Word: payments
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Buried in Facebook's new payment terms is this gem: if you spend $1 to get 10 credits at Facebook's virtual-gift shop--where you can buy icons of unicorns as well as of sock-draped doorknobs (the universal symbol for "Keep out, we're hooking up")--you have three years to use up your points. After that, Facebook reserves the right to go rogue by "sending virtual gifts to your Facebook friends." This is yet another reason to rethink friending your boss, lest you one day unknowingly send her a (virtual) flaming...
...weeks after a leak in a separate investigation into the deaths of 11 French naval engineers in a 2002 bomb blast in Pakistan. Initially blamed on Islamist extremists, the bombing, French investigators now believe, was likely the work of Pakistani military intelligence officials angry that France had stopped the payment of a kickback connected to a $1 billion submarine contract between Paris and Islamabad. (See a TIME video on Buddhist monks...
...told that Pakistani officials may have organized the strike. This new theory hinges on the change in France's government in 1995, a year after Paris signed a $1 billion deal to sell Agosta submarines to Pakistan. The cabinet of newly elected President Jacques Chirac decided to hold back payment of some $33 million in kickbacks that had been promised to Pakistani officials. French security officials tell Time that investigators have obtained documents and testimonies from people involved with the deal naming Pakistani officials who were designated to receive "commissions" for their help...
Perhaps an even more pressing problem in the context of health reform is the risk of overutilization of services. According to a 2006 report from the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, just the presence of a doctor-owned heart hospital in a community increases the rate of cardiac surgery by 6% among Medicare beneficiaries. The upshot, according to a House staffer involved in health reform, is that "people are getting things they probably don't need." Plus, says the staffer, "the community hospitals go to war, bulk up their own specialty centers and all of a sudden you see these...
...third of all the gas the European Union uses each year. But while the gas is cheap and plentiful, this arrangement has created an energy dependence that makes the E.U. vulnerable to Moscow's shifting moods. That was the case in January, when Russia tried to settle a payment dispute with Ukraine, its main transit country, by turning off the taps. In the three weeks it took to get the gas flowing again, Bulgaria's reserves ran out, Slovakia was forced to declare a state of emergency, and countries as distant as Germany and the Czech Republic were affected...