A growing pilot and passenger revolt over full-body scans and what many consider intrusive pat-downs couldn’t have come at a worse time for the nation’s air travel system.

Thanksgiving, the busiest travel time of the year, is less than two weeks away.

Grassroots groups are urging travelers to either not fly or to protest by opting out of the full-body scanners and undergo time-consuming pat-downs instead.

Such concerns prompted a meeting Friday of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano with leaders of travel industry groups.

Napolitano met with the U.S.Travel Association and 20 travel companies ‘to underscore the Department’s continued commitment to partnering with the nation’s travel and tourism industry to facilitate the flow of trade and travel while maintaining high security standards to protect the American people,’ the department said in a statement.

Federal officials have increased security in the wake of plots attributed to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Industry leaders are worried about the grassroots backlash to Transportation Security Administration security procedures. Some pilots, passengers and flight attendants have chosen to opt out of the revealing scans.

More of the units are arriving at airports, with 1,000 expected to be in place by the end of 2011.

‘While the meeting with Secretary Napolitano was informative, […]

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Tens of millions of American voters got duped badly in the 2010 election. The bible-thumping white underclass thought they hit back at what they regarded as the nefarious forces trying to ‘take our country away.

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The following is an excerpt from Thaddeus Russell’s new book, ‘A Renegade History of the United States’ (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010):

In the nineteenth century, a woman who owned property, made high wages, had sex outside of marriage, performed or received oral sex, used birth control, consorted with men of other races, danced, drank, or walked alone in public, wore makeup, perfume, or stylish clothes — and was not ashamed — was probably a whore.

In fact, prostitutes won virtually all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for granted. Prostitutes were especially successful in the wild, lawless, thoroughly renegade boomtowns of the West. When women were barred from most jobs and wives had no legal right to own property, madams in the West owned large tracts of land and prized real estate. Prostitutes made, by far, the highest wages of all American women. Several madams were so wealthy that they funded irrigation and road-building projects that laid the foundation for the New West. Decades before American employers offered health insurance to their workers, madams across the West provided their employees with free health care. While women were told that they could not and should not protect […]

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Private banks will sharply expand headcount in coming years to capitalize on the growing number of wealthy individuals in Asia, dismissing concerns that aggressive hiring is out of sync with a tentative recovery in revenues.

Hiring sprees this year have taken some firms beyond their pre-crisis staffing levels, as banks believe growth in Asia, and robust revenues elsewhere, will support the expansion.

Citi for instance plans to add between 100 and 200 senior staff to its private bank over the next few years, Dena Brumpton, chief operating officer at its private bank, told Reuters.

‘We see a lot of growth coming from Asia. But there will be selective hiring pockets in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and U.S. regions, too,’ she said in an interview.

The hires come on top of the 130 managing directors the bank added during the last 12 months.

The wealth of Asia Pacific-based individuals with investable assets of $1 million or more outranked Europe for the first time at the end of 2009, according to the widely quoted Capgemini Merrill-Lynch 2010 World Wealth Report.

Faced with tougher capital requirements in the wake of the credit crisis and mixed prospects for earnings, many investment banks are expanding their private banking […]

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Maricopa County officials believe the discovery of a duplicate payroll log and database hidden in a secure computer system at the Sheriff’s Office could reveal the extent of alleged misspending in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s agency.

The sheriff’s employee database operated parallel to a county-run system, recording a different set of sheriff’s staff assignments and payments than official records provided to county auditors. County officials say the system has existed since the early part of the decade, but they learned of it only recently through paperwork produced in a case alleging racial profiling against the Sheriff’s Office.

Details of the sheriff’s employee database and steps taken to investigate will be outlined to county supervisors at a hearing this morning.

The supervisors plan to subpoena 20 to 30 people to testify in the future about the hidden database, which is housed in a computer system at the center of a costly legal battle between Arpaio and the supervisors.

County administrators believe the Sheriff’s Office intentionally misappropriated as much as $80 million designated for jail operations over five years to pay employees working in patrol, human-smuggling operations and investigative units. Those employees should have been paid with other funds, but county officials suspect the Sheriff’s Office tried […]

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