Oil supplies rose to within 1 percent of a two-year high as refineries came back on line after power outages and maintenance and prices rebounded from the biggest decline in more than two years, a survey showed.
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Pakistan’s central bank kept interest rates unchanged for a second straight meeting, in line with economists’ forecasts, as the inflation rate slowed to a seven-month low.
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NY, NY, United States (AHN Sports) – The NFL wants to add two games to the current 16-game format for the regular season, though it could end up with no games at all.
NFL Players Association president Kevin Mawae believes players should be bracing for a lockout and other members of the union’s executive committee believe there may be no avoiding a lockout, especially if the owners don’t budge on their insistence for extra games.
“I believe our players understand the reality of it,” Mawae told TitanInsider. “It’s not like it’s a last-minute thing of , ‘Oh my gosh, this is really gonna happen.’ If they are thinking that way, then shame on them.We’ve spent two years now telling everyone this was a possibility.
The players’ union has advised players to save their money in case of a lockout. Mawae acknowledges that there may have to concessions made, but that has to be the mindset of both sides.
“If they want something like a rookie salary structure in place, then they have to give a little bit,” Mawae said. “If they don’t give a little bit, then it’s probably going to force a lockout. If owners want to draw line in the sand, then they’re probably gonna lock the doors. Players are prepared for that, all while hoping to get a deal done and save the season for next year.”
The players union held a conference call Tuesday and Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita pointed to the extra games the owners want as a major sticking point.
“To me, right now, as things stand, 18 games, the way it’s being proposed, is completely unacceptable. … I see more and more players get injured every season,” Fujita said. “There are so many things now—with player health and safety, and the future of us and our families—that aren’t even being considered. And for us, it’s disappointing. It feels like a slap in the face.”
Baltimore Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth also participated in the conference call and said the health and safety issues the players are facing are far more important that a couple extra games.
“”We put our bodies on the line and produce a lot of revenue and we get five years of post-retirement health insurance,” said Foxworth. “And then they want to tack on two more games which is just going to multiply the injuries and the ailments that we’re going to see after we go into our 40s, 50s, 60s ,70s, if we’re lucky.”
“We’re not willing to budge on health and safety, and we’d like to gain some more ground in ways we can protect former players and current players.”
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Neotel, the only fixed line competitor to Telkom, says it is considering restructuring in the face of tough competition.
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New York, New York, United States (AHN) – The American International Group announced Wednesday it will repay the U.S. Federal Reserve $21 billion credit line. AIG will fund the repayment from the sales of two life insurers from outside the U.S.
After paying back what AIG borrowed from the regulator in 2008 at the onset of the financial crisis, the insurance giant will focus on retiring its obligations to the U.S. Treasury Department. The Treasury invested $48 billion in AIG and owns 80 percent of the company.
The Treasury said it plans to convert its AIG preferred shares into 1.66 billion shares of common stock by March 15.
The Treasury, according to reports, is planning to sell up to 20 percent of its AIG shares in the first quarter of 2011 as part of its unloading its stake in the insurance giant.
The stock offering is expected to raise at least $15 billion. The securities will be sold to private investors, similar to what the Treasury did with its Citigroup and General Motors holdings.
Since January, AIG shares gained 41 percent on the New York Stock Exchange to $42.22. If the Treasury sells its AIG stocks at $29 per share, finance experts said the Treasury will break even on its investment.
A Treasury official said the AIG action dovetails with Washington’s strategy to exit investments in private companies as soon as practical, while protecting taxpayers’ money.
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Los Angeles, CA, United States (CNS) – Earlier this year, Taylor Swift became the latest spokeswoman for CoverGirl, where she joined the ranks of A-listers like Drew Barrymore and Rihanna. Now the “Speak Now” star is the face of the beauty giant’s new NatureLuxe line.
NatureLuxe is described as a new simple, high-quality luxury makeup line, which will include a Silk Foundation and a Gloss Balm upon its January 2011 launch. The products drop heavier emollients for more natural ingredients
The Silk Foundation formula uses cucumber water along with hints of natural jojoba and rosehip extracts. The new Gloss Balm blends mango butter, shea and other butters.
Swift’s ads for NatureLuxe will begin appearing in January.
“I’m really excited for people to discover the new NatureLuxe line from CoverGirl!” Swift said in a statement. “The Silk Foundation and Gloss Balm are really light and fresh, they feel amazing on my skin.”
CoverGirl is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. Along with Swift, their celebrity spokespeople have also included Ellen DeGeneres, Tyra Banks, Molly Sims, Brandy, Faith Hill, Keri Russell, and Queen Latifah.
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Jerusalem, Israel (TML) – Beautiful women may get first dibs for a place on the cheerleading squad or for a partner on the dance floor, but when it comes to the job market they would do better to hide their looks, a new study by Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has found.
Conventional wisdom has it that beautiful people are the most likely to be hired, even though laboratory tests and studies using hypothetical situations have found exactly the opposite to be the case. Two Ben-Gurion economists, however, broke new ground in their study “Are Good-Looking People More Employable?” by sending resumes — some with photographs of attractive women, some with pictures of Plain Janes and some with no picture at all — to real advertised job listings.
It was a bad day for the beautiful. Pictureless resumes were the most likely to get a call-back for an interview — 22% more than the resumes of Plain Janes and 30% more than for attractive women.
“I assumed the beauty premium for women was higher, but it was not,” Dr. Bradley Ruffle, one of the two economists who conducted the study, told The Media Line. “I suspected the order would go attractive, no picture and then plain. This was the exact result with the male applicants, but female candidates were treated differently.”
Attractive males elicited a callback on their resumes 19.9% of the time, while among ordinary ones the rate was 13.9%, the study found. Pictureless resumes got the lowest response rate of all, with just 9.2% getting a call-back. The difference is quite significant for job seekers: An attractive male need only send five resumes to perspective employer to get an interview, while his ordinary-looking rival has to send out 11, said Ze’ev Shtudiner, a PhD candidate and Ruffle’s colleague.
“This really goes against what I would assume about the hiring process,” Ayelet Hazie, the public relations manager at Manpower Israel told, The Media Line. “The results are very interesting and not at all expected.”
Israel was the ideal testing site for the study because, unlike most other countries, there is no set standard on whether or not to include a photo in a job application.
“In Anglo-Saxon countries, it’s taboo to send a picture, whereas in continental Europe it is the norm and in China the process of attaching a picture is regulated. In Israel, it’s an in-between case, and people are free to choose and the results shed light on when or when not to use a picture,” Ruffle said.
If female beauty is a handicap to employment, blame other women. A follow-up call to the companies posting jobs revealed that 96% of the time the first-line decision maker on whether to pursue an application was in the hands of a woman. Not only that, she was likely to be young (the average age was 29) and single (67%), two characteristics associated with a “jealous response” when confronted with a young, attractive rival in the workplace, the study said.
“Companies don’t discriminate against men, they treat all males alike. And the companies treat the women without pictures the same as the plain,” Ruffle said. “But the attractive women are discriminated against.”
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Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates David Rosenberg – The world got its first look Thursday at Abu Dhabi’s Zayed National Museum when backers unveiled architectural renderings of the dramatic 345,000-square-foot structure comprised of five soaring pavilions that mimic the feathers of a falcon’s wing. The project radiates money and prestige, if not a little but of glamour.
The internationally renowned architect Lord Norman Foster is designing the building and the British Museum is lending its expertise. When it opens in 2014 on Saadiyat Island, a sandy patch 500 meters off the Abu Dhabi coast, it will be only one of several world-class cultural attractions that include branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums. A prestige golf course, a St. Regis Hotel and a host of other high-end attractions are also slated. The tab for building all this? About $27 billion.
If the plans for Saadiyat Island ring a familiar bell of over-the-top development, the kind that sent Dubai, Abu Dhabi’s next door emirate soaring and then crashing, economists beg to differ. With substantial oil wealth and the lessons learned from Dubai’s experience, the United Arab Emirate’s rising economic power stands a good chance of steering its way through a breakneck growth agenda dubbed Plan Abu Dhabi 2030.
“After the financial crisis they are shifting from real estate. They know that property development alone is not a sustainable growth model over the next five to 10 years,” Jean-Paul Pigat, head of Middle East and North Africa analysis at Business Monitor International, told The Media Line.
Until Dubai World, a quasi-governmental holding company, asked for more time to pay back investors a year ago, Dubai was riding high on luxury real estate development, offices and malls. The emirate, along with Abu Dhabi one of seven that make up the UAE, is now weighed down by debt that may be as much as $100 billion while the property boom has fizzled. The more conservative Abu Dhabi even helped its high-flying brother with a $20 billion aid package last year.
Abu Dhabi still has six hotels opening in 2011, and the tiny emirate is home to three PGA-standard golf courses. But the focus of economic development is on less glamorous projects, like a $5.7 billion aluminum plant; the development of a healthcare center with help from Johns Hopkins University; the Cleveland Clinic; and a host of energy projects.
Abu Dhabi’s state-owned Advanced Technology Investment Co. has taken a majority stake in the semiconductor maker Globalfoundries, which will build a $6 billion plant near Masdar City employing 1,500 people, Ibrahim Ajami, ATI’s chief executive, said in an interview with the UAE’s The National newspaper last week.
The goal is to derive two thirds of its gross domestic product from things other than oil by 2030.
Abu Dhabi also has the added benefit of holding 9 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves — 98.2 million barrels — and 5 percent of the world’s natural gas. It also has enough land to develop without reclaiming it from the Gulf, Robin Teh, director of valuation and research at the international property agency Chesterton International, wrote in The Gulf Times this week.
“Soon, Dubai is likely to have some competition from its neighbor, Abu Dhabi,” Teh said. “Abu Dhabi is in line to offer a greater variety of retail, leisure and recreational activity than most cities in the [Gulf].”
Giyas Gokkent, head of research at Abu Dhabi National Bank, said he didn’t see competition emerging between the two emirates. Much of what Abu Dhabi is developing, such as its airlines and airports and its aluminum industry, is competing with Europe or other non-Gulf economies, not with Dubai, he told The Media Line.
“We’ll have a rapid rail link between the two areas, and if you come back in 15-20 years time you will find a single cosmopolitan area. There will be a merging between Dubai and Abu Dhabi,” he said. “People will fly to Dubai and say, ‘let’s go visit the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi today.’ It will be a single destination. In Yas Island, there will be theme parks – it will be like an Orlando for the region.”
If Abu Dhabi does have any competition, it may be coming from Qatar, another Gulf country with substantial energy resources, said Pigat of Business Monitor International. Qatar aims to boost its liquefied natural gas export capacity by 12 percent to 77 million metric tons a year. Eventually, it wants to raise total oil and gas output to five million barrels of oil equivalent per day, from 2.8 million last year.
Vast amounts are already being spent on education and sports initiatives, the arts and property development, including a quixotic bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
“In terms of infrastructure spending and growth, Qatar is star performer in the Gulf,” Pigat said. “There is a competition within Gulf over who will become the major hub of political and economic power in the Gulf. Abu Dhabi is competing with the likes of Qatar and Bahrain.”
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Baghdad, Iraq (TML) – Iraq and Kuwait have signed a border arrangement in a significant move aimed at freeing Baghdad from the UN imposed sanction regime in place since 1990.
Under the new deal, Iraq and Kuwait agreed to create a 500-meter buffer zone on each side of their common 240km border. Kuwait pledged to finance the removal of Iraqi farmers living along the frontier and build 50 homes for them inside Iraq.
The UN Security Council demarcated the territorial border between Iraq and Kuwait in 1993 and it is today patrolled only by border police.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, claiming it was Iraq’s 19th province torn away by British imperialism in 1932. Following Iraq’s defeat in the First Gulf War, the UN Security Council slapped a sanction regime on Iraq. Under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, it allowed the international body to take military and economic measures against countries it defines as “aggressive.”
“For some time the Iraqis said they wanted to resolve the border issue, but never managed to do so,” Dr. Yousef Ali, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic and Future Studies, told The Media Line. “The UN should be the arbiter between Iraq and Kuwait regarding the border.”
Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki this week pledged to resolve all pending political issues with Kuwait. In a meeting with two UN officials, he focused on the matter of 370 missing Kuwaiti war victims saying that retrieving their remains was “a humanitarian and religious duty.”
Dr. Ali said that Kuwaitis regarded the war victim issue as secondary in the diplomatic relations with Iraq, since the victims are all surely dead.
Ali Al-Saffar, an expert on Iraq at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said that Iraq’s recent overtures towards Kuwait were part of its attempt to end the 20-year-old UN sanction regime. He said that Iraq still owed Kuwait $25.5 billion for damages incurred during the war.
As Iraqi armies retreated from Kuwait in the waning days of the Gulf War in 1991, they set over 700 oil wells ablaze, consuming more than 1 billion barrels of oil over a period of seven months and causing an environmental disaster of huge proportions. Kuwait paid $1.5 billion to extinguish the fires, and billions more to the US to help pay the costs of liberating it.
The exact number of Kuwaitis killed in the war is unknown, but estimates run at 2,000-5,000.
“Land and sea borders can be agreed upon relatively easily by the leaders,” he told The Media Line. “But Iraq’s huge outstanding debt will require a strong diplomatic drive to resolve.”
Al-Saffar said that Iraq regularly transfers 5% of its oil revenues to the UN as money earmarked for compensating Kuwait. Over the past 19 years Iraq has already paid Kuwait 17.5 billion dollars in compensation.
“Many Iraqis aren’t happy about this,” he said. “They feel that the debts owed to Kuwait are odious and vindictive; incurred by a dictatorial regime they had no say over.”
But although being on the receiving end of the deal, Kuwaitis too remain circumspect about Iraq.
“Many Kuwaitis feel threatened by Iraq,” Dr. Ali of Kuwait said. “They feel that even though Saddam loyalists are no longer in power, they influence Iraqi society and may perpetrate terrorist activity in Kuwait.”
Ali said that despite Prime Minister Al-Maliki’s good will toward Kuwait, he does not represent all segments of Iraqi population.
“We can’t trust Iraq, because they have no political stability,” he said.
Diplomatic relations between Iraq and Kuwait improved dramatically since the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003. In July 2008 Kuwait appointed its first ambassador in Iraq since the First Gulf War. Nearly two years later, Iraq reciprocated by sending its ambassador to Kuwait in March 2010. Kuwait has donated money to the reconstruction of Iraq and the implementation of its new multi-party political system.
“Some Arabs still view Iraq the same way they did under Saddam,” Nuri Al-Maliki told a visiting Kuwaiti delegation in 2009. “But we tell them Iraq today is built on a constitution and on democracy.”
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As EU experts dug through the books of Ireland’s debt-crippled banks, the question moved from whether Ireland will take an international bailout to under what conditions. |||
Dublin – As EU experts dug through the books of Ireland’s debt-crippled banks, the question moved from whether Ireland will take an international bailout to under what conditions.
On the firing line was Ireland’s prized low business tax, which the government says has lured 1 000 multinationals to Ireland over the past decade – but which it may have to give up to satisfy conditions of being rescued.
The Irish rescue is the latest act in Europe’s yearlong drama to prevent mounting debts and deficits from overwhelming the weakest members of the 16-nation eurozone. Greece was saved from bankruptcy in May, and analysts say Portugal could be next in line after Ireland for an EU-IMF lifeboat.
Officials on all sides cautioned that the Dublin talks could stretch into early December, after Ireland gives more clarity on its plans by publishing a four-year outline for slashing ¤15-billion (about R143.4-billion) from its deficit – forecast this year to reach a stupendous 32 percent of economic output.
The Irish government said the plan, to include ¤4.5-billion in cuts and ¤1.5-billion in new taxes for 2011 alone, will be published by Tuesday – but won’t include any change to its 12.5 percent rate of corporate tax, among the lowest in Europe.
Officials in Germany, France, Britain and Austria argue Ireland should be prepared to raise that rate to help pay off its debts. They say it’s not fair for Ireland to receive aid from EU partners while simultaneously sticking to a tax policy that amounts to unfair competition.
Ireland says the low tax policy is an essential anchor for keeping employers who generate a fifth of Ireland’s gross domestic product and provide the healthiest stream of tax revenue. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, speaking ahead of Friday’s talks, said the defense of the 12.5 percent rate was “a red line” that Ireland would not allow the IMF to cross.
For Lenihan and Prime Minister Brian Cowen, the low corporate tax is one of the few points of unity with Ireland’s opposition Fine Gael party. Giving it up might be the death sentence for Cowen’s government, whose approval ratings are languishing at 11 percent.
But Ireland’s hand has been forced by a recent run on deposits at Irish banks, which are already receiving a minimum ¤45-billion bailout. Allied Irish Banks said Friday it has lost ¤13-billion ($18-billion), or 17 percent, of its total deposit base since June. It also announced plans to sell ¤6.6-billion ($9.05 billion) in new shares next month – likely taking the government’s stake in the bank from 18 percent to more than 90 percent.
The European Central Bank has been stemming deposit losses with short-term loans that have ballooned to a reported ¤130 billion, a quarter of the ECB’s eurozone loan book. But the ECB’s unlimited supply of liquidity to banks is likely to end as the central bank continues to phase out its financial crisis support measures, adding pressure on the Irish government.
Ireland’s representative on the Frankfurt-based bank, Irish Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan, said Thursday he expects Ireland to receive a credit line worth tens of billions of euro that would serve as a backstop for Irish banks struggling to access funds elsewhere.
Critics of Ireland’s low tax on business profits say raising it would be the quickest way to increase state income without hurting consumers. According to Eurostat, corporate tax rates in the eurozone average 25.7 percent, and only Cyprus and Bulgaria are lower than Ireland with rates of 10 percent.
Germany and France, whose rates stand at 29.8 percent and 34.4 percent respectively, have spent the past decade grumbling as some of their own companies and a disproportionate share of US multinationals choose Ireland as their EU headquarters.
“There’s only one real reason for that, namely the avoidance of taxes,” said Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament for the German Christian Social Union, part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition.
Some go even further, saying that the low corporate tax rate was central to Ireland’s economic collapse.
“Ireland has constructed its development strategy for many years not on attracting large-scale corporate investment, but on corporate headquarters activity,” said John Christensen, an economist and accountant who heads the Tax Justice Network, an nonprofit that advocates more transparent tax policies.
Dublin’s “beggar-thy-neighbour tax policy” is helping large corporations shift profits to tax havens outside Europe, hurting both the Irish government and Europe as a whole, Christensen said.
Irish business lobbyists say it would be crazy for the former Celtic Tiger to increase taxes on foreign investors at the moment when Ireland is shedding domestic jobs and depending on high-tech exporters to lead a recovery.
“Higher rates would mean less revenue for the state, as investment and jobs have the potential to move to countries outside the EU. This would not be in Irish interests or in the interest of the wider EU,” said Danny McCoy, director of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation, which represents 7 500 employers.
But many more Irish people express disbelief that – in the midst of a crisis caused by Dublin bankers who gambled hundreds of billions on property deals gone bust – the government is bailing out those same banks and defending profits for wealthy multinationals like Microsoft, Intel and Google.
The Reverend Sean Healy, a Catholic priest who leads a pressure group called Social Justice Ireland, called the government focus on protecting bondholders and Fortune 500 companies “hypocritical and deeply unjust.”
“By taking so many things off the table, the IMF and the government have created a situation where most of the adjustments will be made at the expense of the weak, the sick, the vulnerable and the working poor,” Healy said.
There were few signs on Friday of protest on the streets of Dublin, only private expressions of shock and disgust that Ireland’s economy had been mismanaged so badly and fallen so quickly since 2008.
“There’s no point protesting. We’ve gambled away our sovereignty, and all we can do is try not to make matters worse,” said Eamon Delaney, a newspaper vendor. “Our own leaders have made such a shambles of it, the IMF crowd will hardly do worse.” – AP
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