The only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows in Montana territory.

On the back of the picture Judy obtained during her research is this inscription: 'Remus Reid, horse thief, sent to  Montana Territorial Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.'

So Judy recently e-mailed Congressman Harry Reid for information about their great-great uncle.

Believe it or not, Harry Reid's staff sent back the following biographical sketch for her genealogy research: 'Remus Reid was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory . His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the  Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to government service, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad.
In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.'

NOW THAT's how it's done, Folks!

Monster.com (MNST) said Tuesday that it will impose a mandatory password change for all North American and Western European users of its popular employment website by the end of this week. 

The precaution comes after Monster quietly posted an online notice Friday disclosing that its customer databases had been hacked for the second time in six months. Thieves took user IDs, passwords, e-mail addresses, names, phone numbers, birth dates, ethnicity and state of residence for an undisclosed number of job seekers and employers, spokeswoman Nikki Richardson said. 

Richardson said a criminal investigation is underway. She declined to confirm or refute a report by The Times of London that 4.5 million British users of Monster had their data stolen. She noted that the thieves did not swipe Social Security numbers, résumés or customer transaction data. 

The theft underscores how cybercriminals are intensifying attacks on data storehouses. Last week, Heartland Payment Systems disclosed that hackers broke into the system it uses to process 100 million payment card transactions a month. "Data is king," says Don Leatham, senior director of solutions and strategy at security firm Lumension. "We will continue to see an uptick in targeted attacks in 2009." 

Security and privacy experts say millions of Monster's patrons are in a particularly vulnerable state. Typing a stolen user ID and password gives an intruder access to everything available to the member job seeker or employer. Crooks "hoover up" such data, says Avivah Litan, banking security analyst at Gartner. They then correlate it with other information, stolen elsewhere, and use it to hijack bank accounts, break into company systems and do other scams. 

A data thief could type in a stolen user ID and password, gain access and then change the password to secure permanent access to the account, says Sam Masiello, vice president of information security at security firm MX Logic. "Considering many users are not always active, this leaves a huge potential for many accounts to be compromised," Masiello says. 

Los Angeles attorney and privacy advocate Mari Frank says Monster users should feel violated. "Here they are, trusting that the information they give up is going only to prospective employers, and now the criminals have it. It's such a betrayal." 

Richardson countered that Monster strives to "provide the best practical security we can." 

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2009-01-27-monster-data-hackers_N.htm

Sharks are important to the health of the oceans, yet humans kill more than 100 million sharks each year. And it's already having dire impacts on the rest of the ocean. The removal of sharks from the ecosystem affects the species below them on the food chain in unpredictable ways, even altering coral reefs and sea grass beds.

That's why it's so important for Congress to pass the Shark Conservation Act, which would protect these important creatures and the entire ocean ecosystem. The Shark Conservation Act would require sharks caught in all U.S. waters to be landed whole with their fins attached. Under current law, fins and carcasses are only required to be landed in a specific ratio.

Urge your representative to help ensure fast passage of this important piece of legislation for the health of our world's oceans!

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/190900047?z00m=19310647

I did this, and it only takes a few seconds - you don't even have to talk to anyone. CA wants to legislate a 9% tax on all veterinary services, including meds. This is really reprehensible at a time when so much is being done to heighten awareness regarding caring for animals. Veterinarians, whose training and licensing is as rigorous as that of MDs will now have their care taxed as though they were dispensing canned goods. And the cost of surgeries, neutering, etc. is high-an additional 9% will discourage many from giving their pet care. Please call the Governors's office and make it known that balancing the budget at the expense of our pets' health is not acceptable!!! It only takes about 20 seconds because it's all automated. Call 916-445-2841. Press 1 for English. Press 5 for the veterinary tax proposal. It will ask you to press 1 if you're calling about the veterinary tax proposal, so press 1. Then press 2 to oppose the tax Please forward to others. Thanks.

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make
the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the
troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is
disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu
understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze
forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl .

James Fallows has a good post on his Atlantic blog about the Chinese censorship of Obama’s speech. He answers the question I’ve been asking myself: Why in the world would anyone - even a Chinese censor - be so stupid as to censor the inauguration speech of the new American president, especially one so popular overseas as Obama? Fallows, who has spent a good amount of time in China and knows the country well, writes “the people in charge of China’s propaganda apparatus are among the least worldly and most rigid-minded people in the entire country, with absolutely the least feel for how people in other countries might react or think. So apparently some of these ignoramuses considered it a good and prudent idea to cut off Obama — even if the vast majority of their fellow citizens would consider such paranoia to be extreme and bizarre. Also, within a part of the government where orthodoxy is everything, an official takes no risks by being too hard-line, but could get in trouble by being too permissive.”

That makes sense. Everybody knows China’s censors have a list of taboo subjects that Net users in the country are not allowed to discuss. By talking about the defeat of communism (albeit not in China) and regimes that try to stifle dissent, Obama ventured into that off-limits territory. So the censors’ knees jerked and they cut. Sure, it means the Chinese censors are now up there with Chief Justice John Roberts among the spoilers of a perfect Day One for Obama. But rules are rules.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/archives/2009/01/why_chinas_cens.html?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_global+business

December job cuts were far worse than expected.  A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal read, “No-Layoff Policies Crumble,” as a number of companies with historical “no layoff” policies have been forced by the economic downturn to do the unthinkable.  Unfortunately, this all-or-nothing approach ignores an important, interim possibility—flexible downsizing. 

As I’ve written many times (here, here, and here), using strategic work+life flexibility--reduced schedules, sabbaticals, job sharing, project-based consulting—can help organizations avoid at least some layoffs.   But, nevertheless, according to the WSJ article:

After 51-years of never laying anyone off, even after 9/11, Enterprise Rent-A-Car is laying off 1,000 or its 75,000 employees.

Gentex Corporation, a company that “didn’t even have a layoff policy,” dismissed 15% of its workforce or 370 employees.

Life Time Fitness laid off 100 of its 15,000 employees. 

In fairness, the WSJ article discussed how the companies tried to avoid layoffs by “freezing salaries,” “drumming up work for idle employees,” “filling openings with temporary workers,” and “moving employees to busy segments from those with little work.” But nowhere did the article mention creative uses of strategic flexibility that would keep valued employees while allowing companies to reduce labor costs. 

Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School was quoted as saying, “Companies really respond to these things based on what they think they ought to be doing.  They watch what their competitors do and listen to what the investment community tells them.” 

Okay, so clearly companies are not seeing their peers use flexible downsizing as an interim step before layoffs.  So maybe they think this is the only option.  And the investment community is stuck in the all or nothing, short-term answer to managing labor costs.  But what are the hidden costs of this inflexible, zero sum approach?

As economist, Albert Wojnilower, noted in a recent New York Times article, “The job insecurity is very serious; that is the worst aspect of all of this.  But most upturns in the economy have begun with upturns in consumption, when people who still have jobs stop worrying about losing them.”  If employees thought they’d have a reduced schedule, have to share their job, or become a project-based consultant before being laid off, would it make people less afraid and would the recovery begin sooner? 

Many of the economists in the same New York Times article felt there is a chance the economy could turn around within the next year.  Then what?  Will companies be ready to hit the ground running, or will they be scrambling to find and train new people?  Wouldn’t it be smarter to increase the hours of a worker on a reduced schedule, or hire back someone full-time who had been consulting? 

With Alcoa announcing it's laying off 13% of its workforce or 13,500 people, let's recognize that maybe the traditional “all or nothing” approach to managing labor costs is not the only answer.  There's a third powerful step in the middle, using strategic work+life flexibility to reduce costs while staying connected to valuable employees.  Flexible downsizing may also have economic benefits beyond direct labor costs savings for the employer, such as limiting consumer fear and positioning organizations to have trained talent in place when the recovery begins.  But first organizations need to understand, downsizing is a three-stage process, not two. 

What do you think?  With unemployment numbers approaching historic levels, can we afford an all or nothing approach to downsizing?  

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cali-yost/worklife-fit-not-balance/downsizing-shoud-have-three-stages-no-layoffs-flexible-downs

From the outset Facebook was a bit more grownup than MySpace, which has been, at least according to Internet legend, the teen realm. But as of the end of 2008, grownups have pretty much raided all of the social networks.

Recently, one teen I know lamented that his friends at school preferred Facebook. “MySpace is better,” he said. “They let you customize your page and there aren’t as many old people there.”

He’s trying to lead a movement, but if and when he returns to MySpace he may be in for a surprise. According to Pew Internet and American Life, the number of adults using social networks as quadrupled since 2005.

And that means there are more adults using social networks than teens these days. Though 65 percent of teens are populating online networks compared to only 35 percent of adults, the number of people in the world over 18 is obviously much larger.

Don’t get those supposedly stuffy grownups wrong, though. They really take the “social” part of social networking seriously. Pew says adults use social networks primarily for personal reasons, like connecting with people they already know, and reserve business networking for where it belongs: at sites like LinkedIn.

Fortunately for the teens concerned about adult saturation, the bulk of grown up social networkers skew younger: 75 percent of the those ages 18-24 are networking, compared to just seven percent of those over 65.

But don’t expect that to last forever. Says one Kentucky-to-Atlanta transplant I know who has not yet embraced the online social network: “A friend of my parents died and, aside from the posting in the local paper, the family only sent out word via Facebook. And I’m like, is this the way it’s going to be? The only way I’m going to know if somebody dies is if I’m on Facebook?”  

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/01/14/social-networks-not-just-for-kids-anymore

I was recently challenged with the following question, “Do you believe that shareholder value is coming to and end?” To which I answered:

Properly viewed, shareholder value is a measurement of performance rather than a driver of performance. Regrettably, we are suffering from a business environment that has been conditioned to believe otherwise. One of the books I am writing deals with this phenomenon.

Most companies are run by managers; only a few are run by leaders. Yet, there is a significant difference between the two. Managers push employees to achieve corporate objectives. Hence, we live in a world of quotas, budget cuts and “street expectations” … all based upon the fictional estimates of what a handful of generally under-informed individuals believe might happen (or needs to happen for them to maximize their incomes).

Conversely, leaders recognize that the true drivers of value are the people who actually do the work. They take the time to learn what’s important to their employees whose personal goals, if achieved, almost certainly will exceed the wildest expectations of the corporation. Then, they create and maintain an environment that is focused upon helping those employees achieve their goals.

Making a concerted effort to help employees achieve their goals within the context of their values can have an astonishing impact. It parallels what we used to see in the former Soviet Union, where farmers would be given 200 acres to farm for the State and one acre to farm for their personal consumption. Their one personal acre would routinely out produce the other 200 acres. Ah, the free market at work.

Leaders inspire while managers tend to threaten. Under which environment do you think your performance would thrive? Since “change” seems to be the contemporary word of the day, managers need to learn to become leaders. They need to “change” their focus to what is truly important: the employee.

Shareholders lend money; essentially placing a bet on the performance of the companies in which they invest. Their investments represent one of the two forms of capital financing (i.e., equity versus debt), which together should be used to finance the capital expansion of the organization rather than to fund operations.

Interestingly enough, shareholders are often advised to make their investments on a long-term basis, but senior executives often make business decisions that are designed to inflate short-term performance; thus jeopardizing long-term returns. This is because executive compensation has been so closely tied to short-term shareholder value (due to stock option bonuses, etc.) that attention is diverted away from strategic decisions that would have a greater return over a longer period of time. Another fear of senior executives is that if they fail to satiate short-term expectations, they may not be around to reap the rewards of executing superior long-term plans.

It reminds me of Peter Drucker’s observation that “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.” Until leadership is established as a priority, our economy will continue to suffer. We will have executives announcing the layoff of 53,000 employees and petitioning for a $300 billion government bailout who then turn around and spend $400 million to have their company’s name emblazoned on a baseball stadium. We will have manufacturers announcing layoffs and plant closings while petitioning for a second infusion of $26 billion in subsidizations (with no strings attached) that then sponsor two professional golf tournaments over the ensuing weeks. Other companies cut services and jobs and cancel raises except for those that are required under contract (i.e., read as “except for top executives”), so that they can remain Wall Street “darlings” in the short-term while sacrificing morale and employee loyalty and commitment in the long-term.

When leaders once again rise to the top and “do the right things,” employees will become the predominant focus, and economic order will be restored.

In closing, I offer O’Hara’s Theory of the Little Big Horn, which I have shared somewhat tongue-in-cheek over the years during some of my public appearances. During the Battle of the Little Big Horn, if 2,000 chiefs had surrounded the rim of the canyon and only a handful of braves had ridden down the hill, Custer’s 7th Cavalry would have easily defeated them. Custer’s problem was that only a handful of chiefs sat up on the ridge while 2,000 braves charged down the hill to attack him and his troops. The morale of the story is, “Make sure you have enough braves to fight your wars.” Well, that’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it. I think investors are best served by companies that provide the outstanding products and service their customers need and deserve, and that to do so requires a loyal and completely satisfied workforce that is totally committed to the core vision, mission and values of their company.

What do you think?

Dr. Terry O'Hara

http://oharaglobal.blogspot.com/2008/12/business-focus-shareholder-value-versus.html

60 Minutes: Speculation Affected Oil Price Swings More Than Supply And Demand

About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market.

So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.

To understand what happened to the price of oil, you first have to understand the way it's traded. For years it has been bought and sold on something called the commodities futures market. At the New York Mercantile Exchange, it's traded alongside cotton and coffee, copper and steel by brokers who buy and sell contracts to deliver those goods at a certain price at some date in the future.

It was created so that farmers could gauge what their unharvested crops would be worth months in advance, so that factories could lock in the best price for raw materials, and airlines could manage their fuel costs. But more than a year ago those markets started to behave erratically. And when oil doubled to more than $147 a barrel, no one was more suspicious than Dan Gilligan.

As the president of the Petroleum Marketers Association, he represents more than 8,000 retail and wholesale suppliers, everyone from home heating oil companies to gas station owners.

When 60 Minutes talked to him last summer, his members were getting blamed for gouging the public, even though their costs had also gone through the roof. He told Kroft the problem was in the commodities markets, which had been invaded by a new breed of investor.

"Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. Not by companies that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies. But by investors that are looking to make money from their speculative positions," Gilligan explained.

Gilligan said these investors don't actually take delivery of the oil. "All they do is buy the paper, and hope that they can sell it for more than they paid for it. Before they have to take delivery."

"They're trying to make money on the market for oil?" Kroft asked.

"Absolutely," Gilligan replied. "On the volatility that exists in the market. They make it going up and down."

He says his members in the home heating oil business, like Sean Cota of Bellows Falls, Vt., were the first to notice the effects a few years ago when prices seemed to disconnect from the basic fundamentals of supply and demand. Cota says there was plenty of product at the supply terminals, but the prices kept going up and up.

"We've had three price changes during the day where we pick up products, actually don't know what we paid for it and we'll go out and we'll sell that to the retail customer guessing at what the price was," Cota remembered. "The volatility is being driven by the huge amounts of money and the huge amounts of leverage that is going in to these markets."

About the same time, hedge fund manager Michael Masters reached the same conclusion. Masters' expertise is in tracking the flow of investments into and out of financial markets and he noticed huge amounts of money leaving stocks for commodities and oil futures, most of it going into index funds, betting the price of oil was going to go up.

Asked who was buying this "paper oil," Masters told Kroft, "The California pension fund. Harvard Endowment. Lots of large institutional investors. And, by the way, other investors, hedge funds, Wall Street trading desks were following right behind them, putting money - sovereign wealth funds were putting money in the futures markets as well. So you had all these investors putting money in the futures markets. And that was driving the price up."

In a five year period, Masters said the amount of money institutional investors, hedge funds, and the big Wall Street banks had placed in the commodities markets went from $13 billion to $300 billion. Last year, 27 barrels of crude were being traded every day on the New York Mercantile Exchange for every one barrel of oil that was actually being consumed in the United States.

"We talked to the largest physical trader of crude oil. And they told us that compared to the size of the investment inflows - and remember, this is the largest physical crude oil trader in the United States - they said that we are basically a flea on an elephant, that that's how big these flows were," Masters remembered.

Yet when Congress began holding hearings last summer and asked Wall Street banker Lawrence Eagles of J.P. Morgan what role excessive speculation played in rising oil prices, the answer was little to none. "We believe that high energy prices are fundamentally a result of supply and demand," he said in his testimony.

As it turns out, not even J.P. Morgan's chief global investment officer agreed with him. The same that day Eagles testified, an e-mail went out to clients saying "an enormous amount of speculation" ran up the price" and "140 dollars in July was ridiculous."

If anyone had any doubts, they were dispelled a few days after that hearing when the price of oil jumped $25 in a single day. That day was Sept. 22.

Michael Greenberger, a former director of trading for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that oversees oil futures, says there were no supply disruptions that could have justified such a big increase.

"Did China and India suddenly have gigantic needs for new oil products in a single day? No. Everybody agrees supply-demand could not drive the price up $25, which was a record increase in the price of oil. The price of oil went from somewhere in the 60s to $147 in less than a year. And we were being told, on that run-up, 'It's supply-demand, supply-demand, supply-demand,'" Greenberger said.

A recent report out of MIT, analyzing world oil production and consumption, also concluded that the basic fundamentals of supply and demand could not have been responsible for last year's run-up in oil prices. And Michael Masters says the U.S. Department of Energy's own statistics show that if the markets had been working properly, the price of oil should have been going down, not up.

"From quarter four of '07 until the second quarter of '08 the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, said that supply went up, worldwide supply went up. And worldwide demand went down. So you have supply going up and demand going down, which generally means the price is going down," Masters told Kroft.

"And this was the period of the spike," Kroft noted.

"This was the period of the spike," Masters agreed. "So you had the largest price increase in history during a time when actual demand was going down and actual supply was going up during the same period. However, the only thing that makes sense that lifted the price was investor demand."

Masters believes the investor demand for commodities, and oil futures in particular, was created on Wall Street by hedge funds and the big Wall Street investment banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and J.P. Morgan, who made billions investing hundreds of billions of dollars of their clients’ money.

"The investment banks facilitated it," Masters said. "You know, they found folks to write papers espousing the benefits of investing in commodities. And then they promoted commodities as a, quote/unquote, 'asset class.' Like, you could invest in commodities just like you could in stocks or bonds or anything else, like they were suitable for long-term investment."

Dan Gilligan of the Petroleum Marketers Association agreed.

"Are you saying that companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Barclays have as much to do with the price of oil going up as Exxon? Or…Shell?" Kroft asked.

"Yes," Gilligan said. "I tease people sometimes that, you know, people say, 'Well, who's the largest oil company in America?' And they'll always say, 'Well, Exxon Mobil or Chevron, or BP.' But I'll say, 'No. Morgan Stanley.'"

Morgan Stanley isn't an oil company in the traditional sense of the word - it doesn't own or control oil wells or refineries, or gas stations. But according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Morgan Stanley is a significant player in the wholesale market through various entities controlled by the corporation.

It not only buys and sells the physical product through subsidiaries and companies that it controls, Morgan Stanley has the capacity to store and hold 20 million barrels. For example, some storage tanks in New Haven, Conn. hold Morgan Stanley heating oil bound for homes in New England, where it controls nearly 15 percent of the market.

The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs also has huge stakes in companies that own a refinery in Coffeyville, Kan., and control 43,000 miles of pipeline and more than 150 storage terminals.

And analysts at both investment banks contributed to the oil frenzy that drove prices to record highs: Goldman's top oil analyst predicted last March that the price of a barrel was going to $200; Morgan Stanley predicted $150 a barrel.

Both companies declined 60 Minutes' requests for an interview, but maintain that their oil businesses are completely separate from their trading activities, and that neither influence the independent opinions of their analysts. There is no evidence that either company has done anything illegal.

Asked if there is price manipulation going on, Dan Gilligan told Kroft, "I can't say. And the reason I can't say it, is because nobody knows. Our federal regulators don't have access to the data. They don't know who holds what positions."

"Why don't they know?" Kroft asked.

"Because federal law doesn't give them the jurisdiction to find out," Gilligan said.

It's impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation. And in 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps, as well as electronic trading on private exchanges.

"Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger.

"You'd have to say Enron," he replied. "This was something they desperately wanted, and they got."

Greenberger, who wanted more regulation while he was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not less, says it all happened when Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the United States. "This was when Enron was riding high. And what Enron wanted, Enron got."

Asked why they wanted a deregulated market in oil futures, Greenberger said, "Because they wanted to establish their own little energy futures exchange through computerized trading. They knew that if they could get this trading engine established without the controls that had been placed on speculators, they would have the ability to drive the price of energy products in any way they wanted to take it."

"When Enron failed, we learned that Enron, and its conspirators who used their trading engine, were able to drive the price of electricity up, some say, by as much as 300 percent on the West Coast," he added.

"Is the same thing going on right now in the oil business?" Kroft asked.

"Every Enron trader, who knew how to do these manipulations, became the most valuable employee on Wall Street," Greenberger said.

But some of them may now be looking for work. The oil bubble began to deflate early last fall when Congress threatened new regulations and federal agencies announced they were beginning major investigations. It finally popped with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of AIG, who were both heavily invested in the oil markets. With hedge funds and investment houses facing margin calls, the speculators headed for the exits.

"From July 15th until the end of November, roughly $70 billion came out of commodities futures from these index funds," Masters explained. "In fact, gasoline demand went down by roughly five percent over that same period of time. Yet the price of crude oil dropped more than $100 a barrel. It dropped 75 percent."

Asked how he explains that, Masters said, "By looking at investors, that's the only way you can explain it."

The regulatory lapses in the commodities market that many believe fomented the rampant speculation in oil have still not been addressed, although the incoming Obama administration has promised to do so.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/08/60minutes/main4707770.shtml

 

Both sides in the legal battle that is threatening the next America's Cup are hardening their positions in a bid to influence the New York court ahead of its final decision in the case.

The prestigious yacht clubs of New York and San Diego have since last week come out firmly in support of US challenger Oracle against Swiss defender Alinghi.

Both US clubs have presented briefs to the court backing Oracle's contention that Alinghi had chosen an ineligible club, Spain's CNEV, to be its official "challenger of record," which gives it the right to help set the rules for the next race along with the title holder.

In its "amicus curiae" legal brief filed last week, the New York Yacht Club, which held the cup for 132 years after its inception in 1851, described the CNEV as "a mere shell of a yacht club" said the Spanish club's position as "challenger of record" gave Alinghi an unfair advantage.

And they have been joined by American billionaire Bill Koch, who won the cup with America 3 in 1992.

Alinghi shot back on Monday by presenting a brief filed by two challengers, French Spirit and South Africa's Shosholoza, rebutting these arguments and attacking the NYYC.

It charged the NYYC engaged in "dictatorial conduct" during its involvement in the cup and is now "serving essentially as a puppet to parrot (Oracle's) arguments."

This sharper tone by both sides reflects a hardening of the positions of their respective billionaire owners -- Larry Ellison of Oracle and Ernesto Bertarelli of Alinghi -- ahead of the court decision.

Alinghi, which successfully defended the cup in the eastern Spanish port of Valencia in 2007, has registered 18 challengers for the 33rd edition, to be held in Valencia in 2010 or 2011.

It is convinced that 10 of these will support its legal case. But none of them have the reputation of the two US yacht clubs.

The New York court is to begin hearing final arguments in the case on February 10 and is expected to issue a ruling in late March.

A legal victory for Oracle could force Alinghi to take part in a multihull duel against its American foe as a "default option" under the Deed of Gift, the 19th century rules that govern the oldest continuously held competition in international sport.

Both teams say they want to avoid the face-off and hold a traditional regatta in Valencia in 2010. But they have been unable to agree on a compromise deal.

A New York judge initially ruled in Oracle's favour in the case in November 2007.

Alinghi successfully appealed that decision, and Oracle then filed their own appeal.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iMNO7SA92Wy6VPeSJedVgH2DHagQ

Voice over IP or telephone over the internet is tempting, especially when you listen to all the promises of savings from providers like Vonage.  But will your connection support VoIP and what quality will you get.  This website will allow to test your connection and answer your questions before you spend any cash

www.voipreview.org/voipspeedtester.aspx