New iPad Battery Indicator Lies, Research Shows

Peter Pachal

The battery indicator on the iPad is a liar. Research from a display research company says Apple‘s new tablet continues to charge for a long time after the onscreen indicator shows it’s full.

Ray Soneira of DisplayMate– whose research also showed that the new iPad’s retina display drains significantly more power than previous models — conducted a test that showed the iPad kept drawing power at the full recharging rate of about 10 watts for two hours after it initially reported having a 100% charge. Only at 2:10 did the recharging “fully terminate” with a sudden drop in power.

Soneira says he wasn’t setting out to test the battery, and that he only looked at the iPad’s power usage to see how much is going to the screen. However, when he noticed his equipment told him his iPad was charging even though the screen said “100%,” he decided to study the issue further. That’s when he discovered the extended charge time.

Why would the iPad say it has a full charge when it doesn’t? Apple isn’t saying (a spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment), but Soneira has a theory.

“The charge indicator on all mobile devices is based on a mathematical model of the charge rates, discharge rates, and recent discharge history of the battery,” he told Mashable in an email. “It’s actually rather difficult to do because most batteries degrade slowly and then tend to surprise with a precipitous decline near the end. So there is something wrong with the battery charge mathematical model on the iPad.”

Read the rest here.

Brian Bremner

The spectacularly botched initial public offering of Bats Global Markets on March 23 is so rich in irony that it’s difficult to know where to begin. What’s far less amusing is the prospect that the current era of high-frequency trading, in which powerful computers sift through massive information flows in search of price discrepancies and split-second trades, will bring even more episodes of market mayhem far more costly to investors and the broader economy.

In the annals of business screw-ups, Bats has certainly made its mark. Bats stands for Better Alternative Trading System and the company runs two exchanges that collectively rank third in terms of U.S. share trading, behind New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The Bats exchanges account for 11 percent to 12 percent of daily U.S. equity trading, according to its website. The company came of age with the expansion of high-frequency trading over the last decade and the proliferation of quant-jock-driven electronic firms that dominate the buying and selling of U.S. equities. Bats founder Dave Cummings is chairman and owner of high-frequency trading firm Tradebot Systems.

Today was supposed to be the Lenexa (Kan.)-based company’s moment in the limelight as it tried to sell about 6.3 million shares in the $16 to $18 dollar per share range. Instead, something went terribly wrong. The company’s shares somehow ended up trading for pennies per share early in the trading day on both the Bats bourse and Nasdaq, according to data reviewed in this Bloomberg story. Then tech investors and Apple (AAPL) fanboys the world over were dismayed when a single trade for 100 shares executed on the Bats market sent Apple’s shares to $542 per share, down sharply from recent levels. (The company set a new 52-week high of $609 per share on March 21.) The stock temporarily halted trading and recovered.

It’s far too early to know what went wrong, though Bats took the unusual step of withdrawing its IPO late in the trading day. “In the wake of today’s technical issues, which affected the trading of certain stocks, including that of Bats, we believe withdrawing the IPO is the appropriate action to take for our company and our shareholders,” said Joe Ratterman, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Bats.

Read the rest here.

Lynne Peeples

If everything goes as planned, Angie Nordstrum’s son may look out the window of his second-grade classroom at Red Hawk Elementary this fall and see a full-scale natural gas drilling operation.

He and his classmates, Nordstrum noted, will then have no choice but to breathe emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), benzene and other toxic pollutants — even while they tend to a 1,500-square-foot organic garden at their LEED-certified school.

“This is so disturbing on so many levels,” said Nordstrum, of Erie, Colo.

Natural gas production is rapidly increasing across the country — from Pennsylvania to Colorado. According to many public health experts, the natural and manmade chemicals released during drilling, hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) and reinjection steps are making more and more people sick. Adding to the concern are new findings showing the associated air pollution, and the dangers of exposure to very small doses of certain chemicals. Developing fetuses and young children can be the most vulnerable to these effects.

In addition to the pollutants, and the intense noise, a natural gas operation looks like a “Christmas tree on steroids,” noted Nordstrum, a member of the grassroots group of parents, Erie Rising, which is battling the gas wells.

“So much is being said in news about how this is the new clean fuel,” she said. “It’s not.”

Water pollution has been the focus of the fracking debate on the East Coast, however, air pollution may be the main source of exposure in many areas. According to a new study in Colorado that sampled air quality over the course of three years, people living within a half-mile of an oil or gas well were exposed to a number of toxic chemicals including benzene, a known carcinogen. VOC levels measured five times the safety limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“For children, the potential cancer risk is a serious consideration. They are more sensitive, exposed at younger ages and for longer periods of time,” said Lisa McKenzie, lead researcher on the study at the Colorado School of Public Health.

McKenzie said the results also pointed to potentially significant respiratory and neurological effects. For children, this could mean more headaches, sore throats and asthma. “Children are more sensitive to all of these pollutants, whether traditional ozone, dust or particulates caused by hydrocarbons leaking out of the wells or the diesel trucks carrying the materials,” added Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, whose goal is to protect public health and the environment.

Lunder called the new findings “sobering” and emphasized the need for further study. “There are an incredible number of other industrial chemicals involved,” she said. But research is complicated by the fact that these chemicals tend to vary from well to well, with names and quantities not always disclosed by the fracking company.

But, not everyone is convinced of the associated airborne risks. “It is important to put this paper into context,” said Tom Amontree, executive vice president of the America’s Natural Gas Alliance. “Not a single human being’s health was evaluated here.”

“Natural gas companies take seriously the health and safety of their workers and the communities in which they operate,” he added.

Read the rest here.

I took the SAT a grand total of one time when I was in dipshit prep school. This was 1993. Like any other kid, I wanted to do well on the test, primarily so that I would NEVER have to take it again, but also because kids at my school were real dicks about their SAT scores. You’d hear through the grapevine about other kids who aced the test, and all that test gossip resulted in an great deal of fear and paranoia about your own performance. It was horrible. If you can, avoid going to high school altogether.

They administered the test at a nearby public high school and herded us into the classrooms. Every classroom had a test monitor, a stack of test booklets, and a large box of sharpened No. 2 pencils. My friend Darren sat in front of me. Thirty minutes into the test, he had to go pee. The monitor denied him a trip to the bathroom. Darren ended up getting a 900 out of 1600. That monitor was a dick.

Shockingly, little about the SAT has changed since I set foot in that classroom. Most students still have to take the test using bubble sheets and a No. 2 pencil, which is insane to me. They’ve managed to digitize VOTING, for shit’s sake. And yet here’s the SAT, still feeding test sheets into the Scantron machine like it’s 1982. Maybe the only differences with today’s SAT are the essay question (barf), the higher maximum score (2400), and the hugely metastasized frenzy over the test. Wired reports that as recently as 2009, the test-preparation industry had earnings of over $4 billion. Private tutoring from a Kaplan expert to study for the test can cost you close to $5,000, an expense plenty of nutjob helicopter parents are happy to throw down.

There are many shitty things about being a grownup. You have to make money. You have to do taxes. You have to show up for your bail hearings. It’s all really fucking annoying. But one of the few upsides of being an adult is that you NEVER have to take the SAT again. You never have to worry about it. You don’t have to give a shit what’ll happen if have to pee during the test. You don’t have to look at another analogy ever again. It’s not bad tradeoff for all the other piddling crap you have to deal with. I know I was happy with the arrangement. But recently, I got this question from reader Brendan:

If you had to take one of the standardized college acceptance tests today, how do you think you’d fare? I did pretty well when I took it in high school, but I’m almost certain these days I’d score like, a 12 on the math section of the ACT. Me no make numbers good.

Me no make numbers good either, Brendan. But there was only one way to find out if I truly am dumber than I was 18 years ago. I had to take the SAT one more time, cold. With no preparation of any sort. And I had to do it under the exact same conditions as before: using bubble sheets, a No. 2 pencil, a standard calculator (I sold my TI-81 graphing calculator after I graduated. OOPS!). And I had to do it in the time allotted. So that’s exactly what I did. I went to the College Board and printed out a sample test, then sat down and took it from beginning to end. Here now is what transpired.

Read the rest here.

By Dylan Stableford | The Sideshow – 12 hrs ago

Researchers at the Univ. of Pennsylvania say they have identified the scalp chemical that stops hair from growing, and believe it may finally—finally!—lead to the elusive cure for male pattern baldness.

The scientists found that a protein called PDG2 was three times as prevalent on the scalps of balding men. (PDG2-blocking drugs are already being tested by researchers working on alternative treatments for asthma, so they’re hopeful testing for baldness can be expedited.)

The news was met with joy in England, where an estimated 7.4 million men are bald or balding.

“Excitingly,” the Daily Mail reported, “drugs that block the protein have already been developed for other purposes, meaning a hair restoring lotion or potion could be on the market in under five years.”

Read the rest here.

John Nolte

If any sacred cow whines to YouTube and Facebook, whatever that sacred cow is whining about is immediately taken down. 

But a song that openly calls for the killing of Rush Limbaugh apparently doesn’t offend YouTube or Facebook, in the least.

Disgusted by Rush Limbaugh’s recent antics? Blast our song, ‘KILL RUSH’

Just don’t call anyone a “slut.”

Source

Twitter: @alphaconsumer

On the surface, the retail world seems stacked against women: We pay more for many items, from shampoo to razors to dry-cleaning services. But a look into the reasons for this alleged price discrimination reveals legitimate market forces—not sexism—to be at work.

In a provocative article on Marie Claire’s website, “Why Women Pay More,” writer Lea Goldman quite rightly points out that women pay more to dry clean shirts than men do. She also calls out more expensive women’s shampoos and razors and different insurance rates for women. “We lose out in nearly every transaction we make,” Goldman asserts.

Aside from that being a gross overstatement (the vast majority of the transactions we make are gender neutral—when you bought your morning coffee, did the barista make note of your gender?), many of Goldman’s examples can be explained through simple economics, not sexism.

Men’s and women’s shirts, for example, are not created equal. Men’s shirts, because of their flat lines, are far easier to clean, and dry cleaners can use standardized machines to iron them. Women’s shirts are, naturally, curvier, and require a more labor-intensive dry cleaning process. It would hardly be fair to require a dry cleaner to charge the same amount for such different services. (Even the feminist blog Jezebel acknowledged this fact when the story first made the news in 2009.) Goldman calls this price difference “blatant discrimination,” but the facts suggest it is only the market at work.

Goldman’s reporting also reveals the complex system of tariffs the United States has developed over the years. Men’s sneakers are taxed at 8.5 percent; women’s at 10 percent. But the price difference isn’t always biased against women. Men’s gloves are taxed at 14 percent and women’s are taxed at 12.6 percent. Complicated and bureaucratic, yes. Sexist? Only if the tax difference always gave men a better deal for no legitimate reason, which it doesn’t.

Goldman also points out a fact of life that many couples have surely noticed: Women’s self-care products tend to be pricier than men’s. Shampoo, deodorant, and razors marketed to women tend to carry higher price tags than those sold to men. Perhaps women prefer fancier products, or maybe we’re simply willing to pay more for our hygiene routines, but the market clearly supports pricier products for women. But is it really sexist when women also have the choice to simply skip the expensive options and purchase off-brand razors, soap, and shampoo instead? Anyone who’s recently visited a pharmacy knows that women do not suffer from lack of choice in the self-care aisles.

The article also calls attention to the higher rates women pay for health insurance, an area of legitimate concern, as the national birth control debate recently made clear. This topic is too important to be lumped in with complaints about expensive conditioners and $7 dry cleaning charges, which are, after all, luxury expenses anyway. The area of insurance is a complicated one, and women don’t always get the short end of the stick: Auto insurance companies often give young women better deals than young men, and for good reason—they’re safer drivers. Does Goldman also think that’s sexist?

Marie Claire encourages readers to contact their members of Congress to ask them to outlaw this so-called “gender-pricing.” Before you do that, consider the unintended consequences of such laws. If dry cleaners could no longer charge more to clean a shirt that required more labor, how many of those small businesses would go out of business? If women’s shampoo couldn’t cost more than men’s shampoo, which popular yet pricey products would be forced off the market? (Goodbye, Kerastase.)

There’s plenty of discrimination and abuse against women in the world to get angry about and to fight. Paying more for expensive dry cleaning and shampoo is not one of them.

Source

By James Pethokoukis

This new fiscal study—from Richard W. Evans and Kerk Phillips of Brigham Young University and Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University—is worrisome, to say the least:

Most developed countries appear to be running unsustainable social policies. In the U.S., federal liabilities (official debt plus the present value of projected non-interest expenditures) exceed federal assets (the present value of projected taxes) by $211 trillion or 14 times GDP. Closing this fiscal gap requires an immediate and permanent 64 percent hike in all federal taxes. … Our simulations, calibrated to the U.S. economy, produce an average duration to game over of about one century, with a 35 percent chance of reaching the fi scal limit in about 30 years. … When our economy reaches game over, the government is forced to default on its promised payment to the contemporaneous elderly.

Read the rest here.

If demographics are destiny, then this might be the best decade for global economic growth in 70 years. Take that, Great Recession.

The following chart from Goldman Sachs breaks down global growth over the past 30 years and projects forward for the next 40. The good (or maybe bad) news is that despite the whole “global financial crisis” thing you might have read about, the 2010s are the big winner. (A note on the chart: The dark blue shows Brazil, Russia, India and China’s share of global growth, the lighter blue the next 11 biggest emerging markets, the lightest blue all other emerging markets, and the grey the world’s rich economies.)

To read the rest and see the chart, go here.

One wonders how this was all missed by the media during his presidential campaign…

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By Murray Weiss

NSFW

Source

LOS ANGELES (CBS) — City Council members took a step closer on Wednesday to becoming the first in the nation to adopt a resolution condemning certain types of speech on public airwaves.

Councilmember Jan Perry introduced legislation that would call upon media companies to ensure “on-air hosts do not use and promote racist and sexist slurs” on radio and other broadcasts.

Members of Black Media Alliance, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Korean-American Bar Association, American Indians in Film and Television were on hand to voice their support for the proposal.

The resolution — which was also supported by Councilmember Bernard Parks and Council President Herb Wesson — called attention to the recent uproar over comments by KFI 640 AM talk show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou.

Kobylt and Chiampou were suspended after they called the late pop singer Whitney Houston a “crack ho” three days after her death in February.

The proposal cites a “long history of racially offensive comments as well as deplorable sexist remarks, particularly towards women and Black, Latino, and Asian communities” at KFI 640 and calls for parent company Clear Channel Communications to hire a more diverse workforce to offset the trend.

“It is easy to become desensitized to what other groups find intolerable which ultimately fosters an environment where negative comments can go unchecked and corporate guidelines and policies are no longer being enforced,” the resolution reads.

Remarks from syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh referring Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” for testifying on Capitol Hill about women’s access to contraception were also cited in the proposal.

Source

(Reuters) – Scott Kluth has a love-hate relationship with his new Fisker Karma luxury electric sedan.

The 34-year-old car lover bought the plug-in hybrid electric Karma in December for $107,850, but five days later the car’s battery died as he was driving in downtown Chicago. While the car he affectionately calls a “head turner” was fixed in a recall, Kluth remains uncertain how much he will drive it.

“I just want a car that works,” Kluth said. “It’s a fun car to drive. It’s just that I’ve lost confidence in it.”

The Karma’s problems — one vehicle died during testing by Consumer Reports this month — follow bad publicity arising from a probe of General Motors Co’s Chevrolet Volt and weak sales of the car, and the closure or bankruptcy of several electric vehicle-related start-ups.

The unrelenting bad news has led to questions about the readiness of electric cars and raises fresh doubts about a technology that has been around since the late 1890s but is still struggling to win over the public.

Whether electric vehicles can find an audience beyond policymakers in Washington and Hollywood celebrities depends on lowering vehicle prices without selling cars at a loss, analysts and industry executives say, while extending driving range to make the cars competitive with their gasoline-powered peers.

“It’s going to be a slow slog,” said John O’Dell, senior green car editor at industry research firm Edmunds.com. “Maybe there’s too much expectation of more and quicker success than might realistically be expected of a brand new technology.”

He also questioned whether priorities will simply change for whomever is U.S. president after the November election. Electric vehicles could lose tax breaks — currently worth $7,500 a vehicle for buyers — particularly if a Republican ends up in the White House.

Edmunds expects pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids to make up only 1.5 percent of the U.S. market in 2017, compared with 0.1 percent last year, and O’Dell said that may be optimistic. Consumers charge all-electric cars by plugging into an outlet, while hybrid versions include a gasoline engine.

President Barack Obama’s administration has been a strong proponent of electric vehicles like the Volt and set a goal of getting 1 million battery-powered vehicles on the road by 2015. Lux Research estimates that number will actually be fewer than 200,000. Both the Volt and Karma’s development were supported by low-interest federal loans.

That has not dissuaded automakers, many of which plan to launch electric vehicles to join the Volt and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf in a bid to meet rising fuel efficiency standards. Toyota has begun selling a plug-in Prius, and EVs from Ford, Honda, BMW and Fiat will join the fray this year, along with cars from start-ups Tesla and Coda Automotive.

HENRY FORD’S WIFE

Electric cars aren’t a new concept. Henry Ford bought his wife, Clara, at least two electric cars in the early 1900s offering at best 50 miles driving range and top speeds of about 35 miles per hour, according to the Henry Ford Museum.

But analysts said automakers have not done a good enough job getting the costs down and explaining the technology to win over anyone beyond early adopters like actor Leonardo DiCaprio, pop idol Justin Bieber, comedian Jay Leno and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“You can do all the advertising and promotion you want, but if people don’t buy into the message the needle’s not going to move,” said George Cook, a marketing professor at the University of Rochester’s business school and a former Ford executive.

The Volt, at almost $40,000 before federal subsidies, is seen as too expensive by many critics. Fiat-Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne, a long-time EV skeptic, has said Chrysler will lose more than $10,000 on every battery-powered Fiat 500 it sells.

And even with rising gasoline prices — topping $4 a gallon in parts of the country — EVs are just not competitive, according to the Lundberg Survey. Gasoline prices would have to rise to $8.53 a gallon to make the Leaf competitive and hit $12.50 for a Volt to be worth it, based on the cost of gasoline versus electricity, fuel efficiency and depreciation, the survey said.

Obama’s vision, which he laid out at a Daimler truck plant in North Carolina this month, includes a car battery that costs half the price of today’s versions and can go up to 300 miles on a single charge. The industry is far from achieving that.

Since last fall, there has been a run of bad news for EVs, starting with the late November news that U.S. safety regulators were investigating the Volt for possible battery fires.

While the federal investigation was closed with the conclusion there was no defect and the car did not pose a greater risk of fire than gas-powered vehicles, weak demand led GM to halt production for five weeks and temporarily lay off 1,300 workers at the plant that builds the car. GM, which strengthened the structural protection of the Volt battery, has repeatedly said the car is safe, and some said the safety probe should have never occurred.

The Karma that died during testing by Consumer Reports magazine was another blow following a recall of more than 200 of the cars last year and the halting of sales in January for a software issue. Fisker, which builds the Karma in Finland, also suspended work last month at its U.S. plant scheduled to make another car, the Nina sedan, while it works to renegotiate a $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher said problems can arise with new technologies and a new company but added Fisker had gone “beyond the call of duty” in instituting a system to respond to customer issues and had plenty of satisfied owners. CEO Tom LaSorda in a letter to Karma owners last week said Fisker was committed to giving customers “complete peace of mind” and he had created a “SWAT team” of 50 engineers and consultants to identify issues with the car.

Read the rest here.

Arends: The little-known fund manager with eye-popping returns has 50% of his portfolio in one stock. Will it pay off?

Should you invest half your money in the same stock?

Most financial planners would tell you that’s a crazy idea, that you need to be more “diversified.” But that’s what Allan Mecham at Arlington Value — aka the 400% Man — has just done.

Mecham, whose stellar returns were highlighted in the March edition of Smart Money, tells his investors that last year he levered up the fund and has invested half the money in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

“Able to borrow at around 1.5%, we levered (Berkshire) into a 50%+ position,” he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders. “Though not advocates of leverage, we believe the low cost and modest amount, combined with [Berkshire’s] iron-clad safety and cheap price, makes our action sensible.”

There is some method to the madness. Mecham, a long-term Buffett disciple, argues that Berkshire Hathaway stock, on its own, “provides ample diversity, with exposure to disparate businesses (more than 70), sectors, and asset allocations.” Berkshire’s assets include a ton of cash-generative businesses, a book of blue-chip public stocks valued at more than $75 billion, and nearly $40 billion in cash, he says.

Short-term gains are irrelevant, but Mecham built up the huge Berkshire Hathaway position before the announcement, last September, that Berkshire would start buying back stock.

Since then stock has zoomed about 16%, from around $105,000 to $122,000.

No one is suggesting you should follow suit — even if you could borrow at 1.5%. But Mecham’s track record makes his moves worth noting. He’s trounced the market since launching Arlington in 1999, posting gains of more than 400% after costs. Arlington’s five-year return through 2011 averages 18.7% net of fees, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 has lost ground.

Read the rest here.

If men could do this, I don’t think obesity in men would be a problem…

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Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

Women may not need a guy, a vibrator, or any other direct sexual stimulation to have an orgasm, finds a new study on exercise-induced orgasms and sexual pleasure.

The findings add qualitative and quantitative data to a field that has been largely unstudied, according to researcher Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. For instance, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues first reported the phenomenon in 1953, saying that about 5 percent of women they had interviewed mentioned orgasm linked to physical exercise. However, they couldn’t know the actual prevalence because most of these women volunteered the information without being directly asked.

Since then, reports of so-called “coregasms,” named because of their seeming link to exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, according to the researchers.

“Despite attention in the popular media, little is known scientifically about exercise-induced orgasms,” the researchers write in a special issue of the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy released in print this month.

Pleasure at the gym

Herbenick and her colleagues used online surveys to gather their data, which included answers from 124 women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms and 246 women who reported exercise-induced sexual pleasure. Most of the women, ages 18 to 63 and an average age of 30, were in a relationship or married and 69 percent said they were heterosexual.

The researchers found that about 40 percent of both groups of women had experienced exercise-induced pleasure or orgasm on more than 11 occasions in their lives. Most of the women in the “orgasm” group said they felt some level of embarrassment when exercising in public places.

The “orgasm” group mostly said during the experiences they weren’t having a sexual fantasy or thinking about someone they were attracted to.

Of the women who had orgasms during exercise, about 45 percent said their first experience was linked to abdominal exercises; 19 percent linked to biking/spinning; 9.3 percent linked to climbing poles or ropes; 7 percent reported a connection with weight lifting; 7 percent running;  the rest of the experiences included various exercises, such as yoga, swimming, elliptical machines, aerobics and others. Exercise-induced sexual pleasure was linked with more types of exercises than the orgasm phenomenon.

Abdominal exercises may be best

Answers to open-ended questions in the survey revealed some interesting details, the researchers found. For instance, the abdominal exercises tied to orgasms seemed to be particularly associated with the exercise in which a person supports their weight on their forearms on a so-called captain’s chair with padded arm rests and then lifts their knees toward their chest.

The open-ended questions also revealed the orgasms tended to occur after multiple sets of crunches or some other abdominal exercise rather than after just a couple repetitions; they also seemed to happen after the woman had really exerted herself.

“Many of these women talked about it happening even as children,” Herbenick said during a telephone interview, adding that some indicated an experience at age 7 or 8.

“We had at least one woman in the study who was a virgin, and she really loved that she could have these experiences at the gym,” Herbenick said.

The researchers aren’t sure why certain exercises lead to orgasm or sexual pleasure, though Herbenick hopes to tease out the trigger in ongoing research.

“It may be that exercise, which is already known to have significant benefits to health and well-being, has the potential to enhance women’s sexual lives as well,” Herbenick said, adding that it isn’t clear whether these exercises could actually enhance women’s sexual experiences.

Read the rest here.

A bipartisan bill on insider trading that had been steamrolling through Congress has ground to a halt.

The Senate and House last month overwhelmingly approved different versions of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle predicted some version of the bill would reach President Obama’s desk swiftly.

But what had been a legislative locomotive is now attracting something quite common in an election year: finger-pointing.

Democrats in the House and a senior Senate Republican want provisions on political intelligence added to the bill. House Republican leaders, who scrapped that part of the legislation, say it’s up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to make a decision of whether to go to conference or pass the House-passed version. Reid, meanwhile, isn’t saying much….

….One thing is clear: The ball is in Reid’s court, and has been for a while.

On March 1, Craig Holman, government-affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, said, “Everyone is waiting for Reid to make a decision.”

Source

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s food police have struck again!

Outlawed are food donations to homeless shelters because the city can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content, reports CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

Glenn Richter arrived at a West Side synagogue on Monday to collect surplus bagels — fresh nutritious bagels — to donate to the poor. However, under a new edict from Bloomberg’s food police he can no longer donate the food to city homeless shelters.

It’s the “no bagels for you” edict.

“I can’t give you something that’s a supplement to the food you already have? Sorry that’s wrong,” Richter said.

Richter has been collecting food from places like the Ohav Zedek synagogue and bringing it to homeless shelters for more than 20 years, but recently his donation, including a “cholent” or carrot stew, was turned away because the Bloomberg administration wants to monitor the salt, fat and fiber eaten by the homeless.

Read the rest here.

Diana B. Henriques

Bernie Madoff hated e-mail. He rarely used it at his high-tech Wall Street trading firm. When others did, he fretted about the trail it left behind. He wasn’t crazy about letters, either. A staffer had standing orders to destroy his correspondence with one important client. Even after December 2008, when the world learned that ­Madoff had run the largest Ponzi scheme in history, few personal letters surfaced. He always preferred to deal with people face-to-face.

But early in his 150-year prison sentence that all changed. His wife, Ruth, stopped visiting. His estranged older son, Mark, committed suicide; his surviving son, Andrew, never visited and swore he never would. His encounters with the world beyond the prison’s razor-wire perimeter shrank down to occasional meetings with lawyers.

In September 2010, in the first months of this intensifying isolation, Bernie Madoff became my pen pal–forced by captivity to rely almost entirely on e-mail and letters to carry out his last, desperate mission.

That mission: rewriting history–his own history. Where better to start than with his biographer?

I first interviewed Madoff in person at the medium-security prison in Butner, N.C. in August 2010 for my book The Wizard of Lies (Times Books, 2011). It traces the roots of his dishonesty to 1962 and details his many cliff-hanger escapes from detection, his precipitous downfall in 2008 and the epic legal struggle over the wreckage he left behind.

After that first visit–I saw him again early last year– we began to exchange letters. Soon Madoff enrolled me in the closed prison e-mail system. We have corresponded ever since, at least monthly, more often weekly, sometimes several times a day.

Read the rest here.