20081128

This is really cool! Electrically-driven Minis in Berlin!

BMW, Vattenfall field test e-mobiles in Berlin
By Christoph Hammerschmidt

Automotive Design Europe

MUNICH, Germany — BMW group and electricity supplier Vattenfall Europe will launch a field trial with electrical vehicles in Berlin. The project will start in spring 2009.

Vattenfall will install publicly accessible "energy dispensers". BMW will provide the vehicles for the test — 50 electrically-driven Minis. The vehicles are part of a fleet of electrical cars currently deployed in similar tests worldwide. The car vendor hopes to gather cognitions in the field of electromobility. The trial focuses on suitability for daily use and user acceptance. The insights gathered will be used for future e-car volume production, the company said.

The cars will be equipped with a 150-kw electric motor which gives the vehicles a maximum speed of 152 km/h. The driving range of the lithium-ion battery equipped vehicles will be 250 km — significantly more than electrical cars used to have up to now.

The project will be accompanied by scientists from the Technical Universities of Berlin, Chemnitz, and Ilmenau. Besides user behavior and acceptance, technical aspect are in the focus of the scientists. For instance, they plan to find out how charging electric vehicles can be used as a compensating element in the oscillations of wind-generated electric energy. Based on the results, Vattenfall plans to develop a system that uses "controlled charging" to equalize the energy production spikes caused by the wind energy variations.

With 50 vehicles participating, the project is much smaller than a similar one announced recently by the Nissan-Renault and the Portuguese government in Portugal. In contrast to the latter, the Berlin project will start as early as coming spring.

 

20081126

US government debt guaranees will be more than 7.8 Thousand Billion Dollars!

http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=arEE1iClqDrk&refer=home

 

The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.

“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”

Too Big to Fail

Bloomberg News tabulated data from the Fed, Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and interviewed regulatory officials, economists and academic researchers to gauge the full extent of the government’s rescue effort.

The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14.

William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the two programs are unlikely to lose money. The bigger risk comes from rescuing companies perceived as “too big to fail,” he said.

‘Credit Risk’

The government committed $29 billion to help engineer the takeover in March of Bear Stearns Cos. by New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and $122.8 billion in addition to TARP allocations to bail out New York-based American International Group Inc., once the world’s largest insurer.

Citigroup received $306 billion of government guarantees for troubled mortgages and toxic assets. The Treasury Department also will inject $20 billion into the bank after its stock fell 60 percent last week.

“No question there is some credit risk there,” Poole said.

Congressman Darrell Issa, a California Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said risk is lurking in the programs that Poole thinks are safe.

“The thing that people don’t understand is it’s not how likely that the exposure becomes a reality, but what if it does?” Issa said. “There’s no transparency to it so who’s to say they’re right?”

The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $23 trillion, or 38 percent, of the value of the world’s companies and brought down three of the biggest Wall Street firms.

Markets Down

The Dow Jones Industrial Average through Friday is down 38 percent since the beginning of the year and 43 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The S&P 500 fell 45 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 49 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The Nikkei 225 Index has fallen 46 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 57 percent from its most recent peak of 18,261.98 on July 9, 2007. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is down 78 percent, to $53.31, on Friday from its peak of $247.92 on Oct. 31, 2007, and 75 percent this year.

Regulators hope the rescue will contain the damage and keep banks providing the credit that is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.

Most of the spending programs are run out of the New York Fed, whose president, Timothy Geithner, is said to be President- elect Barack Obama’s choice to be Treasury Secretary.

‘They Got Snookered’

The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.

“It’s unprecedented,” said Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. and an economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years until January. “The backlash has begun already. Congress is taking a lot of hits from their constituents because they got snookered on the TARP big time. There’s a lot of supposedly smart people who look to be totally incompetent and it’s all going to fall on the taxpayer.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, when almost 10,000 banks failed and there was no mechanism to bolster them with cash, is the only rival to the government’s current response. The savings and loan bailout of the 1990s cost $209.5 billion in inflation-adjusted numbers, of which $173 billion came from taxpayers, according to a July 1996 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, now called the Government Accountability Office.

‘Worst Crisis’

The 1979 U.S. government bailout of Chrysler consisted of bond guarantees, adjusted for inflation, of $4.2 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation report.

The commitment of public money is appropriate to the peril, said Ethan Harris, co-head of U.S. economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. and a former economist at the New York Fed. U.S. financial firms have taken writedowns and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to Bloomberg data.

“This is the worst capital markets crisis in modern history,” Harris said. “So you have the biggest intervention in modern history.”

Bloomberg has requested details of Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit against the central bank Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure of borrower banks and their collateral.

Collateral is an asset pledged to a lender in the event a loan payment isn’t made.

‘That’s Counterproductive’

“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.”

The Fed should account for the collateral it takes in exchange for loans to banks, said Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Chicago-based Northern Trust Corp. and a former research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

“There is a lack of transparency here and, given that the Fed is taking on a huge amount of credit risk now, it would seem to me as a taxpayer there should be more transparency,” Kasriel said.

Bernanke’s Fed is responsible for $4.74 trillion of pledges, or 61 percent of the total commitment of $7.76 trillion, based on data compiled by Bloomberg concerning U.S. bailout steps started a year ago.

“Too often the public is focused on the wrong piece of that number, the $700 billion that Congress approved,” said J.D. Foster, a former staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “The other areas are quite a bit larger.”

Fed Rescue Efforts

The Fed’s rescue attempts began last December with the creation of the Term Auction Facility to allow lending to dealers for collateral. After Bear Stearns’s collapse in March, the central bank started making direct loans to securities firms at the same discount rate it charges commercial banks, which take customer deposits.

In the three years before the crisis, such average weekly borrowing by banks was $48 million, according to the central bank. Last week it was $91.5 billion.

The failure of a second securities firm, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., in September, led to the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and the Money Market Investor Funding Facility, or MMIFF. The two programs, which have pledged $2.3 trillion, are designed to restore calm in the money markets, which deal in certificates of deposit, commercial paper and Treasury bills.

Lehman Failure

“Money markets seized up after Lehman failed,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in New York and a former aide to Fed chief Paul Volcker. “Lehman failing made a lot of subsequent actions necessary.”

The FDIC, chaired by Sheila Bair, is contributing 20 percent of total rescue commitments. The FDIC’s $1.4 trillion in guarantees will amount to a bank subsidy of as much as $54 billion over three years, or $18 billion a year, because borrowers will pay a lower interest rate than they would on the open market, according to Raghu Sundurum and Viral Acharya of New York University and the London Business School.

Congress and the Treasury have ponied up $892 billion in TARP and other funding, or 11.5 percent.

The Federal Housing Administration, overseen by Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Steven Preston, was given the authority to guarantee $300 billion of mortgages, or about 4 percent of the total commitment, with its Hope for Homeowners program, designed to keep distressed borrowers from foreclosure.

Federal Guarantees

Most of the federal guarantees reduce interest rates on loans to banks and securities firms, which would create a subsidy of at least $6.6 billion annually for the financial industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg comparing rates charged by the Fed against market interest currently paid by banks.

Not included in the calculation of pledged funds is an FDIC proposal to prevent foreclosures by guaranteeing modifications on $444 billion in mortgages at an expected cost of $24.4 billion to be paid from the TARP, according to FDIC spokesman David Barr. The Treasury Department hasn’t approved the program.

Bernanke and Paulson, former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, have also promised as much as $200 billion to shore up nationalized mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a pledge that hasn’t been allocated to any agency. The FDIC arranged for $139 billion in loan guarantees for General Electric Co.’s finance unit.

Automakers Struggle

The tally doesn’t include money to General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC. Obama has said he favors financial assistance to keep them from collapse.

Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee Nov. 18 that the $250 billion already allocated to banks through the TARP is an investment, not an expenditure.

“I think it would be extraordinarily unusual if the government did not get that money back and more,” Paulson said.

In his Nov. 18 testimony, Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee that the central bank wouldn’t lose money.

“We take collateral, we haircut it, it is a short-term loan, it is very safe, we have never lost a penny in these various lending programs,” he said.

A haircut refers to the practice of lending less money than the collateral’s current market value.

Requiring the Fed to disclose loan recipients might set off panic, said David Tobin, principal of New York-based loan-sale consultants and investment bank Mission Capital Advisors LLC.

‘Mark to Market’

“If you mark to market today, the banking system is bankrupt,” Tobin said. “So what do you do? You try to keep it going as best you can.”

“Mark to market” means adjusting the value of an asset, such as a mortgage-backed security, to reflect current prices.

Some of the bailout assistance could come from tax breaks in the future. The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at Columbia University Business School in New York.

Wells Fargo & Co., which is buying Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp., will be able to deduct $22 billion, Willens said. Adding in other banks, the code change will cost $29 billion, he said.

“The rule is now popularly known among tax lawyers as the ‘Wells Fargo Notice,’” Willens said.

The regulation was changed to make it easier for healthy banks to buy troubled ones, said Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said he was angry that banks used the money for acquisitions.

“The only purpose for this money is to lend,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “It’s not for dividends, it’s not for purchases of new banks, it’s not for bonuses. There better be a showing of increased lending roughly in the amount of the capital infusions” or Congress may not approve the second half of the TARP money.

To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net; Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 24, 2008 13:26 EST

20081120

Fwd: Urgent action: Protect the people of the DRC





20 November 2008


No excuse, No delay- Protect the civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Dear Friends, Congo Displaced people in North Kivu © UNHCR/P. Taggart

We're sure you have been watching with apprehension the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in eastern DRC. Amnesty is receiving reports of serious human rights abuses, including unlawful killings of civilians, rape, and the recruitment of child soliders. And we would like to ask you to take action for the DRC.

The conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the deadliest in African history. Since it began in August 1998, it is estimated that the fighting and its aftermath (poverty, disease, and malnutrition) have claimed over five million lives. In recent weeks, fighting has displaced at least 250,000 civilians, most of them women and children. These people are in a desperate situation, without sufficient food, water, medical supplies or shelter.

Amnesty is calling for urgent reinforcement of the UN's peacekeeping force, MONUC, to protect civilians and to ensure people have access to humanitarian assistance. Please take action by visiting our website and calling on the UK government to ensure that the UN Security Council takes decisive action and pledges support to protect civilians in eastern DRC.

For all the latest information check here. We will update you on how you can take action but as the situation in DRC is fast moving we may need to ask you to take action at short notice.

Sincerely,

Amnesty International UK
Protect The Human

Amnesty International Secretary-General, Irene Khan
Two Kenyan girls celebrating the opening of the first safe house in Kenya to shelter girls threatened with female genital mutilation © Paula Allen
Hands gripping bars
Actor Jimmy Nesbitt holds a Protect the Human placard










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20081114

Program and teps to remove invisible mallware and spyware from your slow PC!

Hi guys,

As I told some of you, I had some strange problems with my PC so I tried to use an online anti-virus to see if there was something wrong with my PC. This is the web site I was trying to contact and was blocked by my PC (the virus was blocking it):

http://www.kaspersky.com/kos/eng/partner/default/languages/english/check.html?n=1226680184135

 

I tried to search the internet to find some information about it and found out that the problem was due to a program that hides itself from both the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs and it is installing itself on the PC via corrupt JPEG files through a stupid bug in Microsoft Windows that gives total control of the operating system to a routine inside the JPEG image if the image cause a line-data-over-run exeption (or something like it, I don’t remember exactly).

 

 

Then this is how I solved the problem by first closed all the applications including the anti-virus and anti-spyware that I had. Also, turned off all other un-necessary programs I was using (Ctrl-Alt-Delete and killed all the tasks I did not wanted to use, can be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing) then ran the Hijackthis.exe

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html

 

You can ask for experts on MajorGeeks or other online sites to help you get rid of the programs that load into memory on startup. Then download and run ComboFix, to make sure you will not have any problem, save the file as “Combo-Fix.exe” (exactly this) and no blocking virus or worm will be able to prevent it from running.

 

Download ComboFix from one of these locations:

Link 1 (http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/sUBs/ComboFix.exe )
Link 2 (http://www.forospyware.com/sUBs/ComboFix.exe )
Link 3 (http://subs.geekstogo.com/ComboFix.exe )

* IMPORTANT !!! Save ComboFix.exe to your Desktop


Disable your AntiVirus and AntiSpyware applications, usually via a right click on the System Tray icon. They may otherwise interfere with our tools


Double click on ComboFix.exe & follow the prompts.


As part of it's process, ComboFix will check to see if the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console is installed. With malware infections being as they are today, it's strongly recommended to have this pre-installed on your machine before doing any malware removal. It will allow you to boot up into a special recovery/repair mode that will allow us to more easily help you should your computer have a problem after an attempted removal of malware.


Follow the prompts to allow ComboFix to download and install the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console, and when prompted, agree to the End-User License Agreement to install the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console.

**Please note: If the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console is already installed, ComboFix will continue it's malware removal procedures.





Once the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console is installed using ComboFix, you should see the following message:



Click on Yes, to continue scanning for malware.

For me, it took 3 re-boots to clean up my PC, so it may take one or 2 for most of you.

 

The PC was about 3 times faster after following these steps!

Here are some additional utilities that will enhance your safety

MVPS Hosts file (http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm) <= The MVPS Hosts file replaces your current HOSTS file with one containing well know ad sites etc. Basically, this prevents your computer from connecting to those sites by redirecting them to 127.0.0.1 which is your local computer. See also a hosts file tutorial here (http://malwareremoval.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22187)

 

GOOD LUCK!

20081102

Pictures of a trip to Ghana!

Just came back from a few weeks trip to Ghana, one of the friendliest countries I have ever visited. The vast majority of the people are living on only a few dollars a day, but at the same time, most of the hotels in Accra charge minimum of $80 per night for a single room.

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