Emerging markets: a bigger say in IMF?

Associated Press / June 20, 2011 BEIJING – Mexico's central bank governor said Thursday that now is the time for emerging markets to have a greater voice within the European-dominated International Monetary Fund, after meeting Chinese officials to seek support for his bid for the top job.
Agustin Carstens met his Chinese counterpart Zhou Xiaochuan and Finance Minister Xie Xuren, but he told reporters afterward he came away without any guarantee of support.
During their discussions, the Chinese officials reiterated their position that they want a merit-based candidate, he said.
The other candidate, the favorite for the IMF's top job, is French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who visited China last week. Both have been courting emerging markets that have been pushing for a bigger say in the IMF to reflect their growing economic clout.
"I think it is the moment for emerging markets to join forces and to make the strong point that we do not agree with the way the fund is being run," Carstens said, adding that emerging markets are underrepresented in terms of participation in and management of the fund.
Despite his emphasis on emerging markets, he said the most pressing issue confronting the IMF at the moment is the crisis in Europe. He also said the IMF should take decisions relating to Greece's massive debt with the potential consequences on the whole eurozone in mind.
Countries including China, India and Brazil have called for scrapping a tradition under which the IMF's top post has been filled by a European since it was founded following World War II. Still, none of those countries has so far come out in support of Carstens, who has served as executive director and deputy managing director of the IMF.
Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai, said China would like to see a leader from theemerging markets as these countries "have their own problems ... but this doesn't change anything as the U.S. and Europe have over 50 percent of the (voting) share."

"The Chinese are realists," he said, adding that the contest was "a show" and there was no doubt that Lagarde would win. "For public appearance they (the candidates) need to seek some support from emergingeconomies. But the final outcome — there's no doubt."

Lagarde emerged as the front-runner after European officials closed ranks behind her. She also has received endorsements from Indonesia and Egypt.
The United States has so far been neutral in the race, but it has never broken from Europe in who should lead the IMF. In return, Europe has always supported a U.S. candidate to head the IMF's sister organization, the World Bank.
Carstens has the support of 12 Latin American countries, but lacks those with the most voting power — Argentina and Brazil.
The IMF's 24-member executive board will elect a leader June 30. The organization lends money to countries to help resolve balance of payments problems and has played a key role in trying to solve debt crises in Europe.
The top position became vacant after Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned last month following his arrest on sexual assault charges, allegations that he denies.

ICANN approves change to Internet domain name system

IDG News Service - The board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved an increase in the number of Internet domain name endings, known as generic top-level domains (gTLDs), from the current 22.

As a result of the decision arrived on Monday by the board of directors at a meeting in Singapore, Internet users may start seeing new domain name extensions in addition to the more familiar .com, .org, and .net. The current 22 gTLDs also include some country-level domains such as .uk and .in.
The move will not only benefit companies, but also regions and cities that can now use more relevant domain name extensions, said Rajesh Chharia, president of Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI).
The decision respects the rights of groups to create new top-level domains in any language and script, ICANN said in a statement.
The board vote was 13 in approval, 1 opposing, and 2 abstaining.
Internet address names will be able to end with almost any word in any language, offering organizations around the world the opportunity to market their brand, products, community or cause in new and innovative ways, ICANN said.
Applications for new gTLDs will be accepted from Jan. 12 to April 12 next year.

Clarence Clemons, Springsteen’s Soulful Sideman, Dies at 69

Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, whose jovial onstage manner, soul-rooted style and brotherly relationship with Mr. Springsteen made him one of rock’s most beloved sidemen, died on Saturday at a hospital in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 69.
The cause was complications of a stroke he suffered last Sunday at his home in Singer Island, Fla., a spokeswoman for Mr. Springsteen said.
In a statement released Saturday night, Mr. Springsteen called Mr. Clemons “my great friend, my partner.”
“With Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music,” he added. “His life, his memory and his love will live on in that story and in our band.”  
From the beginnings of the E Street Band in 1972, Mr. Clemons played a central part in Mr. Springsteen’s music, complementing the group’s electric guitar and driving rhythms in songs like “Born to Run” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” with muscular, melodic saxophone hooks that echoed doo-wop, soul and early rock ’n’ roll.
But equally important to the group’s image was the sense of affection and unbreakable camaraderie between Mr. Springsteen and his sax man. Few E Street Band shows were complete without a shaggy-dog story about the stormy night the two men met at a bar in Asbury Park, N.J., or a long bear hug between them at the end of the night.
Mr. Clemons also became something of a celebrity in his own right, acting in Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” and other films, and on television shows like “Diff’rent Strokes,” and jamming with President Bill Clinton at the 1993 inaugural ball.
A former college football player, Mr. Clemons towered over Mr. Springsteen at 6 feet 4 inches and about 250 pounds — his self-evident nickname was the Big Man — and for most of its history, he stood out as the sole black man in a white, working-class New Jersey rock band. (The keyboardist David Sancious, who is also black, played with the group until 1974.) Onstage he had almost as much magnetism as Mr. Springsteen, and even if much of his time was spent hitting a cowbell or singing backup, he could still stir up a stadium crowd with a few cheerful notes on his horn.
For many fans, the bond between Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Clemons was symbolized by the photograph wrapped around the front and back covers of the 1975 album “Born to Run.” In that picture, a spent yet elated Mr. Springsteen leans on a shoulder to his right for support; the flip side revealed that it belonged to Mr. Clemons.
“When you look at just the cover of ‘Born to Run,’ you see a charming photo, a good album cover, but when you open it up and see Clarence and me together, the album begins to work its magic,” Mr. Springsteen wrote in a foreword to “Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales,” Mr. Clemons’s semifictional memoir from 2009, written with Don Reo. “Who are these guys? Where did they come from? What is the joke they are sharing?”
Clarence Anicholas Clemons was born on Jan. 11, 1942, in Norfolk, Va. His father owned a fish market and his grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher, and although he grew up surrounded by gospel music, the young Mr. Clemons was captivated by rock ’n’ roll. He was given an alto saxophone at age 9 as a Christmas gift; later, following the influence of King Curtis — whose many credits include the jaunty sax part on the Coasters’ 1958 hit “Yakety Yak” — he switched to the tenor.
“I grew up with a very religious background,” he once said in an interview. “I got into the soul music, but I wanted to rock. I was a rocker. I was a born rock ’n’ roll sax player.”
Mr. Clemons was also a gifted athlete, and he attended Maryland State College (now the University of Maryland Eastern Shore) on a scholarship for football and music. He tried out for the Dallas Cowboys and the Cleveland Browns, but a knee injury ended his hopes for a football career.
He was working as a youth counselor in Newark when he began to mix with the Jersey Shore music scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s. He was older than Mr. Springsteen and most of his future band mates, and he often commented on the oddity — even the liability — of being a racially integrated group in those days.
“You had your black bands and you had your white bands,” he wrote in his memoir, “and if you mixed the two you found less places to play.”
But the match was strong from the start, and his saxophone soon became a focal point of the group’s sound. In an interview with The New York Times in 2005, Jon Landau, Mr. Springsteen’s manager, said that during the recording sessions for “Born to Run,” Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Clemons spent 16 hours finessing the jazzy saxophone solo on that album’s closing song, “Jungleland.”
Mr. Clemons’s charisma and eccentricity extended offstage. Wherever the band played, he made his dressing room into a shrine he called the Temple of Soul. He claimed to have played pool with Fidel Castro and won. And by many accounts, including his own, he was a champion partier on the road. He was married five times and divorced four. His fifth wife, Victoria, survives him, as do four sons: Clarence Jr., Charles, Christopher and Jarod.
Mr. Springsteen put the E Street Band on hiatus on 1989, and apart from reuniting for a recording session in 1995, the group did not play again until 1999. But by the mid-1980s, when Mr. Springsteen reached his commercial peak, Mr. Clemons had already found fame on his own. In 1985 he had a Top 20 hit with “You’re a Friend of Mine,” on which he sang with Jackson Browne, and played saxophone on records by Aretha Franklin and Twisted Sister. Recently he was featured on Lady Gaga’s album “Born This Way.”
Mr. Clemons’s first encounter with Mr. Springsteen has become E Street Band lore. In most tellings, a lightning storm was rolling through Asbury Park one night in 1971 while Mr. Springsteen was playing a gig there. As Mr. Clemons entered the bar, the wind blew the door off its hinges, and Mr. Springsteen was startled by the towering shadow at the door. Then Mr. Clemons invited himself onstage to play along, and they clicked.
“I swear I will never forget that moment,” Mr. Clemons later recalled in an interview. “I felt like I was supposed to be there. It was a magical moment. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love. And that’s still there.”

Facebook facial recognition? Sounds like some "CSI" episode.

Facebook's facial-recognition feature for automatically tagging uploaded photos with the names of those pictured sparked a backlash from privacy advocates. Now it's coming under scrutiny from Connecticut's attorney general, who sent a letter to company officials this week requesting a meeting.
Attorney General George Jepsen of Connecticut said he has "deep concerns" about Facebook's choice to make the tagging feature opt-out, not opt-in.
"The potential uses of facial recognition on this scale remain unclear but concerning," Jepsen wrote. "This important privacy issue needs to be addressed promptly. There may be some fairly simple changes that can be implemented to make certain that consumers are fully aware of the implications of 'Tag Suggestions.'"

Facebook first introduced its "Tag Suggestions" tool in December, but it has recently accelerated the feature's worldwide roll-out to the site's 500 million members. Four privacy advocacy groups, including the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), banded together last week and filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. They asked the FTC to require Facebook to cease using facial recognition technology without users' explicit, opt-in consent.

A Facebook representative said the company is in contact with Jepsen's office and is "eager" to explain more about how Tag Suggestions works. However, Facebook is standing behind the tool and its widespread deployment.
"Since last December, we've been gradually rolling out the feature and millions of people have used it to add hundreds of millions of tags," Facebook said in a written statement. "This data, and the fact that we've had almost no user complaints, suggests people are enjoying the feature and are finding it useful."

Facebook members who don't want their name to come up in the suggestions tool can disable it in their "privacy settings" panel. Facebook offers instructions for how to do that in its blog and in its "help" pages. Members can also un-tag themselves from a photo at any time.

But EPIC and other critics say those tools are too difficult to use, and that the onus should be on Facebook to expressly confirm users' consent -- not the other way around.
That issue is also at the heart of Jepsen's gripe.
"In Facebook's desire to promote photo sharing and tagging among its users, it appears to have overlooked a critical component of consumer privacy protection -- an opt-in requiring users to affirmatively consent," Jepsen wrote in his letter.
Government regulators and policymakers are growing increasingly concerned about how tech companies handle user privacy.

Senators Al Franken and Richard Blumenthal introduced legislation this week that would require the makers of mobile software and devices -- like Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhone and Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android -- to receive express opt-in consent from users before tracking their locations

Green Lantern Movie Review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NWGl_A3b60&feature=player_embedded

It appears that although there is some good casting in this film, the first film with the DC comics character that has been in their arsenal for about 70 years, the script appears to hurt the charachters.
The new movie has some promising sci-fi elements and a pair of normally appealing stars. But the picture is slathered with so much CGI goop that at several points it’s indistinguishable from a Saturday morning episode of "Superfriends." Gives the same feeling after seeing Ang Lee's version of "The Hulk."
Spoiler alert:
The movie begins in deep space with a riot of CGI-digital hubbub (pricelessly silly in big-deal 3D). We meet the Guardians of the Universe, a council of wizened Yodas ensconced on very high stools (which amusingly recalled to the author the much more amusing Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension).
The Guardians have divided the galactic vastness into thousands of separate sectors, all patrolled by an interstellar police force called the Green Lantern Corps, each member of which is armed with a super-powerful green ring and a glowing green lantern with which to recharge it when the super-power runs low. The film makers kept the storyline to the comic series (thank God!) We also make the acquaintance of a rather amorphous evil entity called Parallax—a destroyer of worlds and so forth. When Parallax attacks a Green Lantern patrol ship, the captain is forced to crash land on the nearest reachable planet, Earth. Wounded and dying, he recruits a local human, Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), to take up his ring and lantern and join the Corps.
Hal is a brave but headstrong test pilot in the employ of Ferris Aviation, where he’s maintained a years-long touch-and-go relationship with the boss’s daughter, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively)—a test pilot herself. Here's where they writers miss the mark: Since considerable time is devoted to this underpowered romance, it’s unfortunate that Reynolds and Lively—such engaging actors in other films—never really warm to each other here. But then they’re given little assistance by the dialogue. Carol laments that proud loner Hal has always been “scared I was getting too close.” Changing into his flight suit, Hal says to her, “Let’s get these pants off and fly some planes.” Ummmm...
The story ping-pongs back and forth between the Earth-bound love dawdling and the Guardians’ heavily computerized home planet, where Hal undergoes Green Lantern training under the gimlet eye of a harsh taskmaster named Sinestro (an unrecognizable Mark Strong-of Sherlock Holmes fame whom you might remember him as Lord Blackworth). As with every other off-planet actor in the movie, Strong’s bulb-headed alien makeup forcefully recalls the cornball days of early Star Trek cranial prosthetics. No matter how dire the doings in this film, inducements to giggling are usually close at hand.
Reynolds is too mild a presence to make Hal very compelling. A couple of personality doodles have been sketched in—Hal is haunted by the death of his test-pilot dad, and hobbled by a vague feeling of unworthiness—but when a guy looks like Ryan Reynolds, and has Blake Lively making love eyes at him, it’s hard to accept that his life could be all that tormented. This leaves the field clear for Peter Saarsgard to move in and make up the live-wire deficit. Saarsgard appears to be having a ton of fun as Hector Hammond, a brainiac science professor who becomes infected by the universal Force of Evil (which turns out to be yellow). Before long, the mutating Hector and the increasingly fearless Hal are engaged in super-being smackdowns of an elaborate but not especially thrilling sort—even when Parallax weighs in (as a sort of humongous smoke bomb) to make it a threesome. Despite the movie’s super-budget (officially $150 million, rumored to be twice that), it’s undone by digital cheesiness at every turn. There’s a possibly delusional promise of a sequel at the end—a notion dependent on whether this rather limp opening installment covers its outsized expenses. Big bets are not recommended.
The oddest aspect of Green Lantern—and I wonder if the filmmakers were even aware of it—is its frankly fascist sci-fi philosophy. The green rings and lanterns are charged with the Power of Will, the various counterpoised yellow thingies with the Power of Fear. At one point, Sinestro (who would trust a guy with a name like that?) says, “Fear is the enemy of Will. Fear is what stops you and makes you weak.” At which point I wondered what kind of movie Leni Riefenstahl might have made from this material. Possibly a more interesting one.
Courtesy of: "Green Lantern - Reason Magazine"

Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign amid growing scandal

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York plans to leave office after days of mounting pressure from congressional Democrats following his embarrassing admission of risque online chats and photo swaps with multiple women while married to Huma Abedin.

Weiner, 46, called House leaders Wednesday night at a White House picnic to inform them he would resign today, sources tell ABC News.
He has begun sharing his decision with close friends, the sources said, but has yet to send a formal letter to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, indicating his intentions.

A Democratic source said Weiner called House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Wednesday night at the picnic.

 

 Israel pulled Pelosi aside and both spoke with Weiner on the phone, which is when he shared his decision, said a Democratic aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.

News of Weiner's decision came as Democrats prepared to consider whether to strip the embattled congressman of his committee assignments in an effort to limit his influence and push him out.
In the past week, President Obama, Democratic Party chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Pelosi and other top congressional leaders have all encouraged Weiner to resign, calling the scandal a "distraction."
"Our caucus understands our concern for the rights of the individual member," Pelosi, of California, said after a meeting Tuesday with House Democrats, "but also our higher responsibility to our country to uphold a high ethical standard in the Congress of the United States."
Weiner, who has not been charged with or convicted of violating any laws or House ethics rules, had insisted he would remain in office despite the pressure from his colleagues.
The House approved Weiner's request Monday for a two-week temporary leave of absence while he received "treatment" for an undisclosed condition at an unknown location.
Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, returned from an overseas trip with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton early Wednesday morning and met with her husband in person for the first time since the sexting scandal broke. Weiner had told friends he was waiting for her return before making any decision about his political future.  Congressman Weiner now joins the ranks of former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer who resigned following his prostitution scandal, and the most historic of all,, President Richard M. Nixon, who resigned amid the Watergate break-in's. He was facing criminal charges, but part of his deal to resign included a full pardon from incoming President Gerald Ford.  Too bad Mr. Weiner won't be so lucky.

Stanley Cup Finals Game 7: Boston 4, Vancouver 0

Final Score: Bruins 4, Canucks 0

The Bruins broke things open in the second period by scoring twice, the second time while shorthanded. It got so quiet in Rogers Arena you could hear the Stanley Cup being polished — and not for presentation to the Canucks.
Despite having led the NHL in goals scored during the regular season the Canucks couldn’t get anything going against the Bruins and Tim Thomas. And goaltender Roberto Luongo undermined their feeble efforts with a flat-footed effort on the third goal and no inspirational saves that might have boosted his team’s spirits.
The Bruins didn’t get a shot in the second period until more than seven minutes had passed, but they made their shots count. After taking a pass from 43-year-old Mark Recchi — who might be playing in the final game of his distinguished NHL career — Bruins defenseman Dennis Seidenberg took a long slap shot that Luongo saved with his chest. But Luongo couldn’t control the rebound and Brad Marchand pounced on it, controlled it and took a wraparound shot that eluded Luongo at 12:13.
Boston defenseman Zdeno Chara was serving the game’s first penalty—for interference, called at 16:07—when the Bruins scored again. Patrice Bergeron broke in alone on Luongo and was impeded by Vancouver defenseman Christian Ehrhoff. The referee raised his hand to signal a penalty, but the puck slid into the net at 17:35. The play was reviewed and the goal stood, a stunning blow to a team that was being outscored, 22-8, in the Cup finals. The Game ends with Boston Bruins bringing the cup to Boston after more than 3 decades!