There is no convincing evidence that cellphone use poses a threat to human health, according to an extensive review of scientific evidence released Thursday.
A team of scientists with the UK
No faxing fast cash advance gets you cash fast and easily.
The U.S. economy needs to grow more quickly if it is to produce enough jobs to bring down the unemployment rate further, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Monday.
Bernanke said the recent decline in jobless rate, which dropped from 9.1 percent last summer to 8.3 percent in February, was “somewhat out of sync” with the rather modest pace of economic growth.
U.S. gross domestic product grew 3 percent in the fourth quarter, but is expected to have slowed to just below 2 percent in the first three months of this year.
“Further significant improvements in the unemployment rate will likely require a more rapid expansion of production and demand from consumers and businesses, a process that can be supported by continued accommodative policies,” Bernanke told a gathering of the National Association for Business Economics paydayloan.
Bernanke reiterated his concern about long-term unemployment, but argued against the notion that much of the problem is due to structural factors that monetary policy could not address.
“The continued weakness in aggregate demand is likely the predominant factor. Consequently, the Federal Reserve’s accommodative monetary policies, by providing support for demand and for the recovery, should help, over time, to reduce long-term unemployment as well,” he said.
Please remember that a payday loan is a rather expensive line of credit. Much like taking something to the pawn shop.
News Corp. executive James Murdoch acknowledged Wednesday that he could have done more to investigate the phone hacking scandal that has rocked Britain and threatened his place as the likely heir to his father’s global media empire.
Murdoch’s admission came in a detailed, seven-page letter written to British parliamentarians investigating the scandal. In it, he repeated his insistence that he knew nothing about the criminality which had taken place at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid newspaper, saying that the extent of the wrongdoing had been hidden from him by members of his staff.
“It would have been better if I had asked more questions,” Murdoch said. “However the truth is that incomplete answers and what now appear to be false assurances were given to the questions that I asked.”
Murdoch has already appeared twice before lawmakers, who grilled him in detail about what he knew about the phone hacking scandal and alleged attempts to bury evidence of any illegal activity.
Murdoch was the one who signed off on a massive settlement to one of the first known victims of the practice, a deal which the company’s former in-house lawyer has acknowledged was aimed at keeping a lid on the scandal.
But the cover-up failed after the Guardian and The New York Times revealed that phone hacking was endemic at paper, an expose which has led to dozens of arrests and resignations. Murdoch’s father, Rupert, was forced to close the News of the World following an advertiser boycott. Lawmakers are now sifting through the scandal’s fallout in an effort to find out who was responsible.
In a separate development, police said that a 51-year-old man has been arrested Wednesday on suspicion of intimidating a witness.
Scotland Yard said the man taken into custody Wednesday had been previously arrested on April 5, 2011. Police did not identify the man, but The Associated Press had identified a man arrested that day as former News of the World reporter Neville Thurlbeck, who was 50 at the time.
Thurlbeck did not immediately return a text message seeking details about the arrest. His law firm had no immediate comment.
Wednesday’s developments follow the arrests Tuesday of six other suspects, including former News International executive Rebekah Brooks.
News International, the British newspaper arm of News Corp., has made cash settlements to 58 victims, including celebrities, politicians and the families of crime victims.
We are extending the deadline for Top Workplaces nominations to April 6.
We’ve gotten a great response so far — with nearly 200 companies across the St. Louis region nominated by our original deadline of Friday, March 9, and a large percentage agreeing to participate. But we also know, from the many inquiries we have had (and the natural inclination to procrastinate), that many more local companies will be interested.
Our Top Workplaces list will be the centerpiece of an upcoming special section of the Post-Dispatch this summer. For the project, we have teamed with Workplace Dynamics, a survey company that has similar partnerships with dozens of other newspapers nationwide cash advance in one hour.
Working from your nominations, Workplace Dynamics will recruit employers with at least 50 employees to participate in a comprehensive satisfaction survey of their employees. Those employers that score highest locally — and meet national benchmarks — will make our list.
To nominate a company, please visit stltoday.com/topworkplaces. For more information, email stlouis@topworkplaces.com or call 314-561-9028.
Some of the world’s largest drugmakers will face an uphill battle next week in their bid to revive a class of experimental arthritis drugs that have been sidelined by safety concerns for nearly two years.
The Food and Drug Administration says there is a clear association between the nerve-blocking medications and incidents of joint failure that led the agency to halt studies of the drugs in 2010.
However, the agency also notes that those side effects were less common when the drugs were used at lower doses, potentially leaving the door open for future use. The agency released its safety analysis ahead of a public meeting.
On Monday Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Regeneron will make their case to continue studies of the drugs, with precautions to protect patients.
In March, Sherry Hunt and a co-worker were called into a meeting at CitiMortgage’s big operations base in O’Fallon, Mo.
A high company executive awaited her there.
“It’s your asses if these defects don’t improve,” Hunt recalled being told by her “boss’s boss’s boss.”
Hunt didn’t create the “defects” in mortgage applications. It was her job to find them — red flags for bad loans. She felt the executive wanted her to stop doing her job and let the bank make bad loans that would be guaranteed by the federal government.
“The message was clear to me,” Hunt recalled. “I was threatened.”
Her experience provides a telling window into the inner-workings of mortgage misconduct that continued to occur even after the global financial system nearly collapsed due to the industry’s shady dealings with subprime loans and mortgage-backed securities.
Hunt, rather than cave to pressure, filed a “whistleblower” lawsuit against CitiMortgage and its Citigroup parent, claiming the mortgage lender deliberately ignored fraud and errors in government-insured mortgage programs. The U.S. Department of Justice then joined the suit.
Earlier this month, Citigroup admitted that it approved Federal Housing Administration mortgages that failed to meet government guidelines. It agreed to settle the suit for $158 million, the amount government expects to lose on FHA mortgages it claims Citi should never have made.
Hunt filed suit under the federal False Claims Act, which lets whistleblowers share in the payout if their suits succeed. Her take, minus legal fees, will be $31 million.
“I didn’t do it for the money,” said Hunt in an interview last week with her and her lawyer, Finley Gibbs.
As she tells it, Hunt tried hard to persuade Citi management to root out fraud. She complained weekly in memos, and finally took her case to human resources. When all that failed, and the pressure to bend kept building, she went to a lawyer.
In an emailed statement, Citi said it settled “so we could put these issues behind us and focus on serving our clients. We take our quality assurance processes seriously and have pro-actively undertaken process improvements.”
The bank declined to respond to specific allegations. A spokesman also would not say if Citi had removed or reassigned executives because of the case, or describe other changes it made to satisfy the government.
Now that it’s over, Hunt thinks CitiMortgage will finally reform. But it’s not clear if she’ll be there to see it; she’s now negotiating whether she remains an employee with the company.
INSPECTING LOANS
Hunt lives on a “hobby farm” in Silex with her retired husband, Jonathan. They grow alfalfa and vegetables. She is reticent about her private life. She declined to say how many children she has, for instance, or describe her upbringing. She wouldn’t say what she might do with so much money.
Her entire working life — 37 years — has been spent in the behind-the-scenes paper-shuffle of mortgage processing.
Citigroup, the nation’s third largest bank, is a giant in the mortgage business. It made 30,000 FHA loans since 2004, totaling more than $4.8 billion. About 30 percent have defaulted, according to the government.
Like many big lenders, Citi can make government-backed loans — putting taxpayers on the hook for defaults — without sending applications to the FHA for review. But it has to abide by strict guidelines and set up separate quality control departments, independent of the bank’s other operations, to flag suspicious applications.
That was Hunt’s job at CitiMortgage. She had started in the mortgage business in 1975 at age 18 as a lowly processor, then climbed the ladder into management. By 2008, she supervised nine workers in the quality control department. They scrutinized one out of every 10 mortgage applications.
They caught “over a thousand” applications with problems, according to Gibbs, her lawyer. Some were obvious fraud – such as numbers whited-out on a W-2 wage form faxless payday loans. Others may have been goofs, such as missing documents or wrong calculations.
The cases were passed on to a fraud unit, which verified that about half really were attempts to cheat, says Hunt. Such cases were supposed to be reported quickly to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which overseas the FHA. But the government wasn’t hearing of the problems.
At first, Hunt didn’t blame the Citi system. “The sheer volume of referrals was overwhelming,” she thought.
More than 1,000 cases referred by Hunt’s unit were backed up in the fraud unit in 2009, according to the government. More than 80 percent were loans that had defaulted shortly after they were made, which the government calls an indicator of fraud. Eventually, Citi simply erased those records from its files, the government charged.
Then Hunt suspected something more sinister, a “pattern of behavior,” she said. “As I found things against the HUD rules and reported them to management, nothing happened, even after more follow-ups.”
According to the government, Citi’s misbehavior started in 2004, when it took the quality control function away from an outside contractor and moved it in house. It continued until mid-2011. That was more than two years after CitiGroup nearly failed over problems that included massive investments in bad mortgages. The government bailed out the bank to the tune of $45 billion.
BULLYING
Hunt wasn’t alone in her worries. According to the government’s suit, Michael Watts, the director of quality control, complained repeatedly to company officials charged with controlling risk. He warned that employees had “marching orders” to fight quality control decisions.
At one large staff meeting, managers praised loan processors for “beating back” the quality control team and getting them to withdraw complaints, she said. The quality control team was standing there listening. “Someone was allowing them to bully us,” Hunt said.
In June of last year, Hunt wrote a memo complaining about pressure from Jeffrey Polkinghorne, Citi’s director of “front-end” risk. “We also have Polkinghorne telling us it is our asses . . . if the quality does not improve,” she wrote, according to the federal complaint.
At that point, Hunt could have shut up and started overlooking problems. Instead, she complained to CitiMortgage human resources department. There were meetings. Five months later, nothing had changed.
That’s when she decided to blow the whistle outside Citi.
Part of the decision was self interest — she wanted to separate herself from an illegal activity. Hunt also felt an obligation to keep the mortgage industry honest. The FHA had certified her to handle its mortgages. “I uphold their standard,” she said.
She talked with her husband about the costs of standing up, about everything they could lose. Her career. Their home.
She talked to Gibbs, a lawyer from Columbia, Mo., who she knew. Gibbs knew about the federal false claims act, although he had never handled such a case. He filed suit in August.
Then Hunt went back to work. “I kept a low profile. It wouldn’t serve a purpose for me to go blasting this all over the place,” she said.
False Claims Act suits are filed under seal, and they remain sealed until the government decides whether to participate. For the first few weeks, Citigroup didn’t know it was being sued.
The Justice Department got interested and took up the case. It began negotiating with Citgroup. The law forbids employers from retaliating against whistleblowers, and Hunt said she felt no blowback at work.
“I don’t believe much of this filtered down to the O’Fallon office,” she said. “I was comforted in my mind that nobody I was passing in the hallways knew.”
Technology analyst John Kinnucan was arrested Friday on allegations of trading on information about many of the nation’s leading tech companies, resulting in illicit gains of nearly $110 million.
Kinnucan faces both criminal and civil charges. He was arrested at his Oregon home and is awaiting transfer to New York, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is conducting an ongoing probe into insider trading. The Southern District includes the nation’s major stock exchanges and is taking the lead on insider trading probes nationwide.
In January, seven hedge fund managers and investment professionals were indicted in New York, charged with sharing insider information when making trades. Last year, Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund, was found guilty and sentenced to 11 years in prison and fined a record $92.8 million. The SEC alleges the Galleon case resulted in $91 million in illicit gains, less than in Kinnucan’s case.
The Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that Kinnucan befriended and rewarded insiders at various technology companies, including Apple (, Fortune 500), Dell (, Fortune 500), Fairchild Semiconductor (), Marvell Technology (), and Western Digital (, Fortune 500), in order to gain information, which the SEC claims he then sold to clients, primarily portfolio managers and analysts at prominent hedge funds and investment advisers.
"The information he obtained and passed along to clients was not the result of research. It was inside information Kinnucan bought from company insiders," said Janice Fedarcyk, FBI assistant director-in-charge. "That kind of information beats research every time. The only problem is it isn’t legal."
In late 2010, Kinnucan took the unusual step of announcing on TV and in an e-mail to clients that he had been contacted by FBI agents, whom he mocked as "fresh-faced eager beavers."
He said he was approached at the end of October 2010 and asked to wear a wire in an insider-trading investigation targeting certain hedge funds. He shut down his Portland, Ore.-based firm, Broadband Research Corp., soon after that disclosure. Kinnucan and members of his former firm could not be reached for comment Friday.
The U.S. Attorney’s office and the SEC would not comment on Kinnucan’s actions in 2010.
A senior U.N. nuclear expert says his team is leaving for Tehran with hopes that Iranian officials will agree to talk about suspicions that the Islamic Republic has worked _ or is working _ on a clandestine atomic arms program.
Herman Nackaerts of the International Atomic Energy Agency is heading a group of experts focusing on the allegations, which Iran continues to deny.
Nackaerts told reporters Sunday before boarding a flight to Tehran “the highest priority remains of course the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.”
The trip is the second one in less than a month as the IAEA attempts to dent nearly four years of Iranian refusal to cooperate with its probe. IAEA experts came back from their last visit in late January with no concrete results.
Companies restocked at a faster pace in December, a positive sign that they expect consumers to step up spending.
Business stockpiles grew 0.4 percent in December, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. That followed a similar gain in November. Sales rose 0.7 percent, almost double the November gain.
Companies are building up their stockpiles again after cutting them over the summer amid recession fears. Higher inventories require more production, which boosts economic growth. It also suggests companies expect more sales.
Rising inventories were a key reason growth accelerated in the final three months of last year. Still, some economists expect the restocking to slow this year.
Wholesalers reported a 1 percent increase in inventories. Retailers reported a 0.2 percent gain and manufacturers 0.1 percent.
Inventories rose to a seasonally adjusted $1.56 trillion in December. That is 18 percent above the low point reached in 2009, just after the recession ended.
Rising sales are keeping stockpiles from getting too high. If companies feel their inventories are excessive, they could cut back on orders, slowing the economy payday loans direct lenders.
Overall sales rose in December. Wholesalers reported a 1.3 percent jump in sales, followed by a 0.7 increase for manufacturers and flat sales for retailers. That pushed down the ratio of inventories to sales to the lowest level since March. A lower ratio suggests inventories aren’t out of line with sales.
A separate report Tuesday showed that retail sales rose 0.4 percent in January. Consumers rebounded from a slow holiday shopping season and spent more on electronics, sporting goods, building materials and gas.
The economy expanded at a 2.8 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter. But economists expect companies won’t add as much to their stockpiles in the current quarter. That could push growth down to 2 percent or even below.
Stockpiles held by manufacturers account for nearly 40 percent of total business inventories, while wholesalers and retailers each hold about one third.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is gaining support among Canadians for his plan to ship oilsands crude to China after President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada Corp. (TRP)
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