Word: credit-card
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Armed with guns and search warrants, 150 Secret Service agents staged surprise raids in 14 American cities one morning last May, seizing 42 computers and tens of thousands of floppy disks. Their target: a loose-knit group of youthful computer enthusiasts suspected of trafficking in stolen credit-card numbers, telephone access codes and other contraband of the information age. The authorities intended to send a sharp message to would-be digital desperadoes that computer crime does not pay. But in their zeal, they sent a very different message -- one that chilled civil libertarians. By attempting to crack down on telephone...
...hardest thing to do was to teach Kuwait's children to "like" Saddam, says Salah al-Awadi, manager of credit-card sales for the Gulf Bank. "When Iraqis visited us, we would serve them soft drinks. Once, my son Youssef, who is almost four, said, 'Take this glass and put it on Saddam's head.' We had to teach the kids to say good things about Saddam for fear they would be killed if they didn...
...volume of consumer debt may be less burdensome than it appears, mostly because of the way it is structured. Consumers now stretch out their $ debt over more payments. Many car loans allow 60 months to pay, instead of the traditional 36 to 48 months. Credit-card holders can pay as little as 1.65% of their outstanding balance each month, while home-equity loans are drawn out to as much as 15 years. As a result, the portion of household income devoted to debt payments is roughly the same today...
Still, the Canadian system has a good deal going for it. Citizens are issued a health card by the government, and they present it when they receive care. Doctors process claims much as retailers handle credit-card transactions. The government then pays the doctor with money that comes largely from taxes. "Once somebody's in the system," says Dr. Graham Pineo, an A.C.P. officer from Canada, "the payments flow regularly." Only a few services are excluded. Among them: private or semiprivate hospital rooms, drugs prescribed outside the hospital, eyeglasses and wheelchairs, and pre-employment and insurance examinations...
...credit agencies point out that banks, credit-card companies and other consumer lenders sometimes fail to report promptly on the status of their accounts. Another problem in the industry is that federal law prohibits the credit repositories from sharing information, so that updated information that reaches one databank may still be missing from others...