Media groups reject Big Society request
Media and advertising groups have rejected government proposals that they donate millions of pounds worth of adverts and advertising space on social issues
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Italy’s fight against rampant tax evasion continues
Rome, Italy (AHN) – The fight against tax evasion continued in Italy as financial police claimed that nearly $68 billion of income went unreported last year, which was a rise of 46 percent compared to the previous year. Out of the total undeclared income, $27 billion belonged to only 8,850 employed workers.
In an attempt to avoid tax, Italians sent more than $13 billion to foreign countries – 26 percent of which ended up in Luxembourg, 25 percent in Switzerland, seven percent in Britain and six percent in Panama.
Responding at the report, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said that a quarter of country’s economy goes untaxed last May, forcing Italy to struggle with huge public debt.
According to central bank’s prediction, Italy’s 2010 public deficit is likely to be under 5% of gross domestic product and public debt is expected to be 118.6% of GDP.
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Bravo star Tabatha Coffey gets brutally honest in new memoir
Tampa, FL, United States (CNS) – Tabatha Coffey, who’ known for shocking hairstylists and salon owners with her brutal honesty on her hit Bravo show, sits at a table with bottles of water and black markers at close range. The platinum blonde is ready to meet a long line of fans, pose for pictures and sign copies of her new book.
But if you think this is just another regular book signing, think again.
It’s early Sunday morning, and Coffey is at The Honey Pot, a smoke-filled gay nightclub in Tampa, where half naked drag queens are lip-syncing to the pounding music of Rihanna, Donna Summers and Cher.
And Coffey feels like she’s right back at home.
In her memoir, “It’s Not Really About the Hair: The Honest Truth About Life, Love, and the Business of Beauty,” Coffey pens about her unconventional childhood and growing up around the transvestite strip clubs that her parents owned in Australia.
It was there she first learned how to do hair by working with wigs, hairpieces and hot rollers. She even learned how to sew and bead costumes. But it was also where she learned to be “authentic.”
“Here I was, dealing with men that wanted to be women, and truly believed that they were women. These transsexuals were just so incredibly authentic, and so real, and so honest about it and lived their life the way they truly wanted to live it, and how they felt and the person they wanted to be.” Coffey told AHN. “Growing up in that environment, it really taught me that you have to be authentic.”
From her struggle with obesity as a child and a father who abandoned the family to coming out to her mother and becoming a business acumen, the host of “Tabatha Salon Takeover” said writing her book was inspired by the many e-mails she’s received from people asking questions “that absolutely had nothing to do with hair.”
“I get a lot of e-mails from young people coming out or having a hard time coming out, people from divorced families because my father had disappeared,” Coffey explained. “So, that’s why I chose the stories I chose. I just wanted to give little glimpses of who I am and maybe answer some of their questions.
When asked if there would be a season four of “Tabatha’s Solon Takeover,” Coffey says she’s got her fingers crossed.
“I don’t know yet. I would love to do another season. Every one seems to like it so I would like to keep helping businesses, and we’ll see.”
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The Options Applications Handbook: Hedging and Speculating Techniques for Professional Investors
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Product Description
The Options Applications Handbook offers a lucid, down-to-earth introduction to the fundamentals of options, explaining how options can be used for various purposes, such as options on exchange rates, interest rates, stocks, futures, and fixed-income securities. With the help of this on-target guide, readers will be able to understand basic option types…use standard market terminology…grasp the costs, benefits, and risks of basic option positions…… More >>
The Options Applications Handbook: Hedging and Speculating Techniques for Professional Investors
Corn, soy outlook ‘bullish’ despite Argentine rain
Argentine rains may have staved off crop disasters, but will not prevent further gains in corn and soybean prices, Rabobank says
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Canadian grocery chain warns of higher food prices
Toronto, Ontario, Canada (AHN) – Metro President and Chief Executive Officer Eric La Fleche is warning of a rise in food prices in the coming months. Metro is the third largest food retailer in Canada.
The executive said last week that in some categories such as pasta and bread there would be significant hikes in prices.
Similar warnings have been made the past few days by other major food firms such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Kraft Canada and General Mills.
The Food and Agriculture Organization reported higher prices for grains, oilseeds and sugar at levels similar to the food crises of 2008. As a result, FAO’s overall Food Price index in December surpassed the peak in June 2008.
However, the impact of rising food prices would be felt less by Canadians compared to citizens of large nations such as India and China. This is because food makes up only 17 percent of consumer spending and is third only to shelter and transportation.
Moreover, food prices in Canada rose only 1.7 percent in 2010, compared to 15 percent in India and 9 percent in China. Indians spent 47 percent of their income on food, while Chinese spent 34 percent.
Weather, particularly the La Nina phenomenon, is partly to be blamed for the rising food prices. However, the larger problem is the higher demand over supply. Experts pushed for more investment in agriculture to stem the continuous rise in food prices because there are still many farmlands that are either underutilized or idle.
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Mideast financial markets reel as Egyptian unrest marks day six
Israel (TML) – Concerns that unrest on Egypt posed a threat to the Middle East spooked the region’s stock markets on Sunday, sending shares lower, even as analysts discounted the likelihood on protests spreading.
While Egypt marked its sixth day of mass protests, forcing President Husni Mubarak to dismiss his cabinet, the Dubai Financial Market (DFM) General Index fell 4.3% to 1543.02 on Sunday, its biggest drop since August. The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange retreated 3.7% to 2561, its lowest in fourth months. Egypt’s bourse was closed on Sunday after its main index fell 16% in the final two days of trading last week.
But Yazan Abdeen, a portfolio manager for ING Barings in Dubai, told The Media Line that investor concerns were unfounded and that there were already signs on Sunday that the initial panic had subsided.
The Saudi Tadawul All Share Index, which led the charge lower on Saturday when other markets are closed, with its key index dropping 6.4%, changed direction on Sunday, climbing 2.6%.Other Gulf indexes closed off their lows of the day Sunday.
“The underlying economic drivers vary greatly between countries. That’s why you started to see Saudi pushing back and reclaiming yesterday’s losses,” Abdeen said. “People who don’t know the region vey well worry there will be a contagion effect from Egypt to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. But the ideology driving demonstrations in Egypt is related to poverty and unemployment. You can’t say that about the Gulf.”
Saudi Arabia, the biggest GCC country, enjoys a per capita gross domestic product of about $24,000, compared with $6,200 for Egypt, thanks to the world’s biggest reserves of oil. That underground asset became worth even more on Friday when the price of petroleum rose to nearly $100 a barrel, its highest in 28 months.
Even among the poorer countries the of Middle East, unrest has yet to materialize on the scale of Egypt or Tunisia, where protests forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile January 14. A demonstration in the Jordanian capital of Amman attracted just 3,000 people on Friday. There were no reports of unrest anywhere in the Gulf.
Nervousness over Egypt wasn’t confined to the Middle East. On Friday, stocks worldwide plunged the most since November, with the MSCI World Index, a barometer of global stock markets, declining 1.4%.
As crude oil posted its biggest jump since 2009, Canaccord Genuity said in an investor note that 1.8 million barrels of oil per day were transported through Egypt’s Suez Canal in 2009. If the canal were to be closed for an extended period, the Canadian brokerage house said, it would add 6,000 extra miles of travel costs to bring oil from the Gulf to Europe and the U.S., raising the cost of oil.
In Israel, which has very limited economic ties with Egypt despite 30 years of peace, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s TA-25 index was down 3.6% in late trading. Amir Kahanovich, chief economist and market strategist at Clal Finance, was quoted in the Calcalist financial daily as saying unrest in Egypt could interrupt exports of natural gas to Israel.
Kahanovich also expressed concern that foreign investors would lump Israel with the rest of the region and pull out of Israeli stocks out of concern over regional political stability. But Philip Thorpe, chairman and chief executive of Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority, said investors would learn to distinguish the real risks.
“Investors are sufficiently intelligent to understand the distinction between North Africa and the Gulf. It’s rather foolish to call the impact of the current events on the broader region,” Thorpe told Reuters at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos.
Nevertheless, some Gulf companies have significant enough interests in Egypt that may be hurt by long-term instability or a change in the regime. For instance, Dubai’s Emaar Properties, saw its share price plummeting close to 8.3%, close to the maximum allowed by the market regulations. Air Arabia, the Middle East’s largest low-cost carrier with a hub in Egypt, saw its share price plunge by nearly 10% in early trading before clawing back some of its drop to end down 6.1%.
Dana Gas, an Emirati natural gas producer, plunged 9.9%, despite assurances that its Egyptian operations haven’t been stopped amid the protests.
But ING’s Abdeen said he was optimistic that even if Egypt undergoes regime change, the new government will be investor friendly and promarket. To meet the demands of demonstrators and end unrest, the new government will have to create jobs and provide subsidies for basic commodities, he said.
“The Egyptian government doesn’t have resources to provide subsidies without raising taxes,” Abdeen said. “But if they increase taxes there will be less spending and less job opportunities. That means they will have to attract foreign investment.”
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Painful affairs of child adoption in Nepal
Feature Story, Nepal (AHN) – Last September, American couple Haydn Hilling and his wife Edvige desperately wanted to take home their adopted Nepali child, Kailash. Though the American couple that hails from Louisiana spent more than one-and-a-half years getting the necessary paperwork required for the adoption, the process has come to a standstill following the United States’ decision to halt adoptions of abandoned children from Nepal.
The U.S. administration halted the adoption of Nepali children due to growing allegations of child trafficking and falsification of documents, often in connivance with government authorities.
A joint statement issued by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the first week of August said the step was taken to protect the rights and interests of Nepali children and their families after field visits to orphanages and police departments showed that documents describing children up for adoption as abandoned were often unreliable.
Another 10 countries–Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom–have also halted inter-country adoptions from Nepal.
According to Nepal’s Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, new rules were put in place last December and some stern measures have been added to the process.
“The Hague Secretariat also wants the smooth resumption of child adoption here,” chief of the ministry’s legal section, Sher Jung Karki said. The new set of policies allows local placement agencies to charge US$5,000 to adopting parents, while the government charges US$3,000.
Any foreign placement agency must set up a liaison office in Nepal and pay the government US$10,000 that will be handed over to an organization working for the welfare of children. Subsequently, the process of inter-country adoption of street children is subject to widespread abuses, the government has banned the adoption effective from Jan. 5.
The new policy also allows Nobel laureates, heads of states/governments, foreign ministers, celebrities, or a couple with an annual income of over US$300,000 to become foster parents, while others cannot.
Largely, a vulnerable adoption process that had been taking place in Nepal since several years has compelled the US government more alerted and posed a ban. That was the reason that they could not adopted two – year – old Kailash which made them running from pillar to post that their call will be heard.
Now the list is long. As many as 56 American families are facing heartbreak due to the US Government decision to ban child adoption from Nepal until Nepal’s legal provision ensures that adopted children were not fraud and claim genuine.
These desperate 56 parents have instituted an alliance and had registered a petition in US Congress. “We respectfully request that the Right Honorable members of the US Senate and House petition the Department of State and USCIS within the Department of Homeland Security to assist the “Nepal Pipeline families” in obtaining visas to bring their children home immediately,” the petition reads.
In response to the petition, 14,398 letters and emails were sent far to support their campaign. Moreover they have internet campaign through blog, http://theywaitnepal.blogspot.com/. One can find the photos of to be adopted Nepali child and their US mother. “These families are struggling to bring home their legally adopted children who are stuck in Nepal awaiting visas that will allow them to enter the US,” they write in their blog.
Many anxious parents are waiting in the US also. Many are stranded since August, 2010.
It seems that child adoption in Nepal has been turned into a profitable business as dozens of websites and privately organizations have claimed that there were many advantages of adopting children from Nepal. “There are many advantages for adopting from Nepal. Even though Nepal is an economically poor country, children are cared for very well with few incidences of abuse or neglect. If you like the idea of adopting a baby or toddler, it would be an excellent country to consider,” claims, adoptionark.
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How I Tripled My Money In the Futures Market: Winner of the 1992 Robbins System Trading Championship Shares His Secrets
Product Description
This book covers every important aspect of trading from market selection to money management. Mr. Jensen reveals the market sentiment indicators he created to pinpoint market turns with uncanny precision. Destined to become a Trading classic, this book will make a substantial contribution to the field of technical analysis, as well as to the bottom line of traders that follow its advice. Specific topics include: How to anticipate changes in market sentiment; Combini… More >>
Option Theory
Product Description
Option Theory takes the reader from first principles to the frontiers of modern finance theory. The book is aimed at busy financial engineers at all levels, providing formulas and techniques that can be readily applied to real life problems; yet the theoretical basis of the subject is explored in detail so that the book will also appeal to students and researchers. Written in a clear and accessible manner, the author covers the various approaches to option pri… More >>
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