Author: Serkadis

Synergistic blend with Prickly Ash Bark.

Traditionally used for centuries as a Spring tonic to promote better health. Supplements the diet with Silica, Choline, Calcium and Lecithin in minute quantities.

Promotes Urinary Tract Functions. Fluid Extract 12-15% certified organic alcohol.

This unique blend of pure plant botanicals and fragrant herbs will refresh and revitalize your bathing routine. Natural emollients, sea minerals, and soothing aloe vera gently cleanse, nourish and moisturize for soft, healthy skin.Features and benefits: Our pacifying French Lavender Bath & Shower Gel brings together a medley of soothing herbal essentials, emollient-rich plant oils, nourishing panthenol B-5 pro-vitamins and sea kelp extracts, for a truly transformative bathing experience. Featuring a certified organic herbal infusion of chamomile, rosemary and sage. Who should use this product? Excellent for all skin types.

Planetary Herbals Full Spectrum Vitex Extract combines a standardized extract of chaste tree berries, concentrated to 0.5% agnusides, with whole berries. Vitex extract support female hormone production and its combination with whole berry ensure full spectrum of vitex compounds.

Planetary Herbals Full Spectrum Antler Velvet has been used in China for over 2,000 years. Antler velvet is the early stage of antler growth and is a rich source of collagen, glycosaminoglycans, and glycoproteins, all of which support the skeletal system. Antler velvet is regenerated every year and harvested with great care in controlled environment by specially trained farmers or veterinarians who confirm to the National Velvet Standards Body (NVSB) of New Zealand. Traditionally, antler velvet has been used to restore, balance, and strengthen the body, support joint function, and cultivate an overall feeling of well being.

Throughout the centuries, oats (Avena sativa) have been considered one of the most nourishing tonics for general weakness and men’s health. Planetary Herbals Avena Sativa Oat Complex for Men combines highly concentrated oat and nettle root extracts and whole saw palmetto berries with some of the most respected Western and Chinese tonics for men, including damiana and ginseng, to support a healthy prostate.

Gamma Oryzanol is a naturally occurring plant sterol derived from rice bran oil. It has long been popular among athletes.

Gamma-linolenic acid or GLA, and linoleic acid are essential, polyunsaturated fatty acids. They are used by most cells in the body to produce the soothing prostaglandins (intracellular hormone-like messengers), that Enhance maintain the balance of many functions in the body.

In the last few years, Microsoft has become a bigger and bigger supporter of patents, which is a bit ironic, given that Bill Gates once pointed out that the software industry never would have developed if there had been software patents back in the early days. But, proving that new companies innovate, while older companies litigate, Microsoft has become a big patent hoarder in recent years. But, to date, while it’s used those patents to threaten lots of companies, it seems like Microsoft’s decision to live by patents, is actually costing it quite a bit of money.

We’ve already covered Microsoft’s big loss to i4i at the end of last year, for which Microsoft was told to pay nearly $300 million. And, now, Microsoft has lost a patent lawsuit in East Texas (of course) from a company that appears to have been set up just to sue Microsoft — claiming patents over VPN technology. In fact, the company’s business plan basically admits that its business model is to win these sorts of lawsuits. Hard to see how that’s promoting progress or innovation in any way. Oh well. Live by the patent, die by the patent, I guess…

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A few weeks back, we were a bit concerned about a judge’s decision to force offline a satirical “news story” about a fake giraffe attack at the Global Wildlife Center in Louisiana. Just because GWC was worried that some people might take the story seriously, it doesn’t remove the First Amendment rights of the creators of the satirical site. Thankfully, the judge now agrees and has removed the injunction and ordered GWC to pay the legal costs of the site’s creators. The judge noted that while the center had some concerns about how the article was viewed, it doesn’t change the fact that the content is protected free speech as satire.

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Ron Paul appeared on Fox Business to talk about the Federal Reserve, the flawed monetary system and the inflation it creates.

Channel: Fox Business
Date: 03/16/2010

Transcript coming soon!

Related posts:

1. Ron Paul on the Financial Reform Bill Ron Paul appeared on The ED Show to discuss Senator…
2. Ron Paul and Neil Cavuto discuss Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve and inflation Channel: Fox Business Date: 7/21/2009 Transcript Neil Cavuto: Ben…
3. Ron Paul on Larry King Live Ron Paul and James Carville appeared on Larry King Live…

So you want to be the ultimate fighter? Well, check out the latest trailer of THQ’s upcoming UFC installment, UFC Undisputed 2010, featuring no other than current UFC Lightweight Champion, BJ “The Prodigy” Penn.

As a result of a widely funded Kickstarter project, 8-Bit NYC [8bitnyc.com] represents a real-world place like New York City to look like as an 8-bit video game map. (An Austin version exists as well) The resulting map mixes the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games with the kind of geographical data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation. The map is interactive (similar to Google Maps), allowing zooming down to an individual street.

If you like alternative ways of mapping, see also San Francisco in Jell-O, New York Represented as LEGO and Hand-Cut Street Maps. Specifically for New York, check out Playgrounds in NYC, Income versus Rent Demographics in NYC, Homicides in NYC, Senseable City New York, Alternative Subway Map NYC, Sparkline Subway Map NYC and Visual Composition of New York.

Let’s take a quick tour around the globe and catch up on what’s happening, shall we?

• Healthcare reform foes just 11 votes shy of killing the bill (CNN)
• Huge spending cuts coming to the Garden State (NYT)
• Japan: More money printing to tackle deflation (Bloomberg)
• Australia facing a housing “time bomb” (Sydney Morning Herald)
• Major power supply issues in South Africa (Mail & Guardian)
• Dmitry Medveded growing into his role as a Russian strongman (Moscow Times)
• China tells the US to buzz off on currency pressure (Shanghai Daily)
• Hackers hit Chinese defense websites, too (Shanghai Daily)
• Hillary to Israel: No, really, we’re still friends (BBC)
• LA mayor in DC looking for a handout (LA Times)
• New poll out shows violent divisions on healthcare (WSJ)

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This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

Last year, I spoke with some folks in the White House about various systems for doing “innovation prizes.” I got the impression that the whole concept of innovation prizes and encouraging and rewarding breakthrough ideas in more creative means was a top priority among the team I spoke with. So, it’s no surprise to hear that the White House is now planning to launch its very own innovation prize platform. The government, of course, is no stranger to innovation prizes, with things like the DARPA’s “grand challenge” for autonomous vehicles, and its more recent “find the red balloons” challenge. However, I believe the goal here is to make it easier for other parts of the federal government to quickly offer up compelling innovation challenges. While I’ll be curious to see the platform in action — and how it’s used — it’s really great to see the federal government seriously exploring and enabling new and different ways to encourage innovation. It’s especially encouraging to see them not just fall back on thinking that “patents” are the only lever they can pull.

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By Charles Fromm WASHINGTON, Mar 16 (IPS) Representatives from seven North African and Sahelian states convened in Algiers on Tuesday to discuss the growing threat of al Qaeda's North African affiliate in the region.

Government delegates from Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger assembled to formulate a cohesive strategy to fight the extremist group, which is generally held responsible for a variety of attacks and kidnappings throughout the region.

In Washington, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State P. J. Crowley called the effort "collective action against groups that seek to exploit territories of these countries and launch attacks against innocent civilians."

The meeting is the first of its kind between these states, and after a full day of private discussions, officials seemed to reach a mutual understanding. "We have reached a full consensus to tackle terrorism in the region," Abdelkader Messahel, Algeria's Minister Delegate for African and Maghreb Affairs, told reporters on Tuesday afternoon in Algiers.

According to Messahel, officials decided to re-convene in the Algerian capital next month to clarify specifics. "We will go for action and one step is a meeting between military and anti-terror specialists of the region in Algiers in April," he said.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), whose leadership is based in southern Algeria, has claimed responsibility for a series of suicide bombings, attacks and kidnappings in the North African and Saharan region over the past few years.

AQIM was previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (SGPC), an Algerian rebel group started by Hassan Hattab, a former Armed Islamic Group commander. The Armed Islamic Group was a main faction in Algeria's bloody civil war that spanned most of the 1990s, when a coalition of Islamist insurgents challenged the central government's rule after disputed elections.

However, in 2006, al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, announced the union of SGPC with al Qaeda in a video released on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, followed by a formal statement made by SGPC, in which they pledged allegiance to al Qaeda's central leadership and adopted the AQIM moniker.

AQIM has been held responsible for the killings of many civilians, particularly aid workers and tourists, as well as the December 2007 twin bombings of the United Nations offices and a court building in Algiers that claimed 41 lives.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a press release on Tuesday calling on AQIM to stop targeting civilians and release its remaining hostages. The New York-based group also called on the foreign officials meeting in Algiers to "categorically denounce AQIM's attacks against civilians."

Kidnappings are also a main component of AQIM's repertoire. Last week, they released one of the three Spanish aid workers they had held since last year. On Feb. 23, they released a French aid worker, Pierre Camatte, whom they had taken hostage on Nov. 25, 2009, after Mali's government released four AQIM prisoners (two of whom were Algerian and one Mauritanian), sparking a diplomatic row between the three countries.

Some believe the presence of Mali at the conference could signal a warming of ties between the Malian officials and their Mauritanian and Algerian contemporaries.

"The prisoner release took place largely because Mali was unwilling to let a French hostage die," said Alex Thurston, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University who also authors sahelblog.wordpress.com, a blog that analyses religion, politics and news in the Sahel (Saharan) region and the Horn of Africa.

"As for Algeria and Mauritania, inviting Mali to the summit suggests that the benefits of cooperation have outweighed anger over the prisoner release," Thurston told IPS.

Western governments have long worried that the vast ungoverned spaces between these neighbouring countries could be exploited by international terrorist organisations. Indeed, it is believed AQIM has retained its connections to cross-border smuggling, protection rackets and money laundering in these areas, which it has relied upon for funding since its days as the SGPC. Their practice of holding hostages for ransom also dates back to before the name change.

Now, in addition to these practices, the group is believed to have expanded into facilitating the transport of multi-tonne cocaine shipments across the Sahara desert in order to continue to fund their operations.

In December 2009, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration arrested three men in connection with an alleged transnational drug conspiracy, linking the Colombian rebel group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), al Qaeda and AQIM.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), because of increased border security between the U.S. and Mexico, South American narcotics trafficking organisations have shifted their focus to the burgeoning markets of Europe and especially Britain, which has seen a recent resurgence in cocaine use, according to the U.K's National Treatment Agency.

According to the report and to U.N. officials, large quantities of the drug are flown or ferried across the Atlantic Ocean and then transported through the Sahara in West Africa and across the Mediterranean Sea to be sold in Europe. AQIM is said to charge a fee for ensuring the safe passage and security of the desert leg of this journey.

To authorities, this "reflect[s] the emergence of a worrisome alliance between al Qaeda and trans-national narcotics traffickers," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

But other analysts believe this reflects a much more ad-hoc relationship of convenience than anything else.

"There's a real danger in looking at the drug smuggling in terms of AQIM," said the author of themoornextdoor.com, a well-read blog about politics and diplomacy in North Africa, who asked not to be identified. He contends that the emergence of the drug trade in the region is just a symptom of a broken system, which is often neglected by the rest of the world.

"The drug smuggling represents a whole series of structural problems. We need to change the way we engage with the region as a whole. If we only look to these countries and this region when there is a summit going on, that's a problem," he told IPS.

Two dead General Motors brands, Saturn and Hummer, will get their last hurrah on the automaker’s assembly line.

“We are building out a few Saturns to utilize existing material,” GM spokeswoman Kim Carpenter said. She said that GM will assemble Outlooks for a few more weeks.

The automaker made 1,037 Outlook crossovers last month after not making any Saturns in October.

A fleet company has also ordered 849 Hummer H3s and H3Ts, so the Hummer line in Shreveport, La., will restart April 12 to build the vehicles. The automaker has promised to finish the Hummer production run by May 13.

Hummer stopped production in January.

– By: Omar Rana

Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)

Annally Capital plots the data from the latest Federal Reserve flow of funds report:

And Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns explains exactly what this means:

First of all, what this chart shows you is that the consumer is not deleveraging significantly (see Consumer credit down, but does it show deleveraging? and Why is everyone saying consumer credit is falling? It’s not). Sure revolving debt (read: credit card debt) has fallen. But mortgage debt is still sky high. And on a debt to GDP basis, there really isn’t a huge come down. Sorry, but that’s what the data are saying. For an indebted household sector, this is bad news.

But, then you look at the other sectors and you see that the financial sector is deleveraging in a massive way. When I last looked the data, I concluded that the U.S. economy was wholly dependent on leverage in the financial sector to continue growing. So, the decreased financial sector leverage spells a lower growth future.

Finally, the government sector debt load continues to surge upward. Keynesians will tell you that the deficit spending that is the source of this increasing debt load is needed to increase savings in the private sector. However, it appears that most of the savings is being done in the financial sector and not in the household sector where it should be.

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See Also:

• SocGen: There Is No Way Out Of This Mess But Continued Massive Deleveraging
• Rosenberg: We’ve Barely Begun The Deleveraging Process
• Goldman: Here’s 3 Reasons The Consumer Rebound Is Going To Sputter Out

A few years back, UK law firm Davenport Lyons made a splash by sending out a ton of “pre-settlement” letters to people accused of file sharing, threatening to sue them if they didn’t pay a few hundred pounds. The law firm used a default judgment (i.e., a case where the defendant didn’t show up) to claim that it had the law on its side and would sue and win. Of course, an investigation into the thousands of letters being sent found that plenty of innocent bystanders were being sent those letters as well — which certainly raised all sorts of questions about the legitimacy of the effort. The negative publicity resulted in some high profile Davenport Lyons customers backing out of their relationship, and eventually a new entity called ACS:Law to pop up to continue the effort — though, an investigation found that the documents used by ACS:law were created by Davenport Lyons.

Despite many calls for sanctions against the lawyers for taking part in an effort that has remarkable similarities to a traditional shakedown scheme, there had been little response from regulators. However Marcus alerts us to the news that two Davenport Lyons lawyers have now been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. I’m not quite sure how this process works in the UK, but it seems like it’s about time that someone was checking in on these activities.

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