Former Star

 


Former star financial analyst Meredith Whitney has finally resolved a nasty legal battle, but her hedge fund appears to have little money left.
Executives at BlueCrest Capital Management have dropped their suit against Whitney. The unnamed executives had been the largest backers of Kenbelle Capital.

BlueCrest asked for all its money back in October 2014 then $46 million citing poor investment performance. Whitney refused to return the capital, saying it went against an agreement to have the investment in place for at least two years.
The amount of capital still managed by Kenbelle is unclear.  It was also uncertain if any new money has put into the fund recently.

Whitney was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2009. 

Whitney is best known for her prediction as an Oppenheimer analyst of the subprime mortgage collapse and Citigroup's frailty before the financial crisis. Kenbelle was set up to build on Whitney's 2010 warning about an impending wave of municipal bond defaults and invest in stocks based on the "the new geography of U.S. prosperity,".
The fund suffered losses, however, declining approximately 11 percent, gross of fees, from January through the end of November in 2014, according to the BlueCrest complaint. Recent return information was not available.
 

Key staffers left late last year. Kenbelle's offices on the 35th floor of 444 Madison Ave. in New York are now on the market to rent.

Just a thought.

Fat or Fiction...!

Good fats are needed by the body as they help us to absorb certain nutrients, regulate hormone production and help the growth and repair of tissue. The body does not make essential fatty acids by itself, so it’s really important to consume ‘good’ fats found in flaxseeds and walnuts.

The brain is made up of 60% fat, with brain tissue mostly comprised of the essential omega 3 fatty acid DHA, which supports optimal cognitive function. These are most commonly found in fish. An alternative idea is taking omega 3 supplement.

Not all dietary fats have the same effect on the body. Coconut oil is a type of saturated fat, which is converted into pure energy by the body rather than being stored as fat. As well as providing energy, coconut oil won’t cause a spike to your blood sugar levels.

‘Trans-fats’ are the type of fats to avoid at all costs, as these are the only type of fat to cause weight gain.  The largest and most concerning source of trans-fats in a person’s diet today is found in baked goods, margarine, snacks, and fried food.

Trans-fats can cause insulin resistance, inflammation as well as significantly raise the risk of serious diseases such as heart disease.

Benefits of omega 3 fatty acids include anti-inflammatory, anti-coagulant and insulin-sensitising effects.               Just a thought.

Self-defense... Naa

Prosecutors said Hubers, a UK  graduate, killed Poston out of anger after he tried to break up with her.  Hubers claimed she shot Poston in self-defense.

When she called 911 to report the shooting, she said the 29-year-old attorney from Highland Heights, Kentucky, was frequently violent and had been attacking her when she grabbed his gun. She shot Poston six times.

A juror who helped convict Shayna Hubers in the shooting death of her on-again, off-again boyfriend Ryan Carter Poston says “At no point did I buy the battered girlfriend defense.  .” “She took the key for the house to get back in. She was free to leave and did not. I did not see any evidence of physical abuse.”

 

The jury found Hubers, now 24, guilty of murdering Poston on Oct. 12, 2012. The jury also recommended she spend 40 years in prison.

“He was right in front of me and he reached down and grabbed the gun, and I grabbed it out of his hands and pulled the trigger,” Hubers is heard saying on the call.

 

At times, Hubers was even seen laughing in the police video, seemingly joking about the victim’s gunshot wounds. “I gave him a nose job,” she said.

It took jurors less than five hours to reach their verdict.

A judge has yet to make a final ruling on Hubers’ sentence. Hubers must serve at least 20 years in prison and will be eligible for parole after that time is served. A court date has been set for June 15.

Self-Defense with on and off relationships doesn't work. No-body Buys it.

Just a thought.

Moderate? Not.

Republicans have no shortage of presidential contenders, and the field just got even more crowded when former New York Gov. George Pataki became the eighth Republican to officially launch a bid. The party could have as many as 22 if everyone who's expressed interest decides to get in.

 

Just about every Republican candidate is vying to be considered the most conservative candidate in the 2016 race, from social issues to taxes and federal spending.

 

Pataki boasts of shrinking New York's welfare state and lowering its taxes. 

But he's further to the left. Notably, he believes climate change is a problem. He is for a "cap-and-trade" system to limit carbon emissions in the U.S.; and he supported abortion rights as governor.
 

He sides with the likes of Lindsey Graham and Rick Santorum in calling for more U.S. ground troops to be sent to Iraq to fight ISIS.

  

In the most recent major GOP-primary poll, released Thursday by Quinnipiac, Pataki failed to garner even one percent. The leaders, Jeb Bush and Ben Carson, sat at 10 percent each.

He is way off the Republican ideas except for the war. Don't send our boys to war in the Middle East. Let the Middle East adjust itself and they started. 

Just a thought

 

No Brainer, Health

 

Texas is leaving a huge amount of federal money on the table and not insuring more than 1 million people because of its opposition to Obamacare.

The decision by Texas to reject expansion of Medicaid, the government health-coverage program for the poor, will prevent the state from receiving an estimated $100 billion in federal cash over a decade, at the same time its hospitals are eating $5.5 billion in annual costs for treating uninsured people.

Those uncompensated costs in turn are being covered by taxes and insurance premiums paid by the state's businesses and residents, who are also footing the bill for expanding Medicaid in 29 states.

The Medicaid expansion states, as a rule, have seen a marked decline in their uninsured rates and the amount of costs their hospitals incur in caring for people without insurance.

Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas still has $765 million in uncompensated care costs annually from treating the uninsured.

"A huge chunk" of Parkland's uncompensated care costs "could be paid for by about $580 million a year that would be brought in by the Medicaid expansion monies," said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, who oversees the hospital.

    

Also galling to the business community is research showing that for every $1 the state paid toward Medicaid expansion, it would earn back $1.30 in new economic activity, which would include the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
"You look at the numbers, and you say, this is a no-brainer," said Ray Perryman, a leading Texas economist, in an interview with NPR.

Traditional Medicaid is jointly run by the federal government and individual states, and enrollees do not pay premiums for their health coverage. States have the power to set restrictions on who can receive coverage, whose costs are split, more or less evenly, with the federal government.

No health coverage for the poor will cost the States much more money than having coverage.   Just a thought. 

Complete silence

 

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert paid a man to conceal a sexual relationship they had while the man was a student at the high school where Hastert taught, a federal law enforcement official told NBC News on Friday.

Tribune reported earlier in the day that two unnamed federal officials said that Hastert paid a man from his past to conceal sexual misconduct.

Hastert was indicted Thursday on charges that he structured bank withdrawals to avoid federal reporting requirements and later lied about it to the FBI.
 
The indictment said that Hastert was paying an unidentified person from his past to conceal Hastert's "prior misconduct." The indictment did not specify the alleged misconduct or name the person.

The Yorkville, Illinois, school district where Hastert taught and coached wrestling from 1965 to 1981 said that it had "no knowledge of Mr. Hastert's alleged misconduct, nor has any individual contacted the District to report any such misconduct."

No one on the Republican party said any thing.    Nobody said Hilary had a wrestling team.....   Just a thought.

Delay...

Federal regulators announced that Teva Pharmaceuticals will pay $1.2 billion to settle charges that one of its subsidiaries illegally blocked the launch of low-cost generic versions of the blockbuster sleeping pill Provigil.

Thursday's settlement stems from charges brought in 2008 against Cephalon Inc., acquired by Teva. The FTC alleged that Cephalon paid four generic firms more than $300 million to delay launching their low-cost versions of Provigil drugs until 2012. Provigil is approved to treat excessive sleepiness and posted U.S. sales exceeding $1 billion in 2008, accounting for about half of Cephalon's sales that year.

The $1.2 billion fee from Teva would be paid to pharmacies, insurers, wholesalers and other businesses. The settlement agreement also bars Teva from entering into similar reverse settlement deals.

In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in a key case that reverse settlement agreements can run afoul of federal antitrust laws, and therefore be challenged in court.

"Today's landmark settlement is an important step in the FTC's ongoing effort to protect consumers from anticompetitive pay for delay settlements, which burden patients, American businesses, and taxpayers with billions of dollars in higher prescription drug costs.  Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Limited is the world's largest generic drug maker.

Open the door for generic medications from Canada and most of these scams will disappear. Just a thought.

Abolishing death penalty

In a landmark veto-override vote backed by an unusual coalition of conservatives who oppose capital punishment, Nebraska abolished the death penalty.
Senators in the one-house Legislature voted to override Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican who supports the death penalty. The vote makes Nebraska the first traditionally conservative state to eliminate the punishment since North Dakota in 1973.

Some senators said they philosophically support the death penalty, but are convinced the state will never carry out another execution because of legal obstacles. Nebraska hasn't executed an inmate since a 1997 electrocution.

The repeal bill was introduced by independent Sen. Ernie Chambers, who has fought for nearly four decades to repeal the death penalty.
  
Nebraska now has 10 men on death row, after one died on Sunday of natural causes.
Michael Ryan on death row for the 1985 cult killings of two people, including a 5-year-old boy had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are innocent, according to the first major study to attempt to calculate how often states get it wrong in their wielding of the ultimate punishment. [The Guardian, Ed Pilkington].

Just a thought.

Mathematician's...

John Forbes Nash, Jr. (June 13, 1928) was an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the factors that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life.

His theories are used in economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, computer science (minimax algorithm which is based on Nash Equilibrium), games of skill, politics and military theory.

Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. In 2015, he was awarded the Abel Prize for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations.

In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, and spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia. After 1970, his condition slowly improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s. His struggles with his illness and his recovery became the basis for Sylvia Nasar's biography, A Beautiful Mind, as well as a film of the same name starring Russell Crowe.

On May 23, 2015 was killed in a motor vehicle accident in New Jersey.  Just a thought.

Irish landslide

Irish voters have resoundingly backed amending the constitution to legalize gay marriage, leaders on both sides of the Irish referendum declared on Saturday.

Couples hugged and kissed each other amid scenes of jubilation at counting centers and at the official results center in Dublin Castle, whose cobblestoned central square was opened so thousands of revelers could sit in the sunshine and watch the results live on big-screen televisions.

We're the first country in the world to enshrine marriage equality in our constitution and do so by popular mandate. That makes us a beacon, a light to the rest of the world, of liberty and equality. So it's a very proud day to be Irish.

"For me it wasn't just a referendum. It was more like a social revolution".

In the first official result, the Dublin North West constituency voted 70.4 percent "yes" to gay marriage. But the outcome was already beyond dispute as observers, permitted to watch the paper ballots being counted at all election centers, offered precise tallies giving the "yes" side an unassailable nationwide lead.

Political analysts who have covered Irish referendums for decades agreed that Saturday's emerging landslide marked a stunning generational shift from the 1980s, when voters still firmly backed Catholic Church teachings and overwhelmingly voted against abortion and divorce.

"We're in a new country," said political analyst Sean Donnelly, who called the result "a tidal wave" that has produced pro-gay marriage majorities in even the most traditionally conservative rural corners of Ireland.

The world is changing. Just a thought.