Bloomberg Rules Out Presidential Run - New York Times

Seeking to quell renewed speculation about any presidential aspirations, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Sunday once again ruled out running for the White House in 2012.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Bloomberg said he was “not looking at the possibility of running.”

“I’ve got a great job, and I’m going to stay with it,” he said.

The show’s host, David Gregory, persisted, wondering whether Mr. Bloomberg might change his mind if his advisers learned that he “could actually win this thing.” Mr. Bloomberg replied that he would not change his mind.

“No way, no how?” Mr. Gregory asked.

“No way, no how,” Mr. Bloomberg repeated.

He said he was urging his supporters to “cease and desist” fomenting speculation and buzz about his interest in a candidacy, adding “but most of this is just because the press wants to have something to write about.”

“I want to go out having a reputation as a very good, maybe the greatest mayor ever,” he said.

The periodic speculation about the mayor’s appetite for a White House bid flared anew last week when the mayor spoke to the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and disparaged Congress and President Obama for their management of the economy. While the speech sounded campaign-like, Mr. Bloomberg, as he has many times before, ruled out a 2012 run.

On Sunday, Mr. Bloomberg also lavished praise on Mr. Obama for working out a deal with Republicans leaders to retain Bush-era tax cuts for two years and extend unemployment benefits.

“Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have finally come together to do something in a bipartisan way,” he said.

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DuPont, Zurich Chase $135 Billion Climate Market as Warming Forces Change - Bloomberg

DuPont Co.'s drought-tolerant corn is one of the seeds that's designed to thrive where water is scarce. Photographer: Larry W. Smith/Bloomberg

A cow stands in a dried-up pond in Isabela province in the Philippines. Richer countries are negotiating a fund to help poorer nations cope with the changing climate conditions predicted by climate scientists. Photographer: Nana Buxani/Bloomberg

Seed maker DuPont Co., wind-turbine manufacturer General Electric Co. and insurer Zurich Financial Services AG are devising products to help the world adapt to climate change, a potential $135 billion-a-year market by 2030.

The companies are driven in part by the failure of international efforts to cut the greenhouse gases that scientists say contribute to global warming. Discussions last year in Copenhagen yielded little progress, and officials leading more than 190 countries in talks that begin today in Cancun, Mexico, say they don’t expect to achieve a binding agreement on measures to slow the growth of emissions.

Damages from climate-related disasters are mounting. Insured losses from storms and floods have risen more than fivefold to $27 billion annually in the past four decades, Swiss Reinsurance Co. said in a September report. By 2030, the world may need to spend $135 billion a year on flood protection, buildings that can withstand hurricanes and drought-resistant crops, Swiss Re said, citing United Nations data.

“Climate change presents a direct threat to our business,” Jim Hanna, director of environmental impact for Seattle-based Starbucks Corp., the world’s largest coffee chain, said in an interview. “We are already hearing some anecdotal evidence that shifting weather patterns and increased erosion and pest infestation are starting to impact coffee crops.”

Adaptation strategies, such as rewarding farmers for taking extra steps to prevent erosion on vulnerable land, will help Starbucks prepare, Hanna said.

Richer, Poorer Nations

Relatively rich nations such as the U.S. are devoting more attention and resources to adaptation and are negotiating a fund to help poorer countries cope with the higher sea levels, droughts, heat waves, more severe storms and erratic weather predicted by climate scientists.

“Sooner or later all businesses will have to climate-proof their operations,” Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate chief, said in a September speech in New York. “Adaptation will be imperative if businesses want to avoid climate-change impacts that could drive them out of business.”

Crops better able to resist drought can help DuPont expand its $8.2 billion agriculture business, according to Jim Borel, vice president in charge of seed operations for the Wilmington, Delaware-based company, the world’s second-biggest seed maker behind Monsanto Co.

Farmers’ Productivity

“Real business opportunity comes from using science to help improve productivity for farmers, and they will have to do that to deal with climate change over the next few decades,” Borel said in an interview.

Zurich is offering policies letting businesses and homeowners replace storm-damaged property with structures better able to withstand extreme weather, said Lindene Patton, chief climate-protection officer for the Zurich-based insurer.

“There is more social demand on our customers and other stakeholders in the sense that when governments are not acting, people fill gaps with whatever tools are available,” Patton said.

The Cancun climate talks through Dec. 10, led by Figueres, will seek incremental steps after last year’s failure at meetings in Copenhagen to agree on a new binding international accord to cut heat-trapping greenhouse-gas pollution.

Even if nations were to implement ambitious emissions cuts now, some climate-change effects are unavoidable because of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, the Arlington, Virginia-based Pew Center on Global Climate Change said in an August report.

Effects Locked In

“There are climate impacts locked into the system because of the inertia of the atmosphere,” said Andrew Voysey, secretary of ClimateWise, an association of insurers based at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. that works to reduce the damage from climate change. “The increased focus on adaptation is certainly welcome, but we have to be quite conscious of the limits of what we can adapt out of.”

Lack of progress toward global cuts in carbon emissions means higher adaptation costs in the future, said Joel Smith, a principal at Boulder, Colorado-based Stratus Consulting Inc. and a lead author on U.N climate-change reports.

“The less we do to mitigate the more we’re going to have to deal with the consequences,” Smith said in an interview.

Nations have been slow to live up to commitments to help developing nations, said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group.

“We have put some money on the table,” Beinecke said in an interview. “Not nearly enough. There’s going to be more and more conversations about adaption and the need to take it seriously.”

‘People Are Hurting’

Making the argument to spend millions of dollars today to deal with effects that may not be seen for decades is difficult, said Ruben Kraiem, a partner with the law firm Covington & Burling LLP in New York and an adviser to the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, a New York-based group that works to preserve tropical forests.

“When people are hurting as many people are, it’s extremely difficult to make that case,” Kraiem said. “How much does it make sense to pay for a more robust piece of infrastructure today to protect against potential damage in 30 or 40 years?”

President Barack Obama failed to win passage in Congress this year of legislation to cap carbon emissions linked to global warming. Prospects for action will grow slimmer next year when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives and expand their minority in the Senate. Dozens of Republican lawmakers elected this month have expressed skepticism about global warming or action to curb it.

‘Inevitable Effects’

Obama’s task force on climate-change adaptation is urging government agencies to prepare for the “inevitable effects” of global warming.

“We’re not looking at climate-change impacts that are far in the future,” Shere Abbott, associate director of environment for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an interview. “We’re already seeing impacts today.”

The U.S. Gulf Coast alone may face $350 billion in damages by 2030 as powerful storms fueled by climate change ravage the region, according to a study released last month that was commissioned by Entergy Corp. of New Orleans, an energy company that operates nuclear-power plants.

Texas Instruments, Siemens

Texas Instruments Inc., the second-largest U.S. chipmaker behind Intel Corp., and Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering company, are among companies that say increased demand for energy-efficient appliances and other business opportunities may counter risks to business from climate change such as higher energy costs, according to a report released last month by the Carbon Disclosure Project, which is backed by 534 institutional investors with more than $64 trillion in assets under management.

GE of Fairfield, Connecticut, which has pushed for mandatory carbon limits in the U.S. and worldwide, is working on a project with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to map water-related risks for investors. GE, the world’s second-biggest wind-turbine maker behind Vestas Wind Systems A/S, also views the database as a tool to help the company identify areas worldwide where a shifting climate is causing water scarcity, said Jeff Fulgham, sustainability chief for GE Water.

“We want to make sure we are on the ground in those high- stress areas,” Fulgham said in an interview. Revenue from GE’s business recycling water for use in power plants, agriculture and manufacturing is expected to grow at least 10 percent a year through at least 2016, he said.

Levi Strauss Cotton

While some businesses seek profit in adapting to climate change, others are preparing for the liabilities.

Levi Strauss & Co. says it’s worried higher temperatures and sea levels worldwide will cause diminishing supplies and soaring costs for the cotton used in its jeans.

The apparel-maker is mapping out its operations and supply chain to see where water scarcity may cause damage now and later, said Anna Walker, the San Francisco-based company’s senior manager of government affairs and public policy.

Negotiators pledged in Copenhagen to keep the global temperature rise since industrialization to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), part of a political pact nations settled upon after failing to reach a deal on curbing emissions. Average surface temperatures have risen by about 0.74 degrees Celsius during the 20th century, according to the UN.

Munich Re, the biggest reinsurer, and Swiss Re, the second- largest, back the 2-degree cap and say exceeding it would result in an explosion of risk.

“Adaptation needs more attention,” said Andrew Steer, the World Bank’s climate-change chief who became the first to hold the post in July. “I’m not saying adaptation is better than mitigation. It’s not. But unfortunately it’s unlikely we will be able to prevent temperatures from rising less than 2 degrees.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Kim Chipman in Washington at kchipman@bloomberg.net; Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at jefstathiou@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at LLiebert@bloomberg.net.

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Ore. fire raises Muslims' fears of attack backlash - Bloomberg

CORVALLIS, Ore. (AP) — Someone set fire to an Islamic center on Sunday, two days after a man who worshipped there was accused of trying to blow up a van full of explosives during Portland's Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Other Muslims fear it could be the first volley of misplaced retribution.

The charges against Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali-born 19-year-old who was caught in a federal sting operation, are testing tolerance in a state that has been largely accepting of Muslims. Muslims who know the suspect say they are shocked by the allegations against him and that he had given them no hint of falling into radicalism.

The fire at the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center in Corvallis was reported at 2:15 a.m., and evidence at the scene led authorities believe it was set intentionally, said Carla Pusateri, a fire prevention officer for the Corvallis Fire Department.

Authorities don't know who started the blaze or exactly why, but they believe the center was targeted because Mohamud occasionally worshipped there.

"We have made it quite clear that the FBI will not tolerate any kind of retribution or attack on the Muslim community," said Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon.

Mohamud was being held on charges of plotting to carry out a terror attack Friday on a crowd of thousands at Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square. He is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, and it wasn't clear if he had a lawyer yet.

On Friday, he parked what he thought was a bomb-laden van near the ceremony and then went to a nearby train station, where he dialed a cell phone that he believed would detonate the vehicle, federal authorities said. Instead, federal authorities moved in and arrested him. No one was hurt.

There were also no injuries in Sunday's fire, which burned 80 percent of the center's office but did not spread to worship areas or any other rooms, said Yosof Wanly, the center's imam.

After daybreak, members gathered at the center, where a broken window had been boarded up.

"I've prayed for my family and friends, because obviously if someone was deliberate enough to do this, what's to stop them from coming to our homes and our schools?" said Mohamed Alyagouri, a 31-year-old father of two who worships at the center. "I'm afraid for my children getting harassed from their teachers, maybe from their friends."

Wanly said he was thinking about temporarily relocating his family because of the possibility of hate crimes.

"We know how it is, we know some people due to ignorance are going to perceive of these things and hold most Muslims accountable," Wanly said. "We do what we can, but it's a tough situation."

The imam said Corvallis, a college town about 75 miles southwest of Portland, has long been accepting of Muslims.

"The common scene here is to be very friendly, accepting various cultures and religions," Wanly said. "The Islamic center has been here for 40 years, it's more American than most Americans with regards to age."

In Portland, residents are alarmed by the terror plot, but Mayor Sam Adams said they are "not going to let this change our values of being an open and embracing city." He said that he beefed up patrols around mosques "and other facilities that might be vulnerable to knuckle-headed retribution" after hearing of the bomb plot.

The FBI was working closely with leadership at the Corvallis center as agents investigated the fire, Balizan said. A $10,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest.

Authorities have not explained how Mohamud, an Oregon State University student until he dropped out on Oct. 6, became so radicalized. Mohamud graduated from high school in the Portland suburb of Beaverton, although few details of his time there were available Saturday.

Wanly described him as a normal student who went to athletic events, drank an occasional beer and was into rap music and culture. He described Mohamud as religious, saying he attended prayers in Corvallis once or twice a month over a year and a half.

Wanly, 24, said that in about 15 conversations he had with Mohamud, the teen rarely discussed religion. He said that may have been because Mohamud knew his extremist views wouldn't be tolerated, and suggested that Mohamud was influenced by radical teaching he read on the Internet.

"If a person has a type of agenda, he can find anything he wants on the Internet and block out everything else," Wanly said.

In the days leading up to his arrest, Mohamud's friends thought he appeared on edge, Wanly said.

"He seemed to be in a state of confusion," Wanly said. "He would say things that weren't true. He'd say 'I'm going to go get married,' for example. He wasn't going to go get married."

Mohamud is among tens of thousands of Somalis who have resettled in the United States since their country plunged into lawlessness in 1991. The U.N.-backed government controls only a few blocks of Mogadishu, the capital, while large parts of Somalia are controlled by the insurgent group Al-Shabab, which vows allegiance to al-Qaida.

Omar Jamal, first secretary for the Somali mission to the United Nations in New York City, told The Associated Press his office has received "thousands of calls" from Somalis in the United States who are concerned about tactics used by federal agents in the sting operation against Mohamud.

Jamal said there is concern in the Somali community that Mohamud was "lured into an illegal act."

"Rest assured that the community is very against anyone who tries to do harm to the citizens of this country," Jamal said in a phone call.

But many Somalis in the United States are wondering whether Mohamud's "rights have been violated" by federal agents in the sting operation, he said. "What did they tell him to go along with this heinous crime?" Jamal said.

An FBI affidavit said it was Mohamud who picked the target of the bomb plot, that he was warned several times about the seriousness of his plan, that women and children could die, and that he could back out.

Officials said Mohamud had no formal ties to foreign terror groups, although he had reached out to suspected terrorists in Pakistan.

FBI agents say they began investigating after receiving a tip from an unidentified person who expressed concern about Mohamud. This summer an agent e-mailed Mohamud, pretending to be affiliated with an "unindicted associate" whom Mohamud had tried to contact.

Agents had some face-to-face meetings with Mohamud. On Nov. 4, in the backcountry along Oregon's coast, they convinced him that he was testing an explosive device — although the explosion was controlled by agents rather than the youth.

On Friday, an agent and Mohamud drove into downtown Portland to the white van that carried six 55-gallon drums with detonation cords and plastic caps, but all of them were inert.

Authorities said they allowed the plot to proceed to obtain evidence to charge the suspect with plotting to carrying out the attack.

___

Duara reported from Portland. Associated Press writers William McCall and Tim Fought also contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Australian Security Will Screen All Cargo Coming From Yemen, Gillard Says - Bloomberg

Australia will screen all cargo coming from Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha, the three transit points for passengers flying from Yemen, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, after an attempt to send parcel bombs from Yemen to the U.S. was foiled.

Police in Yemen yesterday arrested a woman suspected of attempting to send two parcel bombs to synagogues in Chicago via air-cargo services, after authorities in Dubai and the U.K. intercepted the packages on Oct. 29. Authorities are investigating whether the shipments were staged as rehearsals for a future attacks, a U.S. official said.

“There are no direct flights from Yemen to Australia, so any cargo that originated in Yemen would come through one of those three locations and there will be 100 percent screening as a response,” Gillard said in Hanoi yesterday, according to a transcript of her comments e-mailed today.

Gillard said she will take any “further advice arising from this incident” when it becomes available.

The prime minister, who is in the Vietnamese capital for the East Asia Summit, said she has been pushing hard to formalize the participation of the U.S. and Russia in future gatherings.

The two nations, which will join the summit from 2011, attended as special guests this year.

Regional Forum

“Prior to this there was no regional forum that brought together the U.S., China, the countries of our region, working comprehensively across the economic, strategic, political and defense relationships,” Gillard said. Such a forum “is important for our future, for the future of China and its role in our world.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will visit Melbourne for the Austrialia- United States Ministerial meeting, a forum between the two nations, on Nov. 8.

Gillard said she plans to visit China next year after Premier Wen Jiabao invited her when they met in Hanoi yesterday.

The Australian prime minister, who also met with leaders of India, Laos and the Philippines, will travel to Indonesia and Malaysia from Hanoi, according to local media reports.

Stock Exchange Merger

Gillard, who also met with Singapore Prime Minister Hsien Loong Lee during her trip, said her counterpart had raised Singapore Exchange Ltd.’s bid for ASX Ltd.

“We both agreed there’s a clear process to be gone through,” Gillard told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview. “From the Australian point of view, from the Foreign Investment Review Board, and that process will be gone through.”

Singapore Exchange, part-owned by the city-state’s central bank, on Oct. 25 offered to buy the owner of Australia’s stock exchange for cash and shares in a deal worth A$8.1 billion ($8 billion), according to Bloomberg’s calculations based on Singapore Exchange’s closing price of S$8.80 on Oct. 29.

The transaction requires an amendment to Australia’s Corporations Act, approved by parliament, which prohibits anyone from owning more than 15 percent of ASX. Singapore Exchange needs the support of the minority Labor government, which hasn’t decided its stance on the deal, and at least four other legislators in the lower house of parliament to approve the bid.

Australian lawmakers including two Greens party members, opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey and two independents said they oppose Singapore Exchange’s bid, saying it’s unlikely to be in the best interests of Australians.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nichola Saminather in Sydney at nsaminather1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net

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UAE Scraps BlackBerry Ban While RIM Says Security Unchanged - Bloomberg

The United Arab Emirates will not suspend Research in Motion Ltd. ’s Blackberry service this month. Photographer: Jonathan Gainer/Bloomberg

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Betty Liu reports on the latest breaking news and top stories in today's Business Briefs. (Source: Bloomberg)

Research In Motion Ltd. averted a ban on its BlackBerry smartphone in the United Arab Emirates after the country’s phone regulator said the company’s messaging services now comply with local regulations.

“All BlackBerry services in the U.A.E. will continue to operate as normal,” the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, which had threatened to ban the service over security concerns, said in a statement on its website today. The regulator didn’t give further details of how the company and local wireless operators addressed the government’s concerns.

RIM said today it continues to follow the principles for working with government officials it laid out in an Aug. 12 statement and wouldn’t comment further on confidential regulatory matters. In that statement, RIM said it doesn’t do “special deals for specific countries” and there have been no changes to the security of its corporate e-mail system.

“Contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers’ encryption keys,” RIM said in August.

RIM’s encryption technology has raised concerns in several countries that BlackBerry may be used for terrorist attacks or other illegal activity. The U.A.E. regulator’s decision, which averts a ban planned for Oct. 11, comes after Saudi Arabia canceled a planned shutdown of BlackBerry service and the Indian government said it would push back a deadline to suspend BlackBerry service as it works toward a solution.

Some Kind of Workaround?

“RIM has previously been clear that it would not change the architecture of the BlackBerry services to placate countries,” said Tony Cripps, an analyst with technology research firm Ovum in London. “We can only hypothesize that some kind of workaround has been agreed” to between the UAE and local carriers to monitor messages sent with the BlackBerry “at a point in the delivery process that is outside of RIM’s control,” he said.

RIM rose $1.44, or 3 percent, to $49.36 at 4:30 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has dropped 27 percent this year.

The U.A.E. regulator said it wants to acknowledge RIM’s “positive engagement and collaboration.” The regulator didn’t say whether the deal allows it to monitor messages sent by BlackBerry users.

In a Sept. 24 interview, co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie said RIM can’t give governments access to corporate customers’ e-mail systems because only those customers -- not RIM -- hold the security codes for reading their employees’ BlackBerry messages.

“I’m not the keeper of that key, I don’t have that key,” he said. “If you want them to break open their servers, you’ve got to go to them.”

Indian Security Trial

Saudi Arabian authorities said Aug. 10 it wouldn’t impose a BlackBerry ban, citing the “positive development” in meeting the country’s monitoring needs. India’s government said Aug. 31 that it’s conducting a two-month test of a tracking system offered by Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM.

A ban would have hurt the image of the U.A.E., home to the business hub of Dubai, as place that is business-friendly, said Mohammed Ali Yasin, chief investment officer at CAPM Investments in Abu Dhabi.

“The fact that we are continuing with the services is important to say we are part of the world community,” he said.

The companies involved would have lost “significant business” if the ban had gone through, he said.

Encryption Technology

Emirates Telecommunications Corp., the U.A.E.’s biggest phone operator, known as Etisalat, and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co., based in Dubai and owner of the Du brand, had introduced packages that would allow customers to replace BlackBerry devices with smartphones offering similar services.

Etisalat said in an e-mailed statement today that its alternative packages will no longer be available and that all its BlackBerry services will continue to operate as normal. Du said in a separate statement that service for both consumer and enterprise customers will function normally.

An Etisalat official who declined to be named said he did not know about any possible monitoring and referred questions to the regulator. “We only provide the service,” the official said. Calls to a Du official went unanswered today, the first day of the weekend in the U.A.E.

The U.A.E. set the Oct. 11 shutdown deadline in August after the regulator said the encryption technology didn’t comply with national-security laws for giving authorities access to electronic messages.

RIM has about 1.1 million users in India and a combined 1.2 million in the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, according to estimates by RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky. The company has over 50 million subscribers globally.

To contact the reporters on this story: Zahraa Alkhalisi in Abu Dhabi at zalkhalisi@bloomberg.net; Hugo Miller in Toronto at hugomiller@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Maedler at cmaedler@bloomberg.net: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net

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Americans Warned to Be Vigilant in Europe After Terror Threat - Bloomberg

Police in Paris evacuated the Eiffel Tower on Sept. 28 for the second time in two weeks after bomb threats. Photographer: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. warned Americans traveling in Europe to be vigilant following weeks of discussion within the Obama administration about threats of an attack by an al- Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group, officials said.

“Terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons and target both official and private interests,” the U.S. State Department said in a travel alert for Europe issued in Washington yesterday.

The State Department didn’t issue a higher level “Travel Warning” for the continent. A warning would have cautioned Americans to avoid Europe, their most popular foreign travel destination, with the potential for a much larger impact on airlines and hotels. Twelve million Americans traveled to Europe last year, spending more than $20 billion, according to Commerce Department data.

“There may be a little dip in bookings, especially on the leisure side,” Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition in Radnor, Pennsylvania, said in an interview after the alert was issued. “All bets are off if the threat is more specific or, God forbid, something happens.”

The State Department has been monitoring the threats in Europe for weeks and made the decision to issue the advisory this weekend based on the “cumulative effect of all types of information” it had, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy told reporters.

Tourists Targeted

Terrorists often target tourist attractions, subways and rail systems, and travelers should “take every precaution” to protect themselves, the alert said. French police have evacuated the Eiffel Tower in Paris twice in the past three weeks because of threats.

The U.S. is “not, not, not” advising Americans to delay or cancel visits to Europe, Kennedy said. Instead they should take “common-sense precautions,” and also register with the consular offices in countries they visit. The alert is set to expire at the end of January.

U.S. airlines “are operating their business as usual, with the same continued security vigilance in the interest of safe travel,” David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, said in an e-mail. The Washington-based group represents airlines such as Delta Air Lines Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co.

While U.S. airlines are continuing normal flight operations, they likely have stepped up security, and won’t tell the public about it, George Hamlin, president of Hamlin Transportation Consulting in Fairfax, Virginia, said in an interview.

More Security Likely

“They may be on a higher state of alert, they may be making more random security checks, they may be even looking more closely at specific flights, but they aren’t going to tell us that,” he said.

Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs said it is “closely monitoring the situation in Europe,” and urged its citizens to “be aware of their surroundings.” The United Kingdom upgraded its terrorism warning for France and Germany.

“As we have consistently made clear, we face a real and serious threat from terrorism,” British Home Secretary Theresa May said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. “Our threat level remains at severe -- meaning that an attack is highly likely.”

Coordinated Attacks

Militants based in Pakistan are planning coordinated attacks in the U.K., France and Germany, prompting the recent increase in U.S. drone strikes in the region, Sky News reported, citing U.S. officials it didn’t name. Reports have focused on attacks similar to the 2008 ones by the Pakistani-based Lashkar- e-Taiba on a hotel in Mumbai that left 166 people dead.

In the attacks in Mumbai militants armed with grenades and rifles stormed into the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel and the Oberoi Trident complex, singling out foreign nationals and taking hostages in a three-day siege.

Pakistan’s intelligence services are acting on information from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to try to foil any terrorism plots against Europe, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday.

ABC News, citing U.S. and European officials, said the tipoff came from a German terror suspect held in Afghanistan who told interrogators that teams of attackers with European passports have been dispatched.

“Security agencies are investigating closely all information and are continually monitoring security measures,” Markus Beyer, a German Interior Ministry spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement.

France sees the U.S. alert as “in line with the general recommendations we ourselves make to the French population,” foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said in an e-mail.

To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net Jeff Bliss in Washington at jbliss@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva in Washington at msilva34@bloomberg.net

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