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Cada vez que encuentro un incidente en donde está inmiscuido un Porsche Carrera GT pongo el grito en el cielo. Se trata de un coche que ya no se fabrica, por lo que los modelos existentes pueden considerarse como únicos. Desafortunadamente el coche que os mostramos irá directamente al desguace.

El suceso se produjo en Holanda, y es bastante extraño, la pareja en cuestión conoció al propietaro del Porsche en un centro turístico y le pidio que por favor les dejara hacer una prueba. El propietario del vehículo accedió de buena fe a la petición. La mujer se sentó en el asiento del conductor y su novio o marido se sentó en el asiento del pasajero. Antes de haber recorrido un kiómetro, la conductora perdió el control y se estrelló contra los árboles partiendo al Porsche por la mitad.

La mujer sufrió heridas graves mientras que su compañero se alejó del accidente con heridas leves. Una vez más, la moraleja de la historia es: Nunca debéis permitir que nadie, pero nadie, conduzca vuestro coche, sea el modelo que sea.

Vía | Wrecked Exotics

Both Eli Lake and Greg Miller report that President Obama personally asked Steve Kappes last year to remain the CIA’s deputy director. Kappes’ boss, Leon Panetta, announced yesterday that Kappes will be retiring next month. Under the Kappes Continuity — he ascended to deputy director in 2007 — the CIA began increasing its drone strikes in Pakistan, accelerating them significantly in 2007 and expanding them to Yemen. It’s a tool the Obama administration has zealously defended.

No one should labor under the misconception that Kappes is the linchpin of the drone-strike effort, which has many authors and advocates and structural factors pushing it forward. (Simply put, it’s what you do when you perceive a terrorist threat in a place you can’t invade.) But now that Kappes is out and his replacement is a longtime CIA analyst, not an operative, named Michael Morrell, it’s an open question whether Panetta and Morrell will shift the agency’s focus at all. The smart early money is probably not, since Panetta believes the strikes to be a smashing success. But watch his next round of congressional testimony to see if any post-Kappes shift is underway.

RealtyTrac reports that foreclosures reached their highest-ever level in March: “[F]ilings were reported on 367,056 properties in March, an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, an increase of nearly 8 percent from March 2009 and the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report in January 2005.”

The troubles continued to be felt most acutely in the so-called “sand states”: California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. In California alone 216,263 properties received a foreclosure notice. Ten states accounted for more than 70 percent of foreclosure activity, RealtyTrac said.

Why the sudden spike, so many months since the start of the burst of the housing bubble? The underpinning reason, of course, is persistent joblessness, declining incomes, and declining real estate prices. President Obama’s emergency foreclosure plans –  including the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, under scrutiny this week — have delayed much foreclosure activity, but not changed the underlying fundamentals.

The more immediate reason is that banks have decided to take action against homeowners late on their payments, both for mortgages and home-equity loans (secondary loans taken against the value of a house). The subprime mess remains a multibillion-dollar liability on the banks’ books. Reporting earnings yesterday, J.P. Morgan, the massive investment bank, for instance, wrote down $1.1 billion in home-equity losses. Lenders with more immediate exposure to mortgages — such as Bank of America — have much more to lose. And a recent report from CreditSights, a research firm, said that Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and J.P. Morgan might need an additional $30 billion to cover home-equity losses alone.

Luke Timmerman wrote:

Catabasis Pharmaceuticals has just raised a load of cash. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech company has raked in an initial $7.7 million in equity financing out of a venture round that could be worth as much as $39.7 million, according to a regulatory filing.

The company, which lists an address at 161 First Street in Cambridge, is led by president Jill Milne, according to the filing. Catabasis’s company website doesn’t say much at the moment, although Milne, a former senior director at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and a director at Pfizer, says on her LinkedIn profile that she founded Catabasis in July 2008.

The startup, which disclosed that it had obtained $2 million in debt financing in January, now has some big hitters on its board of directors. The group includes Maggie LeFlore of MedImmune Ventures; Jeff Leiden of Clarus Ventures; and Michael Ross of SV Life Sciences. Michael Jirousek, another Sirtris veteran, is the chief scientific officer at Catabasis, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The company hasn’t issued a press release, and I left a message for Milne this morning at the office. I’ll update this space if I hear back from her. But the Catabasis company website offers a very basic description of what the company is about. It is developing drugs for inflammatory and metabolic diseases, with the idea of returning the body toward its natural state of balance, known as homeostasis. The compounds are being designed to focus on lipid mediators, specifically by taking advantage of the ability of protective effects of omega-3 fatty acids against heart disease.

“Additionally, there is a growing body of clinical and preclinical evidence that [omega-3 fatty acids] have therapeutic potential for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders, age-related macular degeneration, and cancer,” the company says on its website.

Catabasis is seeking to use what it calls “SMART-linker” technology that improves the delivery, potency, and effectiveness of two specific omega-3 fatty acids.

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

*Terror trial moved from New York City. After first saying he was okay with holding the trial of confessed al-Qaida terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg changed his mind and asked Attorney General Eric Holder to move it. The state’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, and a lot of other politicos also jumped on the “not in our city” bandwagon. That was enough to convince the Obama Administration to pull the plug on a really bad idea. Officials are now scrambling to come up with a new plan. Here’s one: Let the military handle it. This should never have been moved to a civilian court in the first place.

*Man, those new jobs are expensive. Remember when Barrack Obama promised that if Congress approved his $800 billion “stimulus” package, unemployment wouldn’t go above 8 percent? Well, to quote an old country song, he got the gold mine and we got the shaft. Unemployment is now a minimum of 10 percent. Since people who’ve stopped looking for work and down-sized temps aren’t counted among the unemployed, the real number is undoubtedly much higher. Still, our President claims the stimulus has “saved or created” 2 million jobs. Let’s see, that means each new job cost us taxpayers about $400,000 each. Want to guess how long it will take each new worker to pay that much in taxes?

*Our “too little, too late” State Department. You may have missed the news that back in January the State Department revoked the visa of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian wanna-be bomber who tried to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day. Thanks guys, I feel much safer now.

—Chip Wood

Did Kate Hudson have a boob job?

The actress is rumored to have undergone breast augmentation last month after she was recently spotted sporting a noticably fuller bust.

The new issue of Us Weekly includes side-by-side photos of a flat-chested Hudson, 31, in January and another bikini-clad pic snapped poolside in Miami last week, fueling reports that Kate’s gone under the knife.

At the 2002 Golden Globes, the Almost Famous star chatted about the joys of having a less than ample bosom.

“I have small breasts, obviously. It’s nice to be able to wear a plunging neckline and have it be elegant,” she said at the time.

Behind The Scenes – Street Drift: Mulholland with Tanner Foust

Last week we brought you a video of Tanner Foust drifting Mullholland Drive in a highly modified Scion TC, and by highly modified we mean EVERYTHING was done to it. It was converted to rear wheel drive (obviously), has a TRD NASCAR spec engine that was de-tuned from 800hp to make it more manageable, as well as Tanner Foust behind the wheel. Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire was also on hand to film his own behind the scenes footage which, to be honest is just as good as the original video. So now sit back and enjoy some more carnage as Tanner Foust shreds some more tires on Mullholland Drive.

Source: Streetfire.net

As part of my daily reading regimen, I often come across articles that I want to read later. They’re either long or otherwise don’t fit with what I’m reading at the moment. This used to involve keeping the tab open until I got around to reading it. Problem is, oftentimes browser tabs can eat up too much memory, eventually causing the browser to crash. If it’s on a site that automatically reloads every minute or so, forget about it. It’s just a huge pain. On the suggestion of a friend I tried out Instapaper. It installs a bookmarklet in your browser which you can use to set aside everything you want to read at a later time, allowing you to avoid your browser’s clunky bookmark system. This type of application is even more useful on a BlackBerry, so when I learned that Emerick had released a BlackBerry version of Instapaper, I was all over it.

(more…)

It has finally arrived — April 15 — Tax Day.

Today is the deadline for filing your 2009 federal and state income tax returns. The envelopes must be postmarked by midnight tonight.

If you have not yet prepared your 2009 return, for whatever reason, all is not lost. You can file a Form 4868 to request an automatic six-month extension until Oct. 15. The Form 4868 also must be postmarked by midnight tonight. In many cases a federal Form 4868 will also extend your state return. You can download a Form 4868 at the IRS Web site.

The extension is for time to file and not time to pay. If you think you will owe your Uncle Sam you should send a payment with the extension. You will be charged interest, and a small penalty, from April 15 until you file your return and pay the tax on any balance due.

But what if you don’t have the money to pay your taxes? I cannot stress this enough — it is very important that you get your returns, or your extension requests, in the mail today — even if you cannot pay all, or any, of the tax due.

The IRS penalty for paying late is .5% of the tax due per month, or part thereof, but the penalty for filing late is 5% per month — 10 times as much.

— Robert D. Flach

Consumerist has teamed up with MainStreet.com to bring you tax tips every day between now and April 15th now. This frees up Tax Cat to do more important things — like trying to claim hairball meds and catnip as business expenses.

Looking for more deductions? You’ll find tons at MainStreet.com.

More from MainStreet.com:

• The Best Stuff to Buy in April
• Dating Out of Your Salary Range
• The 20 Best DIY Sites

Analysts were looking for about 458,000, so this is obviously a disappointment.

We’re still just not seeing the kind of steady decrease in initial claims we’re looking for.

This is two misses in a row.

Says CNBC’s Steve Liesman: “Next week it becomes worrisome”

Why? Apparently the government is saying this weakness still has something to do with holiday timing. Let’s hope.

Stocks are still lower on the day.

Here’s the full announcement from the Department of Labor.

Join the conversation about this story »

So, I go to meetings on “deterring Iran” all the time where someone says “I think Thomas Schelling would say …”

The funny thing is, Tom is still around. And he has actual opinions on the issue. One needn’t perform exegesis on Strategy and Conflict or try to extrapolate from Arms and Influence. You can just ask him what he thinks.

So, Steve Clemons and I did! Tom is coming to the New America Foundation to talk about our interests in managing a nuclear-armed Iran.

So come join us at the New America Foundation on Friday at 12:15.

Thinking Through the Thinkable on a Nuclear Iran

Please join the New America Foundation for a conversation with Nobel prize winner Tom Schelling.

Participants

featured speaker
Thomas C. Schelling
Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland
Winner, 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics

respondent
Jeffrey Lewis
Director, Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative
New America Foundation

moderator
Steve Clemons
Director, American Strategy Program
New America Foundation
Publisher, The Washington Note

Event Time and Location
Friday, April 16, 2010 – 12:15pm – 1:45pm
New America Foundation
1899 L Street NW Suite 400
Washington, DC, 20036

Harbinger Capital is rolling the dice with Palm. In an SEC filing, the hedge fund disclosed that it purchased 16 million shares, or 9.48%, of Palm.

Harbinger is betting that Palm sells itself at a premium to its current ~$6 share price. Palm has hired Goldman and Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Group to sell the company.

BONUS: Who Is Going To Buy Palm?

Join the conversation about this story »

China recently revealed that it recorded a trade deficit of US$7.2-billion in March, the first time it its balance has been in the red since April 2004.

The news comes at a good time for Beijing as it may decrease expectations for a rise in the yuan. China is facing pressure to let the currency appreciate, with critics suggesting the yuan is undervalued by as much as 40%, providing exporters with an unfair advantage.

Yao Jian, spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, stressed that the continuous improvement of the trade balance had created conditions for China to keep the Chinese yuan’s value basically stable.

“This proved again that in an era of economic globalization, it is not exchange rate but market supply and demand and other factors that decide trade balance,” he said.

National Bank Financial chief economist and strategist Stéphane Marion doubts the deficit will be enough to ease the pressure on China to revalue its currency. He noted that official Chinese trade data are not seasonally adjusted. If you do adjust for seasonal effects, the nominal trade balance was still in a slight surplus position of US$1-billion in March.

“Given the strong global inventory rebuilding cycle that is unfolding, we expect Chinese exports (which are already back their pre-recession peak) to soon be propelled to new record highs,” Mr. Marion said in a report.

He noted that while China has held its exchange rate versus the U.S. dollar stable since 2008, the effective exchange rate for its currency has actually depreciated by roughly 6% over that period. As a result, he still sees a compelling case that can be made for a revaluation of the currency in real terms.

“Of course, China could opt for such a revaluation to take place via higher inflation, but we doubt that this is the route the authorities will want to take,” Mr. Marion said. “In our opinion, domestic conditions alone dictate that China should opt for currency revaluation sooner rather than later.”

Jonathan Ratner

If your 27-inch iMac sometimes forgets to wake its screen when coming out of hibernation, or if CPU usage goes nuts after using headphones for a while, well, you’re in luck. New firmware! It goes by the name 27-inch iMac EFI FW Update 1.0. So do that system update thing you do so well. [MacRumors] More »

It looks like the current season of The Sarah Silverman Program might be its last.

In a chat with TV Squad this week, Silverman’s co-star, comedian Brian Posehn, revealed that the Comedy Central hit will likely not make it to a fourh season. Why, you might ask?

“Just because it was so tough to get them to give us the money to do the third season,” says Posehn. “I don’t know. I’m also a negative person. I’m not going to be the blue sky-er, you know. I feel like we’re lucky to have done what we’ve done, and I would be very happy to come back and do a season four. But I’d also be completely surprised if it happened.”

In American society the connection between religion and belief in god(s) is very close. This of course is not a universal. In Indian and Chinese religion there isn’t a necessary connection, though as a matter of operational reality most religious adherents in India and China do seem to believe in god. In the Abrahamic tradition the issue seems clear cut, but both Judaism and Islam are strongly orthopraxic, and somewhat less fixed on theological orthodoxy, so there is perhaps more wiggle room than one might think. Additionally, Jews are a nation, an ethnicity, as well as a people, and so those who are not particularly religious observant or believers in the God of Abraham, the God Isaac and the God of Jacob, may still identify with Judaism as their religion. The ‘cultural’ aspect of religion has even crept into Christianity, which was originally rather particular as to the content of one’s beliefs. In much of Europe the proportion of self-identified Christians exceeds the proportion of those who avow Christian theism.

In the comment below Amos Zeeberg guesses that many Jewish scientists are also atheists. This seems plausible, and ERV confirms it thanks to Amazon search, 75% of self-identified eminent Jewish scientists are atheists in Elaine Ecklund’s data set. And this tendency may not be limited to Jewish scientists, consider Freeman Dyson, a self-identified Protestant who admits to not confessing beliefs which one would expect from a Protestant.

I wanted to dig deeper. So again, the GSS. I wanted to look at the variable GOD and see how intelligence and education affected it across various religious categories. God has six responses:

– Don’t believe
– No way to find out
– Believe sometimes
– Believe, but doubts
– Know God exists

I clustered the first three into the category “non-theists,” and the middle two as “theist with doubts.” This is mostly because the sample sizes for religious groups crossed with the GOD variable aren’t that big on the secular end of the range. My question was how response on GOD related to intelligence controlled for religion and denomination. For religion I looked at Protestants, Catholics, Jews and “Nones.” For denominations only the Southern Baptists, United Methodists and Episcopalians had decent sample sizes.

To measure education was easy, and I divided them into two classes, those with at least a college degree and those without; the variable DEGREE. To measure intelligence I used WORDSUM, a vocabulary test. I constructed two categories, “average” and “smart,” the former ranging from 0-7 and the latter 8-10 correct.

I’ve included the results in the whole GSS data set without controlling for religion so you have a reference point. The rows add up to 100%. Additionally, if the numbers are bold that means that that point is outside of the 95% interval of its equivalent in the other category. For example, for the general population there’s a difference in proportion between non-theists between the smart and average whereby the 95% interval still does not overlap. Not so with theists with doubts.

A few notes. Sorry about the small sample sizes for some groups. That’s why seeing a lot of un-bolded numbers. But I do want to observe that for Jews and United Methodists many of the values came very close to being outside of the 95% intervals, and to a lesser extent with Episcopalians as well. Catholics are surprisingly homogeneous in this data set. One caveat is that there’s been a massive defection from the Catholic church since 1990, and the data goes back to 1972. It seems that the more ’secular’ the group the bigger effect that intelligence or education has. This goes for comparing Protestant denominations as well, Southern Baptists are relatively uniform, the Episcopalians less so. This makes sense since Southern Baptists are much more stringent in terms of the beliefs one must espouse, so that there’s an automatic filter. By contrast Episcopalians tend to accept a level of privacy in regards to theology or strength of belief. Interestingly, it is among those who have no religious affiliation that intelligence and education seem to be wear away theism the most.

One question I had was the independent effect of intelligence vs. education. Education may have a socializing effect. So I decided to look at the differences by intelligence controlling for education.

I want to note that for college graduates the difference between proportions of non-theists between the smart and average came very close non-overlapping on the 95% interval. It looks that even controlling for education intelligence has an independent effect. I’m shocked by the finding for people with post-graduate education, but perhaps there’s some peculiarity about the who go on to receive advanced degrees of some sort but are not particularly bright.

Officially official specs for the Droid Incredible  have officially hit and they’re in line with the specs we’ve previously leaked. That is the Droid Incredible will rock a beautiful 3.7-inch 480×800 WVGA OLED screen and the increasingly popular 1 GHz Snapdragon Processor. 8GB of internal memory is also confirmed but these specs don’t go on about the 802.11n, which we’ve seen listed before. In any case, combining the two spec sheets makes for an awesome phone. We can’t wait to get our hands on it. [Verizon Wireless via Engadget]

Also, according to the latest leaked screens of Best Buy inventory [via Phandroid], the Droid Incredible is expected to hit Best Buy on April 25th, 4 days earlier than the expected launch date. The price off-contract is listed at $599.99 which is par for the course for a device like this. Pic of that after the break.

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Almost half the nation won’t owe income taxes Thursday, thanks to the Bush tax cuts and thousands of dollars in refundable tax credits from President Obama. That’s why America’s income tax burden looks the way it does. The top one percent of tax payers — those earning over $390,000 — pay the same amount in income taxes as the lowest 95 percent of Americans combined. That group comprises anyone making under $150,000, according to the tax foundation.

“Last year, Washington paid out more than $70 billion in refundable tax credits to individuals who either had no income tax liability or just a small one, so that’s why people look at April 15 as pay day rather than tax day,” said Scott Hodge, President of the Tax Foundation.

Regardless of how much each American is paying, no one wants his or her money being wasted. Take the C-17, a transport plane Obama tried to cancel last year and is again targeting for termination this year.

In fiscal year 2010, Congress appropriated $2.5 billion to procure 10 C-17 transport planes — even though the initiative has been opposed by both the Bush and Obama administrations and the Department of Defense decided to cease C-17 production in 2007.

Fox News Calculator: How Much Are YOU Paying for C-17 Production?

Do you want your tax money to pay for 10 C-17 transport planes the Pentagon says it does not want or need, even if it does employ people in 10 states?

We crunched the numbers so you can find out how much it costs you. If you earn $15,000, the planes will cost you a little more than a dollar. If you make between $200,000 $250,000, the planes will cost you about $70.

How about funding for NASA? Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget would end funding for the Constellation Systems program, initiated by NASA in 2005 to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 and later to Mars. The administration says the program is behind schedule and cannot achieve its goals without budget increases.

Fox News Calculator: How Much Are YOU Paying to NASA?

Now it is your turn to tell Congress which programs you would like to keep funding, and which ones should go.

Even though the nation is technically broke, not everyone votes no.