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Estabrook Drive will close and portions of Cumberland Avenue and Neyland Drive on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus will be reduced to one lane each way this week.

Construction work on underground electrical and sewer lines will close Estabrook Drive starting today and ending Monday, May 24. One lane eastbound and one lane westbound on Neyland Drive between Lake Loudoun Boulevard and Leinard Lane will be closed from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. starting today and ending Friday, May 21.

Cumberland Avenue between 16th Street and James Agee Street will be reduced to one eastbound lane and one westbound lane starting at 7 a.m. today and will remain closed 24 hours a day Mondays through Thursdays until Thursday, June 17. The lanes will reopen on Fridays and weekends during the construction.

Work crews will be conducting utility work and sewer system upgrades on the closed lanes.

For more information call (865) 594-7242.

Gameloft first demonstrated what they could do on Android with their hit racer Asphalt 5 and now the company is back with a full stable of 3D games. Android fans can now enjoy envy 10 new titles, which many iPhone/iPod users might recognize.

In order to play any of these new games, customers will have to purchase them from Gameloft’s smartphone site. Only Asphalt 5 is located on Google’s Android Market, but we expect the others will eventually show up.

Buyers should beware because several users have reported problems when trying to download and install the games. Gameloft will offer users a refund, but expect to run into some issues. It sounds like Real Soccer 2010, Let’s Golf!, and Asphalt 5 are the only titles working. The list of non-working games includes Assassin’s Creed, Modern Combat, NOVA, Hero of Sparta, Dungeon Hunter, HAWX, and Gangstar.

If you try out any of the games, let us know which ones work and we will update our post with a list of issues.

Potential buyers should also know that many of these games are iPhone ports originally designed to work with a PowerVR graphics processor. This means that they will play better on the Droid (which also uses PowerVR) versus any of the Snapdragon phones (Nexus, Incredible, EVO) that have not been optimized. Users who own first generation Android devices should avoid these games.

New Gameloft titles include:

• Modern Combat: Sandstorm
• Let’s Golf!
• Hero of Sparta
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X
• Real Soccer 2010
• Dungeon Hunter
• Asphalt 5
• Ganstar: West Coast Hustle
• Assassin’s Creed – Altair’s Chronicles
• N.O.V.A. Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance

Though it’s slated for a Q3 launch in Europe and Asia, that doesn’t mean that the HTC Wildfire will be ignored.  Sporting a 525MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor, the Wildfire offers a 3.2-inch QVGA screen, 5.0-megapixel camera, Android 2.1 with HTC’s Sense UI, 802.11b/g WiFi, GPS/AGPS, Blueooth 2.1+EDR, and a built-in microSD card slot.  The device offers 900/2100 MHz UMTS/HSDPA support, so it’s a no-go in the US unless you’re using T-Mobile.

At the end of the day, it’s a decent mid-range Android phone.  HTC’s full press release is below.  Anyone giving thought to unlocking one of these puppies and using it as your personal device?

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE WITH HTC WILDFIRE

LONDON – 18 May, 2010, 07.00 CEST – HTC Corporation, a global designer of smartphones, today introduced HTC Wildfire™, a new HTC Sense-based Android phone that integrates the most popular social networks to help bring your friends closer to you. HTC Wildfire closely follows the success of the acclaimed HTC Desire and makes the company’s signature HTC Sense experience accessible to a younger audience.

“Today’s social networks provide an essential forum for friendship with more than 400 million users* – many of whom are young adults – actively sharing their lives with their friends through Facebook,” said Florian Seiche, Vice President, HTC EMEA. “HTC Wildfire makes the HTC Sense experience available to young mobile users for the first time. It brings all your communications into one place, whether it’s through Facebook, Twitter, text messages, images or email, ensuring that you are never far away from the conversation and always close to your friends.”

HTC Wildfire helps you stay connected with those who are most important to you through HTC Sense, a user experience focused on putting people at the centre by making phones work in a more simple and natural way. You won’t miss out on the fun as HTC’s Friend Stream application seamlessly gathers and displays content from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr into one organised stream of updates. HTC Wildfire enables you to stay up to date with your friends’ posts, comments, alerts and photos, wherever you are.

In addition, each contact viewed in HTC Wildfire’s address book includes a thread of recent communications with that person, including when you last spoke, recent text messages and emails, and social network updates. When your friend calls, HTC Caller ID displays their Facebook profile photo and latest update, as well as a reminder if their birthday is fast approaching.

Thanks to a new app sharing widget, HTC Wildfire enables you to recommend an application by email, text message or over social networks. Your friends will receive a link allowing them to find the application on the Android Market with a single click and download it to their phone.

Florian Seiche continued, “We understand that people need a better way to navigate their way through the tens of thousands of applications that are currently available on the Android Market. In fact, our own independent research found that consumers are not only hungry for the latest and most popular applications that their friends are using, they want an easier way to find and download them. For the first time ever, you can recommend the newest and coolest apps to a friend or group of friends with HTC Wildfire. With so many applications to choose from, there’s a world of content to discover and pass along to your friends.”

HTC’s latest advanced smartphone is great for viewing and sharing photos on Flickr and for surfing the internet thanks to its 3.2-inch capacitive touch screen. A five-megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash allows you to capture special moments, while a 3.5mm audio jack and micro SD card slot mean you are never without your favourite songs.

Availability
The new HTC Wildfire will be broadly available to customers across major European and Asian markets from Q3 2010.

Via Engadget

Avatar star Zoe Saldana is in early discussions for the lead role in Columbiana — a upcoming Luc Besson-produced action drama set in Latin America — according to a scoop from The Hollywood Reporter.

The Dominican-American/Puerto Rican actress — whose credits include Star Trek, The Losers, and Death at a Funeral — would play a young Colombian woman who, after witnessing her parents’ murder as a child in Bogota, grows up to be a stone-cold assassin. She works for her uncle as a hitman by day, but her personal time is spent engaging in vigilante murders she hopes will lead her to the mobster responsible for murdering her parents.

The project — directed by Transporter 3’s Olivier Megaton — is expected to begin production this summer..

[JURIST] US President Barack Obama [official profile] on Monday signed into law the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act [HR 3714 materials], aimed at promoting worldwide press freedom and drawing attention to countries where journalists are threatened, harmed, or censored. The law requires the secretary of state to submit an annual report to Congress detailing a description of the freedom of the press in each country, identifying countries where there have been violations of press freedom, and how the governments of the countries violating press freedom are responding to the violations. The law also establishes a grant program aimed at promoting press freedom. Critics of the law claim it takes no tangible steps toward promoting press freedom, but the co-sponsors of the bill indicated the law is a good first step, stating [press release]:

We hope this legislation will help the United States work with other nations to better protect [journalists] serving on the frontlines in the fight for greater accountability and transparency. Freedom of expression cannot exist where journalists are not safe from persecution and attack. Our government must promote freedom of the press by putting on center stage those countries in which journalists are killed, imprisoned, kidnapped, threatened, or censored.

The legislation is named after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl [JURIST news archive] who was murdered after being abducted in Pakistan in 2002 while reporting on events following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US.

The US reports on press freedom will join those issued annually by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) [advocacy website] detailing the rankings of press freedom worldwide. In addition to their annual rankings, earlier this month, RSF issued a list of threats to press freedom [JURIST report]. Last month, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) [official website] ordered the government of Azerbaijan [JURIST report] to secure the immediate release of imprisoned Azeri journalist Eynulla Fatuallyev, who was jailed on what many international organizations claim are spurious charges. Also last month, many rights groups expressed concern [JURIST report] over a Fiji draft bill that would allow the government to sentence journalists to up to five years in prison for publishing controversial content and require them to reveal sources of information. In March, Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] urged the Cuban government [JURIST report] to allow more freedom of expression and release those jailed for criticizing the government.

Intel is about to join you in the living room — the chip maker is touting its new Wireless Display technology, or WiDi, as a simple way to get content from a computer onto the television in your home. By streaming media over a point-to-point Wi-Fi connection, WiDi removes the need for consumers to physically connect a computing device to a television set with wires, making for a more seamless experience.

The solution isn’t totally wireless, though — in this first iteration, you’ll need a small, Intel-powered box wired to your television set. Think of it like a base station that accepts wireless media from computers and then pipes that content over a cable to your TV. Intel expects that the box will eventually go away because the brains of the receiver can be integrated into future television sets.

With so many ways to get content on a television these days, WiDi didn’t sound that impressive to me at first. In fact, it sounded almost at odds with the WiGig alliance that Intel formed with Atheros and Broadcom, also an effort toward wirelessly throw content around the home using 60 GHz spectrum. Plus there are already plenty of web-connected boxes on the market today that gather content for home playback.

In our home we use an Xbox 360, an Apple TV and a Roku HD-XR unit to watch media on our HDTV set. About the only thing that Intel’s WiDi functionality would replace for us is the occasional connection of a laptop to the big screen for photos that haven’t yet been transferred to the Apple TV library. But then I noticed an interesting future use case for WiDi — according to statements made by Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, last week on an investor call, Intel plans to enable the functionality in smartphones, tablets and other handhelds.

That won’t happen for some time, as WiDi currently only works with the new Intel Core i5 and i7 chips, the ones that also power mid-to high-end laptops and desktops. Intel expects the lower-end Core i3 processor to support WiDi in the near future. Once laptops can wireless push content to a consumer electronics display, the next frontier is a pocketable device — something I envisioned back in 2005 with the iPod and HD playback capability. I didn’t plan for the wireless connection but conceptually, it’s the same idea. Consumers would carry digital content for mobile enjoyment but then seamlessly transfer the experience to a large screen when at home.

But Intel faces a challenge if WiDi is ever to move beyond the laptop. The company can’t put WiDi in handsets until it powers those handsets to begin with. That effort is Intel’s Atom platform, which continues to evolve as a more power-efficient chipset to battle against chips built on the ARM architecture. For that reason, I don’t expect to wirelessly stream content from a smartphone to my HDTV set for at least another two years. Om thinks that Intel will be a mobile loser, and while I agree that the odds are stacked against it in the handset market, a technology like WiDi could provide Intel with a competitive advantage over ARM solutions and open doors in the smartphone market.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Slow And Steady, Netflix Pulls Ahead in Streaming Video
• TV Apps: Evolution From Novelty to Mainstream
• Making Movies Mobile

Philadelphia-based national automotive aftermarket and service chain Pep Boys has agreed to pay $5 million in civil penalties for importing and selling Chinese motorcycles, recreational vehicles and engines that did not comply with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requirements. The case is the largest ever brought by the government under the Clean Air Act.

“Equipment imported into the United States that does not meet our pollution control rules is bad for human health and the environment, and unfair to those companies that play by the rules,” the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance said in a statement.

The supplier of the ATVs and other vehicles, Baja Inc., has also settled with the federal government and has agreed to pay $25,000 in fines.

“Pep Boys strives to be a good corporate citizen,” said General Counsel, Brian Zuckerman. “Unfortunately, in this circumstance, we relied upon our vendors to ensure that their products were compliant. We now take it upon ourselves to ensure that all of our small-engine merchandise fully complies with the Clean Air Act.”

The complaint alleged that Pep Boys and supplier Baja imported at least 241,000 illegal vehicles and engines between 2004 and 2009. The totals sales resulted in 620 tons of excess hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions and more than 6,520 tons of carbon monoxide emissions, which in plain English is really bad for the environment.

– By: Omar Rana

Source: LATimes

Dale Peterson has got a big horse, a big gun and a big accent to prove he’s ready to win.

Peterson is running in the Republican primary for Alabama Agriculture Commission and he means business.

Check it out:
Click here to see Peterson political ad campaign.

His hard hitting ad is quite literally an overnight Internet sensation, with more than 100,000 hits and climbing, since he posted it last night.

According to Peterson, Alabama is losing over 1,000 farms a year. He claims that this can be prevented by using the commission’s billions of dollars.

“Bet you didn’t know that.” He claims that residents are unaware of this money because the current politicians  –the “thugs and criminals” are “keeping citizens in the dark,” in order to “do whatever they want” with that money.

The campaign add first introduces us to Peterson with a shot of his dog tags and Marines badge resting on top of the Constitution.

“They don’t give a rip about Alabama,” Peterson dramatically says of the incumbents.

But he does. His drill sergeant tone and shotgun in-hand reaffirm his quest to save Alabama and maybe even our country. He vows to “name names and take no prisoners.”

One of our favorite cars just got a little bit better.

For the 2009 model year, the BMW 3-series sedan and wagon received a minor face lift that included new front and rear lights and a modified trunklid, grille, and front bumper. Inside, the car received the latest version of iDrive and some improved materials. These changes have now been carried over to the coupe and convertible models for the 2011 model year.

Keep Reading: 2011 BMW 335i Sedan – First Drive Review

Related posts:

1. 2010 BMW 335i xDrive Sedan – Quick Spin
2. 2009 BMW 328i / 328xi / 335d / 335xi / 335i / 3-Series Sedan and Wagon – Official Photos and Info – Car News
3. 2011 BMW 3-series / 328i / 335i Coupe and Convertible – Official Photos and Info

The World Bank must systematically address issues of environmental and social sustainability in its mainstream investments.

This post originally appeared on the World Bank blog “Development in a Changing Climate.”

In Copenhagen, donor countries pledged to raise US$30 billion in “fast start funds” and an additional US$100 billion a year by 2020 to invest in reducing emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change. Though the commitments are clear, the delivery is uncertain. By the June UNFCCC meetings in Bonn, countries will need to start drafting a set of decisions on the financial architecture to manage and distribute these climate funds.

By embarking on several climate change initiatives, including an assessment of progress in implementing the Strategic Framework on Development and Climate Change (SFDCC) and the revision of its Energy Strategy, the World Bank has positioned itself to play a role in the management of new climate funds. The Bank already hosts several climate related trust funds, including the Climate Investment Funds. It is the trustee of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and its largest implementing agency. The question is whether the Bank should be entrusted with an even larger role in the future of climate finance. If it is going to gain the political support necessary to make this happen, the World Bank must systematically address issues of environmental and social sustainability in its mainstream investments.

Poverty Eradication and Low Carbon Development

The main challenge for the Bank will be to respond to the needs of developing countries while still promoting scalable investments in low carbon development. In order to do this, the Bank must overcome the mindset that there are inevitable tradeoffs between addressing climate change (and other environmental challenges) and facilitating pro-poor development. In fact, the best route to poverty eradication is low carbon development. Fortunately, there are numerous project and policy interventions that provide synergies between the low-carbon and the development agendas. Helping countries capture those synergies should be the guiding principle of the Bank’s climate work and its future energy sector strategy.

The ongoing energy strategy review offers the Bank a major opportunity to demonstrate leadership and a commitment to change. In 2008, WRI research showed that 60% of financing for the energy sector did not take climate change into account. Also, in 2010 the World Resources Institute released another survey that shows only a limited number of World Bank and other MDB (electricity sector only) loans consistently support sustainable energy investments in developing countries. The Bank now says that 60% of its country assistance strategies consider climate change. Does this signal real change?

A Greater Voice for Developing Countries?

The second challenge will be for the World Bank to embrace changes in its governance structures and procedures in order to give a greater voice to developing countries. This should be done in a manner that ensures efficiency, effectiveness and accountability, but more importantly result in better environment and development outcomes. The key principles to guide the Bank should be:

• Recognition of common but differentiated responsibilities between countries, taking into account national circumstances and the needs of those who are most vulnerable.
• Country ownership of plans that are rooted in development objectives. These plans should be developed with the participation of civil society and non-state actors.
• Provision of incremental financing and technology and financial support to help developing countries leapfrog into low carbon or zero carbon trajectories.

The ability to balance climate change and sustainability objectives with poverty and development objectives is no mean feat. With greater power comes responsibility and developing countries need to demonstrate equal support to climate-friendly approaches. Several are already starting to do a significant part of their share in addressing climate change and are in fact willing to cover part of the costs. A new approach is perhaps overdue in that we explore more ways of “blending” various forms of financing, such as multilateral, bilateral, private, and trust fund monies, in order to help meet the incremental financing required for countries to transition towards low carbon development.

We’ve been covering the new US operation, US Copyright Group. You may recall, it burst on the scene in late March with a claim of having filed 20,000 infringement lawsuits — many of which were over a Uwe Boll movie, Far Cry, despite much of the infringement allegedly occurring before the film was registered at the US copyright office (a no-no for filing a lawsuit). More recently, the company was apparently gearing up to do the same thing over the Oscar-winning movie Hurt Locker.

During that time, we noted that US Copyright Group claimed that it had gone from having one ISP cooperating to “75%” of ISPs cooperating. This was a surprise, because years back, ISPs had been reluctant to cooperate with similar efforts. So the numbers seemed questionable. Either way, apparently Time Warner Cable is not at all interested in working with US Copyright Group. Instead, TWC went to the court to protest US Copyright Group’s efforts:

“Copyright cases involving third-party discovery of Internet service providers have typically related to a plaintiff’s efforts to identify anonymous defendants whose numbers rank in the single or low double digits,” wrote the cable company. “By contrast, plaintiff in this case alone seeks identifying information about 2,049 anonymous defendants, and seeks identifying information about 809 Internet Protocol addresses from TWC….”

“If the Court compels TWC to answer all of these lookup requests given its current staffing, it would take TWC nearly three months of full-time work by TWC’s Subpoena Compliance group, and TWC would not be able to respond to any other request, emergency or otherwise, from law enforcement during this period,” said the filing. “TWC has a six-month retention period for its IP lookup logs, and by the time TWC could turn to law enforcement requests, many of these requests could not be answered.”

Pretty interesting, given Time Warner Cable’s connection to Time Warner, which you would think would make it a bit more open to working with US Copyright Group. The article at Ars Technica also notes that Comcast and Cablevision also aren’t thrilled about US Copyright Group’s subpoenas. That’s three of the largest ISPs out there, so I’m curious about the 75% of ISPs who are supposedly “fully cooperating.” It sounds like that claim is about as legitimate as many of the original filings over infringement on a work who was not registered at the time of infringement.

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Conservatives have ideas, and it’s silly for liberals and moderates to claim they don’t. So let’s take a look at this article on some “innovative and controversial” ideas in the conservative movement.

First: taxes and babies. Robert Stein argues that the tax system is unfair to parents. “Once a country adopts an old-age pension system, it creates an
implicit bias against raising children,” Stein says. “Once a country gives everybody
access to everyone else’s kids’ money, it undermines the natural
economic incentive to raise kids.” To remedy the problem, Stein would quadruple the child-tax credit from $1,000 to $4,000, and make up the money by moving upper-middle income tax payers into a higher tax bracket.

Is it good policy to encourage families to save up to $12,000 a year by having three kids? I don’t know. But it’s a little weird to me that we’re talking about increasing the money rewards for American-born babies while also talking about spending billions to plug up the borders in the South; and profiling Mexicans in Arizona; and watching brilliant college grads leave the country after their visas expire. Countries with old-age pension systems need large tax bases. If we are legitimately worried about too few people paying for our expensive retirement plans, we should consider that immigrants are people, who work for money, whom we can tax.

Second, there’s this idea for the government to promote marriage by building advertorial billboards and punishing folks who want to divorce a spouse against his/her will:

[UVA Prof. Bradford Wilcox] proposes federal funding for public-service announcements and
other social marketing to promote marriage, modeled on anti-smoking
campaigns.

And to discourage divorce, he says, states should change marriage
laws so spouses who are being divorced against their will and have not
engaged in abuse or adultery would be given preferential treatment by
family courts in determining alimony, child support and custody of
children.

This is a little confusing. There’s a debate about whether married couples face a tax penalty (which can happen when two people of similar wages get hitched) or a tax benefit (couples with disparate incomes often see a tax break). So the tax system might provide uneven incentives to marry. But why promote marriage above cohabitation in the first place? Why promote it with billboard ads? Why encourage spouses to remain in unhappy marriages by tipping the scales against them in court? And if marriage really is “a kind of economic cooperation, a form of social insurance,” as Wilcox argues, why deny it to gay couples?

What’s bothersome is not merely the specter of government-sponsored marriage billboards. It’s strange that conservatives would spend considerable energy pushing couples to marry and reproduce when the evidence suggests that late marriages often last longer and allow both partners’ work skills to reach maturity. Jon Rauch wrote a fascinating column on the topic of red and blue families that looked at how marriage ages, childbearing rates and political ideologies meshed with culture in the 21st century. Read the whole thing. But these were striking paragraphs:

[For blue state families] early family formation is often a
calamity. It short-circuits skill acquisition by knocking one or both
parents out of school. It carries a high penalty for immature marital
judgment in the form of likely divorce. It leaves many young mothers,
now bearing both the children and the cultural responsibility for
pregnancy, without the option of ever marrying at all.

New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent
premature family formation. The new paradigm prizes responsible
childbearing and child-rearing far above the traditional linkage of
sex, marriage, and procreation. Instead of emphasizing abstinence until
marriage, it enjoins: Don’t form a family until after you have finished your education and are equipped for responsibility.

Surely, cheering couples onto the alter isn’t the federal government’s job.

In a blog post this afternoon, Kevin Rennie writes about the curious triangle that has developed bteween Rob Simmons, Linda McMahon and former U.S. Attorney Kevin O’Connor.

O’Connor gave a $250 campaign contribution to Simmons but three weeks later, he endorsed McMahon.

“Mahon’s acceptance of the endorsement of a former law enforcement official suggests she thinks she still hasn’t provided convincing responses to persistent stories about the steroid-infested professional wrestling division of show business,” Rennie writes.

In the past, O’Connor has taken a hard-line on steroids. In 2007, he busted a state man and five others who were peddling the drugs on MySpace.

“The dangers associated with the improper use of steroids and human growth hormone are well documented,” O’Connor said in a press release trumpeting the charges.

 

And in 2006, O’Connor’s office brought a case against a California man who was charged with selling anabolic steroids on the internet.

“The illegal distribution of anabolic steroids and other pharmaceuticals on the Internet poses a grave and increasing public health risk, and the federal government will vigorously prosecute this offense,” O’Connor said at the time.

McMahon spokesman Ed Patru said the candidates was “very pleased to have Kevin O’Connor’s endorsement. 

As for the steroid issue, Patru said McMahon has addressed it. “Delegates understand that individuals in the entertainment industry don’t always make the best personal choices…That said, they’re comfortable with the policies Linda put in place at the WWE and convinced that her real world business experience and her ability to create jobs is what’s needed in Washington.”

  

It’s worth noting that O’Connor’s wife, Kathleen O’Connor, served with McMahon on the state board of education. Both were appointed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell in January, 2009. McMahon stepped down from the post earlier this spring.

 

Until this year, California homeowners have usually arranged to have their solar installations slightly undersized, because it didn’t pay to get stuck with excess “roll-over” kilowatt hours at the true-up period at the end of each year. But that will change in six months.

If voters are not tricked by Big Oil into repealing California’s AB32 climate bill; starting in 2011,  Californians will be paid for excess renewable power they make at the end of each year – or they can choose to roll-over extra kilowatt hours and use them later.

As part of meeting the renewable energy requirements to reduce greenhouse gases, the CPUC is scheduled to decide by January 2011 what exact amount will be paid – per kilowatt hour – to individual homeowners and businesses that produce an annual excess of solar or wind power for the grid.

To help policy makers with fine-tuning this decision – to a Goldilocks-like just-right fairness to both sides – Bernard Chabot, the French expert in Feed-in Tariff policy design is offering an advanced Feed-In Tariff workshop in San Francisco  on July 13th. Investors and other interested parties are welcome, and it is free. (more…)

Aunque por aquí no le hemos prestado demasiada atención, HTC Desire es uno de los terminales de esta primera mitad del año. Junto con Nexus One y Motorola Milestone forma el triplete de terminales que ha confirmado – en mi opinión – la tendencia hacia la nivelación de la experiencia de usuario de iPhone y otros fabricantes, aunque a costa de que media industria esté fabricando el mismo terminal móvil.

A quien más se parece HTC Desire es a Nexus One, con la ventaja / inconveniente del interfaz HTC Sense: un añadido interesante, pero que con el efecto añadido de mayores retrasos en las actualizaciones del sistema operativo. En España ya está disponible con Vodafone y con Orange.

Filed under: Etc., Tesla

It’s not all that often that a messy divorce pops up with a billionaire on one side and somebody who wants part of the money on the other, right? Actually, this occurs far too often and a divorce involving wealthy individuals can be downright messy and ultimately destructive to those involved. It appears as though the divorce between Tesla’s chief executive officer Elon Musk and soon-to-be ex-wife Justine Musk is playing out as one of those mega-litigious affairs, and the impact may be extend well beyond just the two involved.

In case you haven’t followed the Musk soap opera, here’s what’s going on. The divorce saga has been going on seemingly forever, as these things take lots of time. Justine Musk recently began blogging about the whole fiasco a couple of weeks ago on her Livejournal site. Justine is fighting the court battle to secure a few things that she feels entitled to. What does Justine want? Not much, just the house, alimony and child support, $6 million in cash, 10 percent of Elon’s stock in Tesla, 5 percent of his stock in SpaceX, and throw in a Tesla Roadster as well.

Naturally, Elon is none too thrilled about the demands and has decided to fight this one in court. As the battle ensues, Elon stands a chance of losing much more than just the things listed above. If the divorce goes awry, Tesla could lose the $465 million in government funding that could delay its initial public offering. How does the divorce play into government funding? A stipulation in the paperwork states that government funds will be withdrawn if Musk doesn’t hold enough stock in the company.

So is Justine being fair? Are her demands legit? As she said on her blog:

Is that what I deserve? I don’t know. Who exactly deserves that kind of wealth? But based on our life and history together, is that reasonable? I think so.

One more thing to think about: by not agreeing to a settlement, Elon Musk risks losing even more as the post-marital agreement could be ruled illegal or fraudulent, and California law would then grant 50 percent of all communal property to Justine.

[Source: Livejournal, Reuters, Inside Line]

Wife of Tesla CEO demands 10-percent of his company stock and a Roadster in divorce originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 17 May 2010 15:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I heard about this a little while back when they had just wrapped. The director was excited to have shot an episode (the season finale) on the 5D mk II and was answering questions about it, a bit inexpertly I think, no doubt to the chagrin of the DP who actually shot the episode. The episode is airing tonight at 8PM tonight on FOX — watch it with your friends and then say “oh yeah they shot that on… this!” And then you pull out your 5D mk II. It’ll be glorious… in a minor way.

The Obama administration’s foreclosure prevention program appears to be running out of steam. Its April progress report (.pdf) shows that it started just 37,021 new trial mortgage modifications — the fewest in a month since at least last June. In fact, its cancelled trials during the month far outweighed those new ones, with 162,467 122,467* failures in April, more than the total 115,173 cancelled through March. The number of permanent modifications rose, though slowly, by 68,291, now sitting at 295,348 active permanent modifications since the program was announced in March 2009. That’s still well short of its goal of helping several million homeowners avoid foreclosure.

New Trials and Permanents

First, here’s a chart showing its progress starting new trial modifications and bringing trials permanent:

It seems pretty clear that the program has run its course in terms of acquiring new applicants. Up to now it has offered about 1.5 million trials, of which about 20% have been made permanent. Considering the report says that only 1.7 million mortgages are eligible, it’s easy to see why new trials are slowing. Unless the program finds a way to widen its net, it won’t have many more borrowers left who can qualify to participate.

The program’s progress bringing these trials permanent continues to be slow. It’s approaching 300,000, but it’s taken over a year to get there.

Cancellations Ramp Up

Perhaps the most shocking results from this report are the number of cancellations for both trial and permanent modifications. This trend was noted last month for March’s data. A whopping 162,467 122,467* trial modifications were cancelled in April. This brought the number of failed trials up to 277,640. That’s nearly as many as have been made permanent. To put these cancellations into context, in the first four months of 2009, only 274,090 trials have been started — fewer than have been cancelled.

Additionally, 865 permanent modifications were cancelled in April. That might not sound like much, but it’s a 30% increase in the number of total cancelled permanents, to 3,663. These modified mortgages shouldn’t be experiencing problems so soon. Remember: they already had to go through a trial period. All of these permanent modifications are less than a year old. Indeed, there were fewer than 5,000 permanent modifications made through September. The fact that these borrowers are already running into problems is very worrying.

Modification Strategy

The April report contains an interesting correction. Servicers appear to be using term extension as a means for modifying mortgages more than we thought. In March, it said 38.9% of mortgages utilized that method, but in April that number jumped to 53.4%. The report notes that this is a correction. That’s a pretty big mistake. The correction also shows than more than half of loans are increasing their terms to lower the payments borrowers face.

Principal reduction is still rarely being used. In April the percentage rose by 1% to 28.6% of mortgage modifications including principal forbearance. Recent efforts by the Treasury indicated that principal reduction would be used more often as a method, but it still appears to be mostly disregarded by servicers.

Report Continues to Evolve

Finally, the program’s report continues to evolve. It now includes a page showing its call center volume and outreach measures — in case you were worried the Treasury and servicers weren’t working hard enough. This is likely an attempt to shift the focus of program evaluation from actual results to effort exerted.

Moreover, the main performance chart continues to change its format, as it has most months. For April it looks like this:

For March, it looked like this:

Perhaps at some point the Treasury will finally settle on a format it likes. Or perhaps not.

*Typo — sorry about that. The analysis remains the same.

Commenter Dave Walser makes a good point:

What Professor Brown and others fail to understand is any measures that would increase the pay of adjunct professors would only increase the imbalance in the job market. If it were easier for an English PhD to make a living, more of us would have gotten that degree rather than pursuing a different field. I know I would have rather spent my days in college reading and discussing quality (and usually interesting) literature rather than parsing the tax code. I suspect, even today, I’d rather spend my days discussing Hamlet than accelerated depreciation. In making my choice between English and accounting, I listened to the price signal sent by starting salaries and earning potential. Dilute that price signal and many more will opt for a career in the humanities — which makes sense since the humanities is more intrinsically interesting as a field.

In other words, fixing the misery would only distribute the misery to PhDs who couldn’t get jobs as adjuncts.