CLEVLAND, OH. — A wave of foreclosures and evictions is about to sweep the United States in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis. This could destabilise the US housing market and may also lead to further turmoil in financial institutions, who collectively own $1 trillion (£480.6bn) worth of sub-prime debt. Cleveland, Ohio, is an industrial city on the banks of Lake Erie in the US ‘rust belt’. It is the sub-prime capital of the United States. One in ten homes in the city is now vacant, and whole neighbourhoods have been blighted by foreclosed, vandalized and boarded-up homes. Many of these homes are now owned by the banks and investment pools owning the mortgages, and the company making the most foreclosures in Cleveland is Deutsche Bank Trust, which acts on behalf of such investment pools. Cleveland is facing a rising crime wave, and the cost of demolishing the vacant houses alone will cost the city $100m of its tax base. According to Jim Rokakis, the County Treasurer for Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, ‘Wall Street strategies that made the cycle of no-money-down, no-questions-asked lending possible have sucked the life out of my city’. […]
Britain will spend billions to defend against rising tides over the coming decades, but experts are sharply divided as to how far and fast the waters will rise, reveals Roger Highfield An apocalyptic vision of a deluged Britain is one of the most potent, chilling and seductive images to emerge from the debate about climate change. The power of such pictures helps account for the success of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth; its warnings over rising sea levels helped win the former US Vice-President a Nobel Prize. But just before Gore shared the prize for raising global awareness of climate change, a High Court judge ruled that the film contained errors, not least an ‘alarmist’ assertion that the sea would rise up to 20ft ‘in the near future’ as the ice in Greenland or Western Antarctica melts. He pointed out that scientists believed that the ice would take millennia to melt: ‘The Armageddon scenario [Mr Gore] predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.’ But as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which […]
The DNA of a 4-year-old Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon, whose well-documented lineage can be traced back several generations to Sweden, has been sequenced. Cinnamon is one of several mammals that are currently being analyzed using ‘light’ (two-fold) genome sequence coverage. To make sense of Cinnamon’s raw sequence data, a multi-center collaboration of scientists leveraged information from previously sequenced mammalian genomes as well as previous gene-mapping studies in the cat. In doing so, they found that Cinnamon’s sequences spanned about 65% of the euchromatic (gene-containing) regions of the feline genome. The similarity between the cat genome and six recently completed mammalian genomes (human, chimpanzee, mouse, rat, dog, and cow) allowed the scientists to identify 20,285 putative genes in the cat genome. The comparison also revealed hundreds of chromosomal rearrangements that have occurred among the different lineages of mammals since they diverged from a diminutive ancestor that roamed the earth among the dinosaurs some 100 million years ago. The genome sequence analysis is certainly expected to lead to health benefits for domestic cats, 90 million of which are owned by Americans alone, according to The Humane Society. But the domestic cat also serves as an excellent model for human disease, […]
ERIE, Pa. — When doctors told John Kanzius he had nine months to live, he quietly thanked God for his blessings and prepared to die. Then 58, he had lived a good life. Now he had leukemia and was ready to accept his fate, but the visits to the cancer ward shook him. Faces haunted him - the bald and bandaged heads, bodies slumped in wheelchairs, and children who could not play. Like him, they had endured chemo, which caused their weight to plummet, hands to shake, bodies to weaken and immune systems to break down. Kanzius thought there had to be a more humane way to treat cancer. Kanzius did not have a medical background, but he knew radios. He had built and fixed them since he was a child, knew how to send radio-wave signals around the world. If he could transmit them into cancer cells, he wondered, could he then direct the radio waves to destroy tumors, while leaving healthy cells intact? Awake one early morning in 2003, Kanzius grabbed some copper wires, boxes, antennas and his wife’s pie pans, and began building a machine. Sending radio waves He knew […]
Gisele Bundchen wants to remain the world’s richest model and is insisting that she be paid in almost any currency but the U.S. dollar. Like billionaire investors Warren Buffett and Bill Gross, the Brazilian supermodel, who Forbes magazine says earns more than anyone in her industry, is at the top of a growing list of rich people who have concluded that the currency can only depreciate because Americans led by President George W. Bush are living beyond their means. Even after the dollar lost 34 percent since 2001, the biggest investors and most accurate forecasters say it will weaken further as home sales fall and the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates. The dollar plummeted to its lowest ever last week against the euro, Canadian dollar, Chinese yuan and the cheapest in 26 years against the British pound. ‘We’ve told all of our clients that if you only had one idea, one investment, it would be to buy an investment in a non- dollar currency,” said Gross, the chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, and manager of the world’s biggest bond fund. “That should be on top of the list,” said Gross, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
