Author: Serkadis

While everyone else is left scratching their heads, Amazon and its lawyers are patting themselves on the back. The company has managed to (re)confirm a patent for 1-Click, a method of buying stuff online with, you guessed it, just one click. And that’s it, that’s all there is to it. If you deploy a system that enables customers to purchase anything online… (read more)

Wondering how you’ll be able to pull off those deadly finishing moves in Fist of the North Star? In Rei’s case, think quicktime events. Stun enemies and button prompts pop up, allowing you to finish them off

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced today that the number of overall traffic fatalities reported at the end of 2009 reached the lowest level since 1954, declining for the 15th consecutive quarter.

“This is exciting news, but there are still far too many people dying in traffic accidents,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “Drivers need to keep their hands on the steering wheel and their focus on the road in order to stay safe.”

DOT said that the projected fatality data for 2009 places the highway death count at 33,963, a drop of 8.9 percent as compared to the 37,261 deaths reported in 2008.

“This continuing decline in highway deaths is encouraging, but our work is far from over,” said National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator David Strickland. “We want to see those numbers drop further. We will not stop as long as there are still lives lost on our nation’s highways.

The NHTSA attributes the decline in 2009 to high-visibility campaigns like “Click it or Ticket” to increase seat belt use and “Drunk Driving Over the Limit Under Arrest, which assists with the enforcement of state laws to prevent drunk driving and distracted driving.

– By: Kap Shah

A game development team was hard at work when the police suddenly busted in and put them all on handcuffs. How’d that happen?

Who says that numbers aren’t fun? A top muni bond analyst at Wells Fargo sent this to me:

What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once?

Sometimes time drags, and sometimes it flies. I came to this brilliant observation yesterday while waiting in the California DMV, waiting for my 15 1/2 year old daughter to obtain her driver’s permit. Time has flown. On the other hand, in the mortgage business, it seems like a lifetime ago when companies were offering stated/stated 90% Neg AM loans. Can anyone seriously push to have those days come back?

That being said, ING notified its brokers that it raised LTV’s and CLTV’s, especially on Jumbo adjustable rate mortgages. US Bank’s wholesale division is pushing its 1/1, 3/1, 5/1, 7/1, 10/1 ARM programs with IO options, cash out, up to $1.5 million. EverBank is “dipping their toe” back into the Jumbo market but with elevated credit guidelines & asset requirements.” For example, its “Preferred ARM” products were tweaked to only include 5/1 & 7/1 Fully Amortizing ARM or 5/1 & 7/1 10 year Interest Only ARM’s, with a maximum LTV/CLTV remaining at 80%, maximum loan amount reduced to $1.5 million. The pricing is rumored to be good, but 1 Unit Single Family Detached & Attached only, including FNMA-eligible Condominiums & PUDs with a minimum FICO of 740 and a minimum reserve requirement of 12 months PITIA .

Wells’ correspondent clients were notified that after April 1st Wells, in response to HOEPA, requires specific interest rate data for higher-priced mortgage loans (HPML) to be reported to HMDA and the Agencies. “In our ongoing effort to ensure regulatory compliance, Wells Fargo Funding will begin requiring and reviewing for documentation of the borrower interest rate set date.” Clients need to include the Borrower Interest Rate Set Date Form, a screen-print of a populated FFIEC rate spread calculator, or a lock agreement with the borrower. Starting now, however, Wells Fargo Funding will now accept signed overnight delivery and courier receipts as proof of receipt of the Truth-in-Lending document by the borrower. There are, of course, policies and procedures to follow – check the actual newsflash for details.

Wells’ wholesale shifted its PUD review requirements in order to meet Agency requirements. “Additional reviews are necessary for Planned Unit Developments (PUDs) with unit-owner responsibility for amenities (specifically golf courses) that are funded by the association” for conforming and non-conforming conventional loans. After March 15th, “If the PUD project is an ineligible project, or if the PUD is associated with a golf course, the Homeowner’s Association budget must be reviewed. If the HOA budget makes a contribution of more than 10% of the HOA dues for the maintenance of the golf course, the loan will be reviewed.”

After March 29th, MGIC will have changed underwriting guidelines, restricted market changes, and new premium plans “for loans originated for and sold to MGIC-Approved State and Local HFAs.” And MGIC’s “HFA Affordability+” rates will be replaced with MGIC’s new national premium plans effective Saturday, May 1, 2010, subject to regulatory approval. But getting back to the changes after the 29th, MGIC has instituted a series of credit changes (minimum of 3 tradelines evaluated for 12 months, loans without valid credit scores must meet MGIC’s Nontraditional Credit guidelines, and Nontraditional Credit maximum 90% LTV), adjusted its DTI and LTV’s for certain FICO scores. Changes, too numerous to list here, also involve minimum borrower contributions, subordinate financing, and restricted market states.

In California (state motto: “By age 30, our women have more plastic than your Honda) last year 47% of all homebuyers were first-time homebuyers, up from 35.9% in 2008. And REO and short sales made up half of the assets sold in the state, up from 36% in 2008, according to the California Association of Realtors. Of those surveyed by CAR, 40% of the homebuyers said they would not have purchased a home without the first time buyer tax credit. Lastly, the higher FHA loan amounts ($729,750 for single family) helped: in 2009 FHA loans accounted for 32% of the market compared to 18.9% in 2008, according to CAR.

HUD issued a new Mortgagee Letter that addressed the validity period for appraisals for HUD’s Real Estate Owned (REO) properties and also announced the conditions for which a second appraisal may be ordered for purchasers of REO properties utilizing FHA financing. After 4/1 all appraisals utilized to establish the listing price on an REO property owned by HUD will be valid for a period of 120 days from the effective date of the appraisal instead of the current 6 months. And effective immediately, with the exception of 203(k) as-repaired appraisals, “when a buyer is using FHA financing to purchase a HUD REO property, the appraisal that was utilized in determining the list price will remain effective for purposes of obtaining the FHA-insured mortgage. A second appraisal may not be ordered simply to support a purchase price that is higher than the value on the current appraisal…only if there are material deficiencies with the current appraisal or the current appraisal will not be valid on the date of contract ratification.”

Mortgage analysts and traders often talk about “negative convexity.” What is that? It is critical to remember that, for fixed income instruments, when rates go up, prices go down. (In a 5% environment, a $100 bond pays $5 per year. But if rates go up to 10%, investors want $10 per year, so the price of the original bond has to go down so that the $5 per year it pays will equal 10% of the purchase price for an investor.) Conversely, if rates go down, prices go up – simple!

But if the bond is “callable”, meaning that the issuer can pay it off, like a mortgage, as interest rates fall, the incentive for the issuer to call the bond at par increases; therefore, its price will not rise as quickly as the price of a non-callable bond. In fact, the price of a callable bond (like a mortgage) might actually drop as the likelihood that the bond will be called increases. This is why the shape of a callable bond’s curve of price with respect to yield is concave, or “negatively convex.” A very simple way to explain it is that mortgages pay off when rates drop, just when servicers and investors don’t want them to pay off, so mortgage prices don’t improve as much in a rally as, say, a Treasury bond!

There is definitely an argument for higher rates over the next few years. Although some analysts believe that the economy is going to head back down, everything I have seen suggests that everyone believes things are better than they were. If the economy is indeed beginning to do better and expand, in the past five-year Treasury rates have tracked fairly closely to nominal growth (growth not adjusted for inflation), and in fact nominal growth and long-term rates tend to converge. So if history is a guide, the 10-year Treasury yield will likely double from the lows of the recession to the end of 2011, due at least in part to much improved economic growth. Of course the good news in this scenario is that more borrowers will actually have jobs, and homes will be appreciating.

But for now, mortgage rates and prices are darn good. In fact, 4.5% securities are above a price of 101 (1 point premium), and if you add the value of servicing onto these 4.75-5.125% 30-yr loans, agents should have a very nice rebate. Origination has indeed picked up to $1.5-2 billion a day, and there is still demand for the product. And there is certainly demand for the Treasury securities – yesterday’s $21 billion 10-yr sale went well. In fact, the bid-to-cover ratio set a record of 3.45:1. Today we have $13 billion of 30-yr bonds to sell, a “re-opening” of the last batch. We have already had the weekly jobless claims and the Trade Balance figures (actually somewhat smaller than expected). Jobless Claims came in at 462,000, down from a revised 468k, but continuing claims were up slightly. The impact on the market of these numbers was nil: the new 10-yr is yielding 3.74% and mortgage prices are worse by about .125.

An Irish priest is driving down to New York and gets stopped for speeding in Connecticut. The state trooper smells alcohol on the priest’s breath and then sees an empty wine bottle on the floor of the car.
He asks, “Father, have you been drinking?”
“Just water,” replies the priest.
The trooper asks, “Then why do I smell wine?”
The priest looks at the bottle, smells it, and exclaims, “Good Lord! He’s done it again!”

Rob
(Check out http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/channels/pipelinepress/default.aspx. For archived commentaries, check www.robchrisman.com )

An electric-car company by the name of Aurica Motors LLC is proposing a plan to keep the California plant New United Motor Manufacturing Inc open, a plant that was a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. Aurica said that it will build zero-emission vehicles there, according to General Manager Matt Pitagora.

“We want to keep the plant open, and we believe we have a very viable plan to do so by manufacturing electric cars,” Pitagora said. “It’s all about keeping the lights on.”

Aurica is a little-known start-up based in Santa Clara, California, with eight employees and unknown finances. The company plans on building electric-vehicles within two years at NUMMI, which is scheduled to close its doors on March 31. GM originally pulled out of the venture last year after undergoing reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Toyota later said that keeping the plant open without GM was not financially viable.

Aurica said it was start training NUMMI’s 4,700 workforce in April and will keep as many workers on the payroll as possible. Aurica plans on financing the move by tapping into the federal government’s green car economic stimulus fund.

Aurica said it has a chassis design for its car, which could cost in the range of $40,000 to $50,000.

– By: Omar Rana

Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)

In an interview with Metropolis’ POV blog, Jan H. De Jager, a Dutch civil engineer and dike and dam expert, finds fault in New Orleans’ new coastal and storm management system and discusses how “soft coastal engineering” is more effective than vertical walls in combatting sea level rise.

De Jager says the current reconstruction work in New Orleans, which involves rebuilding solid vertical walls, is the wrong way to go. “One of the projects I’ve seen is the storm-surge barrier being built across the New Orleans Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. In my opinion, this is a completely wrong structure. It’s a vertical wall to stop the waves. That thing will collapse when you have another category-five hurricane.” Instead, soft coastal engineering, featuring natural marsh systems, would be more effective: “I would restore the marine marshes, the growth of trees, the barrier islands. That’s where your protection should be, not in these massive storm-surge barriers.”

Os Schmitz, Professor of Population and Ecology at Yale University, made a similar argument for restoring natural barrier systems in New Orleans in a recent interview. “The mangroves that used to grow there were excellent buffers for hurricanes before there was much settlement. These mangroves were a highly cost-effective way of controlling hurricane damage. When those were removed and the wetlands were removed and the dikes were put in their place, the human built environment became less resilient. The mini-experiment that sort of proved this was a year after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was another hurricane of I believe close to or equal in magnitude to Katrina that hit the Yucatan in a tourist area. The people in the Yucatan were really worried that the hurricane was going to destroy a lot of the hotels. But, they still have their mangroves in place. They still had those marshlands in place. These features acted as terrific buffers against that hurricane. The resort areas were spared a lot of damage because nature helped buffer the winds and the tidal surge. Here’s an example of where nature provides an important service to humankind. It isn’t about fighting nature and getting rid of nature in favor of built environments. It’s the idea that nature can be beneficial to us.” 

Holland is a country well versed in climate change adaptation, and the Dutch are now tapping their long history of carefully managing water levels to prepare for ongoing sea level rise. “It’s a country built on sediments, which were brought in by the Rhine River. A couple hundred thousand years ago we didn’t even exist. Our ancestors have dealt with sea level rises in the past. And they had only modest means, so what they did was build little platforms, plateaus, where they built up their farms and houses. So when sea water would rise, they would run to their earth plateau and sit out the high water.”

In addition to maintaining its complex system of dikes and dams, Holland will also preserve the role of sandbars in coastal sea level maintenance. “Our coast is all sand dunes, like you have in certain parts of the Carolinas and some parts of Texas. Big waves form in deeper water. So when you lower the water depths just in front of the coastline, even if the sea level rises and the waves come in, the sandbar breaks the waves into smaller ones. Depending on the type of storm and the way the water is flowing, the sandbars will last one to ten years. If the sandbar has eroded too much, you pump sand again.”

However, De Jager thinks its inevitable that some land will have to be given back to the sea. In some cases, ceding back the land doesn’t need to be negative: it can be an opportunity for restoring coastal ecosystems. “In Holland, we have been doing that, making cuts in the dunes and letting seawater enter in a safe way. But that was largely an environmental move, because we wanted to bring back certain plant species that had been lost for one hundred years. It’s not so much a safety concern as a matter of creating new brackish habitats.”

Read the interview and check out an earlier post on Metropolis Magazine’s vision for the future of landscape architecture.

Image credit: Dutch Sandbar. Climate Adaptation Lab, Netherlands

Here’s another fine article by my friend, Tom Fiske:

Genealogy has given me a lot of fun, but more importantly it has given me a sense of where I belong in the grand scheme of things. And it is not among royalty, either. No, I sprang from a large collection of average Americans, where everyone is royalty, or at least we think we are as good as anyone else. Royalty is a private club of those who are born to it. They can neither get in voluntarily nor can they leave voluntarily. Royalty is a genetic condition that is not always good. Many of the royals were bad politicians. They were so bad that various parliaments have taken away their political powers.

Think about it: would you rather be remembered as King George III (who lost the American Colonies) or would you rather be remembered as Mrs. Rosa Parks (the elderly lady who refused to give her bus seat to a white person)? Surely, one of these two has done more for society than the other. I think Mrs. Parks has a special kind of American royalty.

My son-in-law asked me to help him with his genealogy. His dad, divorced from his mother, died a heavy drinker. He was not well thought of in his family. We got to looking through old records and did not find much. Then my son-in-law mentioned that his dad had served in WWII. Once I had the name of his dad’s Army unit I found all sorts of things on the Internet, by tracing that unit from Casablanca through the north of Italy. He had been in the Fifth Army and I had written a book about the Fifth in Italy called Full Duty, so I knew something of its history.

It turns out that his dad carried a rifle and had been through some of the harshest fighting in WWII. He was in the same outfit that Senator Bob Dole was in, but Dole was blown up and suffered the rest of his life. I thought about the death and destruction that this dad must have been through for four long years, and told my son-in-law, “Your dad was a true American hero.”

“Heroism leaves scars,” I wrote in one book or another. I am sure this dad was not the same person when he came out of the Army that he was when he went in, four years before. He must have suffered all sorts of internal emotional injuries that kept him from living like many other young men of the same age. “Cut your dad some slack,” I told my son-in-law, “Accept him as a war hero injured in some of the fiercest fighting mankind has ever seen.”

Most of us genealogists need tolerance.

Having learned tolerance at an early age, I was well suited for a study of genealogy. Why did I learn tolerance? Well my mother was a Southern Baptist Democrat and my father was a Episcopalian Conservative Republican. Try growing up in a household staffed with parents like that when both were active politically and in their churches. Talk about tip-toeing through the tulips! My two brothers and I had to be careful not to choose sides. We watched and listened to the various opinions they offered without belonging to any of the groups more than nominally.

My father’s ancestors, I later learned, were there when Rhode Island was founded, while my mother’s ancestors were busy in Virginia at an equally early age. Some of them were American Indians, too. Dark skins and tomahawks and all that. But whatever their backgrounds, I found that my parents were both Southerners, so they could agree on one thing besides their love for each other.

“What does tolerance have to do with genealogy?” you might ask. It is just that we are not who we think we are or who we want to be. We are, warts and all, the sum totals of those folks whom we discovered in piles of musty old records. If we want to be honest, we have to accept them and find the good where we can.

Oh, I know, we try to put the best face on what we find, but really, that is just window dressing, pumping up the resume’ a tad. No one is fooled if we claim to be descended from earls and princes and explorers—least of all, ourselves. Down deep, we know we are (most of us) ordinary folks, raw immigrants at one time who may not have made big marks in history by themselves.

But, and this is a big but, together with the rest of society in our area, we formed churches, libraries, schools, hospitals and homes for the poor. We were minor political leaders, ministers, or simply followers of the law, the kinds of people who made this the great nation it became in a rather short time. We were the type of people who “caught the vision” of what kind of place we wanted to live in. Americans had the choice few others in the history of the world have had. We chose to live in a democratic society that we made up as we went along.

Once I asked my mother why people did not break the law and cheat in some obvious way (that a seven year-old could discern), when cheating appeared so easy. Mother said, “I suppose it is because people don’t want to live in a world full of cheaters.” And I think Mother really had a handle on something big. She had “caught the vision.”

We do not have a large number of policemen watching over us because by and large, we are a law-abiding society. That is part of the American ethic. We protect the small and weak, we generally pay our taxes, we pay to attend theaters, and we generally know how to conduct ourselves in stores where a customer takes items from the shelves by himself (in some countries, that could never occur). Nowadays in some stores we even check ourselves out and pay for our purchases without supervision! A democracy won’t work everywhere. It needs a good ethical system to support it.

When I retired from industry, I had too much energy to sit in a chair and rock, so I joined up with the local school district to teach science and math. Having tried all grade levels from 6 to 12, I began to specialize in the seventh grade (I thought about teaching elementary school kids, but I looked at the size of my shoes and decided not. I was afraid I might accidentally step on a second-grader and kill it).

As a fully accredited school teacher overseeing classrooms of 30-36 kids at a time, I began to see where some of our ideas about society came from. It was in the home where societal rules were introduced, but it was in the classroom where they were reinforced. Teachers didn’t just teach algebra, they also protected small kids from the big predatory ones, they frowned on cheating, they encouraged self-confidence, and they showed kids the value of an orderly, ethical society. It was amazing how quickly I fell into the habits my teachers had from fifty years before; those habits were part of my psyche.

And there was one more thing I saw from the head of the classroom every morning: I saw 36 kids of all kinds, shapes and colors. “Here is real Democracy,” I often thought. Every kid is treated the same no matter what. I realized that teaching kids in a democratic society is a rare privilege. So is the opportunity to pass along the American “vision.” We owe our school teachers a great deal.

What will future genealogists find, a hundred years from now? Will they see our lives as brief flashes of history with birth, marriage and death dates firmly attached to our names… and little else? Or will they see our lives as parts of a continuity that gave strength and depth to the fabric of a great society which influenced the rest of the world? It depends in part on what kind of a story we leave them. Maybe we can be anchors that give them perspectives both about their pasts and their positions in the present. I am grateful for the vision that my ancestors left for me.

Thomas S. Fiske
Fullerton, CA
February 20,2010

A bunch of news sites have been playing up a minor item in a Deutsche Bank note to clients about how Apple has a lot more patents than Google or HTC. I have to say, this is one of the most meaningless bits of data out there, and it’s getting way too much attention for its import. First of all, it looks like the report counted overall patents — not even patents just in the spaces where these companies overlap. Second, the number of patents one holds is absolutely meaningless when it comes to actually being able to enforce the patents.

More troubling is the report’s conclusion:

“While litigation appears to be an increasingly common cost of doing business,” he concludes, “we view Apple’s willingness to aggressively defend its patent portfolio favorably and welcome the defense of its IP.”

Historically, this is generally not a good sign. It’s usually a sign that a company has run into an innovation stumbling block, and doesn’t think it can really continue to innovate at the pace the market is expecting, so it seeks to hold back competitors and pump up revenue through litigation, rather than innovation. A smart research report would note that breaking out the offensive patent lawsuits is generally a warning sign. But, then again, this is a research report that thinks the overall number of patents a tech company has is a meaningful metric.

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Red Faction: Guerrilla was generally well received by game critics, but its sales still failed to live up to publisher THQ’s expectations. They’re making sure that doesn’t happen with the franchise’s next entry.

Combined with interferon and ribavirin, clinical trials on Vertex’s telaprevir demonstrate twice the success rate in clearing Hepatitis C in half the time as traditional combination therapy. While this alone is exciting, Vertex is exploring a range of drug combination options for battling the Hepatitis C virus.

Vertex Maps Out Combo Drug Game Plan for Treating Hepatitis C

Luke Timmerman 3/8/10

HIV has taught the pharmaceutical industry that the best way to fight an infectious virus that resists a single drug is to make a cocktail that attacks the virus in more than one way. Vertex Pharmaceuticals and its competitors are now following a similar formula with new therapies for hepatitis C.

Vertex, the Cambridge, MA-based company with operations in San Diego, offered a glimpse last week into its strategy for a two-drug combo that could significantly change hepatitis C treatment. If the company has mapped this out correctly, it could rid people of the virus while letting them ditch the detested standard therapies that force them to endure months of flu-like symptoms.

Continue reading this entire article:
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/03/08/vertex-maps-out-combo-drug-as-new-game-plan-for-treating-hepatitis-c/

Following yesterday’s announcement of Rock Band 3, MTV Games and Harmonix have given the upcoming Green Day: Rock Band a June release date.

By Charles Fromm and Mohammed A. Salih WASHINGTON, Mar 11 (IPS) The United States should accept an "Islamist authority" in Somalia as part of a "constructive disengagement" strategy for the war-torn country, according to a new report released here by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on Wednesday.

The 39-page report urges the U.S. to recognise that "Islamist authority" even if it includes al-Shabaab, or "the youth" in Arabic, an Islamist insurgent group that has declared loyalty to al Qaeda.

It calls the current U.S. approach toward Somalia of propping up the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) "counterproductive". Not only is it alienating large sections of the Somali population, but it is effectively polarising its diverse Muslim community into so-called "moderate" and "extremist" camps, the report says.

While the report encourages an "inclusive posture" by the U.S. toward local fundamentalists, it suggests the U.S. should show "zero-tolerance' toward transnational actors attempting to exploit Somalia's conflict", apparently referring to al Qaeda.

"The Shabaab is an alliance of convenience and its hold over territory is weaker than it appears. Somali fundamentalists – whose ambitions are mostly local – are likely to break ranks with al-Qaeda and other foreign operatives as the utility of cooperation diminishes," says the report, authored by Bronwyn Bruton, a CFR international affairs fellow. "The United States and its allies must encourage these fissures to expand."

However, David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to neighbouring Ethiopia in the 1990s, disagrees that the al-Shabaab leadership will be ready to join any future political arrangement in the country.

"I think al-Shabaab has become more radicalised and I don't see any pragmatic leaders in al-Shabaab today. Many in the rank and file maybe pragmatic, the gun-carriers, but they are not the leaders," said Shinn, who also served as U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso in the late 1980s.

"I don't see cracks in the leadership and I don't see pragmatics in the leadership. A lot of the report is predicated on the idea that it is possible to negotiate with al-Shabaab and I think that's wishful thinking," he said.

The report also warns against continued support for the U.N.-backed TFG since it has proven "ineffective and costly".

"The TFG is unable to improve security, deliver basic services, or move toward an agreement with Somalia's clans and opposition groups that would provide a stronger basis for governance," the report says.

The TFG was established in 2004 through U.N. mediation in Kenya in an effort to end the ongoing crisis in Somalia. The TFG moved to Somalia in 2005 but has been unable to make "any progress on state building tasks" due to internal divisions, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said.

It was hoped that the installation of Sharif Ahmed, the former head of the Union of Islamic Courts, as president in January 2009 would attract a sufficient number of Islamist leaders to subdue or at least fragment al-Shabaab's forces. But Shinn says the TFG has become "marginally stronger" in recent months.

"She [Bruton] seems to begin with the assumption that the TFG is doomed to fail. I am not convinced that it will fail," said Shinn, who was a member of the Advisory Committee to the report. "The fact the TFG under President Ahmed has now existed for more than a year has already surprised many so-called Somali experts. It's just wrong to make the assumption that it's going to fail."

Entitled "Somalia , A New Approach", the report comes at a critical moment in the evolution of U.S. policy toward Somalia . Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are helping the Somali government, which has about 7,000 troops in the capital, plan an impending TFG military offensive aimed at dislodging al-Shabaab fighters from Mogadishu.

The report details two decades of strife in the Horn of Africa nation, the establishment of the TFG, and its ongoing ensuing power struggle with the al-Shabaab's movement and its allies.

Bruton contends that the U.S. policy of providing indirect diplomatic and military support to the weak TFG has only "served to isolate the government, and…to propel cooperation among previously fractured and quarrelsome extremist groups."

The report calls on the United States to make a final attempt to help the Somali government build public support by drawing in leaders of the other Islamist groups. But it urges the administration of President Barack Obama to consider major policy changes should the TFG fail or continue to be marginalised to the point of powerlessness.

The TGF, which is backed by some 5,000 African Union (AU) troops in a U.N.-authorised peacekeeping mission, controls only several blocks of Somalia's sprawling capital of Mogadishu and the Aden Adde International Airport, while al-Shabaab controls vast swaths of land to the south, and parts of the capital as well.

Historically, Washington's interest in the volatile East African nation has been limited to security issues, and most recently to denying sanctuary to al Qaeda or its affiliates on Somali territory. In recent years, the U.S. has carried out a number of attacks on targets in Somalia believed to be linked to al Qaeda.

However, some analysts believe that the U.S. help could easily lead to strengthening the insurgent movement in an already complicated set of circumstances.

"The administration has decided to move aggressively to support the TFG and is providing training, intelligence, military advice, and hardware to the TFG army in anticipation of a major TFG offensive against al-Shabaab," said David R. Smock, vice president of the United States Institute of Peace's Centre for Mediation and Conflict Resolution.

"This is a major American gamble which could backfire. The offensive could easily fail, which might lead the U.S. to get even more heavily engaged. We have been burned badly in Somalia before, and we could be burned again," he added.

In late 1992, the administration of former President George H. W. Bush sent troops to Somalia as part of a U.N.-authorised operation to protect the delivery of humanitarian and food relief to starving communities there. But, in an aborted "nation-building" enterprise, U.S. military forces became increasingly engaged in the ongoing warfare between and among clans that followed the ouster in 1991 of the Siad Barre regime.

Then-President Bill Clinton began withdrawing U.S. troops after 18 SOF soldiers were killed during a botched helicopter raid against one clan leader in Mogadishu in October, 2003 and completed the withdrawal early in 2004.

The CFR report also recommends a decentralised development strategy in collaboration with "the informal and traditional authorities" on the ground. It calls for restraining Ethiopia, which has been involved in Somalia's conflicts for years.

Bruton suggests that the U.S. should not "own the Somali crisis" and needs to launch a diplomatic campaign to involve European and Middle Eastern countries to support Somalia's stabilisation and address its humanitarian and developments needs.

A U.N. report on Wednesday alleged that up to half of the food aid delivered by the World Food Programme (WFP) to Somalia is being diverted to corrupt contractors, local U.N. workers and Islamist militants in the country. The WFP has rejected the allegations, calling them "unsubstantiated".

Along with the announcement of the PlayStation Move came the names of the publishers currently developing games for the new motion controller. Which ones are they?

Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama has said that the next story-driven entry in the franchise will be more open than XIII, the linearity of which has invited flak from some quarters.

Are you passionate about fighting poverty and looking for ways to get more involved? Charli, the Oxfam Midlands Community and Activism Campaigner is on the lookout for an intern to help  develop and support the network of local community campaigning groups in the Midlands.

Local groups campaign to fight poverty and suffering. They are made up of passionate, enthusiastic and tenacious members who will be motivated by a like-minde intern who takes on this exciting role.

It’s a great opportunity to further an interest in campaigning and develop skills including managing volunteers, planning and delivering training workshops.

You will be based in our lively Birmingham office and will sometimes travel around visiting groups. We need someone who can commit to 2 days a week for 6 months.

I met Gordon Brown and Barbara Stocking, Oxfam CEO, on my internship! I’m not promising you will do that, but it is an exciting time to be involved with campaigning, and who knows where it will take you!

See this link for full details and to apply: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/volunteer/latest_intern.html#lgb

And if you are interested in reading more about my experience as an intern, here’s my story:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/volunteer/intern-story.html

email [email protected] or call 0121 634 3611 to discuss the internship in more detail.

Andy Kessler has one of his standard thought-provoking opinion pieces discussing the economy of the past decade, suggesting that the real lesson learned from the past decade is the dangers of bad gov’t policies leading to misallocated capital. Starting with bad telco regulations in the 90s that drove a bubble in unnecessary and misguided investment in infrastructure, some of which overflowed into a ridiculous dot com gold rush:

The late ’90s Internet love fest was crazy enough, driven by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt’s misguided telecom reform that had the effect of keeping data rates artificially high. This created a gold rush to install fiber and build applications that didn’t make economic sense (though electronic commerce, online banking, as well as wireless and broadband deployment would eventually prove productive over the next decade). Bad policy meant capital got overallocated and too quickly, as momentum mutual funds (momos) and day traders furiously drove up stock prices of every company with dot-com in its name for no fundamental reasons. Wall Street trading was broken.

But, he notes, there was a core of a good idea in there. What made the investment in the internet and new technologies make sense was that it actually did drive productivity. The proper use of such tools increased productivity, decreased costs and opened up new markets. But with the flood of misallocated money, a lot of that got obscured in chasing sock puppets selling pet food.

Following this, there was a combination of bad policy decisions — Greenspan flooding the system with money out of fear of a Y2K problem, combined with Enron freaking people out and leading to Sarbanes Oxley — and a new mess was created:

Instead of finishing what the dot-com era started to deliver–a productive, wealth-producing economy–capital was seduced into the financial lair of private equity and real-estate mortgages. Trillions were pumped into unneeded housing stock. Fannie and Freddie fanned the flames, and then fizzled and failed. And leveraged buyouts reigned. Even in 2007, one Blackstone private equity fund raised almost as much money as all of the venture capital industry.

The key point here is that venture capital tends to (though, certainly not always…) invest in real innovation, nurturing concepts from idea to market and beyond. Private equity, however, is more about just moving money around and looking for quick hit opportunities to get increasing returns. One grows the economy. The other does not. But, by punishing the capital markets that fund real innovation and company growth via Sarbanes Oxley, money that used to go to venture investment went towards the east coast private equity world, where it was shuffled around, rather than invested productively. And, tragically, it doesn’t look like anything the government is doing is designed to fix this:

Today, we are still left with almost no initial public offerings. While private equity fund-raising was down 68% in 2009 to $96 billion, venture capital barely raised $13 billion.

Capital gains taxes are set to return to 20% on Jan. 1, 2011. And worse, investing is as uncertain as ever. No one wants to fund health care, medical devices or even much biotech if they can’t figure out how they are going to be paid via reimbursements from ObamaCare. Energy investing is also a mess. And while “green” investing is booming, with few exceptions that is about efficiency rather than productivity. There’s a big difference: You can make the Post Office more efficient while email makes us more productive and wealthier.

Big regulated oligopolists control our communications infrastructure. Startups are nowhere to be found. Few are willing to take the risk of true venture investing.

It’s been 10 long years since the economy has created real wealth, as opposed to easy-credit induced real-estate or paper wealth. Amidst all the current confusion over health care and tax rates and energy and banking reforms, maybe it’s time that the market transitions back to investments that drive productivity and increase living standards rather than just paper profits.

Reaching back to our economic parables, it’s a question of whether or not our government has been making a giant broken window fallacy. It’s not working on plans that fund actual productivity and economic growth. The government is focused, instead, on getting money moving around again, and all that means is it will move into another unproductive bubble, until we align the incentives properly again.

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A companhia japonesa Daihastu, filial da Toyota, fez o anúncio oficial que chamou para revisão 274.551 veículos, sendo que sua grande maioria se encontra no Japão. O recall foi feito por causa da falta de um parafuso na suspensão e na transmissão dos modelos “Hijet” e “Atrai Wagon”.

Tal defeito pode causar o desprendimento do pneu traseiro em caso de batida, embora nenhum acidente tenha sido constatado (ainda bem), segundo um porta-voz da Daihatsu. Algumas viaturas dos modelos “Mira” e “Move” também serão chamados devido a uma falha menos grave no tubo de gasolina.

Como citado há pouco, praticamente todos os veículos estão situados no Japão, com exceção de 449 unidades, de acordo com o posta-voz da Daihatsu. Outro recall grandioso da empresa foi feito há poucos meses atrás, onde quase 9 milhões de veículos, sua maioria nos EUA, foram chamados para o conserto de diversos problemas.

Imagens do modelo Mira Cocoa

Via | Autoportal