1974 Volkswagen Scirocco designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro
The last several years have not been kind to the great Italian design houses like Pininfarina, Bertone and Italdesign. The first two have run into financial brick walls after getting over extended and required bailouts. Thankfully, Italdesign, founded by Giorgetto Giugiaro in 1968, may have found a white knight to keep it solvent in the form of Volkswagen AG. VW and the studio have a long history going back to the first generation Scirocco and Golf both of which were designed by Giugiaro. Italdesign has also been responsible for numerous VW Group concepts for the last thirty years.
Giorgetto Giugiaro and his son Fabrizio currently own the studio outright, but it appears that Volkswagen may be preparing to take a majority stake in the Italian company. It’s not clear if Ital Design will continue doing work for outside clients under VW ownership, or if the elder Giugiaro, 71, plans on retirement.
Who hasn’t played the “if I had a million dollars” game? If you are a fan of Office Space, it probably comes as no surprise that I’d take the Peter Gibbons attitude (see the name of the site). Actually doing nothing would get boring after awhile I imagine.
While a million dollars isn’t what it used to be, it is a great start towards financial freedom. Most people don’t know how to become a millionaire. I believe it is an attainable goal if you follow these 5 easy steps:
How To Become a Millionaire
5. Find the elusive money-growing tree and hoard it all to yourself (But first call me and let me in on the royalties since I gave you the idea.)
4. Find yourself a sugar daddy/mama and marry them ASAP.
3. Spend all your time and energy on making your life as ridiculous as possible. Then get an equally ridiculous television station to pick up your life as their newest reality show. (It worked for Jon and Kate… not so much for the balloon boy)
2. Con your friends into playing Monopoly with real money, build hotels on Boardwark and Park Place, and rig the game so that you continually land on the “Free Parking” space and collect the loot from the middle. (That is assuming you play with the rules that Free Parking actually earns you money.)
You don’t like those options? Good, you shouldn’t. The chances of you securing your future and becoming a millionaire through those first four steps are about as good as Michael Jordan becoming a star in NFL now (remembers his baseball career?). Give me one more chance at proving you a path to financial freedom.
1. Read the rest of this article.
The beauty of the prestigious millionaire club is that there is room for all of us at the table. Everyone has power over their financial status if they focus on a few small things. Here are several simple steps that could change your life forever and help you in becoming a millionaire.
Don’t spend more than you make – That sound easy enough, but for most it’s easier said than done. For many, today’s cashless society makes it easy to swipe the credit card and plan on paying it off later. Others, like my wife, just tend to spend whatever cash they have on hand, because it’s a quick transaction (not having to sign anything). We tend to buy now and think later, rather than the other way around.
Get out of the “Now” mindset – Many young couples get married, buy their first home, and expect to immediately have all of the ‘luxury’ items that it took their parents thirty years of working to obtain. I wish I could get them to change their thinking… realize that building your dream home, owning the perfect car, and being able to take extravagant vacations will not happen overnight, nor in 5 years. It takes time to achieve it, just as their parents did. In the same way, realize that it is almost impossible to become a millionaire overnight. What you can do is implement the basic financial principles today that will increase your chances of becoming a millionaire in the next 20 years…
Save Money – In the immortal words of Al Bundy, “Save hard, save now, save silent, save deep…. the key word here is: SAVE!” (Actually, Al used the word “run” instead of “save”, but it is one of my favorite lines and it fits.)
The easiest way to effectively change your saving habits and make a monumental difference is to save at the beginning of your month, rather than at the end. Too many people trick themselves into thinking they are saving by just transferring what is left each month to their savings account. Sure they are saving, but they are not saving intentionally. If you don’t tell your money where to go, you’ll get to the end of the month and question where it went. Decide what you will save each month (after making a monthly budget) and take that straight to your savings account the day you get paid. Don’t allow yourself to touch it, not even for an emergency. Have a separate emergency fund of $1,000 so your savings can be safe. If you are married, try to live off of one income and save the second. This is difficult, but very doable by cutting certain expenses.
Attack debt now – Step #2 doesn’t apply here – when it comes to debt get in the “Now” mindset. Though I’m not really a fan of Dave Ramsey he I do agree with his approach of attacking debt with “gazelle intensity.” (Don’t confuse this with Tony Little’s Gazelle which will get nowhere.) Go after your debt rather than letting it control you. Work on your highest interest loan first, and once you have paid it off, take the amount of that monthly payment and add it on to your next loan’s monthly amount. Many people make the mistake of paying off one debt and then taking that money they would’ve been spending and simply increasing their standard of living. Instead, wait to get out of debt completely and then celebrate with something small.
Invest your savings – Be careful with this step. Don’t go after the get-rich-quick schemes. Look into the mutual funds and other financial vehicles that have historically been shown to appreciate in value. Your savings is not something to gamble with. Don’t make the first four steps obsolete by a reckless decision in the final step.
Whatever you do, make sure that your path to becoming a millionaire is focused on doing something that you absolutely love. Find your passion and follow it. When you do, those long hours and the stressful days becomes a lot more fun.
For just $8.33 per household a month, voters could save hundreds of
L.A. Unified teachers’ jobs and help preserve arts education in
elementary schools.
Those are the headlines over the LA Times highly-paid columnist Steve Lopez’s column today in which he reveals that unlike his newspaper’s editorial board, he supports LAUSD’s $100 per parcel tax to avoid some teachers from being laid off.
“I say yes, and maybe it’s because I have something no member of our
editorial board has: A child who attends an L.A. Unified school,” writes Lopez.
It says a lot about LAUSD that the 10 or so well-paid editorialists at the Times don’t have kids in the city’s public schools, something that puts them in step with thousands of other affluent LA residents.
Like Lopez, I’m a firm believer in public schools and my son is a graduate of Taft High and Berkeley and now is a post-graduate student at UC San Diego. The parents of the 650,000 LAUSD students, nearly 90 percent of them poor, immigrant or minorities, also believe in public schools or can’t afford to buy the education their kids need.
Quite simply, the district is overwhelmed by students with great needs and has failed to make significant strides for three decades in carrying out the reforms needed to meet them or win the confidence of those who can afford private schools.
Writes Lopez: “Times are tough, and people don’t want to dig into their pockets right
now, especially since there’s no citizen oversight written into the
measure. On top of that, the teachers union has stubbornly resisted
needed reforms, the district bureaucracy can be awful and the school
board is no great shakes, either. So do we really want to send these
people more money?”
No, we don’t and the reasons are many.
It’s not because we don’t want to “save the jobs of 350 teachers, along with
400 custodians and campus aides. Seventy-five nurses, counselors and
psychologists will be spared. High school class sizes, already in the
40s, won’t swell any further. And arts programs in the elementary grades
could be preserved,” as Lopez enumerates what the $100 million a year that Measure E would generate.
It’s not even because a parcel tax is the most regressive tax there is. It’s the same $8.33 a month for a tiny cottage in Watts as it is for a Bel Air mansion or an office building worth hundred million dollars.
Voters have backed school bond issue after bond issue — taxes based on the value of property — only to see their money go to build schools that cost up to $500 million, only to see the latest bond issue not even needed for seven years from now.
We’ve seen superintendents and reform plans come and go but we’ve still not seen major improvement in dropout rates or achievement. We’ve seen the mayor take over the schools, at least indirectly, and still not seen the changes we were promised. We’ve recently seen the mayor and district officials collude with the ACLU to stop layoffs of teachers at three impacted schools, two of them directly under the mayor’s control.
We’re seeing the mayor, Superintendent Ramon Cortines and even teacher union leader A.J. Duffy duck the parcel tax campaign, presumably because their standing in the community is so low they would generate more “no” votes than “yes” votes. Instead, the campaign for Measure E is “hoping that if the turnout
is low, only the most passionate voters will take to the polls and
support the schools.”
There’s good reason for running an underground campaign just as events that occurred Tuesday showed.
One of the most important reforms enacted to protect the squandering of taxpayer money at LAUSD was the creation of the Inspector General’s office and the appointment of former FBI agent Don Mullinax to the position.
Mullinax proved so tough and thorough that after a few years, they cut his funding and drove him out of office.
On Tuesday, Jerry Thornton, the current Inspector General, met the same fate. According to word leaking out from the school board’s closed-door session, Thornton — who was largely frozen out by the board and top officials for most of a year — was terminated because
his audits of spending and programs had a “gotcha” tone.
A review of recent audits showed Thornton found P-card abuses like someone at an early childhood education center racking up “$1,100 in dating services” on the card of someone else who was on leave and the “potenti
al for abuse and
misuse” of P-cards for millions of dollars in district and federal stimulus funds.
Of even greater significance is what happened at Verdugo Hills High on Tuesday and how the district is trying to make this scandal go away.
Community activists have long campaigned to get an investigation into LAUSD practices of marking truants present in class for the purpose of collecting the $25 daily attendance payment from the state.
What happened at Verdugo is that Principal Diane Klewitz sent home forms for parents of graduating seniors authorizing their children to go on three-day field trips to get them out of the way while other students were taking standardized tests and still collect the $25 payment..
The trouble was the field trips were for the students to stay at home, something that would not allow for the $25 daily attendance payment — costing $5,000 a day in revenue for the 200 seniors given “stay-cations.”
Klewitz told Howard Blume of the Times she inherited the tradition from her predecessors. In other words, it’s common practice to scam the system and let 17-year-olds party for three days.
“Parents signed a slip saying they’d rather have their children stay
home than sit in an auditorium,” Klewitz said. “There are issues in terms of
safety [when you] ask kids to sit in an auditorium all day. They tend to want to go out and roam the campus or jump the fence
and disappear and roam the streets.”
So being in school is dangerous but being off campus and doing whatever graduating seniors do is safe?
Some parents disagreed and complained and the Times called for comment so the district ordered the kids back to school today and promised to check whether Verdugo cheated in the past.
Don’t expect them to end the practice everywhere else and clean up the truancy issue they have ignored for so long.
These current examples are just small elements in the grand rubric of LAUSD’s failures.
Board member Tamar Galatzan, the only board member to vote against putting the parcel tax on the June ballot, explained her opposition in these terms:
“Now is the time to look at
every single program, how it’s funded, who benefits from it, get rid of the
ones that don’t work and change the ones where the funding mechanism isn’t
benefiting our students.”
That’s exactly what LAUSD needs to do to restore the public trust and get the money it needs to do a better job.
It’s what the district has needed to do for 30 years but the district’s leadership and the union prefer to go on protecting policies that have failed the students and the city as a whole.
As I’ve written before, one of the most baffling things about the BP Gulf oil disaster has been the Obama administration’s flaccid response. They’re doing everything they can to contain the spill, but they also seem to be doing everything they can to contain the American people’s anger. There’s been no effort whatsoever to channel the outrage into support for broader energy reforms. In fact, they seem to be actively working to tamp down the anger and restrict any outbreaks of ambition. “We have to put up with oil spills because we can’t live without oil.” What the hell is a Democratic administration doing pushing that message? Especially when a clean energy bill was just put forward in the Senate? It’s baffling.
In today’s New York Times, Tom Friedman absolutely nails this dynamic. He calls the oil spill “Obama’s 9/11” and laments that he seems to be blowing it, just like Bush blew his. This is the key bit:
Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination. So far, the Obama policy is: “Think small and carry a big stick.” He is rightly hammering the oil company executives. But he is offering no big strategy to end our oil addiction. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have unveiled their new energy bill, which the president has endorsed but only in a very tepid way. Why tepid? Because Kerry-Lieberman embraces vitally important fees on carbon emissions that the White House is afraid will be exploited by Republicans in the midterm elections. The G.O.P., they fear, will scream carbon “tax” at every Democrat who would support this bill, and Obama, having already asked Democrats to make a hard vote on health care, feels he can’t ask them for another.
I don’t buy it. In the wake of this historic oil spill, the right policy—a bill to help end our addiction to oil—is also the right politics. The people are ahead of their politicians. So is the U.S. military. There are many conservatives who would embrace a carbon tax or gasoline tax if it was offset by a cut in payroll taxes or corporate taxes, so we could foster new jobs and clean air at the same time. If Republicans label Democrats “gas taxers” then Democrats should label them “Conservatives for OPEC” or “Friends of BP.” Shill, baby, shill.
Why is Obama playing defense? Just how much oil has to spill into the gulf, how much wildlife has to die, how many radical mosques need to be built with our gasoline purchases to produce more Times Square bombers, before it becomes politically “safe” for the president to say he is going to end our oil addiction? Indeed, where is “The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act”? Why does everything have to emerge from the House and Senate? What does he want? What is his vision? What are his redlines? I don’t know. But I do know that without a fixed, long-term price on carbon, none of the president’s important investments in clean power research and development will ever scale.
I’ve criticized Friedman before over his political instincts, but this is exactly the right thing to write and the right time to write it. Kudos.
I’m sure the White House is thinking that with midterms approaching, it’s an awkward time to force legislators to enter another contentious debate and take another risky vote. They probably just want to lay low, let the economy rebound a bit, and let their numbers inch up; their main goal is to avoid catastrophe. They remember all too well August of last year, when the teabaggers savaged House Dems who voted for the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill and no one rose to defend them.
But right now those Dems are headed into tough elections with the worst of both worlds: a controversial vote but no bill, no historic accomplishment. Wouldn’t they be better off if they could campaign on the bill’s benefits rather than the merits of their (pointless) votes?
In D.C., pundits and consultants always advise caution and defensiveness. Always. It’s always the safe advice to offer and the safe advice to take. But like Friedman says, there’s reason to believe that the American people respond to serious conviction and ambition. What message will they get if Dems warn about climate change and oil dependence in shrill terms for two years and then … do nothing about it? Is that really a more savvy political strategy?
Just when it looked like the trainwreck that is Lindsay Lohan was getting back on track, the noodle-noggin actress went and misplaced her passport, putting the starlet in mayjah danger of missing a mandatory court appearance set for this Thursday.
Lindsay has spent the week partying at the Cannes Film Festival while promoting her starring role in the upcoming biopic Inferno. Sometime between Sunday and Tuesday, the star lost the one thing essential for legally fleeing any country: her passport. She has a meeting scheduled with the US Embassy in hopes of clearing up her passport troubles — but there’s no way she’ll be back in Los Angeles in time for her court date. The judge has already made it clear that if the star isn’t in court at exactly 8:30 AM tomorrow morning for a progress report on her DUI-related probation, a bench warrant will be issued for her arrest.
It’s really a shame. The hard-partying redhead actually be faring quite well in her court-ordered alcohol education classess, despite reports to the contrary. She’s never shown up drunk or treated her classmates or instructors with disrespect, and is maintaining a positive attitude about staying sober, according to a three-page progress report released by the Los Angeles court system on Tuesday.
Shawn Chapman Holley, LiLo’s attorney, tells TMZ.com the star is “distraught” over her latest legal woes: “I was on the phone with Lindsay’s assistant the entire night and we’re doing everything we can to resolve this issue and get her back to LA. Lindsay is distraught because it was her intention to get back to LA today to do more alcohol education classes today and appear in court tomorrow.”
Never again! Never again do we have to write about Android 2.1 coming to the Sprint Hero. Why? Because it’s here.
Though never officially given a date, the Hero 2.1 update was pinned on dozens of leaked purported dates — all of which were either false or missed due to delays. At long last, all that nonsense is over.
This morning, HTC and ol’ Yellow made the Android 2.1 update package available. Alas, like the Samsung Moment, this won’t be coming over-the-air; you’ll have to run a manual update tool, which also means that this thing is going to wipe everything off your device. Backup your stuff!
Ready to do the update-dance? You can dig up the install kit here — and remember, backup! No one ever remembers to save that picture of their friend’s time as a sharpie canvas until it’s gone.
Anyone who thought the housing market might be able to continue its positive trend without the home buyer credit got a swift dose of reality today. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that mortgage applications for home purchases fell off a cliff, declining by 27% last week to a level not seen since May 1997. Clearly, the housing market is already missing the home buyer credit.
First, for a little perspective, here’s mortgage applications for new purchases since 1990:
The red line is the index, and the bright green line shows its level during the week ending May 14th. The chart shows how incredibly high applications were in 2005, and how low they dropped last week, after rising significantly, with consumers anticipating the credit’s expiration. The index fell 34% from the week ending April 30th through the week ending May 14th — in just two weeks.
How can we be sure that the home buyer credit caused this huge drop? No other variable appears to be responsible.
On the supply side, little has changed. There’s still plenty of housing inventory. Even though existing home sales were likely relatively strong in April given the credit, foreclosures are still occurring in high numbers. As a result, the housing inventory probably declined only a little. Prices haven’t moved much either.
On the demand side, the other factors that might encourage buyers haven’t changed much either. Interest rates still remain relatively low: in fact, they decreased to 4.93% this week from 5.21% a month earlier, according to Freddie Mac. The economy hasn’t suddenly worsened in the past few weeks, as jobless claims have been declining over the past few weeks. Banks also haven’t experienced any shocks that would have caused a drastic decline in credit.
That basically just leaves the home buyer credit as the chief cause. And history supports this theory. In November, when the credit was extended, new purchase mortgage applications also plummeted, then to a 10-year low. At that time, potential buyers realized they no longer had to rush, so they put off their buying until the spring. This time around, the drop was even more significant, because even more demand was pulled forward while the credit was in effect.
There’s little doubt that last week’s drop in mortgage applications for home purchases foreshadows what we can expect over the next few months. The home buyer credit likely soaked up most of the home buying demand out there. At this point, the American consumer might be experiencing home buying fatigue. If sales decline to very low levels — and this data indicates that they probably will — then that will result in foreclosures increasing housing inventory further. That could cause a decline in home prices, which had just begun finally rising again.
Actress Amy Adams gave birth to her first baby girl on Saturday in Los Angeles and according to People magazine she announced the name of the child as Aviana Olea Legallo. According to a spokesperson, mom and the baby both are healthy and relaxing at home.
Amy is engaged to actor Darren Le Gallo and she had announced her pregnancy last year. She found out the sex of the baby before she was born because she was impatient to wait until the last minute. Amy Adams who is 35 years old got engaged in 2008 July, Amy says she is going to use this maternity leave to plan their nuptials.
Amy and Darren met in an acting class in 2001 and they started dating since then, but they got engaged after 7 years. Wow….this is a pretty long relationship, hope this will work for a long time and will not end in short time like some other couples in Hollywood…Amy looked fabulous throughout her pregnancy and everyone still remember her role in “Julie and Julia”. Well, congrats for the new baby and new mommy life!!
There have been plenty of headlines generated by President Obama’s apparent criticism of Senate Republicans for blocking legislation to raise the oil spill liability cap. The implication has been that Obama supports the Democrats’ proposal, which would hike the cap from $75 million to $10 billion.
Not so.
Testifying before Congress yesterday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told lawmakers that the administration supports lifting the cap, but the $10 billion figure is “inadequate.”
And by “inadequate,” he didn’t mean that it’s too low (some have suggested that there should be no liability cap at all), he meant that it’s too high. Lawmakers, he said, have to be “thoughtful” not to impose a cap that pushes smaller oil companies out of business just because they can’t afford the drilling insurance.
“You don’t want only the BPs of the world to essentially be the ones that are involved in these efforts,” Salazar said.
And if that sounds familiar, it’s because Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said the very same thing on the Senate floor yesterday when he blocked passage of the Democrats’ bill. In fact, Inhofe invoked the White House when he objected.
“We need to increase the caps,” Inhofe said. “I understand that. But I do agree with the President — he left that [amount] blank — because we don’t know just how high that should be. … Big oil would love to have these caps up there so they can shut out all the independents.”
It’s not an argument that sponsors of the $10 billion proposal find persuasive. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), for example, asked Salazar why the size of the company should influence spill liability when even the smallest operation could potentially devastate an offshore ecosystem.
“If you could create the potential risk that we have in this [Gulf] spill, and you could be the cause of this spill, does the size [of the company] matter?” he asked. “In essence, we’d be saying [that] if you’re smaller, you should have less liability. And I don’t think the American taxpayer would believe in that.”
Salazar responded vaguely, saying he’ll work with Congress “to find a number that is not an arbitrary number.”
Meanwhile, you can bet that the White House will continue blaming Republicans for blocking the same proposal that Obama himself opposes. In other words, they’ll be seeking the political gain while opposing the policy.
El Nurburgring, el Infierno Verde, la pista de ensueño en la que la mayoría de nosotros soñamos algún día dar unas vueltas. Los que habitualmente saben de los riesgos de girar en el Ring sin conocer cada uno de los secretos de la pista y el trazado de la propia pista (y teniendo un poco de juicio, claro) pueden evitarse malos ratos como los pasados por los tripulantes de cierto Opel Astra que luego de golpear contra las barreras, volcó y les dio un gran susto (después del salto). Accidentes como estos son frecuentes en los días en que la pista está abierta, pero además del costo de reparar el coche, se deben pagar una serie de extras en caso de accidente:
Precio base de la reparación de las vallas: 150€.
Quitar la barrera dañada: 10€ por metro.
Reemplazar la barrera dañada 31€ el metro.
Quitar los postes que sostienen la barrera 39€ cada uno.
Servicio del coche de seguridad 82€ por 30 minutos.
Cierre del circuito: 1.350€ por hora.
Grúa: 190€
Salvo el costo de la grúa, a todos los demás se les debe agregar un 19% adicional de IVA.
BPhas turned to “Waterworld” star Kevin Costner to help clean up the oil slick that is spreading across the Gulf of Mexico. Costner has been funding a team of scientists for 15 years in hopes of developing a technology to clean up massive oil spills, and his research has created a powerful centrifuge that he claims can separate oil from water and dump the oil into a holding tank:
Arsenal Medical, a stealthy biotech startup based in Watertown, MA, has tapped its existing base of investors to pump in another $10 million in the second installment of its Series C round of funding, R. Scott Rader, the company’s CEO, says. The financing, which was initially revealed in an SEC filing that went online yesterday, brings the firm’s third round to $18.2 million.
Investors in the latest round included North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners, both of Waltham, MA, as well as Durham, NC-based Intersouth Partners, Rader says. The developer of bioactive materials has raised nearly $41 million since its launch, the CEO says. He declined to discuss the specific purpose of the latest financing.
Arsenal has generated buzz for its big-name founders, most notably Bob Langer, the MIT inventor of acclaimed drug-delivery technologies, and the standout Harvard chemist and Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ) co-founder George Whitesides. Jeff Carbeck, Arsenal’s co-founder and former chief technology officer, provided a few details about the firm’s technology last year. Carbeck says that Arsenal’s chairman and co-founder, Carmichael Roberts, recruited him to help build the startup. Roberts is a partner at North Bridge and a former member of Whitesides’s lab at Harvard.
Arsenal (formerly WMR Biomedical) provides additional information about its “bioactive composites” on its website. It highlights its “ElastaCore” biomaterial, which can provide some of the strength of metal while still allowing the body to absorb it. Also, the firm touts its “AxioCore” technology, which is another absorbable material that is designed to provide controlled release of drugs.
Rader says that the company might shed more light on its technology in the near future.
Seinfeld actor and comedian Jason Alexander lost almost 30 pounds by using Jenny Craig diet and weigh loss program in 20 weeks of time. Jason joined this weight loss program after thinking about every aspect of it, people even said Jason is using Girlie weight loss method to lose weight, but he did not care for that.
Usually men don’t go for such programs, but Jason was strong enough to take this decision for himself. He was concerned how he is going to stay on the plan while traveling. But he was lucky to have Jenny Craig Centers in almost all major US cities. He said he was very careful while eating at the restaurants. He even called Jenny Craig’s consultants and told him what he had eaten the whole day and they told him what he should be doing or eating.
Jason said, Jenny Craig’s food is really good and he did not feel hungry at all while on this plan. He said he couldn’t even finish the whole mean in first couple of weeks. “I would huff and puff to jog just one-tenth of a mile,” he said. “Now, I run a quarter or half a mile. I’ve really been able to stretch my cardio ability.” And we say “Way to go Jason”.
HTML5 video has a few hurdles to leap before it can fully replace Flash, but one looms larger than all others: Opposition to proprietary video formats, like h.264. Conveniently, Google has just open-sourced their own format, called WebM. More »
Former beauty titlist from Russia was arrested for serious criminal charges. Anna Malova was charged for illegal possession of narcotics and drugs, forgery and illegal imposture as a doctor. The said report was made by special narcotics officers in New York City.
Malova was taken into custody by authorities after her over the counter purchase in a pharmacy situated at 6th Avenue, Greenwich Village, New York City. Few minutes after she stepped out of the drug store, police gathered enough evidence to charge her with criminal suits.
In 1998, she was remembered as the tall Russian beauty that graced her way into Miss Universe’s top 10. The pageant made her very famous that she found job and home in the Big Apple.
Going back to the said case, Maldova’s doctors suspected that she stole a prescription pad from her last visit. She faked prescriptions for painkillers and the physician’s signature. This is clear forgery, as the law dictates.
Although she received admiration from fellow contestants and judges during the Miss Universe pageant as she claimed to be a medical doctor in her homeland, still she does not hold any permits to practice inside the territory of the United States.
If you need a breather from all the bad news coming out of the Gulf of Mexico, take a look way up north. In Canada this week, environmental groups and big industry—timber, in this case—actually agreed on something. With the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, the groups reached a truce in their fight over the forests of Northern Canada. The breakthrough could protect vast swaths of forest that, if added up, would be bigger than the state of Nevada.
Signatories include AbitibiBowater, one of the world’s biggest newsprint producers; Seattle-based Weyerhaeuser, and Canfor, British Columbia’s biggest softwood lumber producer, as well as nine environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy and Forest Ethics [Financial Times].
The environmental groups agreed to suspend their “don’t buy” campaigns in exchange for timber firms agreeing not to cut down forests that constitute endangered caribou habitat until at least the end of 2012. In the meantime, the parties will try to hash out a long-term plan. If this step does result in a more permanent conservation plan, it could have benefits not just for the caribou, but for the planet as well.
Over the past decade, boreal-forest preservation has increasingly been seen to be as vital as tropical-forest preservation in efforts to combat global warming. Although tropical forests cover more of Earth’s surface than boreal forests, boreal forests store nearly twice as much carbon, mainly in their soils [Christian Science Monitor].
As you can see in the map here, Canada is home to one of the two great belts of boreal forest in the world; the other stretches across Russia. The timber companies involved in this pact have government-approved leases to 178 million acres of the forests. This agreement covers roughly 72 million acres, and the companies will suspend logging and road-building immediately in 29 million of those acres (the light green portions seen on the map above), with rules for the remaining 43 million acres to come.
While a reasoned truce is nice to see, this fight will go on. Chloe O’Loughlin of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society argues that the Canadian governments need to restrict other industrial development in the areas to ensure they remain pristine.
She said there was no way forest companies would abide by the new agreement unless oil and gas companies were also required to respect the habitat. “I’m sure they wouldn’t agree to defer something and then see it thrashed by the oil and gas industry,” she said. “Put it off limits to forestry and then put it off limits to oil and gas” [The Province].
The leading renewable energy trade association in the United Kingdom, Renewable UK, is celebrating a report released today that shows that offshore wind power generation in the North Sea could eclipse the power generated by oil and gas production in the same region.
Offshore wind in the UK could supercede oil and gas production in the North Sea
“This is a hugely exciting piece of research which sets out compelling factual evidence of the huge potential of the UK’s offshore renewable energy resource,” said Peter Madigan, head of Offshore Renewables at RenewableUK.
“As an association we have long been saying that the North Sea will become the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, and today’s tonne of oil and employment comparisons amply bear this out. Just as 30 years ago, the North Sea could be our ticket for economic growth. We are looking forward to the new Government putting in place the policy framework to make this happen”
The report, published by The Offshore Valuation Group, a coalition of government and industry organizations, concluded that using less than one third of the “available offshore wind” could generate electricity equivalent to that of 1 billion barrels of oil — the amount produced annually by North Sea oil and gas production. It defined the wind available as that which could be practically developed using known technologies.
Job growth also would soar with the robust development of offshore wind, the report found. Using one-third of the wind capability of the North Sea would produce an estimated 145,000 new jobs in the UK.
Developing about one-third of the amount of “practical” wind power also would enable Britain to export wind by 2050. This would be possible if the EU developed an interconnected super grid and Britain pursued wind aggressively until it had an installed capacity of 169 GigaWatts of wind power.
“The infrastructure deployment required is similar in scale to that of oil and gas in recent decades. The major expansion of the supply chain this needs will not happen on its own, however, but will take strong and continuing support from government and industry in the coming years,” according to the report, developed by the Boston Consulting Group.
This degree of wind development also would save 1.1 billion tons of carbon emissions, reducing emissions by 30 percent relative to 1990 levels.
The Boston Consulting Group developed the analysis in collaboration with the Public Interest Research Centre.
How do we protect public health in the aftermath of major disasters? CAP’s Lesley Russell and Ellen-Marie Whelan have the answer.
The tragic BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has taken 11 lives. The immediate economic and environmental damages are still unfolding as the 7,500 square mile oil slick oozes toward the Atlantic Ocean. But Louisiana’s vibrant fishing and seafood industries have been shut down in anticipation of oil contamination.
The oil gusher also poses a less visible, but just as dangerous, threat to public health from the oil, its fumes, and the dispersants—the chemicals used to clean up the oil. All can be highly toxic and harm the health of those exposed to them, especially volunteers and workers engaged in cleanup operations and those with respiratory ailments, the elderly, and young children living on the Gulf Coast.
There is no clear public health infrastructure to monitor and address these potential human health hazards or any others that may arise in the future. So we need to learn from the health disasters of the past, such as those that occurred from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and the World Trade Center attack of 2001, and not wait for this to become a public health emergency before responding.
The human health problems evolving from the BP oil disaster are insidious and unknown. The first and most obvious are the health effects from the oil itself. This is mostly a risk for those in the immediate Gulf region and the cleanup workers. More concerning is the ill effects that may come from the way that BP cleans up these oil disasters using dispersants. These are chemicals sprayed directly on the oil slick to break it up into much smaller particles. This does not remove the oil, but the dispersal makes it less visible and prevents it from washing up on the shoreline by breaking the oil into droplets that then often sink to the ocean floor.
First, consider the effects of the oil itself. We know that Exxon Valdez cleanup workers faced average oil mist exposure that was 12 times higher than government-approved limits, and those who washed the beach with hot water experienced a maximum exposure 400 times higher than these limits. Many of those workers suffered subsequent health problems and in 1989, 1,811 workers filed compensation claims, primarily for respiratory system damage, according to National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. The cleanup efforts in Louisiana’s coastal marshes may look very different, but cleaners can also face heavy exposure to oil mist. In fact, some are reporting that EPA studies now show that airborne levels of dangerous chemical compounds from the oil far exceed pre-determined safety standards.
But what may be an even larger problem are the unknown, long-term health effects of the dispersants. BP has reportedly bought up more than a third of the world’s supply of these dispersants. The issue is that we do not actually know what chemicals are in many of these dispersants, or what their long-term effects will be since their exact makeup is kept secret under competitive trade laws.
There are some things we learned after the dispersants were used following the Exxon Valdez spill. Studies performed on organisms exposed to these chemicals after the cleanup found that the dispersants accumulate in living organisms at very high concentrations and harmed the developing hearts of both Pacific herring and pink salmon embryos. The salmon appear to have recovered in the years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, but the herring were not as fortunate. The herring population has never rebounded, even 20 years after the spill, due to a combination of issues including disease and poor nutrition from decreased plankton production. How sure can we be that these chemicals will not also affect humans? And what happens when oysters in the gulf harvested for consumption are exposed to the dispersants and eventually consumed?
BP has taken an unprecedented step of testing these chemicals underwater at the source of the oil in a desperate attempt to stem the flood of oil coming from the ocean floor. This has never been done before, and the EPA has authorized BP to test and monitor this approach. But are we letting the fox guard the hen house by letting the oil companies determine the safety of these cleaning agents?
Although the exact chemical content of the dispersants is not public, the National Academies of Science 2005 report on these dispersants included several sobering cautions, including how the chemicals are tested in the first place. Most lab studies use the fluorescent lighting usually found in the labs when they test toxicity and chemical breakdown, but research conducted under conditions more equivalent to natural sunlight indicate that toxicity increases significantly after sun exposure—by 12 to 50,000 times as much. Worse still, The New York Times reports that BP chose to use dispersants manufactured by a company with which it shares close ties, “even though other U.S. EPA-approved alternatives have been shown to be far less toxic and, in some cases, nearly twice as effective.”
As the President’s Cancer Panel recently noted, exposure to chemicals in the air, food, and water pose a serious risk to Americans’ health. The panel notes that dangerous chemicals in the environment are a much larger threat to the nation’s health than was previously identified, and calls for a new national strategy to focus on these threats. The panel found that federal chemical laws are weak, funding for research and enforcement is inadequate, and regulatory responsibilities are split among too many agencies. The panel called for a new national strategy to focus on these threats.
President Obama will likely soon appoint an independent commission to investigate the BP oil disaster soon. Part of its responsibility should include assessing the on and offshore health risks posed by the oil gusher and efforts to stop it. This should include finding out what is in those dispersants and whether there were cleaner, safer alternatives. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has begun the process of overhauling the Toxic Substances and Control Act, an important step in protecting public health by setting government standards for safe chemical exposure in workplaces and the environment based on the most up-to-date science. This will require appropriate enforcement authorities and resources. But this important regulatory reform will come too late for those involved in the gulf oil cleanup and those who live nearby.
It is not too early to implement an ongoing monitoring program aimed at ensuring the utmost minimization of negative health effects. This will require intensive, long-term testing and monitoring of people, food, water, and air; timely analysis of the data; and transparent communications with the people most exposed and most likely to be harmed. It will also require the coordinated, best efforts of a raft of federal and state agencies working together with businesses and local groups. Strong leadership from the very top of government and an ongoing commitment of needed revenue are essential. An integral part of this monitoring program must be a mechanism for people who may have been affected to report their health problems and have them addressed.
Many agencies are ramping up monitoring particular effects of this disaster—including the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—but none are ultimately responsible for the overall coordination of what could be a public health emergency. We saw in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack that haphazard responses were not enough to adequately address health problems for the first responders and workers. No one could predict at the time of the building collapse what effect the dust would have on those at the scene. What followed were numerous hearings, studies, and pieces of legislation to mount the proper federal response, including a number of new programs at CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. And many still wonder if we’ve done enough.
We were also worried about what health effect the flood waters would have after Hurricane Katrina, yet the federal government left this monitoring up to the local governments. Despite the lessons from these very real public health emergencies, we are now facing what some are calling the worst-ever ecological disaster without an appropriate public health response in place.
The good news is that there has recently been a major increase in federal investment in public health infrastructure and workforce. The public is reassessing the importance of the public health system after the disasters of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and the threatened pandemics of Avian Flu, SARS, and H1N1.
The recently enacted health care reform legislation provides additional tools to begin to ramp up the nation’s public health infrastructure. It establishes a National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council to help coordinate activities across agencies and numerous provisions to strengthen the public health workforce. These include a public health services educational track to train health care professionals that will emphasize public health, epidemiology, and emergency preparedness; a public health workforce loan repayment program; and a Ready Reserve Corps within the Public Health Commissioned Corps for service in times of national emergency. These are the people with the expertise and the mission to protect the public’s health.
But there is much more that needs to be done to protect public health at times of natural and man-made disasters. The principal aim at this time must be for the federal government to act quickly and put monitoring and response systems in place in the threatened Gulf communities. These can be models of a system that could routinely be implemented at such times, regardless of where in the United States it occurs. We can hope that these systems are not needed and that the cleanup work can be done quickly and safely with no adverse after effects. But as we learn more about this disaster, this does not seem to be the case, and action now must occur to ensure that there is no public health version of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Sprint is trying to do the right thing by telling people not to talk or text during movies, but the full effect of this 3-D cinema ad is lost in 2-D, since its focal points are the gimmicky 3-D immersion sequences. Still, we’ll assume it looks awesome on the big screen! It’s nice to see Sprint getting involved in the vital cell-phone-etiquette education process, as makes them look like a responsible company instead of a irresponsible, avaricious one. Which is handy, because Sprint could use a karmic balance reset after selling out its customers to the government last year.
If you’d like to stare, horrified at the fact that you have just ordered a lunch of 1,213 calories, Burgerville is your new favorite burger joint.
The chain, located in Washington and Oregon, has set up the registers to print a customized calorie count of your order on our receipt– and will even suggest ways you could have ordered fewer calories. (For example: “If you are trying to eat healthier, try ‘holding the chipotle mayo’ on your sandwich and save 180 calories and 18g of fat.”)
“We want our guests to know exactly what they are getting when they order from us,” said Jeff Harvey, Burgerville president and CEO. “That way guests can take control of their food choices and make sure that they feel satisfied and empowered when they eat at Burgerville. The Nutricate program offers a very clear view into how each meal fits into our overall eating habits.”
The WSJ notes that according to the chain’s menu, their hypothetical order: a pepper bacon cheeseburger (including the mayo), regular fries and regular Coke set them back 1,213 calories. Yum.
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If you need a breather from 
