Michael R. Bloomberg loves tropical fish. So when he was elected mayor, he installed two giant aquariums in City Hall.
The cost to him for having the tanks cleaned out every week for the past 12 years: around $62,400.
The mayor likes to nosh, too. So he paid to feed his staff daily a light
breakfast (coffee, bagels, yogurt) and a modest lunch (tuna salad,
PB&J, sliced fruit).
The bill for his entire mayoralty: about $890,000.
Mr. Bloomberg, above all, enjoys hassle-free travel. When he took his
aides anywhere, from Albany to Athens, it was by private plane.
The price tag for all that jetting around: roughly $6 million.
When Mr. Bloomberg leaves office at midnight Tuesday, he will bequeath a
litany of record-shattering statistics on crime reduction, sidewalk
safety and skyline-altering construction. But perhaps the most
staggering figure is the amount of his own money that he devoted, day in
and day out, to being mayor — much of it unseen by the public.
An analysis by The New York Times shows that Mr. Bloomberg has doled out at least $650 million on a wide variety of perks and bonuses,
political campaigns and advocacy work, charitable giving and social
causes, not to mention travel and lodging, connected to his time and
role as mayor. (His estimated tab for a multiday trip to China, with
aides and security in tow: $500,000.)
In the process, he has entirely upended the financial dynamics surrounding New York’s top job.
In the past, the city paid its mayor; Mr. Bloomberg paid to be the city’s mayor.
He donated at least another $263 million to New York arts, civic, health
and cultural groups, personally and through his company, Bloomberg LP.
Campaign donations? He handed out about $23 million of them.
He even chipped in $5 million to renovate an official mayoral residence
that he never inhabited. (He preferred the familiar privacy of his own
nearby mansion.)
“A modern Medici” is how Mark Green, the former public advocate,
described him, reaching back to 15th-century Italy for any kind of
precedent.
file - The French flag flies under the Arc de Triomphe.
Reuters
PARIS — France's Constitutional Council
gave the green light on Sunday to a 'millionaire's tax', to be levied on
companies that pay salaries of more than 1 million euros ($1.38
million) a year.
The measure, introduced in line with a pledge by President Francois
Hollande to make the rich do more to pull France out of crisis, has
infuriated business leaders and soccer clubs, which at one point
threatened to go on strike.
It was originally designed as a 75 percent tax to be paid by high
earners on the part of their incomes exceeding 1 million euros, but the
council rejected this, saying 66 percent was the legal maximum for
individuals.
Paris St Germain
striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic in action against Lille last week. French
football teams had threatened to strike over the tax. Photograph:
Etienne Laurent/EPA
France's constitutional council has given the go-ahead to a
"millionaire's tax" to be levied on companies that pay salaries of more
than €1m (£830,000) a year.
The measure, which follows a pledge by President François Hollande to make the rich do more to pull France out of crisis, has infuriated business leaders and football clubs, which at one point threatened to go on strike.
It
was originally designed as a 75% tax to be paid by high earners on the
part of their incomes exceeding €1m, but the council rejected this,
saying 66% was the legal maximum for individuals.
Der Spiegel reported that TAO's areas of operation range from counter-terrorism to cyber attacks. Photograph: Getty Images
A top-secret National Security Agency hacking unit infiltrates computers around the world and breaks into the toughest data targets, according to internal documents quoted in a magazine report on Sunday.
Details
of how the division, known as Tailored Access Operations (TAO), steals
data and inserts invisible "back door" spying devices into computer
systems were published by the German magazine Der Spiegel.
The
magazine portrayed TAO as an elite team of hackers specialising in
gaining undetected access to intelligence targets that have proved the
toughest to penetrate through other spying techniques, and described its
overall mission as "getting the ungettable". The report quoted an
official saying that the unit's operations have obtained "some of the
most significant intelligence our country has ever seen". NSA
officials responded to the Spiegel report with a statement, which said:
"Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the
front lines of enabling NSA
to defend the nation and its allies. [TAO's] work is centred on
computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence
collection."
Der Spiegel has previously reported on documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The report on Sunday was partly compiled by Laura Poitras, who collaborated with Snowden and the Guardian
on the first publication of revelations about the NSA's collection of
the telephone data of thousands of Americans and overseas intelligence
targets.
On Friday, the NSA phone data-collection programme was ruled legal by a federal judge in New York, days after a federal judge in Washington declared the operations unconstitutional and "almost Orwellian".
On Sunday, appearing on the CBS talk show Face the Nation, former air force general and NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden called Snowden a traitor and accused him of treason. He also accused Snowden of making the NSA's
operation "inherently weaker" by revealing not just the material that
comes out of the agency but the "plumbing", showing how the system works
inside the government.
The NSA's TAO hacking unit is
considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It
maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world
and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in
electronics ordered by those it is targeting.
In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood
baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to
work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door
openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times
they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The problem primarily
affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military
Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.
ANZEIGE
In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious
garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians.
Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the
error lay with the United States' foreign intelligence service, the
National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at
the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA's radio antennas
was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers.
Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the
issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again.
It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned
just how far the NSA's work had encroached upon their daily lives. For
quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch
with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San
Antonio. In 2005, the agency took over a former Sony computer chip plant
in the western part of the city. A brisk pace of construction commenced
inside this enormous compound. The acquisition of the former chip
factory at Sony Place was part of a massive expansion the agency began
after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. On-Call Digital Plumbers
One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a
sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this
expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years -- the Office of
Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA's top operative unit
-- something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal
access to a target is blocked.
According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call
digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by
American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from
counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The
documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO's disposal have
become -- and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT
industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet
and efficient attacks.
The unit is "akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence
community," says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history
of the NSA. "Getting the ungettable" is the NSA's own description of
its duties. "It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of
intelligence that is important," one former TAO chief wrote, describing
her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit
head stating that TAO has contributed "some of the most significant
intelligence our country has ever seen." The unit, it goes on, has
"access to our very hardest targets." A Unit Born of the Internet
Defining the future of her unit at the time, she wrote that TAO
"needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated
Computer Network Operations," and that it must "support Computer Network
Attacks as an integrated part of military operations." To succeed in
this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire "pervasive, persistent access
on the global network." An internal description of TAO's
responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit
part of the unit's tasks. In other words, the NSA's hackers have been
given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the
last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258
targets in 89 countries -- nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it
conducted 279 operations worldwide.
Several
people were killed on Monday in a bombing that destroyed a packed
trolleybus in Volgograd, the second attack in the city in two days.
Photograph: RIA Novosti/Rex
At least
14 people have been killed in a suicide bombing on a trolleybus crowded
with morning commuters in Volgograd, less than 24 hours after another
deadly suicide attack at the main train station in the same city.
The
authorities initially said 15 people were dead, but a statement from
local authorities subsequently put the toll at 14. Dozens were reported
injured. A one-year-old child was critically injured.
The blast ripped the trolleybus apart, leaving a disfigured carcass without the roof and walls.
It
is the third bombing attack in Volgograd in three months, with most
security experts linking the wave of attacks to the pledge by the
Chechen jihadist leader Doku Umarov to disrupt the Olympic Games in
Sochi, which start in six weeks.
The explosion occurred as the
trolleybus approached a stop near an important market and the hospital,
where many casualties from the train station attack were taken on
Sunday. Russian investigators said the explosion was caused by a male
suicide bomber.
Local news sites report that people in Volgograd, a
city of more than 1 million inhabitants, are now avoiding public
transport and walking to work on foot.
"For the second day, we are
dying - it's a nightmare," a woman near the scene told the Reuters news
agency, her voice trembling as she choked back tears. "What are we
supposed to do, just walk now?"
The attacks sent waves of horror
across Russia. Popular writer Sergey Minayev said on Twitter the
atmosphere reminded him of 1999, when a series of bombing attacks on
apartment blocs shook Moscow. "It's like someone has declared a war on
us," he wrote. Read More Here
.....
Terror in Volgograd: 'Blast very powerful, all standing nearby killed'
At least 15 have been killed and
over 25 injured in a blast at a railway station in the city of
Volgograd, southern Russia. The explosion took place at 12.45 local time
(08:40
GMT). A female suicide bomber is suspected, says the National
Anti-Terrorism Committee. The device reportedly went off just before the
metal detector. Witnesses say a policeman detected a suspicious woman
who blew herself up when he approached her.
READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/nll7q3
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Man may have carried out Volgograd blast, earlier said to be female bomber
At least 16 people were killed in a blast at a railway station in the city of Volgograd, southern Russia. Another 37 were injured, 8 of them more critically, including a girl of 9. The child has been taken to a local hospital. A suicide bomber is suspected to have carried out the attack, says the National Anti-terrorism Committee.
READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/nll7q3
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Volgograd trolley blast: Another terror attack hits central Russia day after railway station bombing
A terrorist attack in the Russian city of Volgograd has killed at least 10 passengers on a trolley bus. The explosion comes a day after a suicide bombing in the city which killed 17 people and injured scores of others. READ MORE http://on.rt.com/z22bcf
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