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Pre foreclosure homes in Milwaukee are still rising in number because of continued problems in employment. The unemployment rate in the Milwaukee metro area remained high at an unadjusted rate of 9.6 percent in February, the same as in January but higher than the 8.2-percent jobless rate in February last year.

In February this year, the pace of foreclosures in Milwaukee surged by 12 percent year-over-year, according to officials of the Milwaukee Department of City Development. City records show that over 10,000 foreclosures had been filed in Milwaukee over the past two years.

Additionally, according to a Madison-based research firm, foreclosure filings in southeastern Wisconsin, which includes the counties of Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine, Washington, Walworth, Ozaukee and Waukesha, increased to 1,046, a jump of about 13 percent from 923 filings in February 2009.

Compared to the previous month, total filings in February this year marked an increase of nearly 5 percent. A total of 996 foreclosures were filed in January in the southeastern portion of Wisconsin.

Despite the year-over-year increase in February, local analysts are encouraged that total filings for the first two months of this year – a total of 1,993 filings – is about the same as the total filings for the first two months last year – a total of 1,987 filings.

According to Russell Kashian, economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the slowing pace of entry of Milwaukee pre foreclosure homes and foreclosed properties into the market is a sign that the record pace seen over the past two years is diminishing. Nevertheless, Kashian explained that foreclosure activity will only decline significantly if new jobs are created and unemployed homeowners get new sources of income.

Andy Lewis, a community development specialist with the University of Wisconsin, affirmed the important role of employment in the solution of the foreclosure problem. He contended that unemployment is the best predictor for foreclosure because once borrowers lose their sources of income, they do not have the means to make their monthly loan payments and they are without power to keep their homes from getting included in foreclosures lists.

Lewis contended that the number of Milwaukee pre foreclosure homes and repossessed residential units will still rise this year because of the unemployment situation, but the increase will not be in double digits. He added that in addition to the federal foreclosure prevention programs, there are local initiatives available for distressed homeowners.

Ta da! (photo: purplejavatroll)

The American Medical Association, in a new report, shows that almost every single health insurance market in America is “highly concentrated”.

In 24 of the states, the two largest insurers had a combined market share of 70 percent or more. Last year, 18 of 42 states had that type of market situation.

Among the other findings:

• In 54 percent of metropolitan markets, at least one insurer had a market share of 50 percent or more — up from 40 percent of metropolitan markets the year before.
• In 92 percent of metropolitan markets, at least one insurer had a share of 30 percent or more — up from 89 percent of metropolitan markets the year before.
• Ninety-nine percent of metropolitan markets are highly concentrated, according to federal merger guidelines, compared with 94 percent the year before.

99% of all health insurance markets are highly concentrated. That hasn’t been seen in an entire sector since the Gilded Age.

When markets are highly concentrated, consumers have no choice but to accept extreme rate hikes, denial of benefits and other industry games. And that’s exactly what’s happened in recent years. The Affordable Care Act seeks to solve this problem by fostering competition in the exchanges, but without a renewed effort to break insurance monopolies throughout all insurance markets, including the large-group sector, consumers will continue to get screwed.

The President of the AMA, Dr. J. James Rohack, reacted to this report by calling on the Justice Department to enforce anti-trust laws prohibiting “harmful mergers.” Central to that would be a repeal of the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption. A bill to that effect passed the House earlier this year. It has, say it with me, stalled in the Senate.

Shortly before midnight last night, the UK’s Labour Government finally managed to push through its Digital Economy Bill. It’s a controversial and wide-ranging piece of legislation that is aimed at tackling copyright infringement and, among other things, will force ISPs to cut off persistent file-sharers. Because the bill was forced through during the “washup” period before parliament is dissolved in advance of May’s General Election, there has been concern that the bill hasn’t been debated thoroughly, and not enough attention has been paid to its implications for digital freedoms — for example, the Bill could have the unintended consequence of forcing places like libraries and cafes to stop offering free Wi-Fi. It could also give the government the power to block sites like Wikileaks, just because it hosts copyright-infringing material.

There have been angry reactions to the passing of the bill in the social media sphere (it’s still a trending topic on Twitter as I write this), and from many tech journalists, bloggers, rights advocates — even many of the Labour party’s own MPs.

One of the main opponents of the bill among Labour MPs was Tom Watson, who voted against the Bill and said of the proposals, “There might be a deal with the Tory front bench and the Lib Dem front bench but there are 20,000 people who have taken the time to email their MPs about this in the last seven days alone.” On Twitter, Watson said that voting against his party (known as “breaking the whip”) made him feel physically sick.

Echoing the comments made by Labour MP Kate Hoey, Techcrunch’s Mike Butcher calls the passing of the legislation “a stitch up” and points out that the bill could cause startups to move from the UK. He also points to Sweden, home of filesharing site The Pirate Bay, where similar legislation was passed last year. At first, Internet traffic nosedived, but P2P filesharing soon recovered, with one crucial difference — much it was now encrypted and untraceable. In a column for the Telegraph, Butcher describes the Bill as “a nightmare of unintended consequences.”

In The Guardian, James Graham launched a scathing attack on the Bill, saying, “You would be hard pressed to find a better example of how broken our current political system is than the passage of the digital economy bill through parliament,” and that the legislation was “made to order on behalf of the so-called creative industries in the face of opposition from pretty much everyone else.” Graham also lamented that a lack of Internet expertise in the House of Lords will mean that the legislation does not get a proper debate there, either.

The Register’s Andrew Orlowski described the forcing through of the Bill as “a sort of procedural speed-dating” and also points out that, in some ways, the efforts of the Open Rights Group actually “helped unleash some really dangerous legislation into the wild.” BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin is unequivocal in her criticism,  describing the Bill as a “huge blow” for privacy and freedom, and goes on to say that “this thing makes the DMCA look like a warmup act.” TheNextWeb’s Martin Bryant also lamented the Bill, describing its measures as “draconian,” but pointed out that the episode has been an interesting case study in improving the transparency of government and participation in politics through social media.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to know exactly what the Bill means without having to trawl though the entirety of the document, PaidContent has a handy guide to all of the measures proposed in the wide-ranging legislation.

Do you enjoy a glass of wine with breakfast? What wine would you like to sip over breakfast? Or would you drink wine with breakfast at all?

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Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media – rather than be disrupted by it.

We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us – and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform.

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The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered.

SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the “Facebook Imperative”, which we interpret as “be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither”. Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine’s “Wired: Tired” lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards.

Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service.

A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the “follower” mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done.

Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally.

From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum.

Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here:

• “Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates
• Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company
• Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster
• SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet
• Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business”

We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release.

• SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible.
• Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter. Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you’ll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone’s job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear.
• Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we’re bringing our followers with us with every Tweet.
• IT departments that have invested in document management and other solutions will now be able to extend their reach
• Customer service departments that have the job of closing tickets and meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements)

Welcome to the future of customer service, no telephone required, but your smart mobile device is definitely invited.

Do you believe SalesForce.com onto the next big shift in enterprise computing with the upcoming launch of Chatter?

Photo credits: Salesforce.com

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WILSONVILLE, Ore., April 8, 2010 – Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced the release of the FloVENT® v8 solution with significant enhancements in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) model creation, solution performance and results visualization.

After the lighter app drops, at least in the new apps category, that we saw in previous days, yesterday brought us a much beefier new apps list. We’ve got two new 3D games, with Skater Nation from Gameloft and the hilarious Family Guy: Uncensored from Glu Mobile. And plenty of other new stuff from a slew of other developers, and the usual bucket or two full of fresh hot updates. Oh, and did we mention that there’s now a text editor app for webOS? Find out for yourself, after the break.

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It faded from news coverage over the past few weeks, but when President Obama returns from Prague, he’ll have to make a decision 0n pressing forward to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in federal court, as his attorney general desires, or whether to move him into a military commission, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) urges. The major rationale Graham has cited for the need to get the 9/11 architect out of criminal court is the courts’ inability to handle classified information. But now the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay refutes that argument.

Adam Serwer of the American Prospect is at Guantanamo Bay to observe a commission, and he reports on a briefing he received about their procedure:

But in a conference call with reporters a few minutes ago, the chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions, Cpt. John F. Murphy, said that there was little difference “as a practical matter” between dealing with classified information under CIPA and the new process outlined by the revised military commissions law.

“The new changes to our 505 bring it more into conformity with CIPA — it is closer to the CIPA process in federal court,” Captain Murphy said. “I would need to lay the two statues side-by-side to point out the differences.”

“As a practical matter, there’s very little difference between the two,” he said.

The only practical difference Adam can ascertain concerns a slight delay on the closed-circuit TV feed from the trials into the observation room. On such differences hinge, substantively, the political opposition to trying a terrorist in a venue with nearly 400 terrorism-related convictions as opposed to a venue with three.

Attorney General Eric Holder will next get a chance to press his case publicly on Wednesday, when he testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then on Thursday, when he speaks to the Constitution Project’s annual dinner.

Amazon continues its push into cloud computing with an interesting new service that complements nicely the other cloud services the company is already offering. The Amazon Simple Notification Service allows developers to add a notification system to their apps. The notifications themselves can take several forms and can be aimed at subscribers or othe… (read more)

When Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell declared April as the state’s Confederate History Month, Republican operatives likely thought it was a safe and symbolic gesture that would please the state’s older conservatives.

Instead, it’s exploded into a national news story, raising sharp questions about how race is used in politics — and how the South’s Confederate past still haunts its political present.

The scandal getting the most attention has been the proclamation’s glaring omission: Not once, in five “whereas” clauses, did it mention slavery. McDonnell batted away the criticism about this oversight, saying:

“There were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

By the end of the day, after critics including national conservative pundits to the GOP-inclined Richmond Times-Dispatch denounced him, McDonnell shifted gears and added another clause stating “the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice.”

But it was too little, too late — and didn’t hide that McDonnell’s “omission” clearly wasn’t an accident: As Adam Sorensen at Time points out, earlier Republican proclamations for Confederate History Month by did include references to slavery; McDonnell just cut them out of his version.

NEO-CONFEDERATES AMONG US

For Southerners, the McDonnell affair is hardly Big News. As historian James Loewen documented in his excellent book Lies Across America, Southern states are filled with thousands of historical markers, tourist sites and other remembrances of the Confederacy that downplay, or entirely omit, the essential racism behind the Confederate project.

In other words, Southerners grow up surrounded by such one-sided history etched into their very
landscape. The attempts to romanticize and rehabilitate the Confederate past in the South can take on near-comical proportions. As Loewen wrote for Southern Exposure magazine in 2000:

Although many Confederates were conquered in spirit in 1865, between about 1890 and 1930, neo-Confederates declared victory on the landscape all across the United States, including places that never existed or never were Confederate during the war. A Confederate monument dominates the lawn of the east Bolivar County courthouse in Cleveland, Mississippi, for example, “To the memory of our Confederate dead, 1861-65.” The only problem is, Cleveland, Mississippi, had no Confederate dead. Cleveland did not exist during the Civil War or for some decades afterwards.

Of course, these memorials usually go way beyond remembering Confederate “heritage” and end up glorifying the Confederacy.

Consider the Arlington Confederate Monument, where even President Obama felt obliged to lay a wreath in 2009, like all presidents before him. As leading neo-Confederate scholar Ed Sebesta pointed out in a letter to Obama at the time, the goal of the monument was not just to remember the Confederate dead, but to champion the Confederate cause.

Indeed, the Arlington monument’s Latin motto is “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.” That translates into, “The winning cause pleased the Gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato” — the implication being that Cato, the stoic advocate of “freedom,” would have sided with the Confederacy.

The same is true with the Museum of the Confederacy, also in Virginia (Richmond). As Southern Exposure reported in 2000, then-candidate George W. Bush was a donor to the museum’s annual ball, which each year draws hundreds of all-white guests in period costumes.

The Museum of the Confederacy is hardly an innocent history operation: its book store is stocked with far-right literature on race and politics, and in 1993 it appointed new-Confederate
ideologue Ludwell Johnson as a “museum fellow” — author of “Is the Confederacy Obsolete?” and other calls for revival of the old Southern system.

Sometimes, the racial motives of neo-Confederate remembrances are subtle. Other times, they are crystal clear, as with the timing of the decision to adopt Confederate flags in Georgia (1956) and South Carolina (1962). Today, historians agree it was a statement of protest by white leaders against the growing civil rights movement’s attack on the South’s Jim Crow system.

So McDonnell’s antics are hardly new, or news, in the South. But the scandal does pose some hard questions for Republicans and conservatives: How will such thinly-veiled racial codes by Southern politicians play out nationally? What does this do to their efforts to reach moderates and independents?

And as the South and country grow more racially and ethnically diverse, how do appeals to Old South racial politics help conservatives’ long-term political prospects?

IMAGE: Painting of Nathan Bedford Forrest, leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee and Confederate cavalry leader. Forrest has more historical markers in the country than any other figure, according to historian James Loewen.

Para as pessoas que gostaram do pequeno Smart e esperavam uma continuação do modelo ser lançada ao mercado, pode ser que fiquem um pouco decepcionados com a Daimler, pois pelo que parece, o CEO Dieter Zetsche declarou que isso não vai acontecer em uma conferência de imprensa. Contudo, essa decepção pode ser temporária.

Zetsche explicou que a Daimler esteve procurando por uma parceria para a produção de um novo motor de 4 cilindros para o novo modelo, e que eles conseguiram firmar um acordo com a Renault SA e a Nissan Motor Corp.

Outra curiosidade que o CEO da Daimler informou ao público foi que a parceria que havia com a BMW não foi possível de manter, pois a montadora possui uma arquitetura diferente de seus veículos. Então, resta agora contar com a parceria da Renault e Nissan para ajudar na realização dos objetivos da Daimler e melhorar seus resultados de produção no futuro.

Via | 4 Wheels News

Are you an everyday user of Google Voice? Do you use it as a primary number when exchanging contact information with others, in case you need to use the block feature in the future, or because you are simply not willing to give out your actual phone number?

TechCrunch reports that internal testing of a desktop app that can place and receive calls is under way, as part of the Gizmo5 purchase last year. While more information about the application, as well as it’s release date have not been announced, we can take the internal testing as positive light that it is definitely on its way, and hopefully sooner then later. [via TechCrunch]

There are several reasons why buying Houston pre foreclosure homes is a profitable endeavor.

One reason is the availability of mortgage loans offered at rates lower than in other markets. If home loans are available in a certain market, buying or reselling a property at a profit is more viable. According to Forbes magazine, while mortgage loans are not readily available in certain markets because of high rates of delinquency and foreclosure, Houston banks are more likely to write home loans at better terms because the percentage of foreclosures in Houston is much lower than in other metro areas.

Forbes also cited Dallas and Kansas City in Missouri as the other cities with lower mortgage rates and available home loans.

Another reason for considering lists of foreclosure homes in Houston is the record number of people who have moved to Houston over the past 10 years. According to the annual metro area population report released recently by the Census Bureau, Houston gained over 140,000 new residents, the highest number gained by any city in the U.S. The city tied with the Dallas metro area, which also gained the same number of new residents.

According to think tank Brookings Institute, Houston and other cities in Texas have been attracting out-of-state residents because of their diversified economies and controlled increases in home prices. People investing in Houston pre foreclosure homes would then have more prospects when it is time to resell properties.

Brookings analysts explained that Texas was the only Sunbelt state that did not decline in population growth because of its strong labor market. Other Sunbelt cities and states which traditionally attracted retirees lost population over the past several years. These include Las Vegas, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh and Atlanta.

The third reason is the resiliency of house prices in Houston. According to IHS Global Insight, Houston home prices did not experience the price collapse that occurred in many U.S. cities because house prices did not balloon to excessively high levels during the heydays of the housing market.

IHS analysts said that in the final quarter of 2005, the average price for homes in Houston was $110,100, lower by 20 percent than the national average. In December 2009, the average price rose to $127,400, instead of falling. It is this control in pricing that is making the Houston housing market resilient, giving investors in Houston pre foreclosure homes prospects for better returns than in other cities.