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AS MENTIONED in yesterday’s Link exchange, European governments have agreed to a package of loans to Greece to help cover financing needs while fiscal adjustments are made. The package is fairly generous; some €30 billion will be available the first year, with more authorised for 2011 and 2012. But big as that seems, it’s unlikely to be enough. Here is The Economist:

Whether it does convince the markets may soon be clear: On April 13th Greece was due to try to auction a fresh slice of short-term debt. The government needs to borrow about €11 billion by the end of May to roll over maturing debt and service interest charges. All in all, the country may need to borrow more than €50 billion in 2010 (estimates vary)…

Representatives from the commission, the ECB and the Greek government will meet IMF officials on April 12th to discuss the conditions that would be imposed on Greece and the exact size of the IMF contribution. The combined EU-IMF package is a substantial one but few imagine that it will be a one-off: on Sunday Reuters news agency quoted a Greek official as saying the country is likely to need a total €80 billion of loans over three years. If so it will be the largest multilateral rescue of a debt-ridden country yet seen.

The Economist has also estimated that €80 billion in adjustement assistance would be necessary. Meanwhile, here is the Financial Times‘ Wolfgang Münchau:

So will this stave off insolvency? It is important to distinguish the near-term insolvency as a result of the failure to roll over existing debt, and the country’s long-term solvency position. This deal, I am confident, will solve the first issue. As I predicted last week, Greece will not default this year. But I am still sticking with my second prediction that Greece will eventually default. The numbers simply look too bad. The adjustment effort Greece is asked to make will be one of the largest in history. But unlike other countries that made a similar effort in the past, Greece cannot devalue; it faces a much more challenging global environment; it has a weak fiscal infrastructure; a low consensus in society in favour of deep reforms; and a fragile financial system. The agreed bail-out terms do not exactly offer much relief, except in the very short-term. It will become clear very soon that this loan agreement represents a net transfer of wealth from Athens to Berlin – and not the other way round.

All this points to an eventual but not imminent default. It is important to remember that default does not usually imply a complete wipe-out. Bondholders usually recover some proportion of their holdings. I would expect that some form of restructuring of the Greek debt is inevitable, whereby bondholders will see a percentage subtracted from the par value of the assets. The 5 per cent interest rate, relative to the market rate, may already be a metric of the size of a future restructuring. It is hard enough to imagine how Greece can get out of a simultaneous debt and competitiveness crisis without falling into some vicious circle – debt deflation, for example, or just extreme public hostility that will thwart the government’s reform efforts. But it is impossible, at least for me, to imagine a situation in which Greece can manage to extricate itself from a pending catastrophe without some debt restructuring.

Without leaving the euro zone, an eventuality which is almost impossible to imagine, Greece can’t devalue against its largest trading partners. But it is a cruel irony for Greece that the announcement of the aid package has boosted the euro, leaving Greek exports still less competitive against the rest of the world’s goods. And Peter Boone and Simon Johnson add a pessimistic note:

Often assistance packages of this nature just help “smart money” to get out ahead of a default.  This could be the case here; 40-45 billion euros total money could last roughly one year.  Both Russia and Argentina got large packages in the late 1990s but never regained access to private markets, so eventually everything fell apart.

Things look better for Greece than they did on Friday. But they still look pretty bad.

Sorry for the bad pun in the title.  We tried to avoid it as best as possible.  UPS has announced the release of their new Android application today which tracks packages and helps find the nearest location.  Further, users can calculate shipping rates, time-in-transit, and create shipping labels. If you’re a frequent eBay or Craigslist type of person, you’d probably find quite a bit of help in a tool like this.

It’s not necessary to log in to track packages, however once you do, there are additional options available. For instance, you can rename the tracking number to something like “John Elway rookie card“. You can find the free application in the Android Market today or by scanning/clicking the barcode to the right!

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• New Motoblur Handset or Really Good Photoshop Job?
  

  Droiddog.com is reporting that the handset pictured to the left may be a new Motoblur prototype from …

They are calling it the "Monster of Lake Evans."

Authorities over the weekend tell the story this way: On Friday, Riverside County animal-control officials got a report of a "20-foot snake" roaming around Lake Evans. Authorities went out to investigate. They found a 60-pound, 15-foot-long python.

Officials believe the owner of the python dumped the animal at the lake. There had been earlier reports of people noticing a large snake in the area.

"There were no reports of it feeding off any of the lake’s fowl," Animal Services Department spokesman John Welsh told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. "Clearly, Burmese pythons are not native to Lake Evans."

According to KTLA News, Burmese pythons, while very large, are considered docile and easy to handle. The python is being taken care of by animal-control employees. It could be sent to an exotic-pet rescue facility if the owner is not found.

— Shelby Grad

Photo credit: KTLA

The U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and four states have charged Morgan Keegan & Company with fraud and reckless business practices, saying the company caused bond fund investors to lose more than $1 billion during the subprime mortgage collapse. 

The SEC and FINRA say that James Kelsoe, managing director at Morgan Keegan and a leading mutual fund manager, directed staff to perform 262 “price adjustments” in 2007 that hid the declining values of bond funds that were heavily invested in subprime mortgages. In addition, the two financial authorities say the company, and its subsidiary, Morgan Asset Management, withheld vital information from investors about the value and security of their investments.

The SEC is also charging Joseph Weller, who heads Morgan Keegan’s accounting department, with failing to assure that the securities’ prices were set at the proper level.

The charges come as the company faces hundreds of Morgan Keegan bond fund arbitration claims from investors. Morgan Keegan officials say they have already bought back $100 million in securities to remediate investor losses.

Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and South Carolina have also announced that they intend to take administrative actions against Morgan Keegan, which could result in them being forced to compensate investors for more than $1 billion in losses and could also result in the company losing its license to do business in those states.

The bond funds were heavily invested in the subprime mortgage market, and lost as much as 82% in value after the market imploded. The funds were subsequently taken from Morgan Keegan by its parent company, Regions Financial Corp., and transferred to Hyperion Brookfield Assed Management, Inc., which has since liquidated and closed down two of the funds.

Morgan Keegan officials have said that the charges represent factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations of law and say the company plans to defend itself against the charges and claims.

Hundreds of Morgan Keegan lawsuits filed by individual investors are currently pending against the brokerage firm. The cases involve several different Morgan Keegan funds, including the RMK Strategic Income Fund, RMK Select High Income Fund and RMK Advantage Fund.

We’ve been dipping our toes into the DC housing market recently, but after this weekend, I think I’m just about ready to give up.  Anything that comes on the market at a decent price is snapped up almost immediately–by my count, mean time from listing to contract is under seven days.  The only things that stay on the market long enough to look at fall into one of two categories:

1.  The owner bought the house between 2004 and 2007, and wants to get their money back out, hopefully with a little profit . . . and has therefore priced their home at least $100,000 above what the market will bear.

2.  The house has been rented, and the tenants, familiar with their copious rights under DC housing law, are essentially refusing to allow the house to be shown.

We’ve seen multiple halves of houses, where the house had been divided, and one of the units was still occupied by a recalcitrant tenant.  In one case, we were invited to make an offer on the place contingent upon seeing the upstairs, at which point listing agent expected the owner would finally leap into action and . . . do what?  This is a city that requires you to have a forecast of at least four days of good weather above 65 degrees in order to evict a tenant.  And I’ve heard of one case in which they showed up to do the eviction, the tenant politely declined to be evicted, and the bailiffs went away again.

This should be a golden time for buyers with decent credit, stable incomes, and modest requirement for neighborhood safety.  But there’s almost no inventory, and what there is, can’t be sold.

I spent the weekend in long conversations about why this might be with our real estate agent, and a friend who develops property in DC.  There’s a big “shadow inventory” of houses in late-stage delinquency or foreclosure, particularly in the areas where we want to buy.  Why can’t we find anything?

In part, because that shadow inventory isn’t coming on the market.  There are two components to this, one DC-specific, one not.  The specific part is the aforementioned tenant laws, which make New York’s arcane housing court system look like a bastion of pro-landlord sentiment.  The only way to break a lease is to be a single-family owner who wants to take occupancy.  The bank has to let the tenant’s lease run before they are evicted, as well as give them ninety days notice of the intent to vacate the property.  Given the difficulties of selling a house that cannot be shown, a lot of banks are choosing to do just that.  Others are putting it on the market and then finding that, surprise! they somehow never can schedule a showing.  Yet the banks are understandably unwilling to drag the tenants into court, which is very time consuming, and a huge burden on already overwhelmed administration.

The broader nationwide problem is that banks have a huge backlog of these bad loans, which means first, that they simply don’t have the adminstrative capacity to put them all on the market at once, and second, that at least in the case of the larger lenders, they are trying to dribble them out over time and avoid crushing the market.

Meanwhile, the fall in house prices since 2007, even in DC, where the collapse has been relatively mild, means that no one wants to sell unless they have to.  Everyone’s hoping to wait until the market turns around–and given how optimistic people seem to be about the housing market, that’s hardly surprising.  So there’s very little inventory other than distress sales, or people who have to move for one reason or another.

Meanwhile, DC is one of the relatively fortunate areas in this recession.  Our unemployment rate is high, but it hasn’t shot up the way it has in other areas, pushing previously solid homeowners to the brink of foreclosure.  Meanwhile, the expansion of government is attracting ever more young professionals to the area.  The combination means a lot of money looking to buy very few houses.

It’s not totally unreasonable to think that prices will go up in DC, eventually; huge swathes of Northwest and incresingly, Northeast are gentrifying at a pace faster than anything I’ve ever seen–and before I moved here, I was a lifelong New Yorker.  But even here, that shadow inventory means it’s not going to happen for a few years. 

Nationwide, we’re probably looking at a long period over which house prices don’t fall, but they don’t really rise much, either, and the market sorts itself out by letting inflation eat away the nominal value of peoples’ outstanding mortgages.  And over here on Florida Avenue NW, we’re probably looking at a few more years crammed into an oddly-laid-out one-bedroom-plus den flip house.

(Nav Image Credit: La Citta Vita/flickr)

Following the disastrous spill of a billion gallons of coal ash waste from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant in December 2008, poorly regulated coal ash impoundments like the one that failed have landed in the public spotlight.

But other methods of disposing of coal ash waste have gotten less attention — even though they still present serious environmental hazards.

A new report from the N.C. Sierra Club illuminates one practice of coal ash waste disposal that until now has stayed largely in the regulatory shadows: the use of the material in structural fills for development projects such as roads and buildings.

“Unlined Landfills? The Story of Coal Ash Waste in our Backyard” [pdf] documents how a lack of federal controls combined with weak state regulations have created what it calls a “gaping loophole” allowing an unknown volume of coal ash to be disposed of in this way. Under current North Carolina law, such so-called “beneficial use” of coal ash requires no permits, no liners, no regular inspections and no groundwater monitoring.

“North Carolina’s current practice of allowing coal ash to be placed on the ground as fill material for land development with minimal oversight has led to numerous problems,” the report finds. “These problems include groundwater contamination, surface water contamination, sham landfills, environmental violations and failure to track locations of coal ash fills.”

One of the sites documented in the Sierra Club report — the Swift Creek structural fill site in Nash County, N.C. — was also included in “Out of Control: Mounting Damages From Coal Ash Waste Sites,” a report that was released earlier this year by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice. That report noted that arsenic oozing from the site contaminated groundwater in an off-site aquifer.

The Sierra Club investigation also documents groundwater contamination at another North Carolina structural fill site on Alamac Road in Robeson County, where elevated sulfate and arsenic levels were found in the groundwater below the site:

ReUse Technology, a Georgia-based company that handles coal ash produced by utilities, was operating the Robeson County site without authorization. … After the state began enforcement actions in the 1990s, ReUse Technology removed the ash from the Robeson County site.

In addition, the Sierra Club reports that high levels of toxic arsenic, iron and selenium were discovered last year in wetlands near Arthurs Creek in Northampton County, N.C. at a 21-acre coal ash structural fill site near the community of Garysburg.

The report also revisits a controversy that arose in 2000, when displaced survivors of Hurricane Floyd were temporarily housed in trailers at an industrial park in Edgecombe County, N.C. that turned out to be built on coal ash fill. In response to concerns raised by residents about uncovered ash at the site, the state conducted tests but claimed the soil presented no significant risks to residents.

Also addressed in the Sierra Club report are instances where mass soil excavation occurred at structural fill sites prior to the placement of the coal ash, essentially creating deep unlined landfills that put groundwater at risk.

The report faults North Carolina law for being lax about the use of coal ash at such sites:

According to state and federal (Clean Water Act) regulations — as with all development — coal ash cannot be placed within 50 feet of wetlands unless the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approves. Structural fill sites must be set back from streams at least 50 feet. They must be 100 feet from water wells.

But beyond that, the state’s rules for beneficial use of coal ash — and especially for structural fill — are overly permissive, provide inadequate state oversight, and fail to require minimum, commonsense safeguards.

The Sierra Club calls on the administration of North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue (D) to stop allowing coal ash to be used for land development and instead require that it be disposed of in lined landfills. It also calls for requiring groundwater monitoring at active structural fill sites and at sites created in the last 30 years, mandating cleanup by developers if monitoring data reveals groundwater or surface water contamination, identifying a funding source to enable adequate oversight and enforcement, and requiring that coal ash structural fills be permanently recorded on the deed for the affected property.

North Carolina imposed some regulations on coal ash structural fills in 1994, including a deed recording requirement. However, a 2002 state analysis found that only 56% of closed structural fill sites that held 1,000 cubic yards or more of coal ash had complied with that requirement, according to the report.

The Sierra Club investigation comes as long-promised federal regulations for coal ash —
originally supposed to be released in December — remain in limbo at the
White House Office of Management and Budget. The Obama administration is being lobbied heavily against declaring coal ash hazardous waste, in part because of how such a designation would affect so-called “beneficial uses” of the waste, including structural fills.

Among the many forces that have been lobbying against strict federal regulation of coal ash? The administration of North Carolina Gov. Perdue.

(Aerial photo of contaminated Swift Creek structural fill site in Nash County, N.C. from “Out
of Control: Mounting Damages From Coal Ash Waste Sites.”)

The Internal Revenue Service is spending more time auditing smaller businesses instead of larger ones, according to a new report out today by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Since 2005, the IRS has cut the time it spends auditing firms with assets of $250 million or more by 33%. Meanwhile, the IRS has increased the hours it spends on businesses with assets of $5 million or less by 34%. Yet the report also shows that auditing big firms is much more lucrative than examining the tax returns of smaller ones. Why is the IRS moving in this direction?

Bigger Firm Audits More Profitable

This chart shows how much more money the IRS makes spending its time looking at larger firms:

As the dollars-per-hour figure clearly shows, audits of the larger companies are far more profitable: the IRS earns a whopping $8,329 more per hour auditing firms with assets of $250 million or more than those smaller. This data makes it seem strange that the IRS would make such a shift. Its boss, the U.S. Treasury, collects far more money per hour from the bigger firms.

The Bigger They Are, The Harder the Audit

The report explains that this is due how much longer it takes auditors to examine the bigger firms than smaller ones. Since IRS employees are under pressure to meet quotas, they are steered away from spending more time on the bigger firms — even if that time pays off better. That can be seen pretty clearly by the following two charts. This one shows that the number of firms audited in various size categories isn’t that vastly different across most of the spectrum:

But the hours spent vary greatly:

The IRS Mission?

This raises the question: should the IRS be trying to spread out its effort over roughly the same number of firms of various sizes, or focus on those where it can make the most money? According to its mission:

The IRS role is to help the large majority of compliant taxpayers with the tax law, while ensuring that the minority who are unwilling to comply pay their fair share.

That’s not really a mandate to act like a profit-seeking entity: it’s to catch the firms who aren’t paying what they should be. That could be interpreted to make sure you catch the largest number of firms instead of collecting the most in unpaid taxes. Perhaps the IRS should altar its mission to specifically seek profit, but such an assertion could be controversial.

Auditor’s Instinct?

What this report fails to explain is the judgment factor on the part of IRS agents. It’s plausible that its auditors targets firms where they suspect incorrect taxes to have been paid. Since big firms have very sophisticated tax experts working for them, they should make fewer mistakes. If the IRS is focusing on those they strong suspect of not paying their taxes properly, then that could explain why it has had such dramatic success in its hourly earnings for big firms. After all, large companies have more revenue, so their mistakes would cost them more. But if those big firms are paying their taxes properly, then very time consuming audits could prove a huge waste of time.

More Evidence Reform Is Needed

One clear lesson from this report should be that the tax code needs simplification. If the IRS could spend less time on all audits, it could cover a larger number of firms. A less complex tax code would produce that end. Instead, the IRS feels pressure to spread its scarce resources over smaller businesses so that it can cover more ground. With tax code reform, the IRS could review more companies in less time, which would better ensure that more firms are paying what they owe.

(Nav Image Credit: mdid/flickr)

Probablemente casi mostrado de casualidad, el SUV Spyker Peking-to-Paris fue visto en sus últimas imágenes del modelo final a escala hecho de arcilla, en una conferencia en Holanda. Recordemos que el Peking-to-Paris, además de rememorar una de las primeras carreras de coches del siglo pasado de larga duración, introduce el primer SUV (o SSUV) para la marca Spyker, un proyecto que ya lleva dando vueltas desde hace unos 4 años.

No es un modelo que todavía me termine de convencer, aunque hay que reconocer que es algo nuevo dentro de este segmento ya tan desgastado. Por su diseño, el modelo de arcilla visto parece un poco menos voluminoso que los renders que hemos visto anteriormente y de los cuales tenéis uno a modo de comparación.

Por el lado del motor, las cosas se ponen un poco más interesantes que antes. Si anteriormente se decía que Spyker iba a echar mano al motor W12 de Volkswagen para el Peking-to-Paris, ahora se dice que dicho motor se dejó a un lado a favor de un V8 supercargado de Daimler o Ferrari. Una solución más refinada, que la propuesta de usar motores V8 de GM, ahora que Spyker tuvo una relación comercial con los norteamericanos por la compra de Saab.

Vía | Auto Informatief

The design community has seen a huge expansion in recent years with thousands of blogs or community sites trying to copy or imitate the success of more successful ventures like CSS Globe, Smashing Magazine, Wired, MIX Online, Tuts+, Designer Depot or Noupe.

Recent blog posts and articles show a trend in the web-design community, starte… (read more)

In Memoriam: Lech Kaczynski. A very insightful piece from The Economist.

Filed under: people, politics, World

Greece is still on the ropes, according to Peter Boone of the London School of Economics and Simon Johnson of MIT. They figure that the rescue package agreed to over the weekend will probably carry Greece through the next year. But to avert another crisis, one of two things must happen within the next few months: the global recovery must be so strong that it carries Greece’s economy along with it, or Greece must come up with an austerity program that is big and convincing enough to persuade lenders that Athens is deserving of more loans.

Whatever happens, Boone and Johnson believe that the Greek rescue package—estimated to be worth a total of 45 billion euros—sends the wrong message to other European nations such as Portugal and Ireland that are struggling with their own financial problems.

“The stronger Europeans, by coming to Greece’s rescue at this time with little conditionality, are effectively showing all the weaker nations that they too can get a package. This will undoubtedly reduce the resolve for needed reforms..” write Boone and Johnson on the Baseline Scenario blog. “We are still lurching from crisis to crisis in Europe.”

Freelance business journalist Ian McGugan blogs for the Financial Post

Google’s newest acquisition is Plink, makers of a visual search application for mobile devices called PlinkArt. The app “recognizes almost any work of art,” claims the app’s homepage, “just by taking a photo of it.” In addition to the visual identification aspect, Plink users can also discuss the art within the app, send images to friends or order prints of the artwork.

On its own, Plink sounds like an entertaining and educational tool, but one whose real-life implementations would probably be limited to a tour of an art museum or a late-night cram session for an Art History exam. But Google didn’t just buy Plink for the art it can identify – that’s just an added bonus. It’s likely that Google bought the company more for the algorithm that powers the smart application and brains of those who invented it.

Sponsor

According to a post on the Plink company blog, developers Mark Cummins and James Philbin, Oxford PhD students whose company was only four months old when acquired, will now join Google to commence work on the search giant’s “Google Goggles” project. This ambitious, futuristic mobile search application is already available for Google’s own mobile OS, Android, in a limited format. At the moment, you can use Google Goggles to take pictures of real-world objects like landmarks, logos, books, contact info, places, wine and – oh yes – artwork, too. The mobile application then recognizes the images and objects in your pictures and that, in turn, kicks off a Google search for whatever item it finds.

While on the one hand, it does seem amazing that a mobile application can “see” the world like this, the reality is that this sort of mobile search experience is still in its infancy. Unlike with Google’s text-based search engine, there’s no guarantee that the app will be able to recognize the image in your photo. Was the photo too blurry? Too dark? Or was it a building (book/place/etc.) that the app doesn’t know yet?

But just as how the original tablet computers were heavy, clunky, inelegant devices that blazoned a trail that led us to the sleek and shiny iPad, a tablet some now claim will “revolutionize” computing, Google Goggles could one day lead to a world where everything we see – including people! – can be identified through the eyes of camera and an algorithm.

That’s a somewhat frightening concept, but one that’s also incredibly exciting at the same time, we have to admit.

Plink will now become a part of that effort, enhancing Goggles’ artwork search engine while the engineers bring their talent and ideas to forward the project as a whole. “There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision,” reads the blog post signed “Mark & James.” “It’s going to be a lot of fun,” it concludes. For us, too.

(Originally reported via the Guardian)

Discuss

O CEO da McLaren, Ron Dennis, gosta de ser bem direto e sincero a respeito dos carros das concorrentes, e não mede palavras para expressar o seu gosto pelos supercarros de outras montadoras, como é o caso do Bugatti Veyron. Dennis diz em um tom direto a respeito do rival:

“É feio como um porco, o Veyron não significa nada para mim. Eu estive vendo ele por anos, e eu não vejo uma coisa nele que me faça sentir bem”.

Bom, gosto é gosto não é? Não devemos nos esquecer do fato que Dennis está em uma época em que deveria divulgar o lançamento de sua McLaren MP4-12C, então chamar o Veyron de “feio como um porco”, é somente uma opinião pessoal? Quem sabe…

Via | Top Speed

Here’s a whimsical counting book that celebrates “[o]ne magical, moonlit night in the zoo …” with jumping elephants, biking kangaroos, astonishing lions, squidgeberry-stewing bears, and so many more …

As for their wee-hour shenanigans, ” … nobody knew” … least of all the zookeeper and his trusty crew, who could only wonder aloud why the animals all looked so tired the next morning …

For those of us who have ever had pets, we just know that the moment we’re not around, they’re getting up, rifling through the fridge, seeing what’s on YouTube (TVs are so old-school), checking their secret Crackberries, and getting on with their animal world in all sorts of ways we’ll never understand. Every once in a while, they leave a clue or two … and veteran author Judith Kerr (The Tiger Who Came to Tea remains one our kids’ enduring favorites) delightfully captures those secret nighttime adventures with such contagious glee for the youngest readers!

Readers: Children

Published: 2010

Filed under: ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Nonethnic-specific Tagged: Adventure, Pets/Animals

We were immediately attracted to this industrial kitchen for several reasons. We’re suckers for DIY and we’re completely jealous of the amount of space this home owner had to work with. We’re also blown away by how great of an impact the kitchen and dining area have, even though they’re only a small portion of the home.

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Before a new law went into effect in February to clamp down on their abusive tactics, credit card companies jacked up interest rates, putting the squeeze on already strapped consumers. But that same law can still help as. In it, Congress told the banks to review those spiked rates, and, for responsible cardholders, bring them back down to normal levels. Of course, the banks are working feverishly to make sure they don’t have to live up to the law. As the Senate considers Regulation Z; Docket R-1384, be sure to grab their ear and say hey! Gimmie back my rates! Contact your rep now.

Federal drug safety reviewers say that the side effects of Byetta, a diabetes drug, may share thyroid cancer concerns of similar medications, which may result in black-box warning for a new long-acting version of the drug. 

In a report released earlier this month (pdf), FDA officials said animal testing revealing thyroid cancer links with Novo Nordisk’s Victoza, a long-acting diabetes treatment medication, could affect all similar drugs, including Amylin Pharmaceutical’s proposed once-weekly Byetta shot, Bydureon, also known as Byetta LAR. Therefore, strict label warnings may be necessary about the potential Byetta cancer risk to alert users to the possibility of thyroid tumors.

Byetta (exenatide) and Victoza (liraglutide) belong to the same class of drugs, known as GLP-1 analogs. The FDA report expresses concerns that all extended-release diabetes drugs belonging to that family may be linked to thyroid tumors based on tests conducted on rats and monkeys. Victoza was approved in January, but carries the black box warning on potential thyroid cancer. Amylin’s bid for approval of Bydureon was rejected by FDA last month, with the agency requesting more information before it could release the drug on the market.

In April of last year, when concerns regarding Byetta thyroid cancer side effects came up, Amylin pointed out that Victoza and Byetta are different molecules, and indicated that there was no evidence of any link between Byetta and thyroid cancer. However, a statement from company officials following the FDA report concedes that cancer concerns, while not proven, cannot be ruled out as a side effect of Byetta.

Byetta is a type 2 diabetes drug that is manufactured and distributed jointly by Amylin and Eli Lilly & Co. The drug is used to control blood sugar levels and is part of a class of medications known as incretin mimetics, which imitate natural hormones that lower blood glucose levels.

FDA drug safety reviewers have already expressed concerns that Byetta may be linked to kidney failure and a possible increased risk of pancreatitis. In November, the FDA issued a warning indicating that they have received at least 78 post-marketing reports involving Byetta kidney problems, with 62 of those reports involving users experiencing kidney failure. The alert followed FDA warnings issued in October 2007 and August 2008 of reports involving cases of pancreatitis with Byetta, including severe reports of hemorrhagic pancreatitis and necrotizing pancreatitis, which can be fatal.

Amylin and Eli Lilly also currently face a number of Byetta lawsuits involving allegations that the drug makers failed to adequately warn about the risk of pancreatitis and kidney failure.

Willton writes “Daniel Solove highlights a paper written by Chris Hoofnagle about how one of the reasons identity theft happens is because companies have made the economic decision to let it happen.

In the post, Solove compares the identity theft situation to the famous case involving an accident due to a defect in a Ford Pinto, in which it came to light that Ford knew about the design defect in the car but ignored it because it calculated that paying damages in lawsuits would be less than fixing the design flaw.”

Of course, in the case of the Pinto, the scandalous cost-benefit analysis in question led to 27 deaths, whereas identity theft, at least, hasn’t resulted in anyone’s death (hopefully). However, there is a significant cost to the victim in time, mental anguish, and inconvenience, none of which ever really hits the bottom line of the company involved. That said, since the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act was passed in 2007, it is now possible to sue scammers for the time and effort spent to repair one’s life after identity theft. If there is gross negligence on the part of a company that contributes to identity theft, perhaps a future class action lawsuit over this issue is not too far off.

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