Eideard

Veteran journalist Mark Haines, a fixture on CNBC for 22 years, died unexpectedly Tuesday evening. He was 65 years old.

Haines, founding anchor of CNBC’s morning show “Squawk Box,” was co-anchor of the network’s “Squawk on the Street” program, providing insight and commentary sometimes humorous and occasionally acerbic.

CNBC President Mark Hoffman called Haines a “building block” of the financial network’s programming. Hoffman said Haines died at his home. “With his searing wit, profound insight and piercing interview style, he was a constant and trusted presence in business news for more than 20 years,” Hoffman said in a statement to CNBC employees. “From the dotcom bubble to the tragic events of 9/11 to the depths of the financial crisis, Mark was always the unflappable pro.

“Mark loved CNBC and we loved him back. He will be deeply missed.”

Haines may be best remembered for his calming and commanding presence during the 9/11 tragedy when he reacted unflappably to the furious stream of incoming rumor and even more astonishing truth with a professionalism that rivaled any television anchor, said CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman…

Haines served as a news anchor for KYW-TV in Philadelphia, WABC-TV in New York, and WPRI-TV in Providence, before joining CNBC.

Haines held a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was a member of the New Jersey State Bar. In 2000, he was named to Brill’s Content’s “Influence List.”

His death quickly reverberated through the financial community…

Traders at the normally bustling New York Stock Exchange paused for a moment of silence…

Haines was known for a lawyer-like determination to get at the truth, pressing guests for answers if they tried to avoid his pointed questions. CNBC reporters and anchors remembered Haines holding them up to the same standard…

I’m an old fart who didn’t get serious about investing till this last Great Recession pissed me off. Between incompetent mutual fund managers and the ever-increasing blather of “news” channels – I found myself watching the two professional financial channels to see what was going on in the real world.

Tears fill our eyes, sadness our hearts. He will be missed.

Shhhhh! Do you hear that? Neither do I. I’m talking about reaction from critics of the auto bailout to news that Chrysler will pay back the $7.5 billion that it borrowed from taxpayers of the United States and Canada. Chrysler is raising the cash to pay back its government loans through a combination of bond sales, a commercial loan and a cash infusion from its partner Italian automaker Fiat…

Granted, all this constitutes a refinancing of Chrysler’s debt and the company is far from being out of woods – it still owes the $7.5 billion. But the fact that an automaker that had been given up for dead a few years ago is now healthy enough to convince private investors to pony up billions is a positive sign. And the chief issue among bailout critics wasn’t the long-term survival of Chrysler (they were willing to let the automaker die after all) but whether the company could ever pay back the money it borrowed from the government. Well, it just did.

So Chrysler lives to fight another day, thousands of Americans keep their jobs and the company continues to expand and post profits. Which is good news, unless you are a Toyota state Senator, are paid by a think tank to opine that government can never do anything right, or are an ideologue who’s genetically incapable of uttering the word “government” without immediately blurting out the word “boondoggle.”

Ideologue being the operative word in my humble experience. Usually, the sloganeer is someone who could care less about the lot of someone who spent decades in an auto plant – overpaid for all the fun he had schlepping fenders onto a Chrysler chassis.

Nope. I have a lot more sympathy for the folks who spent a significant portion of their lives in the not-so-healthy atmosphere of an American factory instead of the ivory tower that makes some people “superior” to those getting a paycheck for manual labor.

Photo by Glenn Harper

A resident of a facility for psychiatric patients got past security guards at the Willis Tower and made his way to the 102nd floor before he was tracked down and held for police.

The 42-year-old man was charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass and released on his own recognizance after he followed an employee through a turnstile and got into an elevator, said Police News Affairs Officer Laura Kubiak. The man has no prior arrest record, she said.

The incident happened about 4:35 p.m. on May 16.

A spokesman for the Willis Tower said in a statement released to the media that the man was spotted by security in a freight elevator and was in the building for 16 minutes. He went up to the 102nd floor and on his way down was arrested on the 32nd floor, the statement said…

“At Willis Tower, safety is our utmost priority,” the statement said. “We are aware that an individual entered the building on Monday, May 16. Through our security systems and procedures, we were able to track and detain this individual within 16 minutes.”

That he was under psychiatric care and still able to get past security either says something about the quality of that security – or maybe the fact that he doesn’t need a heckuva lot of care.

Good thing he wasn’t suicidal, eh?

A 90-year-old man who accidentally dropped his commemorative high school ring down a lavatory in 1938 has been reunited with it after 73 years.

The ring was found 200 miles away in a sewer by a sanitation worker who happened to have gone to the same school and recognised it.

Jesse Mattos had dropped the ring, which bore his initials JTM and the year of his graduation, into a toilet in a butcher’s shop where he was working when a high school student in Mount Shasta, California.

Tony Congi, 52, a sanitation worker who graduated from the same high school in 1976, found the piece of jewelley in the sewer system and recognised it immediately.

He had the ring cleaned and then looked at the 1938 year book, discovering there was only one person with the initials on it. He returned the ring to Mr Mattos and described their meeting as “neater than heck.” Mr Mattos told the Vallejo Times-Herald: “Something like this ring thing was a real booster for me. I felt like I was a lot younger again.”

I can picture someone in 2080 returning an engraved iPhone that made the same kind of trip.

Scientists have found that a gene linked to diabetes and cholesterol is a “master switch” that controls other genes found in fat in the body, and say it should help in the search for treatments for obesity-related diseases.

In a study published in the journal Nature Genetics, the British researchers said that since fat plays an important role in peoples’ susceptibility to metabolic diseases like obesity, heart disease and diabetes, the regulating gene could be target for drugs to treat such illnesses.

“This is the first major study that shows how small changes in one master regulator gene can cause a cascade of other metabolic effects in other genes,” said Tim Spector of King’s College London, who led the study.

More than half a billion people, or one in 10 adults worldwide, are obese and the numbers have doubled since the 1980s as the obesity epidemic has spilled over from wealthy into poorer nations.

In the United States, obesity-related diseases already account for nearly 10 percent of medical spending — an estimated $147 billion a year.

Type 2 diabetes, which is often linked to poor diet and lack of exercise, is also reaching epidemic levels worldwide as rates of obesity rise…

The differences between predilection, tendencies, behavior – voluntary and involuntary – mesh together in a health dialectic that overwhelms societies still relying upon ideologies that think some magic bullet or heavenly prophet will cure all their ills.

Understanding complexity is difficult enough to be off-putting for most. But, simplistic and oversimplified answers rarely provide lasting solutions. But, that’s what people and politicians always want.

 
The evangelical Christian broadcaster whose much-ballyhooed Judgment Day prophecy went conspicuously unfulfilled on Saturday has a simple explanation for what went wrong — he miscalculated.

Instead of the world physically coming to an end on May 21 with a great, cataclysmic earthquake, as he had predicted, Harold Camping, 89, said he now believes his forecast is playing out “spiritually,” with the actual apocalypse set to occur five months later, on October 21.

Camping, who launched a doomsday countdown in which some followers spent their life’s savings in anticipation of being swept into heaven, issued his correction during an appearance on his “Open Forum” radio show from Oakland, California…

Reflecting on scripture afterward, Camping said it “dawned” on him that a “merciful and compassionate God” would spare humanity from “hell on Earth for five months” by compressing the physical apocalypse into a shorter time frame.

But he insisted that October 21 has always been the end-point of his own End Times chronology, or at least, his latest chronology…

Asked what advice he would give to followers who gave up much or all of their worldly possessions in the belief that his Judgment Day forecast would come true, Camping drew a comparison to the nation’s recent economic slump.

“We just had a great recession. There’s lots of people who lost their jobs, lots of people who lost their houses … and somehow they all survived,” he said.

“People cope, he added. “We’re not in the business of giving any financial advice. We’re in the business of telling people maybe there is someone you can talk to, and that’s God.”

A good bartender will achieve the same effect – for the cost of a couple of beers.

Naoto Kan, the prime minister of Japan, is expected to confirm the “Sunrise Plan” initiative in a statement on the nation’s energy policy at the forthcoming Group of Eight Summit opening this week in France.

Mr Kan is expected to tell other leaders that Japan will continue to use nuclear energy following industry-wide improvements on safety standards, according to Japanese media reports.

However, he is also expected to highlight the nation’s future efforts to boost the use of renewable energy sources, in particular solar power for which the nation is already among the world’s top users…

The Sunrise Plan builds on earlier solar plan initiatives, including a target of using solar power energy in 12,000 schools as part of its School New Deal, with the company Kyocera Corporation already installing panels in over 1,200 establishments.

Millions have also been spent encouraging home solar power use on a domestic level, with one initiative involving utilities having to purchase excess solar power from homes and businesses for higher amounts than standard electricity rates.

Other energy sources being investigated by the government include geothermal, wind, biomass and hydropower, as the nation explores ways to increase its energy independence.

Most Americans have no idea where building codes come from. If anything, it’s just one more thing to whine about. It might be different if the United States played a leading role at anything more than fire safety – where we participated in the worldwide process of advancing safety decades ago.

We will be last in line, once again.

American soldier [L], Iraqi translator [R] = same risks

An administrative law judge has referred a U.S. insurance company for criminal investigation after the firm failed to pay benefits to survivors of nine Iraqi translators killed while working for the American government.

Under a federally funded program, Chicago-based CNA Financial Corp. provides insurance coverage to contractors killed or injured while working overseas for the U.S. The slain translators were helping to train Iraqi police recruits.

CNA withheld information from the federal government and avoided making payments to the families who lost relatives in a 2006 attack, according to court files and interviews. One widow was unable to keep up the payments and lost her home after her son and other translators were ambushed by insurgents in the southern city of Basra, one of her attorneys said.

In a ruling last week, administrative law Judge Daniel Solomon ordered CNA to begin making payments to the families. In an unusual move highlighting the government’s concern over potential fraud, the judge also told the Labor Department, which oversees the program, to investigate whether the insurance carrier should face criminal charges. A Labor Department spokesman said the agency would “fully investigate” the allegations to determine whether to ask the Justice Department to prosecute the case…

Attorneys for the families said they believed that CNA withheld documents to avoid making payments.

“These were people who helped the U.S. in Iraq,” said Agnieszka Fryszman, an attorney for the families. “Their families were kicked to the curb when they were most in need of help.”

It will take a decade or so to complete all the revelations of corruption and war profiteering by the corporations invited into Bush’s war.

The Supreme Court has ordered California to release tens of thousands of its prisoners to relieve overcrowding, saying that “needless suffering and death” had resulted from putting too many inmates into facilities that cannot hold them in decent conditions.

It is one of the largest prison release orders in the nation’s history, and it sharply split the high court.

Justices upheld an order from a three-judge panel in California that called for releasing 38,000 to 46,000 prisoners. Since then, the state has transferred about 9,000 state inmates to county jails. As a result, the total prison population is now about 32,000 more than the capacity limit set by the panel.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, speaking for the majority, said California’s prisons had “fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements” because of overcrowding. As many as 200 prisoners may live in gymnasium, he said, and as many as 54 prisoners share a single toilet…

In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called the ruling “staggering” and “absurd.” He said the high court had repeatedly overruled the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for ordering the release of individual prisoners. Now, he said, the majority were ordering the release of “46,000 happy-go-lucky felons.” He added that “terrible things are sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order…”

In a separate dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the ruling conflicted with a federal law intended to limit the power of federal judges to order a release of prisoners…

David Fathi, director of the ACLU national prison project, said “reducing the number of people in prison not only would save the state taxpayers half a billion annually, it would lead to the implementation of truly rehabilitative programs that lower recidivism rates and create safer communities.”

I know a few ex-cons who have rehabilitated. I know a larger number of ex-cons who scare the crap out of me. Either road, the safety of the general population should take precedence over housing conditions for convicts.

Toyota…has sold over one million Prius models in the United States since the vehicle first debuted 10 years ago. That number blossoms to two million once global sales are accounted for, and the model’s popularity has helped usher in a bloom of hybrid products from over 16 manufacturers. The technology may not be the perfect solution to our fuel economy concerns, but it has successfully taken off in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when the first gangly Toyota hybrid whirred off the line.

Now Toyota is set to grow its Prius lineup with three new models. In fact, Bob Carter, Toyota division group vice president and general manager, says that the Japanese automaker fully expects the Prius family to become its best-selling product line in the near future – beating out internal combustion titans like the Camry and Corolla in the process. As a result, the company is planning to unleash of a barrage of products that include a model based on the Prius C Concept, a plug-in version of the hybrid and the taller, boxier Prius V. The thought is that a few simple variations on the company’s successful battery-powered recipe will offer buyers solutions that the conventional Prius simply couldn’t match. The only question is whether or not the will respond to what is effectively a few clever re-body jobs. If the Prius V is any indication, the answer is a resounding yes.

Thanks to years of steady sales, legions of faithful buyers and an overwhelming popularity with the celebrity set, the Prius has established itself as an icon of automotive design. Toyota says that the Prius name has the highest brand awareness of any other hybrid on the road right now, and when it came time to design the Prius V, the company’s artists wanted to ensure that the newcomer was instantly recognizable as a member of the Prius dynasty. For aerodynamic reasons, that meant maintaining the wedge-like shape of the lift back, though with a slightly taller roof for greater functionality…

From the side, it’s nearly impossible to escape the wagon-like presence of the Prius V. With its long roof, similarly lengthy rear doors and an extended cargo area, the vehicle ditches the awkward hatchback aesthetics of current generation Prius for a twang of normalcy. We couldn’t help but grow a little fond of the vehicle’s shape after a day behind the wheel. It’s almost as if Toyota has flanked us by using our love for wagons to lure us into the hybrid craze.

Pretty detailed review and road test. Autoblog Green always does a fine job given opportunity and time.

This is not the Prius we would consider for our 2-person hermit commune. But, for someone with children [or strange extended relationships] the critter makes a lot of sense. Especially if you’re bright enough to buy a motor vehicle and keep it longer than the short time span manufacturers love to push us into.