Source

“Aleris Corporation (ARS), a global manufacturer of aluminum products and specification alloys, plans to raise $500 million by offering 31.3 million shares at a price range of $15.00 to $17.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Aleris Corporation would command a market value of $1.87 billion. Aleris Corporation, which was founded in 2004, booked $4.83 billion in sales over the last 12 months. The Beachwood, OH-based company plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol ARS. J.P. Morgan, Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank Securities and BofA Merrill Lynch are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

BrightSource Energy (BRSE), which develops utility-scale solar thermal power plants, plans to raise $152 million by offering 6.9 million shares at a price range of $21.00 to $23.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, BrightSource Energy would command a market value of $1.04 billion. BrightSource Energy, which was founded in 2004, booked $159 million in sales over the last 12 months. The Oakland, CA-based company plans to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol BRSE. Goldman, Sachs & Co., Citi and Deutsche Bank Securities are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

Enerkem (NRKM), which has developed a process that converts municipal waste into cellulosic ethanol, plans to raise $131 million by offering 7.3 million shares at a price range of $17.00 to $19.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Enerkem would command a market value of $534 million. Enerkem, which was founded in 2000, booked $3 million in sales over the last 12 months. The Montreal ,Canada-based company plans to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol NRKM. Goldman, Sachs & Co., Credit Suisse and BMO Capital Markets are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

Erickson Air-Crane (EAC), which provides aerial firefighting and timber harvesting service on heavy-lift helicopters, plans to raise $41 million by offering 4.8 million shares at a price range of $8.00 to $9.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Erickson Air-Crane would command a market value of $84 million. Erickson Air-Crane, which was founded in 1971, booked $153 million in sales over the last 12 months. The Portland, OR-based company plans to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol EAC. Stifel Nicolaus Weisel, Oppenheimer & Co. and Lazard Capital Markets are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

Forum Energy Technologies (FET), a global products and services provider for the oil and natural gas industries, plans to raise $300 million by offering 15.8 million shares at a price range of $18.00 to $20.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Forum Energy Technologies would command a market value of $1.76 billion. Forum Energy Technologies, which was founded in 1985, booked $1.13 billion in sales over the last 12 months. The Houston, TX-based company plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol FET. J.P. Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and Citi are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

MRC Global (MRC), a largest global pipes, valves and fitting (PVF) and services supplier to the energy industry, plans to raise $500 million by offering 22.7 million shares at a price range of $21.00 to $23.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, MRC Global would command a market value of $2.25 billion. MRC Global, which was founded in 1921, booked $4.83 billion in sales over the last 12 months. The Houston, TX-based company plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol MRC. Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Barclays Capital are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

Oaktree Capital Group (OAK), a alternative asset manager with a focus on credit and $75 billion in AUM, plans to raise $501 million by offering 11.3 million shares at a price range of $43.00 to $46.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Oaktree Capital Group would command a market value of $6.71 billion. Oaktree Capital Group, which was founded in 1995, booked $1.36 billion in sales over the last 12 months. The Los Angeles, CA-based company plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol OAK. Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Morgan Stanley are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

Renaissance Capital will have Pre-IPO Research available on each of these upcoming IPOs prior to its pricing.

Last week, there were 1 IPO pricings. Retail Properties of America (RPAI), a third largest shopping center REIT in the US with 259 retail properties, was the week’s winner, ending up 9% from its IPO price.”

“Royal Bank of Canada has chosen to challenge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in court instead of settling over allegations it engaged in illegal futures trades because it said it didn’t break any rules.

“It was a conscious decision to defend ourselves vigorously and we made that decision because we believe we didn’t do anything wrong,” said Arthur Hahn, a Chicago-based lawyer defending Canada’s biggest bank.

Royal Bank is being sued by the regulator over claims it engaged in illegal futures trades worth hundreds of millions of dollars to garner tax benefits tied to equities. The Toronto- based lender made false and misleading statements about “wash trades” from 2007 to 2010 in which affiliates traded among themselves in a way that undermined competition and price discovery on the OneChicago LLC exchange, the CFTC said in a complaint filed April 2 in Manhattan federal court.

“All of the transactions in question here were within standard rules and the guidances put out by the commission,” Hahn said in an interview. “We don’t think we did anything wrong, it’s that simple.”

Royal Bank enlisted affiliates to help carry out hundreds of futures transactions done off-exchange and then reported to OneChicago as block trades between independent affiliates, according to the CFTC.

“These were legitimate block trades, these were legitimate trades between affiliates,” said Hahn, a partner with Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP (1161L)…”

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Texas Water-Pollution Suit Dropped; Third Recent Setback on Drilling for Agency

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

Apps on Facebook can gather many types of personal information if you allow them to. But there are steps you can take to limit their access.

Controlling what gets shared with apps starts on Facebook’s “privacy settings” page. To get there, click the little arrow to the right of the top blue bar on Facebook and select “privacy settings.”

Read the rest here.

After wading in barrels of the Scotch and Irish drams, it’s time to turn our attention homeward, to that quintessential American spirit: good old bourbon whiskey. We’ll look today at what makes bourbon unique, how it’s made, and how it came to be.

Read the rest here.

This week’s Boston Phoenix cover story — Hunting the Craigslist Killer: An Untold Detective Story from the Digital Frontier — would not have been possible without access to a huge trove of case files released by the Boston Police Department. Many of those documents have never been made public — until now. As a kind of online appendix to the article, we’re publishing over a dozen documents from the file, ranging from transcripts of interviews to the subpoenas that investigators obtained from the tech companies that helped them track the killer’s digital fingerprints. We’ve also published the crime scene photos and uploaded recordings made by investigators as they interviewed the killer, Philip Markoff, and others involved in the case.

One of the most fascinating documents we came across was the BPD’s subpoena of Philip Markoff’s Facebook information. It’s interesting for a number of reasons — for one thing, Facebook has been pretty tight-lipped about the subpoena process, even refusing to acknowledge how many subpoenas they’ve served. Social-networking data is a contested part of a complicated legal ecosystem — in some cases, courts have found that such data is protected by the Stored Communications Act.

In fact, we’d never seen an executed Facebook subpoena before — but here we have one, including the forms that Boston Police filed to obtain the information, and the printed (on paper!) response that Facebook sent back, which includes text printouts of Markoff’s wall posts, photos he uploaded as well as photos he was tagged in, a comprehensive list of friends with their Facebook IDs (which we’ve redacted), and a long table of login and IP data.

Read the rest and see the subpoenaed info here.

44 book recommendations from the Black Swan himself.

NBC News has fired a producer who was involved in the production of a misleading segment about the Trayvon Martin case in Florida.

The person was fired on Thursday, according to two people with direct knowledge of the disciplinary action who declined to be identified discussing internal company matters. They also declined to name the fired producer. A spokeswoman for NBC News declined to comment.

The action came in the wake of an internal investigation by NBC News into the production of the segment, which strung together audio clips in such a way that made George Zimmerman’s shooting of Mr. Martin sound racially motivated. Ever since the Feb. 26 shooting, there has been a continuing debate about whether race was a factor in the incident.

The segment in question was shown on the “Today” show on March 27. It included audio of Mr. Zimmerman saying, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

But Mr. Zimmerman’s comments had been taken grossly out of context by NBC. On the phone with a 911 dispatcher, he actually said of Mr. Martin, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” Then the dispatcher asked, “O.K., and this guy — is he white, black or Hispanic?” Only then did Mr. Zimmerman say, “He looks black.”

The editing of the segment was initially noticed by NewsBusters, an arm of the Media Research Center, a conservative media monitoring group. On March 31, NBC told The Washington Post that it would investigate.

Inside NBC, there was shock that the segment had been broadcast. Citing an anonymous network executive, Reuters reported that “the ‘Today’ show’s editorial control policies — which include a script editor, senior producer oversight and in most cases legal and standards department reviews of material to be broadcast — missed the selective editing of the call.”

Read the rest here.

(Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury Department said on Friday that 2012 compensation for the chief executives of the final three firms that got exceptional bailout assistance during the financial crisis was being frozen at 2011 levels.

The ruling from the special master for executive compensation under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, applies to the leaders of AIG, General Motors and Ally Financial, which was formerly called GMAC.

Treasury also said total direct compensation for 69 other senior executives at the three firms was being cut by 10 percent from 2011 levels.

Source

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art – President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex- com- munists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

Read the rest here.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — It’s crunch time for Detroit.

City and state officials are facing a Thursday deadline to save the city from the threat of looming financial insolvency or a takeover of city government by Michigan.

Fierce opposition from unions — in a city that remains a bastion of labor power — has so far stymied efforts to pass a rescue package.

A deal backed by Mayor Dave Bing and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, would grant the city the power to void contracts and slash costs but not provide state funding or loans to bail the city out of its financial problems.

Without city council agreement on that deal, Snyder can by law appoint an “emergency manager” who will assume the powers of the mayor and council to run day-to-day operations. He has until Thursday to take such action.

The city council is under pressure from the public and city unions to reject the deal with the state. At the same time, it would lose its powers if Snyder goes ahead and names an emergency manager.

The council was set to meet again Wednesday. So far the only action it has taken this week to deal with the crisis was to double the city’s corporate income tax to 2%.

November will be Obama vs mini Obama….

Factor #1: How bad will it get ?

Factor #2: Not only has Japan decided to not fund  the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) and the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan (NSC), but many say they have not learned from their previous mistakes.

This makes for a higher increase of a black swan event imo….

Full article

“Japanese airlines canceled hundreds of flights, some train services were halted and thousands of workers went home early as some of the strongest winds in more than 50 years hit Tokyo today.

The weather agency issued a tornado warning for the Tokyo area after the storm dumped as much as 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) of rain an hour in central Japan as it crossed from the southwest, with winds gusting up to 140 kilometers (87 miles) an hour. An 82-year-old woman died after being knocked over by the wind and hitting her head, national broadcaster NHK reported….”

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“SHANGHAI—Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao delivered an unusually direct appeal for financial reform in the world’s No. 2 economy, calling the nation’s big four state-owned banks a monopoly that needs to be broken and saying a pilot program from reform will be expanded nationwide….”

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“BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s competition watchdog on Tuesday opened two investigations into whether Motorola Mobility, which is being bought by Google, is unfairly restricting competitors from accessing essential patents.

The formal investigations were announced after Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. complained to the European Commission that Motorola Mobility was using injunctions against its rivals’ key products — such as the iPhone, iPad or Xbox — as a way of gaining an edge in the market. Apple and Microsoftclaimed that the price Motorola Mobility was demanding for licensing its patents was excessive and its court cases against them illegal.

Motorola Mobility holds patents that are essential for standards linked to 2G and 3G wireless technology — the focus of Apple’s complaint — as well as compressing video for online use and wireless LAN technologies, which are at the heart of Microsoft’s complaint.

The Commission said it “will assess whether Motorola has abusively, and in contravention of commitments it gave to standard setting organizations, used certain of its standard essential patents to distort competition.”

Under EU competition law, companies that hold patents that are essential for industry standards have to make these available to rivals at a fair price. Standards ensure that devices from different producers can interact seamlessly with widely used networks, technologies and each other….”

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“Solyndra was just the appetizer. Earlier today, in what will come as a surprise only to members of the administration, the company which proudly held the rights to the world’s largest solar power project, the hilariously named Solar Trust of America (“STA”), filed for bankruptcy. And while one could say that the company’s epic collapse is more a function of alternative energy politics in Germany, where its 70% parent Solar Millennium AG filed for bankruptcy last December, what is relevant is that last April STA was the proud recipient of a $2.1 billion conditional loan from the Department of Energy, incidentally the second largest loan ever handed out by the DOE’s Stephen Chu. That amount was supposed to fund the expansion of the company’s 1000 MW Blythe Solar Power Project in Riverside, California. From the funding press release, “This project construction is expected to create over 1,000 direct jobs in Southern California, 7,500 indirect jobs in related industries throughout the United States, and more than 200 long-term operational jobs at the facility itself. It will play a key role in stimulating the American economy,”said Uwe T. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Solar Trust of America and Executive Chairman of project development subsidiary Solar Millennium, LLC.” Instead, what Solar Trust will do is create lots of billable hours for bankruptcy attorneys (at $1,000/hour), and a good old equity extraction for the $22 million DIP lender, which just happens to be NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, another “alternative energy” company which last yearreceived a $935 million loan courtesy of the very same (and now $2.1 billion poorer) Department of Energy, which is also a subsidiary of public NextEra Energy (NEE), in the process ultimately resulting in yet another transfer of taxpayer cash to NEE’s private shareholders.

As Bloomberg notes: “The company joins Energy Conversion Devices Inc., a U.S. solar manufacturer that suspended production last year; LSP Energy LP, the owner of a natural-gas-fired power plant in Mississippi; Ener1 Inc., maker of lithium-ion batteries for plug-in electric cars; solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC; and energy storage company Beacon Power Corp. (BCONQ) in bankruptcy.”

And so central planning fails again, and again, and again, and again. But it sure will be better with the centrally planned monetary (and in the absence of a working Congress – also fiscal) policy. Because this time it really will be different.

From Reuters:

Solar Trust of America and several affiliates filed for protection from creditors with the U.S. bankruptcy court in Delaware. It estimated to have as much as $10 million of assets, and between $50 million and $100 million of liabilities….”

Read a lot more on this

If you’ve ever spent significant time in the woods, you’ve undoubtedly run across these trees. I had always heard that they were made by the Native Americans, but didn’t know it was the truth, until now…

————————————————————————————

By Associated Press, Updated: Saturday, March 31, 6:05 PM
DALLAS — The pecan tree, more than 300 years old, stands out from the others in a forested area of Dallas, a 25-foot segment of its trunk slightly bowed and running almost parallel to the ground before jutting high up into the sky.

It, like numerous others across the country known as Indian marker trees or trail trees, was bent in its youth by American Indians to indicate such things as a trail or a low-water creek crossing.

“If they could talk, the stories they could tell,” said Steve Houser, an arborist and founding member of the Dallas Historic Tree Coalition. The trees, he said, “were like an early road map.”

Read the rest here.

“Exchanges in the biggest emerging economies will begin trading futures based on each other’s benchmark stock indexes today as rising wealth spurs demand for new investment products.

The five members of the BRICS Exchanges Alliance will cross-list futures on Brazil’s Bovespa Index (IBOV), Russia’s Micex Index (INDEXCF), the BSE India Sensitive Index, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index (HSCEI) and South Africa’s JSE Top40 Index. Traders engaged in arbitrage will be able to buy and sell futures based on the same index on multiple venues, boosting liquidity, according to Mumbai-based BSE Ltd….”

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