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It Pays Big $$$ to Marry (and Divorce) Kobe Bryant

(via TMZ)

Vanessa Bryants HousesKobe Bryant‘s wife Vanessa is the big winner in their divorce property settlement … TMZ has learned.

Sources connected to the couple and with direct knowledge of the situation tell TMZ … the property settlement agreement is signed, sealed and delivered — a done deal.

Vanessa is walking away with $75 million, which we’re told represents close to half of their total assets, estimated at around $150 million.

TMZ previously reported several transfers of property earlier this year between Kobe and Vanessa.  It turns out, based on the property settlement, Vanessa scored a clean sweep, snagging ALL THREE of the former couple’s mansions in the Newport Beach area.

Vanessa gets the estate the couple was living in, the estate her mom is living in, and she gets the new estate that had been under construction for 2 years and was just completed.  We were told Kobe was moving into the new estate, but that’s not true.  It’s Vanessa’s crib, lock stock and barrel.

Vanessa just scored 3 … where it counts.

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Deutsche Analyst Asked to Alter CDO Models, Blew Whistle

by Carrick Mollenkamp, Special to ProPublica Jan. 19, 2012, 9:04 a.m.

At a time when mortgage-backed securities were imploding and customers were fleeing the market, a junior analyst at Deutsche Bank AG protested when he was asked to alter the numbers in a spreadsheet to make a Deutsche security look less risky to ratings agencies, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Read the rest here.

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Hackers Strike Back at US Government #sopa

In response to government shut down of megaupload.com, hackers have flooded and taken down the following sites.

justice.gov universalmusic.com riaa.org mpaa.org copyright.gov hadopi.fr wmg.com usdoj.gov bmi.com fbi.gov

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SHOCK: ITALIAN CRUISE SHIP CAPTAIN ORDERED DINNER AFTER SHIPWRECK

One final meal after he knew he screwed himself and everyone else…

(via  CNN)

_______________________

The captain of the Costa Concordia ordered dinner for himself and a woman after the ship struck rocks off Italy’s coast, a cook from the ship told a Filipino television station.

In an interview with GMA Network, cook Rogelio Barista said Capt. Francesco Schettino ordered dinner less than an hour after the accident.

“We wondered what was going on. … At that time, we really felt something was wrong. … The stuff in the kitchen was falling off shelves and we realized how grave the situation was,” Barista told GMA.

Schettino ordered dinner around 10:30 p.m. Friday, Barista said. Authorities say the ship struck the rocks at 9:41 p.m.

“I have had 12 years of experience as a cook on a cruise ship. … I have even witnessed fires, so I wasn’t that scared,” Barista said. “But I did wonder, though, what the captain was doing … why was he still there.”

The ship hit rocks off the coast of the Italian island of Giglio on Friday night.

At least 11 people are known to have died in the disaster, and 21 are still missing, according to the Italian Crisis Unit.

Criticism from both Costa Cruises and the authorities has focused so far on Schettino, who is under house arrest and facing possible charges of manslaughter, shipwreck and abandoning ship.

Coast guard records published Thursday by an Italian newspaper pile further pressure on the captain of the Concordia and his officers, suggesting that the authorities first became aware of the crash from a friend of the mother of a passenger about 15 minutes after the ship hit rocks.

Schettino’s brother-in-law defended him in an Italian newspaper Thursday.

Schettino “managed to avoid a tragedy — it could have been worse,” Maurilio Russo said in Corriere della Sera.

And he denied that the captain had abandoned ship.

“He was not running away, he came down (from the ship) to survey the damage,” Russo said.

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William Tecumseh Sherman’s Southern Sympathies

(via) 

The Baton Rouge dinner party in early 1860 had been enjoyable, but as it went on William Tecumseh Sherman couldn’t help but hear his name mentioned repeatedly down at the table’s far end. He suspected it had something to do with his position as superintendent of the newly formed Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (today’s Louisiana State University). He had held the post for a few months and was well regarded by those who knew him personally, but many who didn’t were concerned that the state’s only college was run by a Northerner whose congressman brother was seen across the South as an abolitionist.

The party’s host, Gov. Thomas O. Moore, finally invited Sherman to join the discussion. “Won’t you speak your mind freely on this question of slavery, that so agitates the land?” Moore asked. “You are under my roof,” he added, “and, whatever you say, you have my protection.” His guest wouldn’t need it. Sherman is remembered today mainly as the Union general who led marches through Georgia and the Carolinas that crippled the Confederacy’s war-making capacity and demoralized its people. But that evening, surrounded by some of Louisiana’s leading citizens, Sherman would prove how Southern his views on slavery were.

William T. ShermanLibrary of CongressWilliam T. Sherman

“The people of Louisiana were hardly responsible for slavery, as they had inherited it,” Sherman assured his audience. Further, while the well-being of field slaves might depend on “the temper and dispositions of their masters and overseers,” Sherman thought slaves who worked in family homes were “probably better treated than any slaves on earth.” When he explained that he favored keeping slave families intact and allowing slaves to read and write in order to increase their value as property, a fellow guest pounded the table in excited support of Sherman’s remarks. A lively but congenial debate ensued that left Sherman feeling relieved, “because at the time all men in Louisiana were dreadfully excited on questions affecting their slaves.”

Sherman’s comments shouldn’t surprise us, nor the fact that they were so well received. Though born in Ohio, Sherman had spent much of his life among Southerners. In 1836 he entered West Point, where the emphasis on hierarchy and obedience would prepare Sherman well to move later among aristocratic Southerners. Upon graduation in 1840, Sherman spent the next six years at postings across the Deep South, in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. It was especially while in Charleston that Sherman got to know the South’s aristocracy, attending parties and going on deer hunts along the Cooper River.

Sherman resigned from the Army after a posting in California and embarked on what turned out to be a spectacularly unsuccessful business career. With the help of old Army friends, he was hired in the summer of 1859 to head the nascent Louisiana military academy.

At Governor Moore’s dinner party, in fact, Sherman had if anything actually understated his views. For one thing, Sherman was a white supremacist. “All the congresses on earth can’t make the negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man,” Sherman wrote his wife in 1860. “Two such races cannot live in harmony save as master and slave.” In a letter to his antislavery brother-in-law about plans to bring his family to Louisiana, Sherman crassly joked about becoming a slave master himself. Making light of the problems he anticipated in keeping white servants, he wrote that his wife Ellen “will have to wait on herself or buy a nigger. What will you think of that — our buying niggers?”

Blinded by his implacable racism, Sherman could see no worthwhile moral or legal debate to be had over slavery. History had forced this institution on the South, Sherman thought, and its continued prosperity depended on embracing it. “Theoretical notions of humanity and religion,” he flatly declared, “cannot shake the commercial fact that their labor is of great value and cannot be dispensed with.” Further, Sherman believed that slavery benefited both races. In 1854 he assured his brother that blacks thrived in the Southern heat and later told David F. Boyd, one of his professors at the Louisiana military academy and eventual friend, that he considered slavery in the South “the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world, now or heretofore.”

Still, slavery did trouble Sherman in one way: He grew increasingly worried that the political fight over it would threaten the stability of the Union. However, while he occasionally singled out Southerners for overreacting to antislavery sentiment — once writing that they “pretend to think that the northern people have nothing to do but steal niggers and preach sedition” — Sherman overall displayed a clear sympathy for their side in the growing schism. He was emphatic in an 1859 letter to his wife that the South should make its own decisions regarding slavery and then “receive its reward or doom.” Sherman thus anticipated Jefferson Davis’ famous plea of two years later that the South simply be left alone.

Despite Sherman’s strong affinities for the white aristocratic South, there were parts of Southern life that he seemed to dislike, and even despise. He enjoyed, for example, socializing in the 1840s with the better people of Charleston, but he at least once called their scions “worthless sons of broken down, proud Carolina families.” After the war, as the South struggled to rise above the devastation and impoverishment it had suffered, Sherman admonished Boyd to leave Louisiana for a teaching position in the North. “The commonest of the common schools of Iowa outrank in public estimation your university,” Sherman unkindly informed his friend, somehow overlooking that he was referring to the same college he himself had helped found and was otherwise often proud of. It’s not clear, though, how seriously to take these attacks: Sherman’s relationship with the South, like so many other areas of his life, was marked by a penchant for overheated rhetoric and a shifting array of firmly held opinions that can be hard to reconcile.

On the other hand, Sherman was always consistent when it came to the most fundamental disagreement between himself and his Southern friends and colleagues. He resigned his superintendency in January 1861 when it was clear Louisiana would follow the cotton states out of the Union. Sherman would help Southern whites “protect themselves against negroes and abolitionists,” but he refused to accept disunion under any circumstances. Sherman’s decision was painful for all concerned. “You cannot regret more than I do the necessity which deprives us of your services,” Governor Moore wrote Sherman. For his own part, Sherman told Moore he left with “the kindest feelings toward all.” At a final ceremony at the academy, Sherman bid farewell to each of his cadets individually; he then turned to the assembled faculty, but at first was unable to speak. After a moment, he placed a hand over his heart and choked out, “You are all here.”

Even so, Sherman would also hold rage in his heart at what he considered Confederate treason, and he came to embrace a war strategy to make the South pay for its disloyalty. “My aim,” according to his memoirs, “was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.” This Sherman, the scourge of the South, is well-established in Civil War history.

Much less well known, but equally essential to a proper understanding of this man, is the Sherman who wrote his oldest daughter of his sadness at fighting “some of the very families in whose houses I used to spend some happy days” and of his relief whenever battle against them could be avoided. The Sherman who received under flag of truce in 1864 a letter of thanks from several captured Louisiana students and professors for whom he’d secured release and protection. The Sherman who, a decade later in his memoirs, still recalled by name a former cadet killed in the terrible carnage at Shiloh.

Sherman’s relationship with the South makes him one of the most paradoxical and polarizing figures of the Civil War. He understood, and to a great extent embraced, the beliefs and values that led the South to secede. Yet of all Union generals he was the most viscerally opposed to the rebellion, causing him, as the war went on, to become the Confederacy’s sympathetic, vengeful enemy.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.


Sources: Michael Fellman, “Citizen Sherman”; Walter T. Fleming, ed., “General W.T. Sherman as College President”; M.A. DeWolfe Howe, ed., “Home Letters of General Sherman”; Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., “The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891”; William Tecumseh Sherman, “Memoirs.”


Thom Bassett is writing a novel about William Tecumseh Sherman and the burning of Columbia, S.C. in February 1865.


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FLASH: Excerpts from Paula Deen’s New Health Food Cookbook

(via) (NOTE: This is satire)

Recently, Paula Deen has admitted that she’s had Type II Diabetes for years. Accordingly, she’s putting out a cookbook of healthy food. Here are some excerpts!

FRUIT SALAD

INGREDIENTS:

1 lb. bag of Skittles

3 cups ranch dressing

DIRECTIONS:

Mix well. Serve room temperature.

PAULA’S BROWN RICE

INGREDIENTS:

1 pilaf white rice

1 bowl melted Junior Mints

DIRECTIONS:

Cover rice in chocolate. Serve with maple syrup to taste. To splurge, top with a sprinkle of sausage calzones.

SCRAMBLED EGG WHITES

INGREDIENTS:

1 dozen (12) Cadbury eggs

2 lbs. Frito crumbs

1 package extra-fat pork lard

1 pilaf Paula’s brown rice

DIRECTIONS:

Break the Cadbury eggs and harvest the crème-filled white centers. Dip them in the Frito crumbs. Put the lard (make SURE to get the extra-fat kind or it will be BLAND) in a frying pan on high heat, and fry the crème centers until golden-brown. Serve on a bed of Paula’s brown rice.

PAULA’S GARDEN BURGER

INGREDIENTS:

3 bags Olive Garden® Endless Breadsticks

12 Olive Garden® Stuffed Mushrooms

1 plate Olive Garden® New! Baked Pasta Romana with Chicken

4 Olive Garden® Black Tie Mousse Cakes

1 slice American cheese (optional)

DIRECTIONS:

Smash all of the Olive Garden® foods together until they resemble a large patty and top with cheese. For lowest calories, hold the cheese.

PAULA’S GUILT-FREE FAT-FREE® SMOOTHIE

INGREDIENTS:

34 lbs. sugar

DIRECTIONS:

Put sugar in smoothie glass and drink with straw, serve chilled in white wine tumblers or, for special occasions, lap from trough. This delicacy is guilt-free since you can make a conscious choice not to feel guilty about anything you put in your body like Paula does!

BUFFET AND A BURGER

INGREDIENTS:

1 burger

1 Las Vegas buffet

Christmas-themed elastic pants (optional)

DIRECTIONS:

Go to Las Vegas buffet. Make sure the buffet has burgers, or provide your own. Do NOT walk around the buffet. Get a motorized scooter, or stay in one spot and use a jaws of life to pick some of each buffet food out of the tubs and put it on your burger. Elastic pants are nice because your gupa (gunt-fupa) stays nicely inside the stretchy pants except for a few folds of fat with stretch marks that seep out of the pants.

PAULA’S GUILT-FREE® PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLIES

INGREDIENTS:

1 peanut

18 sticks of butter, mashed

1 pair Jellies shoes

DIRECTIONS:

Cover the shoes with butter and top with the peanut, and then eat the shoes. If you eat shoes it’s like you’re exercising so it’s VERY healthy.

PAULA’S GUILT-FREE® PIZZA PANTS

INGREDIENTS:

10’x20’ swath of pizza

Another pizza to use as pepperonis on the pizza

Stuffed mushrooms

FYI the mushrooms are stuffed with smaller pizzas

Smuckers magic shell ice cream topping

Rolos

Coca-cola

3 bags gummy bears

Fondue

Caesar salad dressing

Wood chips (as a thickener)

Grenadine syrup

Butter-flour mixture

Pizza Pockets

1 sewing machine

1 sewing pattern for pants (size XXXL)

DIRECTIONS:

Mushrooms are a vegetable and there are definitely some mushrooms on that pizza so technically they are HEALTHY-style pizza pants. Take the really big pizza. Put all of the other ingredients on the pizza. Pour the coke on the pizza. Dip the pizza in the fondue, and resist eating it before you make it into pants, no cheating!!! Sew that pizza into pants using the machine and the pattern. Make sure to sew in some pockets so you can keep a few extra spare Pizza Pockets in your pizza pockets!!!! Then eat your pants!!!!!!!!!!!

PAULA’S GUILT-FREE® TURTURTURDUCKDUCKENDUCKEN

INGREDIENTS:

3 turduckens

DIRECTIONS:

Stuff a turducken in a turducken in a turducken. While you’re waiting for it to cook, make your fat niece make you some pizza pants while you’re watching Pawn Stars and eat your pants and then slap your niece.

INSULIN AU GRATIN

INGREDIENTS:

1 insulin shot

15 lbs. block of cheddar cheese

DIRECTIONS:

Bury insulin shot in cheese. When you’re going into a diabetic coma, just eat your way to the shot!! Eat the cheese fast or you’ll die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SPARKLING WATER

INGREDIENTS:

1 glass sparkling water

1 ham

DIRECTIONS:

Put ham in water.

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{PHOTO} Old Man Buffett Goes Big Pimpin’ with Jay-Z

0119_illuminati_warren_getty

81-year-old Warren Buffett — one of he richest men on the planet — got downright gangsta at the grand reopening of Jay Z’s 40/40 nightclub in NYC last night … throwin’ up the Roc-a-Fella sign … like a boss.

It was the first time Jay’s been out in public since the birth of his daughter Blue Ivy — though Beyonce and B.I. didn’t make it out to the party.

Jay and Buffett have been friends for years — and appeared on the cover of Forbes together back in 2010.

via TMZ

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Joe Biden Steps Up His Gaffe Game for the NFL Playoffs

 

 

 An earlier Biden gaffe, asking a man in a wheelchair to stand up 

(via)

Vice President Joe Biden had his “oops” moment Wednesday speaking in a 49er-crazed San Francisco when he told a crowd at a city political fundraiser that “the Giants are on their way to the Super Bowl.”

Biden spoke at a closed event in the city’s financial District at the Bently Reserve when he made the gaffe, according to a White House pool report released today.
The comment by Biden drew immediate “good-natured” boos from the crowd, according to the report by Josh Richman of the Oakland Tribune, who was the only local print reporter allowed to cover the event.
After suggesting that the Giants were heading to the Super Bowl, Biden quickly recognized the gaffe and and explained he was accustomed to thinking in terms of the San Francisco Giants and their baseball wins. His next reference was to the “49ers on their way” to the Big Game.

Richman reported he was ushered out of the fundraiser after Biden started taking a few questions from the audience of about 110 campaign contributors. “The event raised somewhere between $275,000 and $1.1 million,” according to his report.

The event was one of several stops Biden and his wife made in the Bay Area today.

Biden plans to meet this evening with local tech leaders, including the heads of Apple, Google, Yahoo, Netflix and Zynga, but those meetings are not open to the media, the White House said.

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{PHOTO} BLONDE WOMAN ACTED AS SIREN FROM GREEK MYTHOLOGY AS CAPTAIN CRASHED SHIP

(via NY POST)

GIGLIO, Italy — The search for bodies on the wreck of the Costa Concordia resumed Thursday amid reports that a mystery blonde woman was on the bridge alongside the ship’s captain before the liner crashed off the Italian coast.

The woman is believed to be Domnica Cemortan, a 25-year-old Moldovan, thought to be the same female seen dining with Captain Francesco Schettino at around 9 p.m. last Friday, just under half an hour before the disaster, Italian newspaper Il Secolo reported.

Cemortan, who may have been a guest of either Schettino or another officer, or a ship employee, may emerge as a key witness to Friday night’s events, but Italian prosecutors will neither confirm nor deny the reports.

Read more: http://trade.cc/aaqm

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DMX Ruff Ryders Are REUNITING!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3geCP9rNUrU

(via TMZ)

DMX
It’s official … DMX and his legendary rap crew Ruff Ryders are getting back together — in fact, X tells TMZ, a blowout reunion tour is already in the works.

Ruff Ryders first lady Eve told us this weekend to expect a massive comeback — but X says the RR reunion is already underway … with CEO Waah Dean currently booking several venues across the country.

The tour is supposed to kick off in a few months — and X tells us, the entire crew’s already on board, including Swizz BeatsDrag-On, and Murda-Mook.

According to DMX, Eve and The L.O.X. haven’t signed on yet — but that’s just because he hasn’t gotten in touch with them yet. X insists, that will change very soon.

X tells us, “We are all family and we’re going to come back stronger than when we left … It’s going to take the nation by storm.”

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FLASH: RICK PERRY QUITS

He officially quit the race to become GOP candidate for President and is heading back to Texas to shoot some pool.

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FLASH: BOMBSHELL FROM NEWT’S EX-WIFE

(via DrudgeReport.com)

(Drudge gets the big scoop again)


NEWT EX-WIFE UNLOADS ON CAMERA; NETWORK DEBATES 'ETHICS' OF AIRING BEFORE SC PRIMARY
**Exclusive**
Wed Jan 18 2012 18:47:14 ET

Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours.

Her explosive revelations are set to rock the campaign.

But now a “civil war” has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air!

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.

A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted.

Gingrich canceled a press conference on Wednesday to deal with the matter.

“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s wife of 18 years, explained to ESQUIRE last year. “When you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are.”

MORE

 


 

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Bill Clinton De-Balls Newt Gingrich

(via)

Bill Clinton, the original “comeback kid” doesn’t see much hope for a resurgence by Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, dissing him in a new interview as a Romney clone because of issues the former speaker has flip-flopped on.

Clinton, who is on the cover of the upcoming issue of Esquire, puts down the speaker who has bragged on the campaign trail of how he worked with Clinton to reform welfare and balance the budget.[Check out the latest political cartoons.]

Clinton doesn’t giving any love back. In an excerpt provided to Whispers, the former president says, “As a private citizen he was for certain important health-care reforms and believed in climate change and believed there had to be a strong reaction to it. And now he’s just like Romney. Neither one of them can say what they believe to be true and get nominated. Romney’s still trying to figure out what he did as governor of Massachusetts and still appeal to this driving vituperative energy.”

Bubba also takes a shot at the GOP culture, charging that the Republican side of aisle has given up any pretence of moderation and bipartisanship. His key example is how Jon Huntsman was run out of the Republican primaries because voters saw him as a moderate and didn’t respond well to his work as PresidentObama’s ambassador to China.

“Huntsman’s economic record — and his positions on the abortion issue and other things — is every bit as conservative and considerably more consistent than the two front-runners. But he also doesn’t make any bones about being willing to work with people and thinking you ought to put your country first. When the president asks you to serve — to go to China, and you speak Mandarin Chinese and you think you can help American business and America’s national strategic interest by doing it — you do it.”

“But all of a sudden that’s disqualifying. So I think that it shows you, we’re, you know, we’re living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right. And every time the president adopts a plan that they once advocated, they abandon it and push farther to the right. But the voters can push them back.”

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Depressed Harvard Business School Grads with Zuckerberg Envy are Negative on America, and Life in General

(via)

The United States is becoming less economically competitive versus other nations, with political gridlock and a weak primary education system seen as the main drag, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

In particular, the nation is falling behind emerging market rivals and just keeping pace with other advanced economies, according to a Harvard Business School survey of 9,750 of its alumni in the United States and 121 other countries.

Seventy-one percent of respondents expected the U.S. to become less competitive, less able to compete in the global economy with U.S. firms less able to pay high wages and benefits, the study found.

The findings come at a time when high unemployment is a major concern for Americans, with 23.7 million out-of-work and underemployed, and the economy the top issue ahead of November’s presidential election.

“The U.S. is losing out on business location decisions at an alarming rate” said Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor who was a co-author of the study.

U.S. companies, which slashed headcount sharply during the 2007-2009 recession, have been slow to rehire since the downturn’s official end and some have continued to cut. This month, Archer Daniels Midland Co (ADM.N), Kraft Foods Inc (KFT.N) and Novartis AG NOVN.XV all said they would be cutting U.S. jobs this year.

Survey respondents said they remained more likely to move operations out of the United States than back in. Of 1,005 who considered offshoring facilities in the past year, 51 percent decided to move versus just 10 percent who opted to keep their facilities in the country, with the balance not yet decided.

Respondents, graduates of the prestigious business school who were polled from October 4 through November 4, were particularly concerned about how the United States was shaping up versus emerging nations such as China, Brazil and India, with 66 percent saying the United States was falling behind.

WEAK POINTS

Among respondents who had decided to move operations out of the United States over the past year, 70 percent cited lower wages as the reason they chose a new location, pointing to what is widely seen as emerging markets’ main advantage.

While the United States held up better compared to other advanced economies, with about 70 percent saying it was keeping pace competitively, 21 percent said the U.S. was also falling behind other wealthy countries, such as those in Western Europe and Japan.

The United States’ main disadvantages compared with other advanced economies were the complexity of its tax code, the ineffectiveness of its political system and the weakness of its educational system from kindergarten through high school.

Higher education fared better, with respondents citing high-quality universities as the nation’s top competitive advantage.

Asked what the U.S. government could do to improve its competitive position, respondents top recommendations were to simplify the tax code, reform immigration policies and reduce the corporate tax rate.

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Marky Mark is a Douchey Douche

(via TMZ)

0118_mark_wahlberg_BN_01
Mark Wahlberg claims he could have done what hundreds of other doomed passengers couldn’t … fought off the multiple 9/11 hijackers and saved Flight 93.

Wahlberg just gave an interview with Men’s Journal … in which he states, “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'”

So the question … is Wahlberg’s braggadocio insulting to the dead passengers and their families?

Comments »

More insider trading arrests

NEW YORK (Reuters) – At least two senior hedge fund employees were being arrested as part of the government’s sweeping probe into insider trading, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The arrests reflect a widening of the government’s long-running probe into the alleged sharing of confidential information on publicly traded corporations with hedge fund managers and analysts. In the biggest case so far, onetime billionaire Raj Rajaratnam was convicted of insider trading and is now serving an 11-year prison term.

Anthony Chiasson, who co-founded the Level Global Investors hedge fund, is among those expected to face charges, and is turning himself in to authorities, one of the people said.

Todd Newman, who headed technology trading for Diamondback Capital Management from Boston, has also been arrested, another person said.

Newman had been placed on leave of absence in 2010 and subsequently was let go by that firm. Reuters in November reported the government’s interest in Newman.

Overall, charges against at least four people are expected to be unveiled on Wednesday, the people said. The charges are expected to be filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Jon Horvath, who is currently employed at Sigma Capital Management, a unit of Steven A. Cohen’s $14 billion hedge fund SAC Capital, was also arrested, one of the people said. A spokesman for SAC Capital could not immediately be reached for a comment. The identity of the fourth person could not immediately be confirmed.

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Morning Market Update

(via Fox Business)

The markets turned higher as traders paid close attention to headlines from Europe, and mulled a slew of economic data and quarterly earnings reports.

Today’s Markets

As of 10:40 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 57.9 points, or 0.46%, to 12539, the S&P 500 rose 7.1 points, or 0.55%, to 1301 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 22 points, or 0.81%, to 2750.

Wall Street has been off to a strong start so far this year, with the Dow presently sitting at its highest level since July.

Traders have been keeping a close eye on developments from Europe, where the debt crisis is still posing a serious threat to many world economies. The International Monetary Fund said Wednesday it needs to raise its firepower by roughly $1 trillion in coming years, and plans to raise its lending capacity by $500 billion. However, the IMF said it is “exploring options on funding and will have no further comment until the necessary consultations with the Fund’s membership have been completed.”

Also on the European front, the Greek government is still struggling to hash out a deal with creditors on the size of private-sector losses on its debt. The talks, which are resuming on Wednesday, fell through last week. If a deal can’t be struck, it may lead to a Greek debt default when the country’s next major payment comes due in March, analysts have said.

The euro rose 0.49% to $1.2799, while the U.S. dollar slipped 0.32% against six world currencies.

Goldman Sachs (GS: 103.02, +5.34, +5.47%) posted a fourth-quarter profit of $1.84 a share on $6.1 billion in revenue. Analysts expected the investment banking giant to earn $1.24 on sales of $6.5 billion. Shares were up 2.3% in pre-market trading following the report.

Market participants also got a fresh read on wholesale inflation and industrial production on the day.

The Producer Price Index fell 0.1% in December from November, compared with expectations of a 0.1% gain. Excluding the more volatile food and energy components, core prices were up 0.3% on the month, a bigger increase than the 0.1% economists forecast. Inflation at the producer level has jumped 4.8% from the year prior, or 3% on the core level.

The more closely-watched report on consumer prices is on tap for Thursday. Meanwhile, industrial production was up 0.4% in December from the month prior, slightly weaker than the 0.5% gain economists were looking for.

Commodities were mixed. The benchmark crude oil contract traded in New York rose 38 cents, or 0.41%, to $101.12 a barrel. Wholesale RBOB gasoline jumped 2.2% to $2.831 a gallon.

In metals, gold was unchanged at $1,655.

Foreign Markets

European blue chips fell 0.06%, the English FTSE 100 dipped 0.06% to 5,690 and the German DAX rose 0.18% to 6,344.

In Asia, the Japanese Nikkei rallied 0.99% to 8,551 and the Chinese Hang Seng climbed 0.3% to 19,687.

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