STOCKTON, Calif. — Actor Kiefer Sutherland was among cattle customers roped into an alleged scam that netted more than a million dollars. Prosecutors say Michael Wayne Carr of Linden had agreements to buy steers in Mexico for his customers and sell them for profit in the United States. Carr allegedly took $869,000 from Sutherland, star of the Fox TV show “24,” and $177,000 from a New Mexico couple. Prosecutors say there’s no record Carr ever bought the steers. They also say Carr sold steers that didn’t belong to him. Carr is charged with 12 felonies, including grand theft, forgery and embezzlement. He was scheduled to be arraigned Monday, but a judge postponed it to Feb. 8 after his attorney was removed. If convicted on all charges, he faces 18 years in prison. — Information from: The Record, http://www.recordnet.com
January 26, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK — AC/DC is putting the metal in the upcoming “Iron Man 2″ film. The band announced Tuesday they will release the official soundtrack, “AC/DC: Iron Man 2″ on April 19. The first video from the album, “Shoot To Thrill,” was released on Tuesday. The CD won’t contain new music, but 15 classic songs, including “Let There Be Rock,” “Thunderstruck,” and the recent “War Machine.” The film opens in the United States on May 7. — On the Net: http://acdc.com/ http://ironmanmovie.marvel.com/
January 26, 2010 | Posted in
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BEIJING — China sharply rebuked the United States on Monday, denying involvement in any Internet attacks and defending its online restrictions as lawful after Washington urged Beijing to investigate an attack against Google. The search engine giant announced on Jan. 12 that it would pull out of China unless the government relaxes its rules on censorship. The ultimatum came after Google said e-mail accounts of human rights activists critical of China had been hacked. Since then, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has criticized the censorship of cyberspace, drawing a strong counterattack from Beijing. The Foreign Ministry on Friday said her remarks damaged bilateral relations, while a Chinese state newspaper said Washington was imposing “information imperialism” on China. On Monday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology went on the offensive again, saying the country’s anti-hacking policy is transparent and consistent. “Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyberattacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to discredit China,” an unidentified ministry spokesman said, according to a transcript of an interview with the official Xinhua News Agency posted on the ministry’s Web site. The increasingly heated environment is likely to pose challenges to negotiating an arrangement that would suit both Google’s and China’s interests. The company says it remains optimistic it can persuade China’s ruling party to loosen restrictions on free expression on the Internet, so it can keep doing business in the country. However, China’s government has given little indication it’s willing to budge. “Increasingly, the line emerging from the Chinese government is harder and less open to compromise,” said Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst of Chinese politics based in Beijing. “Hillary Clinton’s speech was seen by many officials here as the United States’ laying down a marker and put matters in a more confrontational mode.” The Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper also accused the U.S. government of strictly controlling the Internet at home on Monday while urging other countries to build an “Internet freedom utopia.” “In reality, this ‘Internet freedom’ that it is marketing everywhere is nothing but a diplomatic strategy, and only an illusion of freedom,” the paper said. Xinhua also cited the State Council, China’s Cabinet, as criticizing what it called interference in the country’s domestic affairs. Internet control is considered a critical matter of state security in China. Beijing promotes Internet use for commerce, but heavily censors content it deems pornographic, anti-social or politically subversive and blocks many foreign news and social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, and the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Google said it had uncovered a computer attack that tried to plunder its software coding and the Gmail accounts of human rights activists protesting Chinese policies. The company traced the attacks on its computers to hackers in China, but hasn’t directly tied them to the Chinese government or its agents. A Chinese Internet security official questioned the allegation, saying Google had not reported its complaints to China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team. “We have been hoping that Google will contact us so that we could have details on this issue and provide them help if necessary,” Zhou Yonglin, the team’s deputy chief of operations, said in an interview with Xinhua posted on the team’s Web site. Zhou said the team logged attacks on 262,000 Chinese computers last year by hackers implanting malicious software such as Trojans, which can allow outside access to the target’s computer. More than 16 percent of the attacks came from computers located in the U.S., he said.
January 25, 2010 | Posted in
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