Warren Buffett and Bill Gates called Wednesday on their billionaire peers to give away half of their wealth.

The pronouncement by Messrs. Buffett and Gates stems from a series of dinners the two men held over the past year to discuss the effects of the recession on philanthropy with some of the nation’s richest people, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, investor Ronald O. Perelman and David Rockefeller, his family’s patriarch.

The result of the dinners is an invitation, called the Giving Pledge, which asks the nation’s billionaires to publicly commit to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropic and charitable groups within their lifetimes or after their deaths.

The effort casts a spotlight on a highly private decision, and inserts Messrs. Buffett and Gates into the process. While several attendees of the dinners have made the pledge, many of the nation’s wealthiest already had decided to disburse the bulk of their wealth to charitable causes.

The goal is to help create an expectation in society that the rich should give away their wealth and to create a peer group of wealthy people that can offer advice on philanthropy, said Melinda Gates, Mr. Gates’s wife and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda […]

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A Senate proposal to force banks to shed their lucrative yet risk-laden derivatives units — which is vehemently opposed by Wall Street — is gaining steam, picking up the support of some regional Federal Reserve chiefs with more on the way.

Yet President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, continues to oppose the measure, Senate aides say, who add that Treasury is supporting Wall Street over Main Street by opposing the measure considered of ‘utmost importance’ to financial stability.

‘It shows the access of the major Wall Street banks in the Treasury Department in spades,’ one Senate aide said on the condition of anonymity. Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions Michael S. Barr is said to be leading Treasury’s efforts.

Senate aides say that more letters of support from other regional Fed presidents are on the way.

Treasury is joined in its opposition to the measure by the Federal Reserve’s Washington-based Board of Governors and the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair.

Meanwhile, supporters include the longest-serving policy maker in the Fed, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Hoenig and […]

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LONDON — Obese women have four times as many unplanned pregnancies as healthy-weight women despite having less sex, and obese men are more likely to have sexual diseases despite fewer partners, scientists said on Wednesday.

In a study showing how obesity can harm sexual health, French and British researchers also found that obese women are less likely to ask for contraceptive advice or use the pill, and obese men are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction.

With obesity epidemics overwhelming many wealthy nations and threatening increasing numbers of developing countries, experts said the public health impact of the findings was important.

In the United States, for example, two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese.

‘In public health terms, the study lends a new slant to a familiar message: that obesity can harm not only health and longevity, but your sex life,’ Sandy Goldbeck-Wood, a specialist in psychosexual medicine at Britain’s Ipswich Hospital, wrote in an editorial on the study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The research, led by Professor Nathalie Bajos of France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), is the first major study to investigate the impact of being overweight or obese on sexual activity and other factors such as […]

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The prospect of cobalt in Kandahar has sparked lively debate about whether new mineral wealth — if it pans out — will aid or hinder U.S. policies in Afghanistan, as well as whether the country will fall prey to the so-called resource curse, as political scientist Michael Ross and others fear. But a short-term focus on Afghan-U.S. relations might be a mistake: The real winner from new natural-resource wealth beyond the Khyber Pass will be China. If the United States really cares about stabilizing Afghanistan’s central government and eliminating terrorist havens, it needs to start working now to persuade Beijing that these are shared goals.

First, some background: Chinese foreign investment and aid has accelerated dramatically over the past decade, especially in Africa. In November 2009 alone, for example, China’s largesse amounted to $10 billion in low-interest loans and $1 billion in commercial loans to the continent. With Beijing as cheerleader, trade has soared from $1 billion in 1992 to $106.8 billion in 2008.

In part this is due to China’s willingness to do business with undemocratic, corrupt, and brutal regimes — for example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, and Zimbabwe. The DRC provides the best cautionary parallel […]

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FORT BEND COUNTY, Texas – A contracted operator with BP said calls from concerned citizens are falling on deaf ears.

For this story, we’ll refer to her as ‘Janice.’

Janice said she is one of 100 operators at the BP Call Center in West Houston. They answer phones from the hotline number designated for the Vessel of Opportunity Program and for cleanup ideas.

‘We take all your information and then we have nothing to give them, nothing to give them,’ said Janice.

Janice said calls about the oil disaster are non-stop, but operators are just warm bodies on the other end of the phone.

‘We’re a diversion to stop them from really getting to the corporate office, to the big people,’ said Janice.

The calls come in from around the world, but it’s the desperation of those on the Gulf Coast that has affected her the most.

‘I don’t want to get emotional, but it’s so frustrating when these people live right there and nothing is being done to help them,’ the operator said.

For weeks on end, twelve hours a day, there is a little secret that Janice says she has witnessed firsthand.

Because the operators believe the calls never get past them, some don’t even bother taking […]

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