NEW YORK — US banks have found a way to continue betting their own money on some investments, despite a new law’s restrictions on proprietary trading, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing Wall Street executives.

The ‘Volcker rule’ provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform limits the extent to which banks can bet with their own capital, banning them from short-term trading of securities for their own accounts. Firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley are closing or slimming down some of their units in order to comply with the law.

But the Volcker rule does not apply to banks’ ‘principal investments,’ or longer-term direct purchases of securities, companies and property assets, the Financial Times said. Such deals drove big profits for banks before the financial crisis, but turned into a main source of losses for Wall Street firms like the now-defunct Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, the paper said.

‘On balance it has been a good business,’ he told the paper.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.

‘A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,’ Killingsworth and Gilbert write. ‘The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.’

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain’s default mode of operation.

To track this behavior, Killingsworth developed an iPhone web app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, […]

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 59 million Americans went without health insurance coverage for at least part of 2010, many of them with conditions or diseases that needed treatment, federal health officials said on Tuesday.

They said 4 million more Americans went without insurance in the first part of 2010 than during the same time in 2008.

‘Both adults and kids lost private coverage over the past decade,’ Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news briefing.

The findings have implications for U.S. healthcare reform efforts. A bill passed in March promises to get health insurance coverage to 32 million Americans who currently lack coverage.

But Republicans who just took control of the House of Representatives last week have vowed to derail the new law by cutting off the funds for it, and some want to repeal it. Experts from both sides predict gridlock in Congress for the next two years in implementing healthcare reform’s provisions.

Even before the healthcare reform act, Congress passed provisions expanding free health coverage for children.

‘As private insurance coverage fell, the safety net protected children, but did not adequately protect adults,’ Frieden said.

Nine percent of adults lost private insurance, and public insurance […]

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Last night, the American Spectator – a right-wing magazine known for its role in the ‘Arkansas Project,

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China’s push for rapid economic development will dominate global energy markets and be the single biggest force in spurring higher oil prices and carbon emissions linked to climate change over the next quarter-century, the International Energy Agency reported on Tuesday.

At the same time, however, China is poised to be the driving influence behind the development of renewable energy like wind and solar power, according to the agency’s annual energy outlook.

The agency, which is based in Paris and advises the industrialized nations, predicted that Chinese energy demand would soar 75 percent by 2035, accounting for more than a third of the growth in global consumption. While China today accounts for 17 percent of world demand for energy, it should account for 22 percent in 25 years, at the same time that India and other developing countries also expand their energy use.

The growth in Chinese energy consumption has already been breathtaking, according to the report. Over the last decade, China’s energy demand has doubled. While China used only half as much energy as the United States in 2000, it actually surpassed the United States in 2009 as the world’s largest energy user.

And given that the average Chinese consumer uses roughly one-third the […]

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