economic health of certain European nations.

February gold fell $28, or 2.5%, to settle at $1,107.40 an ounce after falling to a low of $1,098 an ounce earlier in the session. The retreat came two weeks after gold settled at an all-time high of $1,218.30 an ounce.

Carlos Sanchez, a precious metals analyst at CPM Group in New York, said the selloff was "definitely attributable to the stronger dollar, and some stop-loss selling."

The dollar jumped 1.3% against the euro to $1.4346, its highest level since early September. The euro came under pressure after Standard & Poors downgraded Greece’s credit rating, raising concerns about the health of other strained euro zone economies like Ireland.

A stronger dollar tends to weigh on the price of gold, since the precious metal is traded in U.S. dollars around the world.

The buck was also supported by a Wednesday statement from the Federal Reserve that said U personal loan for poor credit.S. economic conditions continue to improve, even as the central bank held interest rates near historic lows.

Sanchez said a firm move below $1,100 an ounce could pave the way for a brief retreat toward a range near $1,050 an ounce. However, he expects the weakness to be short lived.

Gold, which has gained about 24% this year, has been on a tear over the last few months as the dollar has weakened substantially.

While the dollar has regained ground in recent days, many traders expect gold prices to push higher into next year amid strong investor interest and the outlook for low U.S. interest rates.

In a research report out Thursday, analysts at Morgan Stanley raised their forecast for gold prices next year by 20% to $1,200 an ounce. The investment bank also raised the outlook for 2011, but reduced forecasts from 2013 onwards.  

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Otterbein Homes has acquired Pioneer Home Health Care, a Medicare-certified home health agency with operations in the Wilmington area.

Pioneer Home Health Care was established in 2005 by licensed physical therapists Tim McCormick and Kimberly Neikirk. Neikirk has been named executive director for the new venture for Otterbein, and McCormick will assume the position of therapy supervisor.

All of the other current employees will remain with the company, according to a press release.

Otterbein’s five full-service retirement communities in western and northern Ohio are located in Lebanon, St. Marys, Cridersville, Pemberville and on the Marblehead Peninsula on Lake Erie. Avalon by Otterbein neighborhoods, which offer skilled nursing and rehabilitation, are located in Perrysburg and Monclova in northern Ohio and Springboro and Middletown in southern Ohio Same day payday loans.

Avalon in Hamilton Township is under construction.

Jill Hreben, CEO of Otterbein Homes, said: “Extending the Otterbein brand to include home health services was critical to our continuing strategic goals, and we recognized an outstanding alignment with the level of care and the values displayed by Kimberly and Tim and the other partners at Pioneer.”

Otterbein Homes serves nearly 1,700 people and is related to the East Ohio and West Ohio Conferences of the United Methodist Church.

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The U.S. Federal Reserve is best equipped to supervise the largest, most complex firms, a top U.S. Treasury official said on Friday.

“No regulator had a perfect record leading up to the crisis,” Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin said in prepared remarks to the American Bar Association’s banking law committee. “But in our view, the Federal Reserve is the agency best equipped for the task of supervising the largest, most complex firms.”

The comments came three days after Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, proposed consolidating bank supervisory powers in a single agency, stripping the Fed of its role as a direct bank supervisor.

Wolin did not mention Dodd by name in his comments, but said the Fed’s supervisory role gave it a deep understanding of and timely access to information about the banking sector, payment systems and capital markets no credit check payday loan.

“Stripped of its supervisory role, the Fed would not have timely and complete information in a crisis,” he said.

The Fed, the U.S. central bank, has drawn sharp criticism from some lawmakers for its handling of the financial crisis, particularly its controversial decisions to extend emergency loans to firms such as AIG, which it did not directly supervise.

(Reporting by Emily Kaiser; Editing by Neil Stempleman)

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American International Group Inc’s tough talking chief executive has reportedly threatened to quit, but the giant insurer, which is showing signs of life after its brush with bankruptcy last year, could do fine without him.

Robert Benmosche threatened to quit AIG in part because he complains he cannot pay employees enough, according to the Wall Street Journal.

AIG declined comment, but in a letter to employees Benmosche said he was working aggressively to “overcome this compensation barrier that stands in the way of restoring AIG’s value.”

He also said he was “totally committed” to seeing the company through its difficulties.

As a recipient of some $180 billion in government aid, AIG falls under the purview of Obama administration compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg and Benmosche has balked at Feinberg’s proposed pay restrictions.

But if Benmosche, the well regarded former CEO of MetLife Inc makes good on his reported threats to leave AIG, it would hardly be a tragedy for the company, analysts said. He has been at the insurer for only about three months, which is not enough time for him to have become essential for its daily operations. And Wall Street is full of competent executives looking for work.

“The loss of one chief executive won’t change too much for AIG,” said Sean Egan, principal of ratings agency Egan-Jones Ratings Co in Haverford, Pennsylvania. “There are plenty of other people who can fill the role.”

A CALCULATED RISK

What is at issue in Benmosche’s conflicts with Feinberg is whether companies that rely on government support to stay in business can pay less than competitors that have shucked that support payday cash loans.

Feinberg has cut cash compensation for the 25 best-paid employees at companies that received multiple bailouts and is setting guidelines for pay for the next 75.

For AIG in particular, Feinberg has vowed to limit bonuses at the company’s Financial Products unit, whose massive payouts earlier this year sparked huge outrage. AIG is on track to pay $198 million in bonuses to Financial Products employees in March 2010.

Making these cuts amounts to a gamble.

“He’s thinking he can limit pay and that an insufficient number of people will leave for better opportunities to really harm the companies,” said Robert Sedgwick, a partner in executive compensation and benefits at law firm Morrison Cohen in New York.

To some analysts, that is a reasonable bet. The pool of talent for hire is likely fairly deep now, as financial companies have announced about 400,000 layoffs since the credit crunch really accelerated in mid-2007, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. So even if people leave, others can replace them.

“There are a lot of qualified people out there who would love to work at AIG,” said Bill Fitzpatrick, equity research analyst at Optique Capital Management in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

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U.S. retailers are poised to defy gloom this week as earnings expectations have improved, but the big test will be what they say about holiday shopping.

Earnings estimates for Standard & Poor’s 500 retailers have headed higher in recent weeks, some after October same-store sales figures were released Thursday, leaving strategists optimistic about next week’s retail results.

The sector takes center stage just as the earnings calendar winds down, with results already in from almost 90 percent of S&P 500 companies.

Same-store sales were mixed. But several retailers expected to post results this week, including upscale department store chain Nordstrom JWS.N, performed better than expected on the same-store sales front.

That bodes well for the week’s results, analysts said, but commentary about store traffic, with the start of holiday shopping less than three weeks away, could be just as important to investors.

“It’s all about perception going into Christmas,” said Todd Leone, head of listed trading at Cowen & Co. in New York.

The S&P 500 is up 58 percent since its 12-year closing low in early March. But it’s down more than 2 percent since mid-October, and investors are anxious to see if the market can hold those gains through the end of the year.

The Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday marks the start of the holiday shopping period, when most retailers traditionally make most of their profits.

Third-quarter earnings for retail apparel S&P 500 companies are seen rising 18 percent, compared with expectations for a gain of just 4 percent just three weeks ago, said John Butters, director of U.S. earnings for Thomson Reuters, in New York.

SLIGHTLY BRIGHTER PROSPECTS

S&P 500 department store earnings are seen declining 48 percent, but that’s an improvement from expectations for a drop of 54 percent three weeks ago, he said.

Earnings for the entire consumer discretionary S&P sector, which includes most retailers, are expected to increase 44.7 percent from a year ago, compared with October 1 expectations for a gain of 16 percent, Thomson Reuters data showed.

“If comps (same-store sales) are any indication, there should be some positive surprises,” said Fred Dickson, market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Retailers have been helped by economic growth, even though employment levels are falling, analysts said.

Friday’s government jobs report put the nation’s unemployment rate at 10.2 percent, the highest in 26-1/2 years. 

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Japan’s demand for services rose for a third month in August, signaling that the country’s recovery from its deepest postwar recession is spreading to consumers.

The tertiary index, which captures 63 percent of the economy, advanced 0.3 percent from July, the Trade Ministry said today in Tokyo. The median forecast of 21 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a 0.1 percent increase.

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