Listen to the conference call yourself for proof. There will be no debate.
Monthly Archives: January 2012
ACCORDING TO SOVEREIGN BOND YIELDS: CRISIS OVER
Birdman plans to bet $5M on Super Bowl; 50 cent takes him up on $1M
Comments »CBS) Sure, we have our friendly bets with our friends when it comes to the Super Bowl, but rapper/producer Brian “Birdman” Williams is upping the ante: He’s betting $5 million that the New England Patriots will win on Feb. 5. Full Story.
EARTHQUAKE SHAKES BUILDINGS IN TOKYO
Stocks Rising on Unusual Volume
click here for charts.
Comments »ETFs Rising on Unusual Volume
Stocks Falling on Unusual Volume
Click here for charts.
Comments »ETFs Falling on Unusual Volume
ETFs falling on Unusual volume: XBI, XHB, TBF, EWZ, KBE, KRE, FCG (click here for charts)
Comments »ARMAGEDDON!!! Should Have Used a Flashlight…
***Warning*** NSFW
Comments »How Pimps Use the Web to Sell Girls
In November, a terrified 13-year-old girl pounded on an apartment door in Brooklyn. When a surprised woman answered, the girl pleaded for a phone. She called her mother, and then dialed 911.
The girl, whom I’ll call Baby Face because of her looks, frantically told police that a violent pimp was selling her for sex. He had taken her to the building and ordered her to go to an apartment where a customer was waiting, she said, and now he was waiting downstairs to make sure she did not escape. She had followed the pimp’s directions and gone upstairs, but then had pounded randomly on this door in hopes of getting help.
Baby Face said she hurt too much to endure yet another rape by a john. She told prosecutors later that she was bleeding vaginally and that her pimp had recently kicked her down a stairwell for trying to flee.
That 911 call set in motion the arrest of Kendale Judge, then 21. Judge has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, kidnapping, rape and compelling prostitution. He is in jail, and we haven’t heard his side of the events yet.
The episode also shines a spotlight on how the girl was marketed — in ads on Backpage.com, a major national Web site where people place ads to sell all kinds of things, including sex. It is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.
Lauren Hersh, the ace prosecutor in Brooklyn who leads the sex-trafficking unit there, says that of the 32 people she and her team have prosecuted in the last year and a half — typically involving victims aged 12 to 25 — a vast majority of the cases included girls marketed through Backpage ads.
“Pimps are turning to the Internet,” said Hersh. “They’re not putting the girls on the street so much. Backpage is a great vehicle for pimps trying to sell girls.”
Craigslist backed out of this sector after public protests. Pimps then moved toBackpage.com, which is owned by Village Voice Media, owners of The Village Voice weekly newspaper.
Attorneys general from 48 states wrote a joint letter to Backpage, warning that it had become “a hub” for sex trafficking and calling on it to stop running adult services ads. The attorneys general said that they had identified cases in 22 different states in which pimps peddled underage girls through Backpage.
The attorneys general cited a 15-year-old girl who was being forced to have sex with men last year in Dorchester, Mass. The pimp marketed the girl through Backpage.
But Backpage isn’t budging. Indeed, it has fought back with personal attacks on those,such as Ashton Kutcher, who have linked it to human trafficking.
Steve Suskin, legal counsel to Village Voice Media, gave me a lengthy statement in which he argued that the company is already cooperating closely with law-enforcement authorities. He cited a 16-year-old girl in Seattle who was rescued as a result of a tip the company had made.
“Censorship will not rid the world of exploitation,” Suskin asserted.
It’s true that there’s some risk that pimps will migrate to new Web sites, possibly based overseas, that are less cooperative. But, on balance, that’s a risk worth taking. The present system is failing. Pimps aren’t the shrewdest marketers, and eliminating a hub for trafficking should at least chip away at the problem.
Backpage suggests that it is battling censors and prudes. In fact, what drives it seems to be greed. In their letter, the attorneys general said that Backpage earns more than $22 million annually from prostitution advertising.
On Backpage, the pimps claim adult ages for the girls they market, but Hersh scoffs. “I see 19,” she said, “and I immediately think 13.”
“I’m not seeing a lot of cases where there’s not coercion,” she added. “The average age where a girl is forced into prostitution is 12 to 14. And most of these 16- or 17 year-olds are being run by pretty vicious pimps.”
While there are no reliable figures for human trafficking, the more we look, the more we find. The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, says that in the year before he set up a sex-trafficking unit in June 2010, his office prosecuted no trafficking cases. Since then, the office has become a national model, indicting 32 people, with 10 convictions and no acquittals so far.
Among those rescued was Baby Face, who had run away from home in September. Judge allegedly found her on the street, bought food for her and told her that she was beautiful. Within a few days, he had posted her photo on Backpage and was selling her five to nine times a day, prosecutors say. When she didn’t earn enough money, he beat her with a belt, they add.
When Baby Face ran away from her pimp and desperately knocked on that apartment door in Brooklyn, she was also in effect pounding on the door of the executive suites of Backpage and Village Voice Media. Those executives should listen to her pleas.
Comments »NFL: Patriots WR Wes Welker Engaged to Former Miss Hooters International
I’ve always liked this cat due to him racking me up plenty of points in fantasy football. Well, it looks like he is living his own fantasy by popping the question to his Hooters hottie Anna Burns.
Flash: Conservatives = Morons
Unfortunate, but that’s the way it goes.
Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.
Comments »Westport Innovations May Profit Big from NAT GAS Act
Jim Cramer made positive mention of Westport, calling it a solid play on natural gas should Congress pass its pending Natural Gas Act. Westport converts diesel engines (i.e. – those found in semi trailers) into ones that run on natural gas.
Benefiting Westport is that it’s: A) basically first to the market, at least in terms of mass production, and B) high barriers of entry for competition because of the complex technology involved in the transformations.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Gates Injects $750M in Troubled Global Fund
By JOHN HEILPRIN | Associated Press – 12 hrs ago
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Bill Gates pledged $750 million on Thursday to fight three killer diseases and rescue a beleaguered health fund whose financial losses have cost it donor support.
The Microsoft founder said he is lending his “credibility” to the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by making the donation through a promissory note so the fund “can immediately use the money and save lives.”
Gates’ announcement at the World Economic Forum — a magnet for the world’s business and political elites who pushed for the fund’s creation — was part of an orchestrated attempt by the fund to galvanize donors on its 10th anniversary.
“These are tough economic times, but that is no excuse for cutting aid to the world’s poorest,” Gates told reporters.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Economists vs. Americans
By Sudeep Reddy
The Financial Trust Index has been tracking public sentiment toward the financial system for more than three years. And sentiment isn’t good.
In the latest release today, the survey found that just 23% of Americans say they trust the U.S. financial system. That’s as low as the earliest months of the economic crisis. And 62% describe themselves as angry, or very angry, about the nation’s economic situation — the highest level since March 2009. (The index is a joint project of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.)
For its latest quarterly survey, the Financial Trust Index took its responses from average Americans to a series of economic assertions and put them up against the responses from an expert panel of economists. The results are striking:
Read the rest here.
Comments »China’s Very Mysterious Data
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Economics Last updated: January 26th, 2012
A quick observation.
I could not help noticing that China’s imports from Japan fell 16.2pc in December. Imports from Taiwan fell 6.2pc.
The Shanghai Container Freight Index fell 1.4pc to a record low of 919.44 in November, after sliding relentlessly for several months. It has picked up slightly since.
Read the rest here.
Comments »PPT Hybrid Movers
Here are today’s hybrid movers, click here for charts
Comments »LIVE CONFERENCE CALL: CRUS
LIVE CONFERENCE CALL: SIVB
SBUX SOLD OVER 100 MILLION K-CUPS IN TWO MONTHS
They furthered there has been no marketing because they are supply constrained and have no idea how big this market can be. Sales are much stronger than originally anticipated.
Comments »
