XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

Warren Buffett Expects ‘Terrible Problem’ for Municipal Debt - said guaranteeing against default - a dangerous business -

Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has been trimming its investment in municipal debt, predicted a “terrible problem” for the bonds in coming years.

“There will be a terrible problem and then the question becomes will the federal government help,” Buffett, 79, said today at a hearing of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in New York. “I don’t know how I would rate them myself. It’s a bet on how the federal government will act over time.”

Berkshire’s investment portfolio included municipal bonds valued at less than $3.9 billion as of March 31, down from more than $4.7 billion at the end of 2008. The company had a maximum of $16 billion at risk in derivatives tied to such debt, according to the company’s annual report for 2009.

Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman and chief executive, has previously warned about the risks of insuring municipal bonds. In his annual letter to shareholders in 2009, he said public officials may be tempted to default on bonds whose payments are guaranteed by insurance companies rather than push through needed tax increases. He said guaranteeing municipal bonds against default “has the look today of a dangerous business.”

Local governments rely on the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market to raise money for construction projects and fund other budget items. The financial crisis and recession battered governments across the U.S. by cutting into tax collections and causing pension-fund losses. Some governments failed to set aside enough money to cover retirement benefits promised to employees, which may place increasing strain on public finance.

Rescue for Governments?

Buffett said last month that the U.S. may feel compelled to rescue a state facing default after the government committed $700 billion to bail out financial firms and automakers.

“It would be hard in the end for the federal government to turn away a state having extreme financial difficulty when they’ve gone to General Motors and other entities and saved them,” Buffett told shareholders in Omaha, Nebraska, at Berkshire’s May 1 annual meeting. “I don’t know how you would tell a state you’re going to stiff-arm them with all the bailouts of corporations.”

A report by the Pew Center on the States in February estimated that by the end of the 2008 budget years, states had $1 trillion less than needed to pay for future pensions and medical benefits, a gap the center said was likely compounded by losses suffered in the second half of 2008.

Defaults

About $14.5 billion of municipal bonds defaulted in 2008 and 2009, according to Income Securities Advisor Inc., a Miami Lakes, Florida-based company that publishes a newsletter tracking distressed debt. Many those were securities backed by revenue from nursing homes, property developments and other projects without claim to government tax revenue.

Defaults by local governments with the power to raise taxes are less common. Jefferson County, Alabama, defaulted on more than $3 billion of bonds backed by sewer fees after the deals grew more costly in the wake of the credit crisis in 2008. Vallejo, California, filed for bankruptcy in 2008 after its tax revenue tumbled.

Buffett set up a municipal bond insurance company in December 2007 as competitors, including Ambac Financial Group Inc. and MBIA Inc., struggled to maintain top ratings. Berkshire has scaled back sales as Buffett said the rates that bondholders are willing to pay don’t match the risk.

Finnish police probe theft of virtual furniture - stolen from around 400 users of the Habbo Hotel virtual hotel -

A virtual thieving spree could have real life consequences for culprits in Finland, where police are investigating the theft of virtual furniture on a social networking site popular with teenagers.
"Significant amounts of virtual property" were stolen from around 400 users of the Habbo Hotel virtual hotel, where visitors can create a character for themselves to hang out with friends, take care of virtual pets and furnish their own rooms for a fee, Finnish police said Tuesday.
The cyber thieves used hoax web pages to steal user names and passwords, which they then used to sign in to Habbo profiles and shift property away from its rightful owners, the police said in a statement.
As part of the investigation, the police have searched homes in five Finnish cities, confiscated computers and interrogated several people, they said, adding that while the value of damages could not yet be defined, for some users the cost could be "significant".

Read more - http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.b054565423287aad171074503885d125.71&show_article=1

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

Contaminated Cocaine Can Cause Flesh to Rot - you should be aware that some of the cocaine is not clean -

Cocaine abusers -- already at risk for an abnormal heartbeat, blood pressure problems, hallucinations, convulsions and stroke -- can add another potential health complication to the list: rotting flesh.

"If you are a user of cocaine, you should be aware that some of the cocaine is not clean and can have other agents that can cause you to have a low white-cell count or skin tissue death," said Dr. Ghinwa Dumyati, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Rochester and an epidemiologist for the Monroe County Health Department in New York.

In a report in the June 1 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, Dumyati and doctors from the University of Rochester Medical Center discuss two cases involving women with a history of cocaine use who came to the hospital for help when they noticed purplish plaques on their cheeks, earlobes, legs, thighs and buttocks.

Their profiles were typical of toxicity with levamisole, the doctors reported. The medication is a veterinary anti-worming agent, approved for use in cattle, sheep and pigs. It was once used to treat cancer, autoimmune diseases and kidney problems in humans, Dumyati said. It's no longer approved for use in people in the United States, she said, because of adverse side effects.

But it's often used to cut cocaine, before distribution to the user, she said. "Almost 80 percent of the cocaine coming into this country has levamisole mixed in," Dumyati said.

Exactly why is not known, she said. Some say it might enhance the effects of the drug, which include a euphoric mood or ''high" and a boost in energy. It also might be used to stretch the drug and increase profits.

"The person using cocaine would not know this [levamisole] is in it," Dumyati said.

In the new report, the doctors concluded, based on the women's symptoms, that cocaine laced with levamisole cannot only cause problems with white blood cells -- a problem previously reported -- but also death of the skin's outer layer. They said that physicians should suspect cocaine abuse when they see patients with skin lesions caused by tissue death.

"The drug may induce an immunological reaction producing inflammation or vasculitis, an inflammation inside the small blood vessels," Dumyati said in explaining the link to tissue death. "The result can be the death of the epidermis or outer layer of skin."

But that's not all that's bad about levamisole. "It has other side effects," she said. "It has effects on bone marrow function. There can be a drop in the white blood cell count."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in late 2009 on a cluster of cases of problems with white blood cell counts linked to cocaine use. Called agranulocytosis, the condition occurs when bone marrow fails to make enough white blood cells.

The report noted that levamisole was found in some of the people with agranulocytosis and cocaine exposure.

But the reports of tissue death associated with contaminated cocaine are newer, said Dr. Kurt Nolte, a pathology professor at the University of New Mexico and one of the authors of the CDC report. "Tissue death has been associated with levamisole in a clinical context," when the drug was used therapeutically, he said. "I've not seen any cocaine users with this."

But it's not a surprise, given the amount of cocaine that has been laced with the medication, said Dr. Juliet VanEenwyk, an epidemiologist with the Washington State Department of Health, who also contributed information to the CDC report.

"The increase [in cocaine containing levamisole] has been really rapid," she said. Until a few years ago, she said, probably less than 10 percent of cocaine supplies had it. Now, experts suspect that 80 percent do.

Dumyati said that the skin problem is treatable, but "if you stop using cocaine, most of the cases would get better."

Agranulocytosis, on the other hand, is a serious illness that requires hospitalization for treatment, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has more on cocaine.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20100601/hl_hsn/contaminatedcocainecancausefleshtorot

When good URLs go bad - The book of slurls: unintentionally funny websites - the world’s worst Internet URLs -

The people at choosespain.com, the travel agency, are resigned to their double entendre name and the swimming pool company poolife.com isn’t about to throw in the towel.

Software programmer Andy Geldman, 35, has collected the best of the unintentionally funny URLs in a new book called Slurls: They Called Their Website What?, with the subtitle: The world’s worst Internet URLs.

“Lots of them are rude,” he says apologetically to the Star on Tuesday.

The dog grooming company in Warwickshire, England answers to www.doggiestyles.co.uk, for example. “Apparently, she didn’t realize.” And like most exposed by Geldman in his slurls blog, the company isn’t going to change, even though doggiestyle.co.uk is not at all about pets.

Houseofart.com didn’t make his stringent requirements (English, active, double meaning and not deliberate) but the show business agency whorepresents.com did. Among his favourites: the simple oh.no, which is the Norwegian holiday resort Osnes Hyttepark.

Among the ones that puzzle him the most: the domain name adopted by the tiny Cook Islands (you can look it up). “I mean, they didn’t have to. There can’t be that many businesses in the Cook Islands.”

Geldman swears effoff.com, the U.S. furniture company Effective Office Environments, was blissfully unaware of the British slang in the name and so makes the cut. And therapistfinder.com, a California counsellors’directory, embodies exactly what he finds funniest and most interesting: a perfectly sensible name that just happens to mean something else entirely without the capitals and the spaces.

A boring morning commute in 2006 to central London led to the creation of the blog, Geldman says. The book, officially released on Friday, was his attempt to “make something more of it.”

His stab at international URL humour falls short, he admits, when it comes to Canada. The book carries funny site names from Norway, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand — but none from Canada.

“Maybe you’re immune,” he muses. Then he offers a challenge: “The first person to find a Canadian slurl can have a free, signed copy of the book.”

Google Inc is phasing out internal use of rival Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system because of security concerns -

Citing several Google employees, the FT said the decision to move to other operating systems including Apple Inc's Mac OS and open-source Linux began in earnest in January after Google's Chinese operations were hacked.

Internet security firm McAfee Inc said at the time the cyber attacks on Google and other businesses had exploited a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which was vulnerable on all recent versions of Windows.

The FT quoted one Google employee as saying: "We're not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort." Another said: "Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO (chief information officer) approval."

Google said in a statement: "We're always working to improve the efficiency of our business, but we do not comment on specific operational matters."

Google, which already offers e-mail, Web and other software products that compete with Microsoft's offerings, is developing its own operating system based on its Chrome browser. It will initially target netbooks, or inexpensive, pared-down notebook PCs.

Microsoft Windows runs about nine out of 10 of the world's personal computers.

Friday, 28 May 2010

Eighty percent (80%) of Americans now agree with Congress that Auditing The Federal Reserve Board is a good idea -

Eighty percent (80%) of Americans now agree with Congress that auditing the Federal Reserve Board is a good idea, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Just nine percent (9%) oppose an audit of the Fed, and 12% more are not sure.

This marks little change from December. But it’s up five points from last July when Congressman Ron Paul’s proposal began to gain steam in Congress.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has consistently opposed such an audit of the Fed’s monetary policies, but it’s included in the major financial regulatory legislation now being pushed through Congress. Forty-six percent (46%) of Americans oppose more government regulation of the U.S. financial system, but 37% are in favor of it. Just 27% favor giving the Fed more regulatory control over the financial system.

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

The survey of 1,000 U.S. Adults was conducted on May 21-22, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Investors support an audit of the Fed even more strongly than non-investors.

Republicans and adults not affiliated with either major party also favor an audit more than Democrats do, but support for auditing the Fed is high across all demographic groups.

Congressional supporters of the audit see it in part as a way to check how much the Fed’s actions are influenced by political pressure. Sixty percent (60%) of Americans believe the Fed chairman is influenced by the president in his decision-marking. Just 20% say the chairman acts independently.

Bernanke and the Fed have been key players in the Obama administration’sunpopular stimulus and bailout plans.

Americans were evenly divided over whether Bernanke should stay or go just before the Senate confirmed the president’s nomination of him to a second term as Fed chairman.

Hurricane season could be stronger than usual because Black Oil would heat the water and speed formation of hurricanes -

A predicted busy hurricane season this summer is on a collision course with an unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the results are anyone's guess, weather experts say.

"The problem is that this is a man-made experiment we wish we hadn't made," said Jenni Evans, a professor of meteorology at Penn State University. Scientists on Thursday said as much as 19,000 barrels of oil have been spewing every day from the BP well in the Gulf, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Most of the oily water lies off the coast of Louisiana, where marshes and wildlife have been coated and the state's fishing and tourism industries have taken direct hits. Not only is it hard to track how contaminants would be redistributed by a hurricane, but it's also hard to predict how the slick would affect the storm, NOAA Public Affairs Officer Dennis Feltgen and Evans agreed. Evans said the storm could either move the oil along the water's surface or it could mix the oil with the water and cause it to sink. If the oil moved horizontally, the shoreline would be polluted, she said. If it moved vertically, the marine life under the surface would suffer. The oil could slow the storm's growth, Feltgen said. Evaporated ocean water fuels hurricanes, and the oil forming a film across the Gulf could buffer the water from the air, preventing the ocean water from feeding the hurricane, he said. CNN meteorologist Chad Meyers said there was another threat from the volatile mix of hurricanes and oil: storm surge.But other scientists say the storms could be stronger than usual because the black oil would heat the water faster and accelerate formation of hurricanes, which rely on warm waters for their development, Evans said. "All the winds would be coming here," he said, indicating the coast on a map, "and there would be storm surge here. All the winds would be going this way, and there would be scouring and cleaning of the beaches on this side. But the storm surge that could make its way up and bring the oil miles inland could be completely contaminating the oil inland." Oil in the Gulf coast isn't the only worry for hurricane forecasters this year: In earthquake-devastated Haiti, roughly 1.5 million displaced people are at risk. They are living under tarps and in tents in makeshift camps. In Haiti, aid agencies relocated about 20,000 people who were vulnerable to flooding and mudslides when the rainy season began. But it is impossible to hurricane-proof the congested tent cities that many are calling home right now, said Heather Paul, CEO of the aid program SOS Children's Villages. Paul's program is working to provide permanent, stable homes to orphans in the form of polypropylene shelters. While her program's anchored shelters have the greatest potential to withstand strong winds, the outlook appears grim for many Port-Au-Prince residents. "It's only short of a miracle to prepare these people for hurricane season," she said.