BANGALORE, India,
Oct. 6--Global corporations are failing to safeguard their information networks against potent threats from viruses, worms and especially their own employees, according to a report unveiled here Wednesday by consultancy firm Ernst and Young, AFP reported.
The Global Information Security Survey said while corporate leaders were increasingly aware of the risks to their information security from people within their organizations they are not acting on the knowledge.
"More than 70 percent of the companies surveyed failed to list training and raising employee awareness about information security issues as a top initiative," the report said.
Ernst and Young polled more than 1,233 organizations from across 70 countries. There were 69 respondents from India making it the second-largest country sample.
"While organizations remain focused on external threats such as viruses, the internal threats are constantly being under-emphasized," said Terry Thomas, Partner, Ernst and Young's Risk and Business Solution Practice.
"People and organizational issues are equally important because many insider incidents are based on concealment, organizations are often unaware that they are being victimized," Thomas told reporters.
The report said as corporations are increasingly outsourcing business to third party vendors outside their region it was becoming more difficult to retain control over the security of their information.
"The more likely and most lethal threats are those originating from within an organization's growing extended enterprise," it said.
The report said 80 percent of the organizations surveyed failed to conduct regular assessment of their IT outsourcer's compliance with the host organization's security requirements.
It said most organizations felt that information security had no value when "there is no visible attack. "This perception has remained unchanged over the decade that Ernst and Young has been conducting the survey. The topmost obstacle
to effective information security today is the lack of security awareness by users," said Thomas.

Kemal Unakitan

PARIS, Oct. 6--Turkey will fulfill all the criteria of the Maastricht treaty in five years in its bid to gain acceptance to the European Union, the country's finance minister said in a newspaper interview published here Wednesday, AFP reported.
Kemal Unakitan attributed Turkey's economic success in recent years to rigorous fiscal discipline and political and economic stability.
The European Commission was expected on Wednesday to give Turkey the green light to start entry negotiations with the EU, while warning there was a long and potentially bumpy road ahead.
The country's budget deficit and public spending levels are dipping below the respective targets of three percent and 60 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), Unakitan said in the interview with La Tribune daily.
"The result is that while last year's aim was five percent, the growth we actually achieved was 5.9 percent," and that figure is rising quickly this year, the minister said in the interview conducted in Washington.
"Before we came to power, our debt levels were equivalent to 90 percent of GDP. We've brought that down to 70 percent and even 68 percent by the end of this year. In five years' time we will be respecting the Maastricht criterion of public debt of under 60 percent of GDP," Unakitan assured.
The current account deficit will be 4 percent this year and will be financed "without difficulty" this year and next, he went on, while warning that 2006 could be difficult, in which cases there could be sales tax rises on imported cars.
On the matter of eventual EU membership, the Turkish minister said that Ankara's bid was strongly supported by most Europeans and downplayed some of the racist sentiments expressed by a European "minority".
Unakitan said that fears of the arrival of vast numbers of Turkish immigrants in EU member states were unfounded as Turks "prefer to stay at home and work among themselves rather than immigrate".

MADRID, Spain,
Oct. 6--Spain needs to use more economic incentives to encourage polluters to clean up and to protect the long-term health of its key tourism industry, according to a report published on Tuesday, AFP said.
A survey of Spain's environmental performance by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also highlighted the need for better management of water--a particularly valuable resource in the arid south, where vegetable growers and tourism complexes vie for scarce supplies.
The government should encourage a "polluter-pays" attitude, strengthen penalties for rule-breakers, and consider making taxes in areas like energy and transport more environmentally friendly, the report said.
"Using economic instruments, we think Spain could do better, although we are saying that to other countries as well," said Lorents Lorentsen, OECD's director of environment, presenting the report together with Spain's environment minister.
Tourism accounts for around 11 percent of gross domestic product, but Spain is fighting to hold market share in the face of competition from cheaper destinations such as Croatia and Bulgaria.
The Paris-based OECD, which groups 30 industrialized countries, called for more efforts to improve the environment in coastal areas and to protect them from over-development.
Mass tourism has put particularly heavy pressure on Spain's coastal regions and the Balearic and Canary Islands, which have a population density some five times higher than inland areas.
Some in Spain's tourist industry are aware that over-development of tourist resorts and damage to the environment can end up putting tourists off.
The former regional government in Spain's Balearic islands, which include Ibiza and Majorca, introduced a one-euro-a-night tax on hotel guests in 2002 to raise money to repair tourism's ravages on the environment.
But the tax proved deeply unpopular with tourists and hoteliers alike and was scrapped after a change in regional government at elections last year.
The OECD also warned that some ground water reserves were being over-exploited, irrigation systems needed modernizing and quality control of urban water supplies could be improved.
"Water management in Spain is far from sustainable. Water prices remain low and the pricing system is not used sufficiently for demand management," the report said.

NEW DELHI, India, Oct. 6--India's oil minister pledged Wednesday to protect millions of poor consumers from the effects of rising global oil prices which threaten to derail the country's economic boom, AFP reported.
State-run Indian companies which import oil and sell it in the domestic market have managed to keep a lid on prices earlier in the year, except for a small hike in August.
"We will continue to protect domestic consumers from the worst surge in crude prices," Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar told reporters here.
New York's main oil contract closed above 51 dollars a barrel for the first time Tuesday, riding a speculative wave powered by fear of interruptions to supply from the Gulf of Mexico.
"We have a system to deal with normal volatilities," Aiyar said, referring to the government's protection mechanisms. "But in abnormal times, government has to take a view," he added, without elaborating.
He said a meeting has been scheduled with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh next week to discuss the situation.
Any rise in the price of crude has a major impact on India as it imports over 70 percent of its oil needs.
India's inflation has risen to a three-year-high at around eight percent in recent weeks due to the combined effect of the oil price rise and scanty monsoon rainfall hitting prices of fruits and vegetables.
Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram Tuesday in Washington urged multilateral institutions to help countries exposed to oil price shocks and said the current oil price situation made macroeconomic management in India "very complex."
He called for "better international cooperation on the part of both oil producing and consuming countries (and) for the multilateral institutions to stand ready to support countries" exposed to an oil shock.
Rising oil prices have come as bad news for the Indian government which was elected this year on a pledge to uplift the poor and extend the benefits of economic reforms to all sectors of the population.
Economists say the high oil prices could upset India's booming economy, which grew 7.4 percent in the first quarter of the fiscal year between April and June.

SINGAPORE, Oct. 6--Singapore remains a major hub for the global trade in illegal timber, Greenpeace said Wednesday as it called on the city-state to set up a dedicated law enforcement unit to crack down on the problem, AFP reported.
The international environment group brought its flagship Rainbow Warrior vessel to Singapore to highlight what it said was new evidence of criminal smuggling of endangered hardwood from Indonesia into Singapore and Malaysia.
"It is quite evident that if countries in the region do not act now to stop the destruction of rainforests and illegal trade, we will soon have nothing to protect," Greenpeace forest campaigner Tim Birch said.
"Countries like Singapore and Malaysia hold the future of not only timber species, but of all plants, animals and communities that live in and depend on forests, in their hands."
Greenpeace released documents to reporters showing photos of boats laden with endangered ramin timber from the forests of Riau province in Sumatra, Indonesia, that were bound for Singapore and Malaysia.
Ramin is a hardwood tree species that is mainly found in lowland swamp forests of Malaysia and Indonesia. It is used in common household products such as window blinds and baby cots.
Birch said Singapore should set up a law enforcement unit focused solely on the illegal timber trade, saying this was a commitment the city-state gave when it signed a free trade agreement with the United States this year.
Singapore's Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority, which enforces the nation's commitments to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), released a statement saying trading in illegal timber was not tolerated by the government.
"Singapore views illegal wildlife trade seriously and will not hesitate to take enforcement actions on companies or individuals who violate CITES provisions and our wildlife laws," the statement said.
The authority said it would continue to work with local and international enforcement agencies to ensure Singapore was not used as a conduit for the trade.
However it pointed out that not all ramin timber from Indonesia was logged illegally and that many timber species could be traded freely without a permit.

An Alitalia plane waits to take off at Milan's Malpensa airport. (AFP File Photo)

ROME, Oct. 6--Unions and management at Alitalia have struck a deal on payoffs for 3,700 employees set to lose their jobs. The agreement should open the way for the restructuring which could save the Italian carrier from bankruptcy, AFP reported.
Late-night meetings with government ministers finally brought weeks of prickly talks over the fate of a sixth of the airline's workforce to an end.
Those laid off will get two years of state welfare payments, while staying on the firm's books for two years.
They will then get three years of redundancy payments at a lower level.
Only one of Alitalia's nine unions refused to sign up.
"We have laid the foundation stone," said Alitalia chief executive Giancarlo Cimoli. "Now we have to build the house."
The agreement also opens the way to a 400 million euro ($490m; ¨280m) government loan package to help fund a wholesale restructuring.
The plan is to split the airline into two: AZ Air to handle flight operations, and AZ Service to look after the ground side of the business.
Further funding will have to come from future share sales. The airline has told shareholders it is hope to sell 2 billion euros of new shares by March 2005.
Alitalia lost 330 million euros in 2003, as it struggled - along with much of the rest of the aviation business--with high costs, soaring oil prices and competition from budget carriers.
Several US airlines are still in bankruptcy proceedings, while Switzerland's Swiss is still trying to recover from its own remodeling following Swissair's collapse in 2002.

TALLINN, Estonia, Oct. 6--The gap between women and men's pay in Estonia is still among the highest in Eastern and Central Europe despite some progress in the last decade, a survey released Tuesday showed, AFP reported.
Women in Estonia, a former Soviet Baltic state which joined the European Union in May, get just 73 percent of the salary enjoyed by men, the study compiled by Praxis think-tank revealed.
The gender salary gap in Estonia has fallen since 1994 by around four percent but is still 10 percent greater than in the 15 countries that were EU members before May's enlargement and is also greater than the average gender gap in Central and Eastern Europe, according to the survey.
"Considering that compared to Western Europe education levels of women, as in many Eastern European states, are much higher in Estonia than those of men, the actual gender salary gap is even higher compared to Western Europe," said Epp Kallaste, one of the report's authors.
Higher education affects men's salary increases much more than those of women in Estonia: women who have received a higher education earn an average nine percent more than women with basic education while men earn an average 16 percent more.
"The main reason why the gender salary gap has been decreasing since independence was restored (in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet Union) is the transformation to a market economy: education is more valued and better paid," said Tairi Room, co-author of the study.
"But women in Estonia as well as in many other Eastern Europe states are too modest and shy and the topics of equality have been less discussed in public," said Kallaste.