Job Growth In U.S. Probably Picked Up After April Slowing

Boolish….

Job growth probably picked up in May after the weakest gain in six months, and the U.S.unemployment rate held at a three-year low, signs of gradual improvement in the labor market, economists said before reports this week.

Payrolls climbed by 150,000 workers after a 115,000 gain in April, according to the median forecast of 68 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News ahead of Labor Department figures due June 1. Manufacturing cooled and household purchases increased, other data may show.

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t 4:09 a.m. on May 12, Chinese national Ma Chi sped through a Singapore stop light in his $1.4 million Ferrari 599 GTO and slammed into a taxi, killing himself and two others and sparking a wave of anti-foreigner sentiment.

The crash, caught on camera by another cab and viewed more than 7 million times on the Internet, prompted ministers to try to defuse public anger over immigration policies and the rising wealth gap that caused the ruling party’s worst performance since independence in last year’s general election. Within days of the crash, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean urged people on his Facebook page not to “blame all foreigners.”

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Duke University men’s lacrosse coach John Danowski still talks to recruits’ parents about the stripper party that led to false rape allegations six years ago.

University of Virginia coach Dom Starsia won’t grant interview requests about a former player who beat his girlfriend to death two years ago. Johns Hopkins coach Dave Pietramala says a survey that showed lacrosse players are the biggest users of illicit drugs among college athletes was “deeply concerning.”

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For the latest sign of a U.S. housing rebound, Toll Brothers (TOL) Inc. Chief Executive Officer Douglas Yearley points to Hoboken, New Jersey: A couple torn between two condos last month at the sales office for its Hudson Tea complex decided to think about it over lunch. When they returned an hour later, both units were gone.

“People feel like now is the time to buy and they aren’t isolated to one building in Hoboken,” Yearley said in a May 23 conference call with analysts after the Horsham, Pennsylvania- based luxury homebuilder reported that quarterly orders for new homes surged 47 percent. “Confidence is up. The interest rates are there and they’ve been waiting so long to move on with their lives that they came out this spring.”

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THE American marriage, it seems, is on the rocks. The common line — true or not — is that half of all marriages in this country end in divorce.

So here comes a plucky entrepreneur from, of all places, the Netherlands, with a wild, you’ve-got-to-be-joking plan to profit from the sorry state of so many American unions.

It’s called Divorce Hotel, and the idea is this: Check in on Friday, married. Then, with the help of mediators and independent lawyers, check out on Sunday, divorce papers in hand, all for a flat fee.

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FUCKING CANNIBALS IN MIAMI!!!!!

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp, police said.

This is absolutely ludicrous!

udge Lanny Moriarty, who sentenced her, said when Tran appeared in his court last month for truancy, he gave her a warning, reported KHOU.com. But when she continued to miss classes, he issued a summons and arrested her in open court.

Tran’s case of truancy is unusual, however, because she’s a highly-successful student who takes advanced placement and dual credit college level course, according to KHOU.com.

Moreover, she said her parents divorced and moved away from the city of Willis. She now works a full-time job and a part-time job to support an older brother who attends college and a younger sister who lives with relatives in Houston. She currently lives with the family of one of her employers.

The rest of this madness found here

So even if Jamie Dimon was completely at fault, you really couldn’t remove him from much of his wealth.

Trusts often are funded with liquid assets such as stocks and bonds, and may be appealing because individuals who establish them may also take distributions if they need to, while the assets are generally out-of-reach from future creditors. They won’t offer protection if a defendant creates a trust after a potential claim has already arisen.

Directors and officers increasingly are being named in investor lawsuits. About 64 percent of federal securities class- action suits filed in 2011 named board members as defendants, compared with about 35 percent in 2008, according to New York- based PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Asset-protection trusts are sometimes used to supplement their liability coverage, also called directors and officers insurance.

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A good perspective as to the current psychology of investors in this volatile market.

Patricia Arroyo, 53, a psychologist and executive coach in Boston who manages her own investments, said, “What shakes my investor confidence more than the glitches is to see all the institutional investors, insiders and favored clients get all the advantages in these situations.”

After Facebook said on May 9 that growth in advertising had failed to keep up with user gains, analysts at some banks underwriting the deal cut their earnings estimates, said people familiar with the process. The new estimates were relayed to institutional investors.

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As he clambered out of bed and onto his feet one morning late last year, Miguel Angel Cardona, 62, felt his body betray him. His head grew so heavy it pulled him tumbling back down.

“You feel fuzzy, like you’re drunk,” recalls the grandfather of nine, who’s spent most of his life in Segovia, a gold-mining town in northwestern Colombia. In the days that followed he noticed numbness in his hands and fingertips. He lost 12 pounds, no longer able to stomach the meat, rice and fried plantains his wife sent with him to work each day at a single-shaft mine on the edge of town. He worked with drums filled with mercury, water and crushed stone to process gold. Cardona suspected his job was poisoning him, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its May 28 issue.

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he arc of Europe’s postwar history is turning toward tragedy. It isn’t just that much of the continent has fallen into a new Great Depression, or that in some countries things will get worse before they get better. It isn’t even that the whole mess was avoidable. It’s that the crisis is dividing Europe along the very lines the European project was intended to erase.

Decades of cliches about European solidarity and the European idea are being held up to ridicule. The argument that Britons, Germans, Greeks, Italians and Spaniards are instinctive cultural partners whose commonalities transcend their obvious differences and historical enmities — that “Europe” is a real community, not just a heavily worked-over Brussels blueprint — turns out to be, let’s say, disputable.

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This is important as it is another nail in the coffin that is the STVF fraud

Encouraged by distrust of artificial sweeteners and demand for natural products, they have turned to extract of stevia, which is up to 300 times sweeter than traditional beet or cane sugar.

The problems are the aftertaste, the cost, and possible hurdles in defining it as natural in some European Unionmarkets.

read the rest here and all you need to do to read plenty about how STVF is a fraud, just Google it and the links are endless.

“This is like hearing the cry of ‘wolf’ too many times and people will no longer, in some sense, be scared of what’s happening,” said Srinivas Thiruvadanthai, an economist with the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center.

“The risk is, there is real danger and it’s not that there no wolf, there is a real wolf here,” Thiruvadanthai said.

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The basic concept behind taxes, the real reason no one is ever told, is that governments can spend your money better than you can spend your money.  As with every lie, of course, there is a skin of truth in that malevolent concept.

The average citizen cannot, and has no desire to, collect garbage, deliver mail, incarcerate and feed criminals, or establish and maintain a military. Those and other necessary government functions require taxes and, indeed, provide citizens with safe and comfortable existences. That is how it should be — and was……

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A graphic video showing Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy groping employees, grabbing their junk and squeezing their nipples is being shopped … TMZ has learned.

We have seen the video, and it’s extremely disturbing. Roy — who was mauled by a tiger in 2003 — has been going through rehab to strengthen his left side. But the physical therapists tell us, Roy’s right side is “extremely strong,” and the video clearly shows Roy sexually assaulting the male therapists.

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1. At 75, the bridge, designed by Joseph Strauss, is certainly aging gracefully. That iconic orange color is maintained by constant repainting.

2. There are approximately 1.2 million rivets in the bridge’s two towers.

3. The bridge’s two towers support cables containing 80,000 miles of steel wire. Together, the cables weigh a whopping 49 million pounds.

4. In its first year, the bridge carried 3,892,063 motor vehicles and 8,000,000 passengers. More than 400,000 pedestrians walked the sidewalks. Today, 110,00 cars cross the bridge daily, and the bridge gets 10 million visitors a year.

5. It’s also the place where more than 1,600 people have jumped to their deaths. That grim statistic makes it the most visited site for suicide.

But for many people, those golden spires have become the symbol of California.

Then check out the video of the construction here.

So much for mending things with North Korea now that the kid is in power…

A new Amnesty International report paints a gruesome picture of summary executions, torture and ill-treatment in North Korea as Kim Jong Un succeeded his late father, Kim Jong Il, as the country’s ruler last December.

The country used firing squads or staged traffic accidents to execute 30 officials involved in talks to unite North and South Korea, according to the 2012 Amnesty International reportreleased Thursday. It also notes that the country had been questioned about another 37 reported executions between 2007 and 2010 for “financial crimes.”

As the ruling authority shifted to Kim Jong Un, the country’s State Security agency detained another 200 North Korean officials, some of whom are now feared executed or in prison camps, the report notes.

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High-ranking members of both political parties were unaware that posting photos of completed ballots onFacebook or Twitter is illegal in Wisconsin, and they promised to quickly take down the posts Friday after election officials reminded voters of the law.

The law bars voters from showing their completed ballots to anyone. The intent is to prevent people from selling their votes and then showing their ballots as proof they voted as requested,Wisconsin Government Accountability Board spokesman Reid Magney said.

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Spain’s troubled bank, Bankia, has asked theSpanish government for €19 billion ($23.8 billion) in financial support just as a leading credit rating agency downgraded it to junk status.

Jose Ignacio Goirigolzarri, the bank’s president, said late Friday that the bailout would “reinforced the solvency, liquidity and solidity of the bank.”

The request came as Standard & Poor’s downgraded Bankia and four other Spanish banks to junk status because of uncertainty over restructuring and recapitalization plans.

Trading in Bankia shares was suspended Friday while its board determined how much new aid was needed. The bank’s shares have experienced turbulent trading in recent weeks on fears it would not be able to cover the massive losses it has built up in bad loans to the country’s collapsed real estate sector.

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Interesting points, but in the end FUCK FACEBOOK!

The botched offering of Facebook stock has raised several troubling questions, but at least we don’t have to worry about the one that plagues many IPOs: How are a few select investors able to buy in early at lower prices and then pocket huge profits when the trading frenzy begins?

Among the many apparent missteps in its public debut, Facebook is accused of setting an opening price that was too high. Instead of spiking on the first day, shares inched up just 23 cents, to $38.23. The stock has mostly fallen since.

But some IPO experts don’t think this was problem at all.

“The debacle was not the IPO but all the whining by speculators who didn’t make money,” says Lise Buyer, who helps companies plan initial offerings. Says Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida, “Selling something for what it’s worth is the way most people think a market should work.”

For all its flaws, the Facebook debut did fulfill the chief purpose of a stock offering— to raise money for a company to pay bills, buy rivals, invest and expand. That aim is often lost amid the inflated expectations accompanying high-profile debuts.

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