Welcome to Finance World

JEFFERSON CITY - The gambling industry will fight Gov. Jay Nixon’s proposal to raise casino entrance fees by $1 per patron to help finance the state’s veterans homes.

Casino lobbyist Mike Winter told the House Veterans Committee on Tuesday that the proposal amounts to “a bottom-line hit of $53 million for our companies” each year and could prompt cuts in marketing, capital projects and staffing at the state’s 12 casinos.

Legislators said they’re open to compromise but made clear that they’re adamant about finding a dedicated source of money to operate the state’s seven nursing homes for veterans and possibly, build a new home to accommodate a mounting waiting list.

“Our veterans are out of money in 2013,” said Rep. Charlie Davis, R-Webbb City. “If something doesn’t happen, where are they going to go?”

The Missouri Veterans Commission’s $80 million budget is funded roughly 40 percent from federal money, 35 percent from charges paid by residents of veterans homes and 25 percent by the state.

In recent years, as tax collections have lagged, the state has reduced the general revenue it puts into the veterans commission’s budget, from nearly $31 million in 2009 to $18.6 million this year.

The state now wants to tap the veterans commission’s surplus to help pay operating expenses at the homes, which include one in Bellefontaine Neighbors in St. Louis County.

But that trust fund was designed to cover repair bills when a boiler breaks at a veterans home, as well as the state’s share of construction costs for any new homes. The fund also pays operating costs at the state’s six veterans cemeteries and grants for local programs that help veterans sign up for federal benefits.

While the trust fund now stands at $17 million, it will run dry by June 2013 if it is used at the projected rate of spending, Larry Kay, the commission’s executive director told the House committee on Tuesday.

Kay said the veterans commission needs a funding source that provides at least $35 million a year “just to stay even.”

Nixon’s budget proposal, which he released last week, would pump about $50 million a year into the veterans commission’s budget through a $1 fee increase for every gambler who goes through the casino turnstiles.

The current entrance fee is $2, with half going to the state and half to the home-dock city or county. Last year the veterans trust fund got $6.5 million under a law that divvies up the state’s share of those proceeds.

Winter, who lobbies for the Missouri Gaming Association, noted that casinos also pay a tax equaling 21 percent of their adjusted gross revenue, with most of that money going toward elementary and secondary education.

Combining the tax and the entrance fee, Missouri’s effective tax rate is about 27 percent for casinos now, which he portrayed as high compared to states such as Nevada, which he said charges only 6.75 percent.

However, the Missouri Gaming Commission’s annual report showed Missouri is competitive with most nearby states.

At 27.18 percent, Missouri’s effective tax rate is lower than Illinois (33.92 percent) and Indiana (31.31 percent) but higher than Kansas (25.08 percent), Iowa (22.33 percent) and Mississippi (11.94 percent), according to the latest report.

Legislators pointed out that casinos could pass any entrance fee increase on to their patrons. But Winter said they have no plans to do so. They absorb the current $2 fee.

The gambling industry got some backing from the Missouri Chamber of Commerce & Industry, which said veterans homes were a statewide responsibility that should not be borne by “a single sector.”

But Dewey Riehn, who represents the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said a higher admission fee wouldn’t break casinos, which pulled in $1.8 billion last year.

“If they think they can convince me that a $1 entry fee will cause them to close boats, that’s ridiculous,” Riehn said.

Missouri has the 14th largest population of veterans, according to federal statistics.

In addition to St. Louis County, the state operates veterans homes in Cameron, Cape Girardeau, Mexico, Mt. Vernon, St. James and Warrensburg.

The state’s 1,350 beds are 99 percent full; there are 1,691 people on the waiting list.

In addition to a higher casino entrance fee, legislators are considering asking state voters to pass a constitutional amendment establishing a special Missouri Lottery ticket, with proceeds earmarked for veterans programs.

The sponsor, Rep. Sheila Solon, R-Blue Springs, said a dedicated lottery ticket would not provide a “total fix” but had helped pump money into veterans programs in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas and Texas.

“We need to take care of our veterans,” said Solon, who also sponsors the casino fee increase. “These brave heroes have defended us.”

Source

Provides fast cash advance payday loans nationwide with no credit checks required.

South Korean President Lee Myung Bak said a new era in inter-Korean relations was possible if the North begins behaving sincerely, after the nuclear-armed nation accused Lee of

Please remember that a payday loan is a rather expensive line of credit. Much like taking something to the pawn shop.

When it comes to Christmas sweaters, even thrift stores lower their standards.

As she climbed through a stack of boxes in the back of the Goodwill store in south St. Louis County, a district manager explained that sweaters that are too faded, or have too many lint pills on them, are usually recycled.

“This sweater would normally never make it (to the sales floor) in a million years,” said Latrice Clayborne, as she pulled out a lint-infested brown cardigan with a snowman, a sprig of holly and white snowflakes on it.

But when it comes to “ugly Christmas sweaters,” Goodwill, like many resale shops around town, has started to make exceptions. They know that no matter the condition, these items of questionable fashion won’t last long once they put them out on the racks.

Yes, the holidays are approaching, which means that “ugly Christmas sweater” season is also in full swing no faxing payday loan. The sweaters, popular in the 1980s, have found a second life in recent years as part of an ironic fashion trend that pokes fun at the aesthetics of the garments.

“People are calling, desperate to see if we have any,” said Faith Sandler, executive director of the nonprofit that runs the ScholarShop. “They are going to events where they are trying to outdo one another with how ugly the sweaters are. The more stuff hanging from them, the better!”

She noticed an uptick in traffic to the stores’ holiday sweaters rack last year. But this year, they seem to be even hotter commodities, she said, so much so that they can hardly keep them in stock.

“I’m just so glad they’re cool, because for a while I was embarrassed by the rack,” she added.

Josh Goldman, 26, of Chesterfield, went to several stores over the weekend in search for an over-the-top sweater that would elicit chuckles

As stock markets continue their roller-coaster ride, even investors who profess to adhere to a buy-and-hold strategy have become eager users of mobile technologies that allow them to track their portfolios almost minute by minute.

That tendency apparently goes double for private banking clients, who investment managers say demand more information than the average investor and are embracing smartphone use at a fast clip.

And yet, for a variety of reasons, wealth managers were slow to embrace mobile applications for their clients. The reasons most often cited included concerns about security and a general impression that private banking clients did not want that kind of relationship with their bankers.

That appears to be changing.

JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and UBS are among a small number of banks that have released smartphone apps to their wealth management customers. The use of the apps is often restricted regionally; the JPMorgan and Merrill apps are available only to clients based in the U.S., and only Swiss clients have access to the UBS app.

“Private banks have been trailing behind retail banks with this type of offering for consumers, and even when they do offer an app, those have pretty poor functionality,” said Steffen Binder, managing director of MyPrivateBanking, an independent research firm based in Switzerland.

To keep up with competition and customer demand, banks will have to start interacting with their clients more through social media, said Nick Pollard, chief executive of RBS Coutts Asia, whose parent bank is using YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to reach out to its clients and is developing a smartphone app cashadvance.

“It’s less about today’s clients and more about tomorrow’s clients,” Pollard said. “Whether we like it or not, this generation and certainly the next one has no boundaries when it comes to accessing information.”

This year, Merrill Lynch introduced mobile applications for Apple and BlackBerry devices for clients of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and the online discount brokerage service Merrill Edge. The applications allow clients to view their portfolio holdings and account activity; transfer money among linked Merrill Lynch brokerage and Bank of America banking accounts; and trade stocks, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and options in approved accounts. Clients can track market news and headlines and gain access to the bank’s latest research reports.

Buoyed by clients’ positive feedback, the bank now plans to release Android versions in December.

The bank is evaluating how the new technologies “can create value for advisers and the firm while at the same time having prudent supervisory and compliance oversight,” said Paul Fox, head of Merrill Lynch Online Platforms. The bank is now running a limited pilot program with LinkedIn to allow clients to communicate with the bank.

The adoption rate of JPMorgan’s iPad and iPhone apps has been rapid, said Stephen Clifford, a managing director at JPMorgan Private Bank in New York, responsible for the client experience. The bank made the apps available this year to its high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth U.S. clients

Forecasters say Hurricane Kenneth is weakening rapidly and has been downgraded to a Category 2 storm in the eastern Pacific.

There is no threat to land from what had been the strongest late-season hurricane in that area on record when it earlier reached Category 4 status.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Wednesday that Kenneth has maximum sustained winds near 110 mph (175 kph). The storm was centered about 840 miles (1,350 kilometers) south-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico best payday advance.

It is moving west at 9 mph (15 kph)

Kenneth is expected to weaken further and could be downgraded to a tropical storm by Thursday. There are no coastal watches or warnings in effect.

The eastern Pacific hurricane season ends Nov. 30.

Source

Economist Mario Monti formed a new Italian government without a single politician Wednesday, drawing from the ranks of bankers, diplomats and business executives to make sure Italy escapes looming financial disaster.

The 68-year-old former European Union competition commissioner told reporters he will serve as Italy’s economy minister as well as premier for now as he seeks to implement “sacrifices” to heal the country’s finances and set the economy growing again.

Monti and his new cabinet ministers will be sworn later Wednesday, formally ending Silvio Berlusconi’s 3 1/2-year-old government as well as his 17-year-long run of political dominance.

Monti said he would lay out his emergency anti-crisis policies in the Senate on Thursday, ahead of a confidence vote. A second vote, in the lower Chamber of Deputies, will follow, likely on Friday. He stressed that Italy’s economic growth is a top priority.

Hopes for Italy’s new administration won it some respite in financial markets Wednesday. The yield on its ten-year bonds dropped 0.16 percentage point to 6.77 percent. In the last week, that borrowing rate had flirted over 7 percent _ the level that forced fellow eurozone members Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek international bailouts.

Up until summer, Italy had mostly avoided the European debt turmoil despite having a jaw-dropping amount of debt: euro1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion), or is nearly 120 percent of its GDP. But after frequent delays and backtracking on austerity measures, markets lost faith that any Berlusconi government could fix Italy’s economic issues.

Restoring confidence in Italy’s financial future is crucial because, as the third-largest economy in the eurozone, it is too big for Europe to rescue. A debt default by Italy would threaten the euro itself and shake the global economy.

Monti gave few hints about his political program Wednesday, sidestepping a question about whether the government would dip into citizens’ bank accounts as it did decades ago during another debt crisis.

“You may ask,” he replied, but went no further.

Explaining why his Cabinet contained no one from Italy’s fractious political parties, Monti said that his talks with party leaders led him to the conclusion “that the non-presence of politicians in the government would help it.”

His ministers include Corrado Passera, CEO of Italy’s second-largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo SpA, to head Development and Infrastructure; Piero Gnudi, a longtime chairman of Enel utility company, as Tourism and Sport minister in a country heavily dependent on tourist revenues; and the current Italian ambassador to Washington, Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata, to be foreign minister.

A historian of the Catholic church with close ties to the Vatican, Andrea Riccardi, was named minister of international and domestic cooperation, a choice that seemed to reward pro-Vatican lawmakers in Parliament.

A Monti government is “an historic and significant turn of events,” said Francesco Rutelli of the pro-Vatican centrists payday loans lenders.

Still, his choices raised some eyebrows.

“This government, ties to banks, to business, to the Vatican, to private universities _ to the usual names _ is the opposite of what this country needs,” said Paolo Ferrero, leader of Rifondazione Comunista, a tiny, far-left party.

Passera also sits on the board of directors of Milan’s Bocconi University, which forms Italy’s business elite. Monti is currently the head of the Bocconi.

But analysts gave Monti’s selections a top mark, insisting the Cabinet ministers were independent.

“I think the quality of the people is very high,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political science professor at Rome’s LUISS University. “All these people are very high-caliber, and highly respected, independent.”

Italy’s economy is hampered by high wage costs, low productivity, fat government payrolls, excessive taxes, choking bureaucracy and low numbers of college graduates. But Monti says Italy can beat the crisis if its largely polarized citizenry _ often bitterly divided over Berlusconi’s long tenure _ can pull together. He has also met with union leaders and business representatives.

“I hope that, governing well, we can make a contribution to the calming and the cohesion of the political forces,” Monti told reporters.

The head of Italy’s largest union confederation, Susanna Camusso, backed Monti but hoped he “won’t put his priority on pensions.”

Parliament on Saturday voted to raise the retirement age as part of an austerity package to 67 by 2026 and 70 by 2050, but critics say those reforms are meaningless because they are so far in the future. The new changes also call for the sale of state property and privatizing some services but contain no painful labor reforms. They also offer tax incentives to companies that hire young workers to fight Italy’s 25 percent unemployment rate for people ages 15 to 24.

The shift in power away from career politicians had caused bickering within Berlusconi’s conservative People of Freedom Party, which eventually endorsed Monti. But Berlusconi’s main coalition ally, the Northern League, has announced it will stay in the opposition during Monti’s government.

Rutelli predicted on Sky TG24 TV that Monti’s government would win the confidence votes and last until the end of the legislature in spring 2013, to the dismay of many of Berlusconi’s allies, who want elections in a few months.

“The economic crisis won’t be solved in a brief time,” he noted.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about an unelected, technocratic government.

“When governments of technocrats are needed, it means democracy and politics are considered useless, so it’s something negative that has to be for a limited period of time,” said skeptic Giuseppe Drago on the streets of Rome.

Source

Fast-expanding Gulf carrier Qatar Airways says talks with Airbus over an expected large plane order are now stalled.

The company’s CEO, Akbar al-Baker, said the negotiations were at an impasse Tuesday. He added that he is “pessimistic” about an accord before the end of this week’s Dubai Airshow.

Doha-based Qatar Airways’ fleet of 101 aircraft is dominated by Airbus planes, though it does have orders or options for nearly 90 Boeing jets.

On Tuesday, Qatar Airways announced plans to buy two Boeing 777 cargo planes.

Qatar Airways is increasingly challenging Dubai-based Emirates in the race for long-haul customers that use the Gulf as a transit hub.

Source

The complex network of flood defenses erected to shield Thailand’s capital from the country’s worst floods in nearly 60 years was set for one of its biggest tests yet Saturday as coastal high tides approached their peak.

High tides expected to crest Saturday morning were pushing the city’s main waterway, the Chao Phraya river, to its brink. Overflows so far have lightly inundated riverside streets from Chinatown to the white-walled royal Grand Palace and the neighboring Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

Amid heightened fears that floodwaters could swamp Bangkok, saffron-robed monks and soldiers piled sandbags outside the city’s most treasured temples and palaces Friday as the Chao Phraya swelled precariously beyond its banks, spilling ankle-high water briefly into some of the main tourist districts.

Most of the water has receded at low tide. Still, some worried Bangkokians are buying up bright orange lifejackets and inflatable boats, fearing the worst is yet to come.

“You have to prepare,” said Fon Kanokporn, a banker who bought a rubber boat from a store that had several hanging as advertisements from trees out front.

Employees at the shop said they had sold well over 3,000 boats in the last week. The brisk business is a measure of the fear gripping Bangkok and a reflection of the tragedy of neighboring provinces that have been submerged for weeks. Several buyers said they needed boats because their submerged homes outside the capital were no longer accessible by road.

Three months of relentless monsoon rains have caused the worst flooding in Thailand in more than half a century, triggering a national crisis that has overwhelmed Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government.

The water has crept from the central plains south toward the Gulf of Thailand for weeks, engulfing a third of the country and killing nearly 400 people and displacing 110,000 more. Now, Bangkok is in the way _ surrounded by behemoth pools of water flowing around and through the city via a complex network of canals and rivers.

The government is worried that major barriers and dikes could break because they were not designed to hold back so much water for so long. And this weekend, higher than normal tides are obstructing the critical flow of runoff from the north, fueling fears that parts of downtown Bangkok could be swamped.

On Friday, army trucks dumped thousands of sandbags outside the riverside Siriraj Hospital, where Thailand’s ailing and revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej has stayed since 2009.

Elsewhere along the Chao Phraya, dozens of monks at the 200-year-old Temple of the Dawn stacked hundreds more along a secondary barrier to protect against river overflows.

“It’s likely going to get higher, but I don’t think its going to get high enough to cause chaos,” said Phramaha Abhin, a 42-year-old monk business cards. Still, he said, “we cannot neglect the risk to this temple. It’s one of the country’s landmarks, one of the things Thailand is known for. We have to protect it.”

So far, most of the capital has remained untouched, and tourists are still snapping pictures in riverside districts as always.

But little by little, the city is slowing down.

This week, floodwaters pushed into Don Muang airport, used mostly for domestic flights, shutting it down. And on Friday, the State Railway of Thailand said all train services from Bangkok to southern Thailand were suspended after the tracks in Bangkok’s suburbs were submerged by floodwaters.

Thais and expatriates alike continued to leave Bangkok as foreign governments urged their citizens to avoid the threatened city, citing transportation difficulties and shortages of certain food items.

Seven of Bangkok’s 50 districts _ all in the northern outskirts _ are heavily flooded, and residents have fled aboard bamboo rafts and army trucks and by wading through waist-deep water. Eight other districts have seen less serious flooding.

New flooding was reported Friday in the city’s southeast when a canal overflowed in a neighborhood on the outer parts of Sukhumvit Road. And high tides briefly touched riverside areas closer to the city’s central business districts of Silom and Sathorn.

But the day passed without major incident.

“It is clear that although the high tides haven’t reached 2.5 meters (8.2 feet), it was high enough to prolong the suffering of those living outside of the flood walls and to threaten those living behind deteriorating walls,” Bangkok Gov. Sukhumbhand Paribatra said.

The flood walls protecting much of the inner city are 8.2 feet high, and Saturday’s high tide is expected to reach 8.5 feet (2.6 meters).

International charity Save the Children said it was concerned that crocodiles and snakes were lurking in stagnant floodwaters it said are growing filthier by the day.

“Every day we see children playing in the water, bathing or wading through it trying to make their way to dry ground,” said Annie Bodmer-Roy, the group’s spokeswoman in Thailand.

The aid group said many families have been left without access to running water or clean toilets.

“There is a very real risk of waterborne or communicable diseases such as diarrhea and skin infections taking hold if families can’t maintain basic standards of hygiene,” Bodmer-Roy said. “It is essential that the risks facing children in this crisis are understood and steps taken to keep them safe.”

Source

The Occupy Wall Street movement has close to $300,000, as well as storage space loaded with donated supplies in lower Manhattan. It stared down city officials to hang on to its makeshift headquarters, showed its muscle Saturday with a big Times Square demonstration and found legions of activists demonstrating in solidarity across the country and around the world.

Could this be the peak for loosely organized protesters, united less by a common cause than by revulsion to what they consider unbridled corporate greed? Or are they just getting started?

There are signs of confidence, but also signs of tension among the demonstrators at Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the movement that began a month ago Monday. They have trouble agreeing on things like whether someone can bring in a sleeping bag, and show little sign of uniting on any policy issues. Some protesters eventually want the movement to rally around a goal, while others insist that isn’t the point.

“We’re moving fast, without a hierarchical structure and lots of gears turning,” said Justin Strekal, a college student and political organizer who traveled from Cleveland to New York to help. “… Egos are clashing, but this is participatory democracy in a little park.”

Even if the protesters were barred from camping in Zuccotti Park, as the property owner and the city briefly threatened to do last week, the movement would continue, Strekal said. He said activists were working with legal experts to identify alternate sites where the risk of getting kicked out would be relatively low.

Wall Street protesters are intent on hanging on to the momentum they gained from Saturday’s worldwide demonstrations, which drew hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in the U.S. and Europe. They’re filling a cavernous space a block from Wall Street with donated goods to help sustain their nearly month-long occupation of a private park nearby.

They’ve amassed mounds of blankets, pillows, sleeping bags, cans of food, medical and hygienic supplies _ even oddities like a box of knitting wool and 20 pairs of swimming goggles (to shield protesters from pepper-spray attacks). Supporters are shipping about 300 boxes a day, Strekal said.

The space was donated by the United Federation of Teachers, which has offices in the building.

Close to $300,000 in cash also has been donated, through the movement’s website and by people who give money in person at the park, said Bill Dobbs, a press liaison for the movement. The movement has an account at Amalgamated Bank, which bills itself as “the only 100 percent union-owned bank in the United States.”

Strekal said the donated goods are being stored “for a long-term occupation.”

“We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!” Kara Segal and other volunteers chanted in the building lobby as they arrived to help unpack and sort items, preparing them to be rolled out to the park.

While on the streets, moments of madness occasionally erupt in the protest crowd _ accompanied by whiffs of marijuana, grungy clothing and disarray _ order prevails at the storage site.

It doubles as a sort of Occupy Wall Street central command post, with strategic meetings that are separate from the “general assembly” free-for-alls in the park. One subject Sunday was data entry: protesters are working to get the names and addresses of donors into a databank.

The movement has become an issue in the Republican presidential primary race and beyond, with politicians from both parties under pressure to weigh in.

President Barack Obama referred to the protests at Sunday’s dedication of a monument for Martin Luther King Jr., saying the civil rights leader “would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing those who work there.”

Many of the largest of Saturday’s protests were in Europe, where protesters involved in long-running demonstrations against austerity measures declared common cause with the Occupy Wall Street movement. In Rome, hundreds of rioters infiltrated a march by tens of thousands of demonstrators, causing what the mayor estimated was at least euro1 million ($1.4 million) in damage to city property.

U.S. cities large and small were “occupied” over the weekend: Washington, D.C., Fairbanks, Alaska, Burlington, Vt., Rapid City, S.D., and Cheyenne, Wyo. were just a few. In Cincinnati, protesters moved their demonstration out of a park after hearing that a couple was getting their wedding photos taken there _ but the bride and groom ended up seeking them out for pictures.

More than 70 New York protesters were arrested Saturday, more than 40 of them in Times Square. About 175 people were arrested in Chicago after they refused to leave a park where they were camped late Saturday, and there were about 100 arrests in Arizona _ 53 in Tucson and 46 in Phoenix _ after protesters refused police orders to disperse. About two dozen people were arrested in Denver, and in Sacramento, Calif., anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was among about 20 people arrested after failing to follow police orders to disperse.

Activists around the country said they felt that Saturday’s protests energized their movement.

“It’s an upward trajectory,” said John St. Lawrence, a Florida real estate lawyer who took part in Saturday’s Occupy Orlando protest, which drew more than 1,500 people. “It’s catching people’s imagination and also, knock on wood, nothing sort of negative or discrediting has happened.”

St. Lawrence is among those unconcerned that the movement has not rallied around any particular proposal, saying “policy is for leaders to come up with.”

“I don’t think the underlying theme is a mystery,” he said. “We saw what the banks and financial institutions did to the economy. We bailed them out. And then they went about evicting people from their homes,” he said. He added that although he is not in debt and owns his own home, other people in his neighborhood are suffering and “everyone’s interests are interconnected.”

In Richmond, Va., about 75 people gathered Sunday for one of the “general assembly” meetings that are a key part of the movement’s consensus-building process. Protester Whitney Whiting, a video editor, said the process has helped “gather voices” about Americans discontent, and that she expects it will eventually take the movement a step further.

“In regards to a singular issue or a singular focus, I think that will come eventually. But right now we have to set up a space for that to happen,” Whiting said.

Some U.S. protesters, like those in Europe, have their own causes. Unions that have joined forces with the movement have demands of their own, and on Sunday members of the newly formed Occupy Pittsburgh group demanded that Bank of New York Mellon Corp. pay back money they allege it overcharged public pension funds around the country.

New York’s attorney general and New York City sued BNY Mellon this month, accusing it of defrauding clients in foreign currency exchange transactions that generated nearly $2 billion over 10 years. The company has vowed to fight the lawsuit and had no comment about the protesters’ allegation about pensions.

Lisa Deaton, a tea party leader from southern Indiana, said she sees some similarities between how the tea party movement and the Wall Street protests began: “We got up and we wanted to vent.”

But the critical step, she said, was taking that emotion and focusing it toward changing government.

The first rally she organized drew more than 2,500 people, but afterward, “it was like, `What do we do?’” she said. “You can’t have a concert every weekend.”

The Wall Street protesters’ lack of leadership and focus on consensus-building has help bring together people with different perspectives, but it’s also created some tension.

“Issues are arising _ like who is bringing in sleeping bags without permission,” said Laurie Dobson, who’s been helping a self-governed “working group” called “SIS” _ for Shipping, Inventory and Supplies.

Sleeping bags were among items cited by Zuccotti Park’s owner, Brookfield Properties, as not allowed on the premises _ along with tents, tarps and other essentials for the encampment. By Sunday, all those items were back.

Strekal didn’t see that as a problem. Protesters could do it, he said, “because we’re winning the PR war.”

Source

To some heavyweight pundits, the resizing of the iconic Ikea Billy bookshelf signals the death of the print book and the demise of reading.

To Ikea, it just means you can finally shelve your coffee-table books.

Billy shelves deeper than the standard 28 centimetres (11 inches) just allow people to store bigger books, Ikea Canada spokeswoman Madeleine Löwenborg-Frick told the Star on Tuesday.

“This design update is quite simply to accommodate a wider selection of books.”

Nearly 50 million Billy bookshelves have been sold worldwide and there has been no drop in sales, said Löwenborg-Frick.

Regardless, The Economist smelled doom.

“The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome — anything, that is, except books that are actually read,” the magazine warned.

Time magazine picked up the banner, declaring that the move “foreshadows the demise of books.”

“They’ve realized we’re more comforted by the endless capacity of a millimeters-thin box of transistors,” blogger Nick Carbone wrote.

“In the first five months of this year, sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books,” The Economist reported.

“Just a year earlier, hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books.”

High profit margins for e-book are spurring the trend, compounded by retailing giant Amazon.com’s move to “agency pricing.” The six major U.S. publishers have agreed to set the consumer prices for their e-books, The Wall Street Journal reported. It means retailers can’t discount an e-book price without the publisher’s approval.

Publishers also get 70 per cent of each sale, from which they pay the author royalties; the retailer gets 30 per cent, WSJ said.

For the consumer, it means far fewer $9.99 bestsellers through Amazon and prices that are higher today than they were at the start of last year.

Source