J. Kyle Bass, whose Hayman Advisors LP made $500 million amid the U.S. subprime crisis, said the Bank of Japan will have to
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Federal regulators have indefinitely delayed a decision on the proposed restart of the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant in California, raising new questions Monday about whether the twin reactors will produce electricity again.
The seaside plant between San Diego and Los Angeles has been dark since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.
Operator Southern California Edison wants permission to restart the Unit 2 reactor and run it at reduced power in hopes of stopping vibration and friction that was blamed for damaging tubing.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission delayed several earlier target dates for a ruling. Its website on Monday listed no date for a restart decision _ only “to be determined.”
Agency spokesman Victor Dricks had no comment.
Last week, the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board sided with environmentalists who have called for lengthy hearings on the restart plan after concluding that firing up the plant would allow Edison “to operate beyond the scope of its existing license.”
A statement from SCE spokeswoman Jennifer Manfre noted that NRC Chair Allison Macfarlane indicated earlier that no decision would be made until at least mid-June on the company’s request to change its operating license to run at lower power.
“SCE continues to adhere to the established regulatory process,” the statement said payday loans with no fax. The company “cannot restart Unit 2 until the NRC says that it is safe to do so.”
Last month, SCE’s parent, Edison International, raised the possibility of retiring the plant if it can’t get one reactor running later this year. The company also disclosed that costs tied to the long-running shutdown had hit $553 million.
Edison is facing a tangle of regulatory obstacles that include a separate state investigation into who should pay for the trouble _ customers or shareholders.
Meanwhile, anti-nuclear activists and some lawmakers have said restarting the plant would lead to a disaster.
Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group challenging the restart, believes no decision can be made “until all the safety issues raised by the board are addressed,” spokesman Shaun Burnie said in an email.
Even with San Onofre sidelined, state power officials predict that there should be adequate power supplies in California this summer, but heat waves or wildfires that damage transmission lines could lead to potential shortages.
San Onofre is owned by SCE, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside.
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Smartphones are increasingly popular not only with consumers, but also with thieves who see the devices as another way to tap into bank accounts and other sensitive information, experts say.
Many consumers simply don’t realize how vulnerable their Androids, iPhones and other devices can be. An April study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta said threats are proliferating, ranging from “phishing” — where consumers click a phony email or text message and are tricked into handing over personal information — to consumers’ reluctance to use security protections they normally have on home computers, like a password.
The study said there are several things that can make smartphones an easy target. Vast amounts of personal data are stored in emails, texts and other applications, and personal information is increasingly easily found on social media. Organized crime operations also see smartphones as the most vulnerable entry point into the electronic financial system, according to the Federal Reserve.
“We have some very bad characters who would like to take our money, take our identification, and run away with it,” said Marie Gooding, first vice president of the Atlanta Fed.
Research the Fed cited, done by Boston-based Trusteer Inc., involved 20 computer servers that were used to send out more than 100,000 “phishing” emails. By studying the server records, Trusteer found that about 2,200 of the 3,000 responses the scam artists received came from smartphones.
Doug Johnson, vice president of risk management for the American Bankers Association, said he expects those numbers to get worse.
“This is one more platform criminals will continue to exploit as the channel grows,” he said.
The Fed helps operate the industry’s Automated Clearing House, a system that processed 21 billion transactions last year. While banks are required to adhere to authentication standards for ACH transactions, those protections are often unknowingly compromised by consumers.
“A lot of it has to do with all of the players making sure they have the strongest security controls they have, and then consumers being aware of what those controls are, and making use of them,” Gooding said.
Miami attorney Andrew Carter learned the hard way, after misplacing his phone amid the hubbub of a Christmas vacation. He had a mobile banking app installed on his phone, but had turned off his passcode lock because he found it annoying to enter whenever he wanted to use the phone.
“That was a big mistake,” he said. “I knew it intellectually, but I hadn’t really intuitively grasped that I had to be able to be a lot more secure with it.”
Weeks later, Carter found $2,000 had been withdrawn from his account by someone in Texas, possibly through emails retrieved from his phone. He also found someone trying to hack his Facebook account.
Today, he keeps his phone locked and changed to a brand that allows him to remotely erase phone data — something he couldn’t do with his old phone.
Several manufacturers are planning new “biometric” technology, such as fingerprint scanners, that can make phones more secure. But even with those safeguards, consumer behavior can still lead to danger.
Vikram Thakur, principal security response manager for security software giant Symantec, said attackers can get complete control of a phone simply by getting people to click on a link. Without actually having the phone in their hands, the hackers can access messages, phone calls and personal information.
“The amount of information we’re storing on mobile phones these days kind of incentivizes the attackers to go after the platform,” he said.
European stocks fell for the first time in five days and U.S. equity-index futures dropped before a report that may show American retail sales slipped. Oil declined while the yen swung between gains and losses after sliding beyond 102 per dollar for the first time since October 2008.
The Stoxx Europe 600 Index slipped 0.5 percent at 6:05 a.m. in New York. Standard & Poor
The no-parking sign didn’t really make sense. Nader Khan parked there anyway.
All along Finfar Court in Mississauga, signs stated parking was prohibited from 12 to 3 on Fridays. It seemed odd to Khan, since a large mosque — the Islamic Society of North America — was a few metres away and offered its main prayer service at the same time.
“When I first parked there, I genuinely thought the sign said no parking every day but Fridays,” said Khan, an Islamic singer and songwriter who had driven there to pray. “I thought, wow, how accommodating.”
But when he returned an hour later, he found that his car and all the others parked on both sides of the street in the light industrial area had been ticketed. “I was furious.”
A year later, Khan returned and saw the signs were still there. Instead of parking, he started taking photos and turned to Facebook to express his frustration. “Finfar Court: A most racist, discriminatory, Islamophobic street in the GTA, located in Mississauga Ontario,” he wrote to introduce the pictures.
The Facebook post sparked intense debate between those agreeing with Khan and those who thought the issue was merely a response to years of bad parking, including blocking driveways and parking too close to hydrants.
Across the GTA, places of worship have claimed intolerance and unfairness when their facilities face resistance from residents or their expansion plans and building permits are rejected by the city.
But a look at parking bylaws across the city and the outcomes of dozens of Ontario Municipal Board decisions suggests the real culprit is much more benign and mundane. It almost always comes down to indiscretions of the vehicular kind — traffic and parking.
“The truth is, places of worship have a need for a lot of parking,” said Joe D’Abramo, director of zoning and environmental planning for the City of Toronto. “Nobody wants to provide parking, because it takes up land and costs money to put it underground. But if we don’t require it, then they park on the streets and the community around it gets very upset.”
Toronto recently completed a review of its outdated zoning bylaws, including those for parking near a place of worship, and enacted them into law last week.
There was ample resistance. The Toronto Faith Coalition protested some of the zoning changes, concerned the parking requirements would make it impossible for existing places of worship to expand and new ones to set up.
“Parking is a big issue because it determines whether or not a church, synagogue and mosque can be built,” said Charles McVety, an evangelical Christian leader, who headed the Toronto Faith Coalition. “It’s fundamental, because if you do not have enough land to meet this high level of parking required, then you can’t build your building or expand it. They won’t approve it.”
D’Abramo said the changes were necessary. Not only were the bylaws old, but they were from pre-amalgamation and rules differed across the city. They also didn’t reflect the diversity of the city. “Some faiths have seating, and some faiths have no seating, so the standards are different depending on how you worship,” he said.
Generally, municipalities require a place of worship to provide parking based on complex formulas that account for the number of pews or square footage. The parking requirement is reduced if the religious centre is near transit or major city centres.
In recent years,the neighbourhood church has been replaced by mega-churches. According to a study commissioned by the City of Toronto on parking standards for a place of worship, the average size of a new place of worship built between 2000 and 2005 was more than double the average size of one built between 1975 and 1990. This means more people now drive to church. And, since many religious centres are set up in industrial areas — where land may be cheaper — public transit is rarely a realistic alternative.
A number of municipalities, including Brampton, Mississauga and Markham, have also conducted reviews of their parking bylaws around places of worship.
And it turns out nothing riles up the neighbours like bad parking and increased traffic. Infractions or even the perception that rules could be broken have been enough to ignite tensions and divide communities.
In Markham, a Taoist temple trying to build in a residential area faced heavy resistance from neighbours primarily due to fear of increased traffic and parking concerns — even though the temple said it expected attendance of 15 to 20 people at a time. The city voted against the temple’s plans for rezoning, and the matter eventually landed at the Ontario Municipal Board, which approved the building last summer payday loans online.
Ten years ago, city officials thwarted the plans of a Hindu temple in Scarborough to redesignate a property it purchased in an industrial zone into a religious facility. There were a number of concerns, including parking and lack of transit. The temple took its case to the OMB, but the city’s concerns were upheld.
And a new mosque project in Markham has divided an otherwise peaceful community with concerns that the construction of the facility would create a traffic nightmare and lead to parking chaos in a neighbouring residential area. The matter was further complicated by what the mosque called a “typo” on its website suggesting it could hold 1,600people when it only had approval for 500 — and parking accommodations for such. The mosque has since decreased the planned size of its worship space and will provide 188 parking spaces.
On the surface,the primary concern appears to be good planning. But there are some who question whether the zoning issues are simply a mask for underlying tensions.
“It becomes an oddly intense battle when it comes to parking and mundane zoning issues around a mosque or temple,” said Jason Hackworth, a geography professor at the University of Toronto who wrote a paper on the collision of faith and economic development in the city’s industrial zones. “You have to ask yourself why this is the case, as zoning issues normally don’t invoke such a reaction.”
But he, too, is careful. “Of course, something like that is hard to prove.”
Especially when mosque officials agree that their congregants are also at fault. “The officials are very frustrated with the small minority of people who park badly,” said Khan, the Mississauga man offended by the signs. But Khan still thinks the city went too far: “Have tow trucks on call, tow the cars that are being inconsiderate and fine them again and tow them again. Punishing an entire community or the actions of a few is very problematic.”
Mosque officials say they constantly make announcements about parking etiquette to their congregants, and have even organized a shuttle from free parking lots nearby to accommodate overflow. But they were surprised when the city put up the signs without any consultation.
The bylaw was enacted in December 2011 after the city received numerous other parking complaints from businesses, said Mississauga transportation commissioner Martin Powell. The staff report on the matter only refers to the concerns of one citizen. And the city did not send out a petition to local residents and businesses, as is the normal process, the report states.
“I know it seems a bit strange because of the hours, but that’s when we have a problem,” said Powell. “If there are safety issues involved, then staff will make recommendations to council, and that is what we did here.”
But Powell is quick to point out that the mosque isn’t the only place of worship that faces odd parking restrictions. Last spring, a number of churches in Mississauga were shocked to find their congregants could no longer park on the streets nearby from 10-1 on Sundays.
“We have been at our location for 19 years, and there has never been any problem,” said Desmond Singh, a pastor with Mississauga Gospel Assembly. “But it seems like the city has been targeting our church hours.”
Some of his congregants and those from the nearby St. Joseph Syriac Catholic Church took a petition to city hall, but their protest fell on deaf ears. A member of St. Joseph’s church wrote about the restrictions on a website on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms claiming that it infringed upon the rights of parishioners to freely practise their religion.
The Toronto Faith Coalition’s McVety believes further restrictions on where a place of worship can be set up will make the problem even worse. Toronto and Ajax have recently banned places of worship from setting up in industrial zones — forcing new places of worship into expensive residential areas.
McVety says the coalition is considering taking Toronto’s new zoning bylaws to the OMB.
“We bring in hundreds of thousands of new Canadians in the GTA every year, and then we pass laws to restrict their ability to worship.”
The European Central Bank said low inflation in the 17-nation euro area allowed policy makers to cut interest rates last week, as economists lowered forecasts for consumer prices and economic growth.
The decision was
Consumer borrowing in the U.S. climbed less than projected in March as Americans reduced credit-card purchases for the first time this year.
The $7.97 billion increase followed an $18.6 billion advance the previous month that was the biggest since May 2012, Federal Reserve figures showed today in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a $15.6 billion rise. Revolving credit, which includes credit-card spending, fell, while non-revolving borrowing rose.
The tempering of credit-card use coincides with a slowdown in March consumer spending amid higher payroll taxes and limited income growth. At the same time, rising stock prices and home values are enabling households to repair finances, putting them in a position to take advantage of low borrowing costs for purchases such as new cars.
It was a surprising recall and an unlikely major-league start for Ricky Romero on Friday at the Rogers Centre. It wasn’t supposed to be this soon. The Jays’ 28-year-old lefthander remains a work in progress, with a single minor-league start under his belt on the way to his necessary rebuild. But the club decided he was ready to begin the next segment of his career. Romero’s results were mixed.
Facing the Mariners, replacing a disabled Josh Johnson, he lasted just four innings in a 4-0 loss facing the M’s ace, Felix Hernandez. After three shutout innings, looking re-energized and confident, Romero went back out and threw 37 pitches in the fourth, with two visits by a trainer — one for what may have been a blister and the other when his left arm was in the way on a hard comebacker by Jesus Montero. But the best news, the news that matters most to Romero at this point, is that he’s back.
The Jays have avoided any comparisons to the past, the Roy Halladay rebuild, for the obvious reason of not putting pressure on their current down, but not out, still improving starter. But the relationship between the reconstructing Romero and his current minor-league instructor, Dane Johnson, bears a striking similarity to that of their former star, Halladay, and his mentor, the late Mel Queen.
Nobody is suggesting that Romero will ever bounce back to match Halladay’s career numbers — the very comparison the Jays are trying to avoid — but the most important thing for the L.A.-born lefty’s rebuilt psyche is that he’s back in the majors with a new outlook and a new delivery.
The 50-year-old Johnson has been the organization’s minor-league roving instructor since 2004. On March 27, the day after Romero was given the devastating news of his demotion following another failed spring training start vs. the Pirates, Johnson, a second-round pick by the Jays in 1984, was handed the important assignment of fixing what was broken with the two-time opening day starter.
Every day in April, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, in addition to his normal duties seeing kid pitchers at the Jays’ extended spring camp, Johnson and Romero worked alone. Much has been made of several publicized Romero fixes — a more direct line to the plate and hands that never are raised above his head anymore — but there were other factors as important, many involving routine.
“Taking a step back and breaking down throwing programs,” Johnson said of the most difficult part of the rebuild. “Breaking down where the ball should come from, how he’s going to cross the T’s and dot the I’s in his throwing programs and how he was going to work around all the things that needed to be implemented in his delivery online payday loans.
“They came pretty quick, because No. 1 he’s a smart guy. No. 2 he’s a good athlete. No. 3 he’s a pro and when he realized himself that, ‘Hey, I do have to do these things to be able to be effective and throw strikes,’ it started the flow a little bit. He saw the progress. We had little victories along the way. He saw the results and took them into his games and he repeated it and he reaped the benefits of it.”
A lot of the change and the ability to convince Romero of the need for the change came in the video room, finding old video as a kid pro, comparing it to the success of 2011 and the failure of 2012.
“I went back to 2005-06,” Johnson explained. “I broke out the analog equipment. We got those tapes, not necessarily implementing them, we saw an explosive young kid at that particular time who got out over his front side and drove the ball with real great extension.
“That reminded him of a lot of things when he got into his throwing programs of what he could do, what he has to do. Again, it was more attention to detail on his throwing programs, on his (bullpen) sides, on his deliveries, paying attention to those. The focus now seems taken off the mound and going to home plate. Hopefully he has enough reps under his belt doing the things properly, technique-wise, mechanical-wise where he can worry about the hitter and what’s going on at home plate.”
Thus it was that a more confident Ricky Romero strolled with J.P. Arencibia from the bullpen to the dugout after the anthems had been played and then moments later headed out to the mound with a renewed confidence in what he could accomplish against major-league hitters — if he threw strikes.
“The first inning is going to be huge, the first hitter is going to be huge,” Johnson predicted. “Hopefully those go well and we’ll roll from there and I think you’ll see, if that continues to roll, I think you’ll see the guy getting back on the mound and working with good tempo and repeat his pitches.”
Romero’s first was a confidence boost. He retired Canadian leadoff man Michael Saunders on a 3-1 grounder to second base, allowed a line drive single to Kyle Seager, then had Kendrys Morales roll over on a grounder to short for an inning-ending double play. In his mind, he was back.
OMAHA, Neb. • Billionaire Warren Buffett is known for being reluctant to invest in technology companies, but he now has a Twitter account.
Buffett unveiled his @WarrenBuffett online handle on Thursday during a speech.
Buffett has always resisted investing in technology companies because he says he can’t predict the future of those businesses the same way he can insurance or manufacturing.
Buffett says even though he may not understand Twitter well, he knows it can’t be all bad because one of the company’s co-founders is from Nebraska.
Buffett’s first tweet said simply “Warren is in the house.” By midday he had more than 32,000 followers.
Buffett doesn’t have a computer in his office, but he uses one at home for research, writing and playing bridge online.
The dollar was 0.4 percent from a two- week low against the yen on speculation the Federal Reserve will affirm its bond-buying program to cap borrowing costs when it announces its policy decision today.
The U.S. currency also traded near the least in almost two weeks versus the euro before a report that economists said will show America
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