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What You Can Learn From Mitt's Tax Return

2012-01-28T05:26:00.000-08:00

What You Can Learn From Mitt's Tax Return
28-Jan-2011, WSJ
By LAURA SAUNDERS

[Full Tax Filings Here]

How did they do it?

That is the question many Americans are asking of Mitt and Ann Romney's 2010 tax bill, disclosed on Monday evening. While the couple paid almost $3 million in taxes, that amounted to less than 14% of their $21.6 million income.

The Romneys' rate was far lower than the average of 24% paid by the top 1% of U.S. earners, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

The couple's 2010 filing presents a rare glimpse into how the ultrawealthy can use the tax code to their benefit, and offers important lessons for others.

The biggest: the powerful tax benefits of capital gains, which are taxed at a top rate of just 15% if the underlying investment is held for more than a year.

"There's a saying in Texas: If you don't have an oil well, get one," says Janet Hagy , a certified public accountant practicing in Austin, Texas. "I tell my clients, 'If you don't have capital gains, get some.'"

Another lesson: Get good tax help. The Romneys' 1040 return is 203 pages long, with different "schedules" and 20 different forms attached, some of them multiple times—not the sort of work typically done by a neighborhood Joe.

Says David Kautter of the Kogod Tax Center at American University in Washington: "The only schedules missing [from the Romneys' return] are the ones for fishermen, farmers and the elderly. Maybe Mitt should get some cows so he can have a 'full house' of schedules."

Some have suggested that, despite their low tax rate, the Romneys might have paid a few thousand extra dollars in tax. Among other things, they take no mortgage-interest deduction—a write-off claimed by 80% of taxpayers who itemize—or deductions for a home office, a car or travel expenses.

But given the complexity of their filings and the public scrutiny they were sure to endure, overpayments were far preferable to underpayments, experts say. The Romneys must file several separate returns for the "blind" trusts the couple set up to manage their investments, any of which could present snags. (The wealthy often do this when they are running for office, in order to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.)

Experts who have parsed the returns say the Romneys' advisers have been tax-smart without crossing legal lines. "The trustee has clearly gotten good advice and managed to reduce the Romneys' taxes in many perfectly legal ways," says Tom Ochsenschlager, a former official at the American Institute of CPAs who now teaches at American University.

Former IRS Commissioner Fred T. Goldberg, who examined the filings for the Romney campaign, characterized them differently: "This return reflects a trustee who spent a lot of care and time finding investment opportunities with the potential for substantial appreciation. By their very nature, these investments generate capital gains."

The returns don't disclose everything about the Romneys' finances. The couple isn't required to report their underlying wealth, investment returns or fees as a percentage of invested assets, for example.

But the filings do lift the veil on how the wealthy can use the tax code to their advantage. Here are some lessons the experts have gleaned.

A. Avoid salary, wages and tips to the extent possible. The Romneys reported no such compensation, which is taxable at rates up to 35%. In addition, these types of pay are subject to payroll taxes: a 6.2% Social Security tax (lowered to 4.2% in 2011) and 1.45% in Medicare tax, both of which the employer matches. While the Social Security tax is capped each year at a certain income level ($110,100 for 2012), the Medicare tax isn't.

Some experts believe "carried interest," or profits such as those from investments that Mr. Romney received as a partner at Bain Capital, should be taxed as compensation at rates up to 35%. Currently, those profits usually count as capital gains and are taxed at a top rate of 15%.

B. Muni-bond interest isn't the be-all and end-all. Many wealthy people turn to municipal bonds for tax-free income, but the Romneys reported only $557 of tax-free interest in 2010—and $3.3 million of taxable interest.

Kenneth Brier, an attorney at Brier & Geurden in Needham, Mass., notes that Massachusetts has a flat tax of 5.3%, making munis less attractive there than in high-tax states with graduated rates such as New York or California. And because the Romneys' overall tax rate is so low, the after-tax difference between munis and taxable bonds might not be large enough to justify investing in munis, Mr. Ochsenschlager says.

Some of the taxable interest on the Romney's 2010 return came from U.S. Treasurys; such interest isn't subject to state taxes.

C.Strive for "qualified" dividends. The Romneys' 2010 return reports $3.3 million of qualified dividends, which are taxed at a top rate of 15%. (There is another $1.6 million of nonqualified dividends, taxed like interest income.)

What makes a dividend "qualified"? In general, the dividend must be from a stock held at least two months and paid by any domestic corporation or most foreign corporations. The dividend can't come from a stock that a brokerage firm has lent as part of a short sale, says Robert Willens, an independent tax expert in New York.

D. If you have a "Schedule C" business, think twice before claiming a home-office deduction. The Romneys didn't take one on either of two Schedule C forms, which are for business results reported on personal returns. The Romneys used their Schedule C forms for director's fees and speaking fees.

Not only do home-office deductions raise red flags at the IRS, but they can come back to haunt taxpayers when the home is sold: Part of the gain on the home's sale may not be eligible for the $250,000 or $500,000 tax exclusion because taxpayers who took depreciation deductions in prior years have to reduce the exclusion by that amount.

In addition to raising taxes in many cases, this poses a record-keeping problem, Mr. Ochsenschlager says.

E. Generate income from long-term capital gains. The biggest factor in the Romneys' super-low tax rate is their outsize income from capital gains: $12.6 million in 2010. Most of that consisted of long-term gains, which, like qualified dividends, are taxed at a top rate of 15%.

The benefits don't end there. While the tax code gives wage earners almost no flexibility as to timing, the capital-gains rules offer unparalleled flexibility. Investors can often time when they take a gain or loss, and losses may be used to offset gains so that no tax is due. There are few restrictions: For example, a loss on land held as an investment can offset the gain from a stock.

Net capital losses can shelter up to $3,000 a year of ordinary income from tax, and losses can be carried forward indefinitely to shelter future gains. Canny investors or their advisers often "harvest" losses during market downturns, reacquire the investment after 30 days and use those losses to offset future gains, Mr. Willens says.

On Schedule D of their 2010 return, the Romneys' original long-term capital gain of $16.8 million was reduced by $4.8 million of carried-over long-term capital losses.

F. Know the score on itemized deductions. One way the Romneys resemble many other taxpayers is that they didn't get a medical-expenses deduction. Only expenses above 7.5% of adjusted gross income are deductible; for the Romneys, that hurdle amounted to $1.6 million, while they reported medical expenses of just $14,176.

The Romneys did make tax-wise charitable contributions. They gave away nearly $3 million, almost 14% of their adjusted gross income, about half in cash and half in other forms.

All of their contributions were fully deductible, whereas the biggest givers are subject to limits. Billionaire Warren Buffett, for example, gives away such vast sums each year that much of it can't be deducted from his income tax (though the gifts will be out of his estate).

Making noncash gifts—such as appreciated stock or other assets—often is a smart move for people like the Romneys because they can skip paying capital-gains tax on any appreciation, while getting a full deduction.

For example, say a higher-bracket taxpayer has 100 shares of stock bought years ago for $30 a share that is worth $80 when he donates it. If he sold the stock, paid tax and gave the remaining cash to charity, it would receive $7,250 and he would have a deduction of the same amount. If he gives the stock directly to the charity, it would receive $8,000, and he could deduct the full $8,000. (Some restrictions apply.)

G. Capital gains and dividends can help trigger the AMT. Long-term capital gains and qualified dividends are taxed at 15% and aren't subject to the alternative minimum tax.

The AMT takes away the value of deductions, such as the one for state taxes, when taxpayers are deemed to have too many write-offs. But a large percentage of capital gains and dividends in a taxpayer's overall income mix can cause a taxpayer to owe AMT.

The reason: With capital gains and dividends off limits, deductions loom large relative to other income, and that triggers AMT. The Romneys paid $232,989 in AMT in 2010 and lost the value of their state tax and other deductions, according to Jay Starkman, a CPA in Atlanta. "Without that, their tax rate would have been even lower," he says.

H. Beware of small benefits requiring large tax-prep efforts. The oddest line on the Romneys' 2010 return is a tax credit for $1 of "General Business Credit." Don Williamson of American University's Kogod Tax Center says the credit could be for hiring a disadvantaged youth or qualified veteran and it flowed through from an investment partnership.

But likely it cost far more than $1 just to fill out the three-page Form 8300 for the return. Mr. Williamson says he sees this problem all the time. Often tax-prep fees are disproportionate to an investment's tax benefit or the income it produces, he says—especially with larger investment partnerships.

One other lesson: For the wealthy, offshore investments can save onshore taxes. Robert Gordon, head of Twenty-First Securities in New York, a firm specializing in tax strategies, points out that the Romneys' 2010 return has 17 different filings of IRS Form 8621. Each indicates an investment, perhaps a hedge or private-equity fund, held in an offshore corporation.

These are legal arrangements, Mr. Gordon stresses. They can have significant tax advantages for the wealthy who live in high-tax states—especially Massachusetts, because its flat tax allows no deductions.

Investments held offshore in what is known as a "blocker corporation" can allow U.S. taxpayers to pay less tax than if the same investment were made through an onshore entity, Mr. Gordon says.

He offers an example. Say a partnership based in the U.S. invests $100, $80 of which is borrowed. It earns $5 of profits and has $4 in interest expense, for $1 of net pretax profit. In Massachusetts there isn't an interest deduction, so the entire $5 would be taxable.

If the investment were held in a fund based in the Cayman Islands, however, only $1 would be taxable in Massachusetts. Federal deductions subject to limits would also be preserved, Mr. Gordon says.

Trulia CEO: Housing 2012

2012-01-15T08:12:00.001-08:00

Credit Score Zealots Pursue Fool’s Errand for Numbers Over 800

2012-01-13T05:56:00.000-08:00

Credit Score Zealots Pursue Fool’s Errand for Numbers Over 800
Bloomberg, 13-Jan-12
By Alexis Leondis

Jeff Rose, a 33-year-old financial planner, is trying to improve his credit score even though it’s 780, which is 69 points above the median score.

Rose, who lives in Carbondale, Illinois, said he opened up a second credit card last year to establish another line of credit and help boost his score. He said he doesn’t know exactly what actions will help or hurt his score, so wants to get it above 800 to ensure he gets the best rate if he refinances his mortgage.

Three years after the credit crisis when lenders abruptly closed accounts and cut limits, consumers, including those who have excellent scores, have become more focused on getting the number above 800. Those efforts may be futile because once consumers have FICO credit scores of 760, a higher one doesn’t mean they’ll get better interest rates on mortgages and credit cards or more elite card offers, said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com, a unit of Bankrate Inc.

“There’s very little incremental benefit to getting a score above that,” said McBride, who’s based in North Palm Beach, Florida. Once consumers are above 760, “it’s a lot more difficult to move the score up in any noticeable way, and little reward.”

Mayank Maheshwari, 26, a business analyst who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, said his FICO (FICO) score is 780 and he’s still trying to get it higher. He has a student loan that he hasn’t paid off in full, although he can afford to, because he thinks maintaining monthly payments on time will help increase his score.

FICO Scores
The most common scores are based on models established by Minneapolis-based FICO, formerly known as Fair Isaac Corp., which are used to gauge a consumer’s financial health. The numbers, which range from 300 to 850, affect the ability to get mortgages and credit cards, as well as the rates borrowers pay for them. The score is used by 90 of the 100 largest U.S. financial institutions, according to FICO’s website. There are other scores used by lenders, such as VantageScore, which has a 501 to 990 range for measuring credit risk.

About 18 percent of 200 million consumers in the U.S. with credit scores, or 36 million Americans, had credit scores of 800 or higher in 2011, according to estimates from FICO. More than 75 million had scores of at least 750 while the median credit score last year was about 711, FICO said.

‘Bragging Rights’
The percentage of consumers with scores of 750 or more has fluctuated only slightly during the past five years, said Barry Paperno, consumer affairs manager for myFICO.com. That’s because consumers with high credit scores tended to maintain their good behaviors during the credit crisis, such as paying down debt and cutting expenses, Paperno said.

The score that’s considered the cutoff to qualify for the best rates, however, has changed. Before the recession, it was generally 720 instead of at least 750, said Ben Woolsey, director of marketing and consumer research at CreditCards.com, a website for cardholders based in Austin, Texas.

FICO credit scores rank borrowers according to the likelihood of default and there’s almost no difference in the probability of default when a consumer has a 780 or an 820, said Ken Lin, chief executive officer and founder of San Francisco- based Credit Karma. That means lenders won’t price a consumer differently and extend different rates, since the risk is virtually the same, Lin said.

“If you’re at 780 plus, it’s all bragging rights from there,” Lin said.

Credit Decisions
The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 3.89 percent in the week ended Jan. 12, according to Freddie Mac. The average interest rate charged on credit-card balances was 12.8 percent in November, according to Federal Reserve figures released Jan. 9.

A FICO score of 760 or higher on a $300,000 30-year fixed mortgage may qualify a borrower for a 3.62 rate or $1,368 monthly payment, compared with a 3.85 percent rate and monthly payment of $1,406 for those with scores from 700 to 759, according to myFICO.com. Having a credit score of at least 720 means a consumer may get a 3.89 rate on a 36-month auto loan of $25,000 and pay $737 a month, compared with 5.31 percent and a payment of $753 for those with scores from 690 to 719.

The decision to offer a mortgage and the size and rate on that loan is based on many factors about a borrower’s financial history, Tom Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by assets, said in an e-mail. JPMorgan’s risk management approach is proprietary, and criteria that go into the decisions on credit cards may be based on income and credit history with other Chase products, said Paul Hartwick, a spokesman for the New York-based bank, also in an e-mail.

Elite Offers
While the type of mortgage product and region may impact rates, generally FICO scores above 720 receive the lowest rates, Terry Francisco, a spokesman for Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina, said in an e-mail. A FICO score is one of several considerations the bank uses in determining credit-card rates, Betty Riess, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, which is the second-biggest U.S. lender, said in an e- mail.

Elite card offers are more likely to be based on income and assets than solely on high credit scores, Bankrate’s McBride said. When making credit decisions, American Express Co. (AXP) looks at a cardmember’s credit profile, which includes total debt level, reported income, credit bureau score, credit report and payment history, Melanie Backs, a spokeswoman for the New York- based firm, the biggest credit-card issuer by purchases, said in an e-mail.

Hiccups Happen
Revolving debt, which includes credit cards, climbed in November by $5.6 billion, the biggest advance since March 2008, according to Federal Reserve data.

“There are a lot of companies out there competing for credit,” said Linda Sherry, director of national priorities for Consumer Action in Washington. “Once you’re there, your dance card is going to be full,” she said, referring to a score of about 770.

The benefit for consumers who have good scores and are still trying to raise them is that they’ll have more of a cushion in case they do something that negatively affects their scores, said Woolsey of CreditCards.com. Borrowers should also keep in mind that each lender may vary on what they use as a cutoff for qualifying for the best rates, although anything above 750 generally should be sufficient, he said.

“Some hiccups could happen and I get whacked and I’m a 720, so you shouldn’t be too comfortable because you never know what might happen,” said Rose, the CEO and founder of Alliance Wealth Management.

Timely Payments
Consumers with scores from 750 to 800 who want higher numbers should continue what they’re doing, just for a longer period of time, said FICO’s Paperno. That means continuing to pay bills on time, keeping a low amount of debt relative to available credit and not opening accounts unless needed, he said.

Making a payment 30 or more days after the due date could cut a score by as much as 110 points while applying for a new card may result in a five point drop, said Liz Weston, author of “Your Credit Score.”

Borrowers should avoid using more than 30 percent of their available credit, even if they pay their balances in full, because the balance owed may be reported to the credit bureaus before the payment is due, according to McBride.

Credit Monitoring
Some things consumers do to try to raise their scores, such as paying for a credit score monitoring service, aren’t worth it, said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington. Monitoring doesn’t prevent errors or identity theft and consumers may not understand the cost of the service, Mierzwinski said.

Instead, borrowers may want to just stagger looking at each one of the free credit reports they’re entitled to annually from the three major credit bureaus every four months, he said.

“Credit is there to save you money,” said Lin of Credit Karma, referring to how a high credit score can help consumers qualify for lower interest rates. “You shouldn’t be using money to build credit.”

Other Links
What’s in your FICO® score? [Link Here]

Weekhawken Real Estate Market Trend

2012-01-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

Weekhawken Real Estate Market Trend
Trulia.com
[Full Link]

The median sales price for homes in ZIP code 07086 for Sep 11 to Nov 11 was $500,000. This represents a decline of 13%, or $75,000, compared to the prior quarter and an increase of 4.6% compared to the prior year. Sales prices have appreciated 3.6% over the last 5 years in 07086, Weehawken. The median sales price of $500,000 for 07086 is 0.00% higher than the median sales price for Weehawken NJ. Average listing price for homes on Trulia in ZIP code 07086 was $976,230 for the week ending Dec 28, which represents a decline of 3.9%, or $39,196 compared to the prior week and an increase of 6.1%, or $56,066, compared to the week ending Dec 07. Average price per square foot for homes in 07086 was $480 in the most recent quarter, which is 0.00% higher than the average price per square foot for homes in Weehawken.

Median Sals Price is the price at which one half of the homes sold above that amount and one half of the homes sold below that amount. Median Sales Price is based on sales during the most recent 90-day period available and is updated each week to include recent transactions from public record data sources.

Number of Sales is a count of all known arms-length residential property sales over the prior 90-day period. Volume for All Bedrooms may be higher than the total volume for 1-4 Bedrooms. All Bedrooms includes not only 1-4 Bedrooms but also 5+ Bedrooms and records where the number of bedrooms is unknown.

07086, Weehawken Recently Sold Homes

How Newt blew it: An Iowa road map

2012-01-02T23:57:00.001-08:00

How Newt blew it: An Iowa road map
Politico, 2-Jan-12
By: Jonathan Martin
[Full Link]

The high water mark of Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign may have been Nov. 27, the day the New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed his candidacy for president.

The famously conservative paper’s endorsement was a priceless gift. The former House Speaker proceeded to squander it.

In doing so, Gingrich revealed that he learned all the wrong lessons from his campaign’s collapse this summer and none of the right ones from his remarkable comeback.

Instead of seizing the moment and making an aggressive case for why the contest was now a two-man race between a movement conservative and flip-flopping moderate — a unique opportunity afforded by the endorsement’s implicit-but-unmistakable critique of Mitt Romney in his firewall state — Gingrich fell back to his familiar habits, a routine marked by too much self-assurance and not enough discipline.

Between that and some other key factors — among them, Romney’s super PAC blitzkrieg and his own weak fundraising — a campaign that seemed on the cusp of stealing the nomination barely a month ago now faces an ignominious fourth place finish or worse. And the dramatic arc of the final chapter in his political career suddenly seems a lot less triumphant.

“This has been a great example of best of Newt and worst of Newt,” said Dan Meyer, his Chief of Staff as speaker, of Gingrich’s December. “He has the vision thing and he knows how to inspire people. But he was going to be smarter than the consultants and he didn’t pay enough attention to fundraising and organization and so when he got pounded he couldn’t respond.”

Gingrich’s problems weren’t just on the airwaves here, though.

Until an Indiana-based GOP direct mail consultant, Chris Faulkner, arrived in Iowa a week ago at the behest of a political director Gingrich only hired a week before that, the candidate had nobody here running his day-to-day caucus effort.

Beyond the TV barrage and tactical missteps, though, he lost his lead for a more fundamental reason: just as Gingrich demonstrated during his speakership, the most basic ability to stay disciplined and drive a consistent message escaped him.

He offered no discernible response to an onslaught of negative ads other than to complain about the negativity and insist that he would stay positive. Then he repeatedly undermined his own attempt to stay on the high road by criticizing his GOP rivals.

When he and his campaign decided they had to offer policy contrasts with Romney in week after Christmas, Gingrich veered off every day into all manner of rabbit holes instead of closing here by outlining the differences between his supply-side tax plan and Romney’s less-bold proposal. He revisited his Greek cruise (an intentional ploy to anger his old staff, he explained), went to a chocolate shop and engaged Romney over his rival’s Lucille Ball crack, accused an unscrupulous paid contractor of being the reason he didn’t make the Virginia ballot, and gladly riffed on electromagnetic pulse attacks. In response to a question about climate change, the would-be president said: “I’m an amateur paleontologist.”

Even more damaging, Gingrich let himself get into a back-and-forth about Ron Paul and gladly delivered a multitude of soundbites on campaign process, returning again and again to his greatest obsession: the ad campaign against him.

By Sunday, two days before the caucuses, any hint of a policy-oriented message was gone. He was in full grievance mode.

“If I could have done anything differently I would’ve pulled the plug on Romney’s PAC,” he told reporters in this central Iowa town, revealing that he felt “Romney-boated” by the third-party attacks.

In spite of it all, Gingrich does not seem entirely convinced that his campaign is in dire straits. He has spoken in the last few days about taking the fight to Romney more aggressively in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and Gingrich strategist Kellyanne Conway said on Fox Monday that viewers should expect a fiery speech from the GOP candidate on caucus night.

Gingrich’s defiance is understandable, for a candidate who has been prematurely left for dead before.

But it’s unclear how much political wisdom Gingrich gained from his resurrection experience. Even before the SuperPAC ads went on the air here, Gingrich betrayed a remarkably naive view of what was needed to win the caucuses.

Appearing at a POLITICO forum in Des Moines on November 16th, he was asked if he had the cash for TV ads.

“We’ll be able to afford them; I don’t know that we’ll do them,” said Gingrich. “We may do all of our stuff in social media. It will depend on what we think works best, particularly here where you’re targeting a very definable universe.”

It was Newt-the-futurist, musing about an unconventional approach to politicking that would break all the rules.

It was also revealing about Newt-the-candidate: after seeing his campaign team walk off en masse in June, he was going to remain his own chief strategist.

Gingrich didn’t go up on TV in Iowa until December 5th, when he unveiled a morning-in-America style spot. It was a modest buy, though, and it was barely even playing on the airwaves here by the time Gingrich returned to the state on December 14th.

By that time, Romney’s super PAC and Paul’s campaign were saturating the airwaves with a series of brutal ads attacking Gingrich for his policy shifts and past controversies.

While promising to do more ads, he was largely dismissive of the need to fight back.

“I’m going to run my campaign the way I want to and my campaign’s going to focus on positive ideas and positive solutions and I’m, frankly, taking the gamble that the American people care about actually solving our country’s problems, not just watching politicians beat each other up,” Gingrich told reporters in Iowa City.

The venue was telling. The former speaker had just finished a lecture on brain science in a University of Iowa classroom that was interrupted by protesters and featured a question about Gingrich’s three marriages.

While his Republican rivals were spending as much time as possible in conservative-heavy precincts, Gingrich was indulging his long-standing passion for brain science by discussing the topic in Iowa’s version of Berkeley.

Just as it was in the first iteration of Gingrich’s campaign when his advisers insisted he run a more traditional retail campaign and dispense with book-signings and documentaries, scheduling was another nagging problem over the last month.

After receiving the Union Leader’s endorsement on Nov. 27, he didn’t return to New Hampshire for another 15 days. Nor, between those weeks, did he air a single radio or TV ad in the state touting his seal of approval from a conservative institution.

As for Iowa, he flew back to Washington the weekend before Christmas, immediately following the Sioux City debate. The reason? To appear at a book-signing at Mt. Vernon and his wife’s band concert in Fairfax. His opponents were all making their cases in early states that weekend.

Gingrich returned to Iowa in the days before Christmas, but had no discernible message besides carping about the negative ads and citing how many “Pinocchios” a Washington Post fact-check had given one of the spots cut by Romney’s super PAC.

Still, Gingrich officials said not to worry – the candidate would return to the state after the holiday with a 44-city bus tour and new, sharp distinctions between his economic plan and that of Romney.

When he arrived in Iowa on Dec. 27, his campaign made headlines by announcing the bus tour had been cut in half and Gingrich was forced to address a similarity — not a difference — with Romney: namely a page-one Wall Street Journal article revealing that he had praised “Romneycare” in 2006.

Whether or not the story was planted by Romney’s campaign is unknown, but it nonetheless illustrated how, at nearly every turn over the last month, Gingrich was haunted by his top rival.

The degree to which Gingrich has been outgunned by Romney was most vividly depicted in the days immediately before and after Christmas.

The reason Gingrich cut short his final pre-holiday Iowa trip wasn’t just to toe-touch in New Hampshire, as he did for a few hours. It was because he had to hustle back to hold two events in Virginia that were aimed entirely at getting him the 10,000 signatures needed to be on the commonwealth’s ballot.

That was something Romney’s campaign had taken care of by having volunteers appear at polling places for Virginia’s August primary and on Election Day in November.

But Gingrich was, to use his word, “scrambling” then to meet the deadline. Appearing in Richmond the morning of Dec. 23, the deadline to file petitions, the candidate proclaimed they had gotten the requisite signatures.

Except he hadn’t.

The next day, Gingrich was humiliated. Enough of his signatures didn’t match voter rolls that he was found to have less than 10,000. He wouldn’t appear on the ballot in the state he’s called home for over a decade.

Romney officials pounced, mocking Gingrich for his organizational failure.

As bad as the ballot issue was from a perception standpoint, Gingrich’s campaign made it worse. On Christmas Eve, Gingrich campaign manager Michael Krull posted a message on Facebook comparing their failure to get on a primary ballot to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Coming in a slow-news period, word of the bizarre comparison quickly spread and was still being discussed two days after Christmas. Then Romney ensured it would keep getting attention by saying the more apt metaphor was “I Love Lucy” grappling with chocolates on the conveyor belt.

Yet for all the very public ways in which Gingrich fell short, there were other, less obvious examples.

Take Dec. 26. Romney returned to the campaign fray by releasing a new ad and holding conference calls with early-state voters. Both got significant media attention.

Gingrich, meanwhile, was spotted that day padding around the McLean Giant and the only video that came out of his campaign was a three-minute video about George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day 1776.

Even after he began raising the money needed to pay a professional staff, Gingrich didn’t immediately hire experienced operatives.

In that context, it’s not difficult to understand how Gingrich failed rudimentary campaign tests like getting on ballots.

His political director, Martin Baker, didn’t begin work until Dec. 19.

At that point, Gingrich was being advised by a few more veterans behind the scenes.

But by then, some of the most severe challenges were already coming to fruition. And not just the Virginia ballot.

The day Gingrich appeared in Des Moines, Nov. 16, happened to be the day he was confronted with a Bloomberg story reporting that he made over a million dollars consulting for Freddie Mac.

He had been roundly mocked after saying in a debate the week before that he was paid for his “advice as a historian,” and when faced with question about his compensation level he wouldn’t say if it was accurate.

But more telling was what he said when asked if he had documentation ready about his time consulting for the mortgage giant — he admitted he didn’t.

The Freddie issue has now dogged Gingrich for well over a month and he’s yet to offer a cogent answer or air an ad pushing back on the charge, as he suggested at one point he would.

“I probably should’ve responded faster and more aggressively on that,” the former speaker conceded to reporters in Marshalltown Sunday, lamenting that he didn’t run a spot “that explicitly repudiated the Freddie Mac distortions.”

For Gingrich, a figure pocked with scars from decades of political combat, December has been among the most humbling months of his long career.

He began it with the bravado-bordering-on-arrogance that has marked his public identity.

“I mean, it’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee,” he told ABC’s Jake Tapper on Dec. 1.

A month later, on Monday Jan. 2, he was conceding Iowa.

“I don’t think I’m going to win,” he said the day before the caucuses.

Access Capital spreads equity, denies exodus

2011-12-28T19:47:00.000-08:00

Access Capital spreads equity, denies exodus
I&T News, 5-Jul-2010
[Full Link]

Access Capital Advisers (Access CA) has denied media rumours of a mass exodus of its partners, and has clarified how it will redistribute the 24 per cent shareholding sold back to the firm by departed director Paddy Jilek.

Access CA said yesterday that Jilek was the only one of the firm’s four founding partners to no longer be working for the asset consultant, although it confirmed two other partners, both of whom held an approximate 1 per cent share in the business, had left recently.

These departees were Guillaume Valdant, the former head of private equity at the firm, and former reporting/operations chief Julian Widdup.

Two new partners have been promoted, with Tom Snow, a Rhodes scholar, rising from associate director to partner within the Access CA infrastructure group, focusing on Australian investments. Meanwhile Kui Ng becomes a partner and continues to head the consultancy’s property group.

These two have bought some of the equity which Paddy Jilek sold, since he ceased to be an employee of Access CA in January 2010, and ceased to be a director effective July 1. Equity has also been allotted to the company secretary and the chief financial officer of the consultancy.

A founding partner and the chief executive officer of Access CA, Alexander Austin, refused to comment on persistent industry talk that Jilek’s departure related to the integrity of valuations obtained from independent valuers on deals either advised upon or directly put together by Access CA.

Austin acknowledged that Access CA would be losing South Australia’s Statewide Super as a client, but said the two organisations would continue to work together on co-invested deals.

He said the performance of Access CA’s portfolios, famously heavy on unlisted assets, had begun to improve from the doldrums of the global financial crisis. The consultancy’s template unlisted portfolio has returned a net 9.97 per cent a year since 1999, against a 7.42 per cent return for an amalgam of the ASX300 and the MSCI World ex-Australia indices.

The experience of 2008-09 had lead to a few changes in the Access CA approach, Austin said, with “purely defensive” assets such as government bonds and cash once again a permanent feature of the house strategic asset allocation.

The “learning experience” had also lead to enhanced liquidity management protocols within the Access CA approach, including the use of 12-month rather than 3-month currency forward contracts, giving clients “more time to manage the effects of a rapid currency depreciation”.

ID theft claims emerge in MTAA Super inquiry
St Michael Investigations, 17-Jun-2011
[Full Link]

THE prudential regulator’s investigation of MTAA Super has reached a new level of intrigue, with claims of identity theft as the Coalition seizes on governance of the fund as evidence of a wider industry malaise.

Yesterday, an email was circulated, purporting to be from Paddy Jilek, a founding director of MTAA Super’s asset allocation consultancy Access Capital Advisers, who left last year to join investment bank UBS.

The email, containing suggestions about further lines of inquiry on MTAA Super, was sent from a Yahoo address.

Mr Jilek denied all knowledge of it and otherwise declined to comment.

“Maybe Access advised against MTAA hedging policy?” the email says.

“Since when does a regulator investigate underperformance? Why you (sic) not asking what the regulator is really looking into on mtaa board?”

Clearly, the lid has been blown off a can of worms this week, with reports that the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority had appointed Clayton Utz partner Jane Paskin to probe the performance of the nation’s 10th biggest industry fund for the three years to June last year.

MTAA Super, which has a relatively strong bias to illiquid infrastructure and property investments, had $1.67 billion in negative investment income in the year to June 2009.

The fund reportedly lost more than $500 million from the removal of currency hedging, but chief executive Michael Delaney shot this down on Wednesday.

Denying there was $500m in hedging losses, he declined to name a figure and said the fund was only unhedged “for a short period of weeks”.

Access executives Alexander Austin and David Chessell and a third employee have been questioned on oath by APRA, with some examinations said to have continued for 14 hours.

APRA, however, has stuck rigidly to its policy of not commenting on regulated institutions, and Mr Delaney has declined to take questions.

Mr Austin emerged briefly to defend the firm’s business model against suggestions of perceived conflicts, as it advises funds on asset allocation and earns management fees from assets it introduces to its clients.

Access, he said, had pioneered the approach of offering asset management services to its advisory clients.

“All investment decisions are taken by trustee boards in full knowledge of the nature of this advisory relationship, including any fees to Access,” he said.

Amid calls for MTAA Super to release a full set of accounts and for Mr Delaney to step down, the vacuum was filled by Canberra.

The large retail funds have long agitated for a bigger role in highly lucrative award super, which is dominated by union-influenced industry funds.

“Super is one of the many things that are negotiated in an award, and it’s part of the DNA for a union,” Warren Chant of consultancy and researcher Chant West said.

“But for employers, it’s often the first thing they give away in award negotiations. There are no objective criteria for choosing default funds, and retail funds are not getting the same opportunity as industry funds.”

Coalition senator Mathias Cormann blamed Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten for protecting “closed shop” arrangements for the selection of default super funds under awards.

The top 10 default funds were all industry funds and were listed 330 times in awards after being chosen in “a secretive process riddled with undeclared conflicts of interest”, he said.

Last year, MTAA Super was added to six awards, despite its balanced growth fund’s performance being ranked 48 out of 49.

Mr Shorten reaffirmed the government’s election commitment to a Productivity Commission review, starting next year, of the way in which default funds were selected.

The review would be considered before the July 2013 introduction of the MySuper reforms, he said.

Mr Chant said it was unprecedented to hear of an APRA investigation taking evidence on oath, followed by a “jumble” of information in the following days about whether the fund had been hedged or unhedged.

Footage from fieldwork during 1950-58 by Toni Hagen

2011-12-23T05:41:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce

2011-12-12T04:50:00.000-08:00

[Full Link]

Wall Street Unoccupied With 200,000 Job Cuts

2011-11-22T03:52:00.000-08:00

Wall Street Unoccupied With 200,000 Job Cuts
Bloomberg, 21-Nov-11
By Max Abelson and Ambereen Choudhury

John Brady, co-head of MF Global Inc.’s Chicago office, was having a vodka cocktail at the Ritz- Carlton in Naples, Florida, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, on the day his company reported its largest-ever quarterly loss.
“Wow, the sun just set,” Brady said to his wife and two colleagues attending a conference with him, he recalled in an interview. “I hope it doesn’t set on MF Global.”

A week later, on Oct. 31, the firm led by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) co-Chief Executive Officer Jon Corzine collapsed. Brady and 1,065 colleagues joined a wave of firings that has washed away more than 200,000 jobs in the global financial-services industry this year, eclipsing 174,000 in 2009, data compiled by Bloomberg show. BNP Paribas (BNP) SA and UniCredit SpA (UCG) announced cuts last week, and the carnage likely will worsen as Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis roils markets.

“This is something very different,” said Huw Jenkins, a former head of investment banking at UBS AG (UBSN) who’s now a London- based managing partner at Brazil’s Banco BTG Pactual SA. “This is a structural change. The industry is shrinking.”

Wall Street rebounded from the financial crisis of 2008 with the help of unprecedented government support, including loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. Goldman Sachs posted record profit the following year, and bonuses paid to securities-firm employees in New York City rose 17 percent to $20.3 billion, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

‘Nothing There’
Now, faced with higher capital requirements, the failure of exotic financial products and diminished proprietary trading, the industry is undergoing what Steven Eckhaus, chairman of the executive-employment practice at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, called “a paradigm shift.” The New York attorney, whose clients have included former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Chief Financial Officer Erin Callan, said he has stopped giving his “spiel” about inherent talent leading to new work.

In interviews, a dozen people who have lost jobs at firms including Societe Generale SA, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) and Jefferies Group Inc. (JEF) described a grim banking landscape that also includes Occupy Wall Street protests against unemployment stuck above 9 percent and income inequality.

“These are by far my darkest days,” said Scott Schubert, 49, who was dismissed in late 2008 as a mergers-and-acquisitions banker at Jefferies, a New York-based securities firm, and has been unemployed since. “It’s harder and harder to look for a job and feel that there’s nothing there.”

HSBC, BNP Paribas
Banks, insurers and asset managers in Western Europe have been hardest hit, announcing about 105,000 dismissals this year, 66 percent more than the region’s losses in 2008 at the depths of the financial crisis, Bloomberg data show. The 50,000 job cuts in North America this year are more than twice last year’s and fewer than the 175,000 in 2008.

Almost every week since August has brought news of firings by the world’s biggest banks. HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), Europe’s biggest lender, announced that month it would slash 30,000 jobs by the end of 2013. In September, Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the second-largest U.S. lender, said it would cut the same number of jobs. Both banks are trimming about 10 percent of their employees. Last week, BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, said it will cut about 1,400 jobs at its corporate and investment- banking unit, and UniCredit, Italy’s biggest, said it plans to eliminate 6,150 positions by 2015.

“It’s a once-in-a-generation challenge,” said John Purcell, founder of London-based executive search firm Purcell & Co. “Everyone who has worked in the City since 1985 will have no idea of how to cope with this level of dislocation.”

Panic Attacks
Neil Brener, a psychiatrist whose patients work in London’s City and Canary Wharf financial districts said the stress is contributing to panic attacks, binge drinking and chest pains.

“Because there are fewer jobs, people are unhappy about being stuck,” Brener said. “They don’t have options about moving, and there is a sense of feeling trapped.”

London hiring could be frozen next year, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research Ltd. Headcount in the City and Canary Wharf may fall to 288,225 by the end of the year, 27,000 fewer than in 2010 and the lowest since at least 1998, when there were 289,666 jobs, according to the London- based research firm.

Wall Street won’t regain its lost jobs “until about 2023,” Marisa Di Natale, an economist at Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an e-mail.

Second Time
That’s not encouraging for Michael Reiner, 44, who lost his job in June as a credit strategist in New York for Societe Generale (GLE), France’s second-largest bank, whose shares are down 60 percent this year. When he called his wife to tell her the news, she was home watching “The Company Men,” a film about corporate downsizing, he said.

It wasn’t the first time Reiner had lost a job on Wall Street. He worked at Bear Stearns Cos. for 14 years until the firm collapsed in March 2008 and was taken over in a fire sale by JPMorgan Chase & Co. He said he was happy to have some time off with his family and go to Little League baseball games.

When he began looking for a job, he “wanted to find a place for the next 14 years,” he said. A recruiter brought him to Paris-based Societe Generale. It didn’t last that long.

It’s harder to talk about losing a job the second time, Reiner said. “There are a lot of people I haven’t told.”

Opportunities for employment “evaporated” as the European debt crisis escalated, he said. Now he spends his time going to his daughter’s field hockey games and managing his investments. He’s planning to make maple syrup from the trees in the backyard of his home in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

‘Fruitless’ Search
For Schubert, the former Jefferies banker in his third year looking for work, the longer he’s out of a job, the harder it is for him to tell his 10-year-old son to do his homework, he said.

“It might seem outwardly to him that I’ve given up,” he said in an interview this month from his four-bedroom home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. “I can’t come to the table and say, ‘Well, when you were five, I worked nonstop.’”

Schubert, who received a master’s degree in business administration from New York University in 1989 and was a managing director specializing in middle-market M&A deals at Jefferies, said he wasn’t surprised when he lost his job in 2008 during the financial crisis. He thought unemployment would last 12 months at most.

“The first year out was fruitless,” he said. “There wasn’t much hiring going on at all.”

By the middle of 2010, more potential employers seemed interested, and he felt “something was imminent,” he said. Nothing happened.

This year, he has become increasingly disheartened by bad news on Wall Street, and it’s more difficult to stay in touch with former colleagues as time goes by, he said.

Hurricane Irene
On the August weekend of Hurricane Irene, training to coach his son’s soccer team alongside younger fathers, being “overly competitive for a man of my age,” Schubert twisted his right knee, he said. He aggravated the injury doing yard work and worries how much his health insurance will help, he said.

While his investment choices haven’t been “too terrible,” he will consider selling his house if he doesn’t find a job. “God, I hope it’s in the next six months,” he said.

Hetal Patel, 44, a foreign-exchange trader who worked at London-based Lloyds Banking Group Plc (LLOY) for more than 20 years until last month, said he doesn’t plan to look for work until early next year, “when budgets become clearer and perhaps conditions improve.”

Shares of his former company, controlled by the British government since a bailout in 2008, have fallen 64 percent this year, and the bank has posted a pretax loss of 3.86 billion pounds ($6 billion) in the first nine months. It announced 15,000 job cuts in June.

RBS Cuts
Another lender backed by the U.K., Edinburgh-based RBS, has announced about 30,000 job cuts, including 2,000 this year, since receiving the world’s biggest government bailout in 2008. Its shares are down 50 percent in 2011, and CEO Stephen Hester said Nov. 4 the investment bank “will have to shrink further.”

Tim Leary, 29, a director in high-yield and distressed trading, lost his job there on Nov. 7. After he got the news, he called his wife to say he’d see her and their 4-month-old son for breakfast.

He drove back to Manhattan from his office in Stamford, Connecticut, and put together a resume for the first time in years. He said he plans to spend “a fair amount of time figuring out what the landscape is” before starting his search.

Falling Bonuses
“Unfortunately, the industry always seems to get it wrong and they over-hire,” said Philip Keevil, 65, a former head of investment banking at S.G. Warburg & Co. and now a partner at New York-based advisory firm Compass Advisers LLP. “They are over-optimistic and then periodically throw large numbers out.”

Morale on Wall Street and London is “probably as bad, if not worse” than it has been in decades, said Keevil.

Wall Street bonuses are expected to fall in 2011 from the $128,530 average last year, DiNapoli, the state comptroller, said in October. Even so, when Goldman Sachs set aside 24 percent less to pay employees in the first nine months than in the same period last year, the amount, $10 billion, was equal to $292,836 for each of its 34,200 workers as of Sept. 30. That’s nearly six times the median household income in the U.S., where 49.1 million live in poverty, according to Census Bureau data.

Quitting for Quito
Wyatt Laikind, 26, made three times as much in his first year out of college working at Citigroup Inc. (C) as his single mother earned when he was growing up in western Massachusetts.

“It was like winning the lottery to get that job,” said Laikind, who worked as an associate on the New York-based bank’s high-yield credit-trading desk.

He got a job on Wall Street because he “was under the impression that it was a more meritocratic environment,” and “my hard work and intelligence would be paid off,” he said.

At first, he liked the excitement, he said. Then, after financial regulations curtailed proprietary trading, the job became “less appealing.” He said he didn’t like smiling at clients while having to figure out how to profit from them.

In July, after a vacation, he called his boss to quit, he said in an interview from Quito, Ecuador, where he is now working for Equitable Origin LLC, a start-up that offers a certification system for oil exploration. His salary is less than 5 percent of what he made at Citigroup, he lives with intermittent hot water, and he was robbed at knifepoint last month, he said.

“I feel happier on a daily basis,” Laikind said.

Sagging Mattress
His tone was different in a later e-mail.

“I wasn’t brought up in luxury, so I like to think I can tough it out,” he wrote, describing the sagging mattress he slept on in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt to stay warm. “But I may have to give it up and try going back to finance soon.”

If he does, it won’t be easy.

“Until now, at many firms, a lot of investment bankers have been convinced that we are living now in a limited period where things are a bit more difficult and afterwards the old world will come back,” Kaspar Villiger, 70, chairman of Zurich- based UBS said in an interview this month. “This illusion has now vanished.”

Increased capital requirements agreed to by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision will limit banks’ use of borrowed funds to boost profit, lower their return on equity and likely reduce executive compensation, analysts say. High leverage “was the juice in the system,” said Ilana Weinstein, CEO of New York-based search firm IDW Group LLC. “It’s gone.”

Boxer Shorts
For Brady, 42, the vanishing point at MF Global arrived after he returned to Chicago from Florida. He thought the New York-based futures brokerage would “weather the storm,” even as Moody’s Investors Service cut its rating and shares plunged, he said. He got word that another company would buy the firm while at a Talking Heads cover-band concert and celebrated with a friend by drinking Anchor Steam beer and shots of Jameson.

He woke on Oct. 31 at 4:40 a.m. and searched for deal reports on his phone while standing in his boxer shorts with an electric toothbrush in the other hand. He didn’t find any.

The acquiring firm, Interactive Brokers Group Inc., pulled out of the deal after a discrepancy in client accounts surfaced, and MF Global filed for bankruptcy later that day.

At first, Brady thought his company would survive, he said. His wife thought he was in denial. His mood changed when he was sitting in the home office adjoining his bedroom, looking at the value of his holdings.

“My Fidelity account looks like my bar tab from just a week ago,” Brady said.

All Fired
On Nov. 11, a human resources executive asked colleagues on Brady’s floor to gather by his desk, which looks out on the Willis Tower, the tallest building in the U.S. They were all fired. She told them to show receipts for large personal belongings to the plainclothes security guards by the elevators, and that checks would be sent in the mail, Brady said. Someone asked if the checks would bounce. She said she didn’t know.

Brady, who said he wasn’t aware of the size of the bets MF Global made on European sovereign debt, wrote to clients this month saying he’s looking to join a firm that believes “integrity and honesty are the single most important ingredients to success.” He said last week he is optimistic.

To contact the reporters on this story: Max Abelson in New York at mabelson@bloomberg.net; Ambereen Choudhury in London at achoudhury@bloomberg.net

Jon Stewart: Occupy Wall Street Protest

2011-11-19T07:40:00.000-08:00

[Full Link]

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

James Altucher, Wall Street's Keeper of the Pain

2011-11-18T05:11:00.000-08:00

James Altucher, Wall Street's Keeper of the Pain
Bloomberg, 17-Nov-11
By Roben Farzad

Shaggy-haired, bespectacled James Altucher is a 43-year-old venture capitalist who puts money into tech startups such as Buddy Media—last valued at $500 million. He has also designed websites, worked as a financial columnist, and run a fund that invested in hedge funds. Along the way, he lost his savings and his marriage, and by his own admission suffered several nervous breakdowns.

Now Altucher has turned his misfortune into a source of wisdom and comfort for the despondent. He shares his insecurities and psychic traumas with 30,000 Twitter followers and on his blog, the Altucher Confidential, which he says has had 10 million page views since he launched it a year ago. His self-published book, I Was Blind But Now I See, has ranked as high as No. 2 this year in (AMZN)Amazon.com’s motivational books category, and he’s publishing a comic book about his life. “I think the role James fulfills in the post-crash world is beacon of hope,” says Joshua Brown, a financial adviser who blogs as the Reformed Broker. “I know it sounds corny, but no one has been more forthcoming about how the torn economic fabric of this country has affected him personally. The message is always centered around him still being here—that there’s life after financial near-death.”

While blogging is his passion, Altucher makes his living investing in tech startups as founder and managing partner of Formula Capital in New York. “The guy is too complicated to analyze, and I’m not a psychologist, but he knows his stuff,” says John Pappajohn, a biotech investor in Des Moines who helped found Caremark (now (CVS)CVS/Caremark ) and seeks Altucher’s insight on companies and the markets. “I don’t go to New York without asking him to breakfast.”

On a November morning, Altucher digs into pancakes at a diner near New York’s Grand Central Terminal, having just blogged from a (FDX)FedEx Office/Kinko’s. “A year ago I had a revelation,” he says. “I’ve failed time and again, hurt myself and others, woke up angry and scared at three every morning. I needed to open up and share.” In October 2010, Altucher started posting confessions on everything from business failure and sex to death and depression. Example: “I was completely lost, four years old, running around the department store looking for my parents who I was afraid had abandoned me. … I’m still wondering why they were thinking of entering the elevator without me.”

Shortly after launching his blog, Altucher learned that the top search query bringing readers to the site was “I want to die.” He realized that the Altucher Confidential had become much more than an exercise in self-exploration. “There is such a deep need out there to know you are not struggling alone,” he says. In one August post he wrote about the times he had pondered ending it all and how he managed to persevere. The essay prompted an outpouring of gratitude from grieving parents, laid-off breadwinners, and battered women. “I was just really f***ing sick of letting a man hit me,” wrote one reader. “So I left. And the fear I was living with died.”

Altucher’s path to this unlikely role dates to the mid-1990s, when the computer programmer launched a startup to build websites for media companies. In 1996 he successfully pitched (TWX)HBO on III: am, a Web series that had him wandering the streets of Manhattan late Tuesday nights to see what people were doing at that hour. “Altucher’s conversation with an Eighth Avenue transvestite prostitute brings out the desperation and loneliness of those who don’t (or can’t) fall asleep with the rest of us,” wrote a reviewer in Newsweek.

In 1998, Altucher was recruited to redesign the investor portal TheStreet.com. While working there he caught tech-stock fever and made millions speculating with the money earned from the sale of his media consultancy. He bought a big apartment in Tribeca, decorating it with expensive art. He says he played poker every day in 1998, including the night his first child was born—and took helicopters to Atlantic City to stave off boredom.

By the summer of 2000, with dot-com stocks imploding, Altucher says he was losing $1 million a month. He put his apartment up for sale. “I had two kids to feed,” he says. “I honestly thought I would kill myself—that I’d be better off dead if my family got my life insurance.” He hit bottom in 2002. “Cash was running out at the bank, expenses were going up, the house was standing still and nobody wanted to buy it, and eventually I would be unable to buy diapers and food for my children. This wasn’t just me. In the last decade this has happened to a lot of people.”

In desperation, he e-mailed money managers with his investing ideas. Jim Cramer of TheStreet.com hired him to write about stocks, and a hedge fund manager threw him some money to invest. Altucher also began writing for the Financial Times, and started his own hedge fund, as well as 10 investing websites. He sold the most successful one, Stockpickr, for $10 million in 2007; he wound down his hedge fund just before the financial crisis.

While Altucher had come back from the financial brink, he says he was an emotional wreck. By the end of 2008, his marriage was falling apart, and he found himself drinking heavily and holing up at the Hotel Chelsea. With the stock market in free fall at the beginning of 2009, TheStreet.com and the Financial Times let him go, and TV bookers stopped calling. “So once again,” he says, “I was lost.”

Altucher, now remarried, credits intensive yoga, Eastern philosophy, and introspection for rescuing him and changing his perspective. In a Nov. 8 blog post, he reflects: “How much happier would I have been if I had said in 1999, ‘You know what, I have enough cash now to live forever and pursue creative, charitable, or spiritual pursuits so I could become a better person.’”

“He’s at peace,” says Howard Lindzon, co-founder of StockTwits, and a former co-investor with Altucher on deals. “It’s all very cathartic for him.” Even so, Lindzon calls Altucher “a pain in the ass who would just disappear for months at a time. Would it have killed him to see the light back then?”

Homeownership and college education have become Altucher’s bêtes noires. He calls the mortgage industry “programming by the machine. By the banks, the corporations, the government, that wants you in hock.” Altucher, a Cornell grad, faults colleges for churning out “debt slaves” who take unhappy jobs just to service their loans. “If you could,” he says, “take half the people accepted into Harvard and tell them they can’t go to college. Then compare them in 20 years. It’s about ambition. Not the diploma.”

At his Formula Capital, Altucher says he is finding no shortage of promising opportunities in tech and media. He thinks the Dow Jones industrial average may hit 20,000 in a few years. “The economy is about to boom,” he writes. “Bernanke just printed up a trillion dollars and airlifted it onto the U.S. economy.” Even so, he does not believe individual investors have enough patience, discipline, or nerve to invest in stocks successfully. Altucher himself concedes his message is a work in progress that is rife with dissonance and contradictions. Not unlike the times.

Lazard's Sanjay Shrestha on First Solar

2011-11-16T17:55:00.001-08:00

H. Gobind Khorana, 89, Nobel-Winning Scientist, Dies

2011-11-14T05:23:00.000-08:00

H. Gobind Khorana, 89, Nobel-Winning Scientist, Dies
NYT, 14-Nov-2011
By DENISE GELLENE

H. Gobind Khorana, who rose from a childhood of poverty in India to become a biochemist and share in a Nobel Prize for his role in deciphering the genetic code, died on Wednesday in Concord, Mass. He was 89.

His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Khorana was a professor emeritus.

Dr. Khorana, who received his early schooling from his village teacher under a tree, advanced his education through scholarships and fellowships to become an authority on the chemical synthesis of proteins and nucleic acids, the large molecules in cells that carry genetic information.

He received the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert W. Holley of Cornell University and Marshall W. Nirenberg of the National Institutes of Health. They worked independently of one another and received the award for showing how genetic information is translated into proteins, which carry out the functions of a living cell.

Their experiments looked at the nucleic acids found in RNA, a chemical in cells that translates the genetic information contained in DNA. RNA is composed of four chemical bases, adenine, cytosine, uracil and guanine, which are represented by the letters A, C, U and G. The three scientists showed that these chemical bases combine to form three-letter “words” that represent amino acids, the components from which proteins are constructed. Dr. Nirenberg discovered the first word, UUU, the code for phenylalanine.

Dr. Khorana used chemical synthesis to combine the letters into specific defined patterns, like UCUCUCUCU, from which he deduced that UCU encoded for serine and CUC encoded for leucine. His work unambiguously confirmed that the genetic code consisted of 64 distinct three-letter words. He and Dr. Nirenberg discovered that some of the words told a cell where to begin reading the code, and where to stop.

In 1972, Dr. Khorana reported a second breakthrough: the construction of the first artificial gene, using off-the-shelf chemicals. Four years later, he announced that he had gotten an artificial gene to function in a bacterial cell. The ability to synthesize DNA was central to advances in genetic engineering and the development of the biotechnology industry. “He left an amazing trail of technical achievement,” said Dr. Thomas P. Sakmar, a professor at Rockefeller University and a former student.

Dr. Khorana’s lab also turned out leaders in academia and industry. One former student was involved in the creation of Applied Biosystems, which developed equipment used to decode the human genome. Another student, Michael Smith, was a recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for devising a method of manipulating DNA.

Har Gobind Khorana was born in the village of Raipur in the Punjab region, which is now part of Pakistan. Not certain of the date, he said he was probably born on Jan. 9, 1922. He was the youngest of five children of a Hindu tax clerk for the British colonial government, who was dedicated to educating his children. His family was “practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by 100 people,” Dr. Khorana wrote.

His aptitude for science was evident from the start. He received a scholarship to study chemistry at Punjab University, although he had been too shy to attend the required admissions interview. He received his bachelor’s degree from Punjab University in 1943 and his master’s from there in 1945.

After earning a doctorate in organic chemistry from Liverpool University in England in 1948, he spent a year doing postdoctoral research at the Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland, where he secretly took up residence in a laboratory until some financing came through.

He received a research fellowship at Cambridge University, a center for the study of proteins and nucleic acids, where James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick would discover the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. Dr. Khorana was drawn to the field.

In 1952, he was recruited to the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver to join a group working on nucleic acids. He developed a new method of synthesizing nucleotides, and achieved international recognition for synthesizing coenzyme A, which is involved in converting fats to energy.

His move to Canada coincided with his marriage to Esther Elizabeth Sibler, whom he had met in Switzerland. “Esther brought a consistent sense of purpose into my life at a time when, after six years’ absence from the country of my birth, I felt out of place everywhere and at home nowhere,” he wrote.

His wife died in 2001. Their daughter Emily Anne died in 1979. His survivors include another daughter, Julia Elizabeth, and a son, Dave Roy.

In 1960, Dr. Khorana moved to the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin, where he did the work that led to his Nobel Prize. His lab included researchers from 27 countries with expertise in basic chemistry, molecular biology, enzymology and biochemistry, a multidisciplinary effort unusual for its time.

Dr. Khorana became an American citizen in 1966. He joined the M.I.T. faculty in 1970 and retired in 2007.

Among the honors Dr. Khorana received were the Lasker Award for basic medical research in 1968 and the National Medal of Science in 1987.

Dr. Khorana, an unassuming man, shied from the spotlight and did not like talking on the phone. In the weeks before he received the National Medal of Science, a stack of message slips piled up on his desk with increasingly urgent messages that the White House had called and that he should call back, Dr. Sakmar said. With the ceremony date fast approaching, a representative of the White House tracked down Dr. Khorana at a scientific meeting and told him he would be receiving the award. Dr. Khorana assured him he would attend.

Hurricanes in the East Coast

2011-08-26T01:48:00.001-07:00

New York City's Hurricane History

2011-08-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

New York City's Hurricane History
Weather.com, 23-Aug-2011
By Becky Kellogg

Hurricane Irene is threatening the U.S. and could impact tens of millions of Americans along the East coast by this weekend.

People from the Deep South to New England are watching the storm's progress very closely to see how Hurricane Irene will impact them. Several cities who were highlighted by Hurricane Expert Dr. Rick Knabb as being overdue for a hurricane hit, are in the cone of concern. New York City is one of those cities.

"Hurricanes in New York City metro area are relatively rare events because of the geography (places like Cape Cod stick much farther out into the ocean), typical steering patterns, and a tendency for tropical systems to weaken as they go very far north," says The Weather Channel's Senior Meteorologist Stu Ostro.

Only 5 hurricanes in records dating back to 1851 have tracked within 75 miles of New York City. The most recent one being in 1985.

1985 (Cat 1): Gloria
1976 (Cat 1): Belle
1938 (Cat 3): Long Island Expressway
1894 (Cat 1): No name given
1893 (Cat 1): No name given

One of New York's unique challenges in dealing with a hurricane would be mandatory evacuations. It takes hours to evacuate significantly smaller cities, such as New Orleans and Savannah. But New York, as America's most populous city, faces a unique set of evacuation challenges.

“It’s a concern because surveys in recent years have shown that even after the 2004, 2005, and 2008 seasons there is complacency in places which are much more prone to hurricanes, much less in places where hurricanes are very infrequent." says Ostro. "Plus this is one of the last big weekends of the summer with many people heading to the beaches. Folks in New York City and elsewhere need to be closely monitoring the progress of Irene just in case.”

Regardless of Irene's eventual impact on the U.S., Hurricane Expert Rick Knabb says now is the time to prepare. Learn your evacuation routes, get your evacuation kits ready, and be ready to move if your local official order an evacuation notice.

For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers

2011-08-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers
5-Aug-11, NYT
By JENNY ANDERSON

Josh Isackson, an 18-year-old graduate of Tenafly High School in New Jersey, spent the summer after his sophomore year studying Mandarin in Nanjing, China. The next year he was an intern at a market research firm in Shanghai. When it came time to write a personal statement for his college applications, those summers offered a lot of inspiration.

“When I was thinking about the essay, I realized that taking Chinese was a big part of me,” he said.

So Mr. Isackson wrote about exploring the ancient tombs of the Ming dynasty in the Purple Mountain region of Nanjing, “trading jokes with long-dead Ming Emperors, stringing my string hammock between two plum trees and calmly sipping fresh green tea while watching the sun set on the horizon.”

Jill Tipograph, who founded a consulting company called Everything Summer, helped Mr. Isackson plan the China trips. To Ms. Tipograph, his experience was the best possible outcome: he loved China, and the trips offered priceless fodder for the cutthroat college application process. (Mr. Isackson will attend Yale University this fall.)

“Students are planning their summer experiences to augment who they are and discover who they are, and that absolutely helps the college process,” she said.

Students preparing to apply to college are increasingly tailoring their summer plans with the goal of creating a standout personal statement — 250 words or more — for the Common Application in which to describe “a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.” Specialized, exotic and sometimes costly activities, they hope, will polish a skill, cultivate an interest and put them in the spotlight in a crowded field of straight-A students with strong test scores, community service hours and plenty of extracurricular activities.

A dizzying array of summer programs have cropped up to feed the growing anxiety that summer must be used constructively. Students can study health care in Rwanda, veterinary medicine in the Caribbean or cell cloning at Brown University, or learn about Sikkim, India’s only Buddhist state.

For those who lack the means to pay for an essay-inspiring trip, at least one scholarship program exists to help. Ten 11th-grade New York City public school students won the Palazzo Strozzi Renaissance Award, which entailed traveling around Italy for a month this summer to study the culture, philosophy and arts of the Renaissance. The students were required to keep diaries and write a final essay, which the foundation said would be used with their college applications.

Suddenly, the idea of working as a waitress or a lifeguard seems like a quaint relic of an idyllic, pre-Tiger Mom past.

“The reality is that the whole process of getting into school is extremely competitive, and it’s not only what you do during the school year — your grades and extracurriculars,” Mr. Isackson’s mother, Marla Isackson, said. “It’s your whole package, including what you do in the summer.”

Students do not have to spend a summer abroad for an essay-worthy experience. When Mary Lang Gill was a rising senior at the Atlanta Girls School, a private school, she hired Pam Proctor, an independent college counselor and the author of “The College Hook,” a college admissions guide. After learning that Ms. Gill loved to paint, Ms. Proctor connected her to the Florida Highwaymen, a band of renegade painters active during the 1950s and ’60s.

“I spent a whole day with them,” painting and observing, said Ms. Gill, who just graduated from Dickinson College. “It was one of the coolest things ever, and I love that and I got to put it on my application.” Ms. Proctor said she spent a great deal of time with students helping them find the right topic for the college essay. “Picking the essays is as important as writing them,” she said. After that, she said, the stories “write themselves.”

As colleges look for specialization, “mastery” and “passion” have become buzzwords at many New York City private schools. Along with the perception that perfectly developed essays are essential is the sense among some parents and teachers that colleges have shifted from valuing balanced students who excel in several areas, like history and ice hockey, to demanding students who perform well across all subjects and have an area of “mastery,” like squash or fencing, that showcases one’s depth.

“Colleges have moved people from thinking they should be exceptionally well rounded to using the vocabulary that ‘well rounded’ means ‘no edge,’ ” said Bruce Poch, the former dean of admissions at Pomona College.

Mr. Poch said members of his office staff sometimes joked that they were witnessing the “complete disappearance of summer jobs,” especially among upper-income applicants who opted for “decorative” internships at places like investment banks, where they could work with friends of their parents. He said further evidence of overspecialization was the disappearance of the multisport athlete. “It’s all but vanished,” he said.

Mr. Poch wonders if the specialization emphasis is going too far. “It can rob children of their childhoods,” he said.

Susan Warner, an independent college counselor, said she believed an application essay should be about the student, not about an activity.

“Parents always ask, ‘What should my child do this summer to assist in the college application?’ ” Ms. Warner said. “I tell them it’s as significant to scoop ice cream as it is to build houses in a foreign country.”

Some students make sure to cover several bases during the summer. Rebecca Weinberg, who will be a senior at the Dalton School in Manhattan, loves writing and theater. She built a summer around both. For two weeks, she worked as a camp counselor at Applause Theatrical Workshops, a performing arts program on the Upper East Side that she attended as a child. Then she attended a three-week creative writing program at Columbia University. For the last part of the summer, she is working as a camp counselor, preparing for the SATs and trying to squeeze in some beach time in the Hamptons.

“I’ve always been really interested in theater and creative writing, and I wanted to do things that included those things and helped my college application,” she said.

She said her friends were doing fellowships with surgeons, taking engineering classes at Columbia and working alongside interior designers.

“If you can find something in the summer that marries your interests, it’s a home run,” her mother, Pamela Weinberg, said. “Your child is happy, and it will help them stand up in a sea of very well-qualified kids.”

Who Needs the Hamptons? Dip and Sip at Manhattan’s Poshest Swimming Pools

2011-06-29T05:10:00.000-07:00

Who Needs the Hamptons? Dip and Sip at Manhattan’s Poshest Swimming Pools
Bloomberg, 29-June-2011
By Lili Rosboch and Catherine Smith

This happens all the time, especially when it’s hot: You wake up and decide it’s a perfect day to lounge around a pool sipping something cold.

If you aren’t already at the Hamptons, you’ll need access to deck chairs, a pool and drinks. Here’s our list of options in Manhattan:

Holiday Inn
440 W. 57th St.
212-581-8100
http://www.holidayinn.com/

By far the most straightforward is the midtown Holiday Inn with an outdoor, rooftop pool, plastic lounge chairs and a long line of liquor bottles that shimmer against a wall the color of sea foam. Frozen-drink machines dispense strawberry daiquiris and pina coladas for $8. Burgers cost $5; hotdogs are $3.

Kids are allowed, though the sign says the lifeguard can eject them at will every hour on the hour for an adult swim.

The pool is open from 10 to 6 daily; access costs $70 and includes a towel. But consider the $25 day pass for the over 21 set. It’s available Monday through Friday after 3 p.m. A little research revealed that deck chairs are first-come, first-served and fill up quickly on the weekend. Cash only.

James Hotel
27 Grand St.
212-465-2000
http://www.jameshotels.com/New-York.aspx

The glass elevator at The James is a good indication of the swank scene that awaits on the rooftop above the 17th floor. The hotel’s modern indoor bar and small outdoor pool with deck, both under a vague door policy, are surrounded by views of Midtown, Wall Street and the Hudson River.

Grab an orange towel and an open lounge chair. Stop inside at the Jimmy for a St. George Absinthe Drip ($22). Don’t despair of the cost; the pool is free from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends. Swimming is off-limits at all other times unless you’re a hotel guest.

The Peninsula
700 Fifth Ave. @ 55th St.
212-956-2888
http://www.peninsula.com/New_York/en/default.aspx

To get access to the brand-new, wrap-around sun deck opening on July 1 and the glass-enclosed pool at the Peninsula hotel, book a “Spa-cation” Monday through Thursday for $285. It includes 75 minutes of treatments like holistic massage or intensive facial, a bento-box lunch, yoga, sunscreen and more.

While there’s no swim-up bar, there’s a full-time attendant, and cocktails like a $22 frozen margarita are just a room-service bell away.

To get access on the weekend, book two hours of spa services for approximately $400 or ask for a summer fitness membership for $500 monthly with a three month minimum. The luxurious facilities are located on the top three floors of the 22-story hotel with views over Central Park.

Gansevoort Meatpacking
18 Ninth Ave. @ 13th Street
212-206-6700
Gansevoort Park Avenue
420 Park Avenue South
212-317-2900
http://www.hotelgansevoort.com/

The Gansevoort Meatpacking also offers full access to its rooftop pool Monday through Thursday for the cost of a $299 Renewal Day Package. It includes spa services like massage, facial and manicure/pedicure, and a poolside drink from the adjacent Plunge bar. Cocktails include raspberry caipirinhas and the French Kiss, which combines vodka, Chambord and Champagne.

If you’re claustrophobic, this might not be your place. The sundeck is only a narrow strip surrounding the pool, separated from the bar by a hazy glass wall.

Still, the view is great, and when you have sun, swimming and cocktails in the heart of Manhattan there’s not much to complain about.

Le Parker Meridien
119 W. 56th St.
212-245-5000
http://www.parkermeridien.com/index1.php

Soon, maybe even this weekend, Le Parker Meridien on 56th Street will reopen its outdoor deck near the already open indoor pool, with lounge-side cocktail deliveries available.

A day pass to the facility is $100, on Saturdays and Sundays too, so keep checking their website for details on deck- opening day. Proximity to the Burger Joint is a plus.

Soho House
29-35 Ninth Ave.
212-627-9800
http://www.sohohouseny.com/

Of course, you could also book a room in a hotel with a pool like Trump Soho, Thompson LES or The Empire.

Soho House in the Meatpacking district is a members-only club with a small number of hotel rooms offered at $350 and up a night.

The outdoor, rooftop pool has a beach feel. Extra-wide lounge chairs are pushed together on one side to create the largest communal couch we’ve ever seen. The dining area is shaded by umbrellas, and two bars complete the scene. It’s a very relaxed atmosphere where kind servers in striped dresses cater to your needs.

City Pools

Lasker Pool
West 110th St. @ Lenox Avenue
212-534-7639
http://centralpark.org/index.php/attractions-h-w/lasker-pool-%20rink/

There are also 50 free outdoor city pools opening today. We like the Lasker Pool in Central Park which is open from 11 to 7 daily with an hour off from 3 to 4 in the afternoon. Officially, imbibing isn’t allowed in public, though stealth nipping might go unnoticed.

Wall Street Braces for New Layoffs as Profits Wane

2011-06-17T04:28:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Braces for New Layoffs as Profits Wane
NYT, 16-Jun-10
By SUSANNE CRAIG

Wall Street plans to get smaller this summer. Faced with weak markets and uncertainty over regulations, many of the biggest firms are preparing for deep cuts in jobs and other costs.

The cutback plans are emerging even as Wall Street firms have mostly recovered from the financial crisis and are reporting substantial profits again. But those profits are not as big as they were before the crisis, and it is expected that in the coming months it will be even more difficult for firms to make money. Worries about debt in Europe and the shape that the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul rules will ultimately take, combined with the usual summer doldrums, are prompting banks to act.

“It’s a tense environment right now,” said Glenn Schorr, an analyst with the investment bank Nomura.

Even Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s most profitable firm, is retrenching. Senior executives at Goldman have concluded they need to cut 10 percent, or $1 billion, of noncompensation expenses over the next 12 months, according to a person close to the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record. The big pullback will cause Goldman employees, who have already been ordered to cut costs, to re-examine every aspect of their business.

The firm, this person said, had not set final targets for layoffs, but Goldman was “certain” to shrink headcount in the coming months. Decisions on bonuses are still months away, but they are sure to come down as well if business does not pick up.

Bank of America is also examining its expenses and is likely in the next few months to cut some staff members from its securities division, according to one senior executive at that firm who was not authorized to speak on the record. And Credit Suisse is in the process of identifying people to cut in its investment banking unit, according to a person briefed on that bank’s plans.

Morgan Stanley is expected to cut at least 300 low-producing brokers in its wealth management division this year, more than the firm initially expected, and has announced plans to cut $1 billion in noncompensation expenses over the next three years. Unlike many of its rivals, however, the firm so far has no plans to cut staff members from its investment banking and trading division, which has added hundreds of employees over the last two years or so as part of a rebuilding effort after the financial crisis.

Some firms have already wielded the ax. In January, Barclays Capital cut 600 people, or more than 2 percent of its worldwide staff, citing a business slowdown, and recently cut more employees for “performance-related reasons,” according to a person briefed on the cuts but not authorized to speak on the record. A third of the January cuts were in New York.

Regulatory overhaul has weighed on the decisions to cut back, senior bank executives say. Regulation has caused some Wall Street banks to exit some businesses, like proprietary trading. Rules that require banks to hold more capital will probably cause some firms to end certain business lines as they decide they can more effectively deploy the capital elsewhere. On products like derivatives, firms will lose revenue as instruments once traded off exchanges will move into open markets.

While many financial rules are still to be written, some firms have decided that they cannot afford to wait any longer. The last significant industrywide job cuts were in early 2009. In the first quarter of that year Goldman alone cut its work force by almost 9 percent. Since then, most firms have held steady on their head counts or have added to them slightly. That will change this summer.

The scale of the expected cuts is bad news for the New York City economy, which depends heavily on a booming financial industry to pay taxes and fill its restaurants. And they will come as the national economy is still struggling to find its footing since the financial crisis.

Not all is doom and gloom. Wall Street is benefiting from the boom in social media and technology public offerings. In recent weeks big names like Pandora Media and Linkedin have gone public, brought to market by banks. So far this year, companies have raised $29.3 billion in public offerings, up more than 200 percent from a year ago. This year is on track to be the most lucrative since the technology boom in 2000, according to Thomson Reuters data.

The profit picture is also somewhat more stable for diversified companies like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, which have large commercial retail banking operations in addition to those in trading and sales. JPMorgan has no immediate plans to cut head count in trading, according to a person briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak on the record. The bank is, however, trying to reduce noncompensation expenses.

But firms like Bank of America are still paying for mortgage sins of days gone by, which have dimmed their profit pictures. Earlier this year Bank of America put aside another $1 billion to cover claims from outside investors who lost money and want the firm to buy back billions of dollars in bad Countrywide Financial mortgages. The Durbin Amendment, a proposed restriction on debit card fees, is also expected to reduce profits when it comes into effect next month.

For those firms that depend on trading, it is clear how much the engines of Wall Street have slowed. Return on equity, the amount a firm earns on its common stock outstanding and an important measure of financial performance, has decreased significantly in the years since the credit crisis. Industrywide return on equity was 8.2 percent in 2010, down from 17.5 percent in 2005, according to Nomura.

And this year there is another reason that is prompting Wall Street to act more swiftly on cuts. Wall Street typically pays out roughly half of its revenue in compensation, and firms often wait until late summer to cull staff when they have a better sense of revenue for the year. The newest cuts are expected to come earlier this year because of recent changes in the way employees are paid.

Traditionally, Wall Street employees get most of their annual pay in the form of a one-time year-end bonus. But after the credit crisis most firms changed the way they compensated employees in an effort to discourage excessive risk-taking, increasing base salaries while reducing performance-related payments. As a result, banks are paying out more compensation as the year goes on, forcing firms to re-evaluate staffing levels earlier in the year because more of their compensation costs are now fixed.

Firms are also trying to cut noncompensation expenses and are looking for ways to cut fat. Goldman’s goal to cut $1 billion in noncompensation expenses this year is significant, analysts say. There will be immediate and significant savings from the fall off in trading volumes.

Trading firms pay fees to trade, and lower volumes could result in an annual savings of $200 million at Goldman alone, one analyst estimated. Those savings will come naturally, but most will not, and banks will be forced to rein in everything, including travel and professional fees.

Monopoly Lost: Atlantic City's Rise and Fall

2011-06-01T04:07:00.000-07:00

Monopoly Lost: Atlantic City's Rise and Fall
AP, 31-May-11
By WAYNE PARRY

Four years ago, some Atlantic City casino customers were shelling out $1,000 for a brownie sprinkled with edible gold dust in a Baccarat crystal they could take home.

Nowadays, some wait until 11 p.m. to eat so they can get a steak dinner for $2.99.

At the beginning of 2007, Atlantic City's 11 casinos were at the top of a wave of prosperity. Starting with the 1978 opening of Resorts, the nation's first casino outside Nevada, Atlantic City for years was the only place to play slots, cards, dice or roulette in the eastern half of the United States. The cash kept pouring in, the busloads of visitors kept coming and the revenue charts went one way: straight up.

And then, they didn't. Now, battered by competition from casinos all around it, Atlantic City is in a fight for its very survival.

The resort is furiously trying to remake itself into a vacation destination that happens to have gambling, but with no guarantee it has a winning hand even as other threats loom, including the possible expansion of casinos to north Jersey racetracks and a growing push for online gambling.

Intoxicated by years of success, Atlantic City missed numerous opportunities to diversify its offerings, widen its customer base and fend off competition that clearly was on its way even 20 years ago.

"The atmosphere was a total irrational exuberance; it truly was," said Robert Griffin, CEO of Trump Entertainment Resorts, who worked at Trump properties here in the 1980s and 1990s. "There was a feeling that there was no end to the good times and that the money would never end."

Then, disaster struck the nation's second-largest gambling market. A perfect storm of competition right on its doorstep in Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware, coupled with the recession, pummeled Atlantic City worse than any other casino market. In four years, a billion and a half dollars vanished, along with thousands of jobs and tourists. Pennsylvania, with its 10 casinos, is poised to knock Atlantic City into third place at some point next year.

How did things go so wrong so fast?

Cars streamed into Atlantic City on May 26, 1978, and people lined the Boardwalk for blocks, waiting to get inside Resorts on the first day it was legal to gamble there.

People bought tickets for buffets they had no intention of eating, just to sneak inside the casino earlier than the rest. Men relieved themselves into plastic coin cups to avoid losing their spot at the tables by going to restrooms. And cash — more than anyone had ever seen and more than management could imagine — flooded into the counting room, to the point that it took nearly an entire day to count it.

"It was euphoria," said Steve Norton, who was Resorts' executive vice president when it opened and now runs a casino consulting firm in Indiana. "I mean, it was an unbelievable time."

One after another in the 1980s, casinos kept coming. Revenues reached a high point of $5.2 billion in 2006.

And then the Pocono Downs harness racing track in Luzerne County, Pa., added slot machines and opened them to the public on Nov. 14, 2006. Suddenly, people in the heart of one of Atlantic City's key feeder markets could drive 10 or 20 minutes to play the slots instead of making a three-hour round trip to Atlantic City. In less than four years, there would be 10 casinos in Pennsylvania, all of which now offer table games, too.

They took in nearly $2.5 billion last year, approaching Atlantic City's $3.6 billion. So far this year, they are running neck-and-neck: $996 million for Pennsylvania, and $1.1 billion for Atlantic City.

"If you didn't anticipate this competition coming, you were asleep at the wheel," said Israel Posner, executive director of the Lloyd Levenson Institute of Gaming at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

David Schwartz, director of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research, said Atlantic City can be successful again, "but it's going to require a reinvention."

"Basically, the city needs to stop looking backward and start looking ahead," he said.

A look back reveals many missteps and lost opportunities. The most obvious: a failure to reinvent the resort as a place to go for more than gambling. Atlantic City belatedly jumped on the bandwagon, adding non-gambling amenities over the past eight years like celebrity restaurants, spas, shopping and top-name entertainment. The Borgata even built a stand-alone luxury hotel called the Water Club, and Harrah's indoor pool has become a cash cow, doubling as one of the city's hottest nightspots.

But back then, anything customers couldn't bet on was seen as a waste of money.

"Nobody wanted to build anything other than casinos," Norton said. "The property values shot up so high, it didn't make sense to build anything else."

There's plenty of blame to go around. Casino owners focused only on their own properties instead of the market as a whole, a habit that Atlantic City is only recently shaking off. Competing against each other instead of Las Vegas was the city's playbook for decades.

Now, the casinos are banding together for joint marketing efforts, and will chip in to help sponsor the biggest names in entertainment, rather than letting one casino pay the whole cost of a Britney Spears or Lady Gaga show, or a rodeo. And three casinos are even thinking of jointly funding a new convention or trade show center in Atlantic City to draw badly needed midweek business.

New Jersey also erred by failing to approve legalized sports betting in 1991 when it was given the chance to do so ahead of a nationwide ban, gambling experts say. A state senator sued the federal government in 2009 to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, but the suit was dismissed by a federal judge last month.

When Griffin, the Trump CEO, lays his head on the pillow at night, he worries that New Jersey will one day succumb to political pressure from lawmakers in the more populous northern part of the state to expand casino gambling to the Meadowlands racetrack, 10 minutes from New York City. Analysts expect it would instantly become a $1 billion market. State law now allows casino gambling only in Atlantic City.

"That would devastate us," he said. "This would become a two-casino town; it wouldn't even take five years. That's what keeps me up at night."

Maddie Downey, a bartender at the Showboat, has her own worries. The single mom has already lost one casino job when the Sands closed in 2006, and worries that gas prices will stay near $4 a gallon, keeping people away from Atlantic City.

"I'm just glad to have this job," she said. "I just hope it doesn't get any worse, and I hope the price of gas comes down."

When the Indian-run Foxwoods casino opened in Connecticut in 1992, it was the closest casino to Atlantic City — and a sure sign that more were to come. Mohegan Sun, another tribal casino, opened in Connecticut four years later. The resort responded by allowing its casinos to stay open 24 hours a day; they formerly had to close for a few hours in the wee hours of the morning. It also introduced new games like poker, keno and racing simulcasts.

But the money kept coming in, and the two Connecticut casinos didn't prove to be a major problem for Atlantic City, which sat on its cards. No new casinos opened until the Borgata in 2003, which would usher in a new era of grand dreams — very few of which would ever come true.

The Borgata touched off a casino arms race, with companies from across the country vying to build the next mega-resort here. At the start of 2008, there were plans for as many as four new casinos; MGM Mirage unveiled a $5 billion, three-tower casino project that would have been the largest ever built here.

Pinnacle Entertainment blew up the Sands to make way for its own $2 billion casino resort, modeled on a beach house. Before setting off the explosives that would bring it down, then-CEO Dan Lee spoke of the importance of keeping the market fresh, new and exciting. The challenge, he said, is "to compete in this new world, or be the next implosion."

Yet by the end of 2008, Pinnacle and MGM's projects imploded on their own, and Revel, the first of the new projects to actually put shovels in the ground, was limping along. It would run out of money in 2009 and halt construction on the interior. Morgan Stanley, its major financer, walked away from the project, deciding it was better to take a nearly $1 billion bath on the deal than to stay in Atlantic City.

After scouring the globe for financing, including asking the Chinese government, Revel CEO Kevin DeSanctis finally secured new financing in February 2011 that allowed the project to resume, with some state tax incentives.

"Every market got hit, but nobody faced the amount of new competition coming online as much as Atlantic City did," said Larry Mullin, who was president of the Borgata at the time and now runs an Australian casino company. "We were just exposed. Nothing was going to stop the convenience customer from trying a product that was closer to them. I just don't think there was any silver, magic bullet. It was a very tough situation."

Torn between demands from the New Jersey casino and horse racing industries, New Jersey's incoming governor, Republican Chris Christie, sided in 2010 with the casinos, which provided more tax revenue to the state's coffers. He refused to allow slot machines at the racetracks — something the racing industry has long wanted to keep pace with its competitors in other states.

New Jersey staged a quasi-takeover of Atlantic City's casino and tourist zones; Christie called it "a partnership." But the new tourism zone is run by the state and takes charge of many functions Atlantic City's often dysfunctional municipal government had long struggled with, including safety, cleanliness and economic development. (At one point just a few years ago, four of the previous eight mayors of Atlantic City had been arrested on corruption charges.)

The $30 million in annual payments that the casinos had to pony up to the horse racing industry, in return for keeping slots out of the tracks, will now be used to market Atlantic City nationally. The state rewrote many of its famously strict regulations for casinos, removing, among other things, minimum staffing requirements. They even allowed casinos to keep some jackpots that had built up on progressive slot machine games that they decide to cancel.

State-mandated economic redevelopment funds collected from each casino will now be used solely for projects within Atlantic City; before, the money was spread around the state.

The help cannot come too soon. Casinos are selling at fire-sale prices. Within the past year, The Tropicana, Resorts and Trump Marina have all sold for about 10 cents on the dollar from their values of just a few years ago. The Atlantic City Hilton stopped paying its mortgage in 2009 and is looking for a buyer. The casinos have shed nearly 15,000 jobs since 1997, with more layoffs to come.

The extra marketing money is crucial to Atlantic City's future, said Frank Fantini, a Delaware casino consultant and publisher.

"If it can create that same, "I gotta go party!' atmosphere that Las Vegas has, it ought to be able to work," he said.

Griffin, the Trump CEO and Casino Association president, said Atlantic City should bottom out at around $3.5 billion, then slowly start to grow again.

"There's a lot of pain coming, but I strongly believe that in 2012 you're going to see us coming back," he said. "I definitely think better days are ahead for Atlantic City."

Could that be a new marketing slogan for Atlantic City? Most of America seems to know that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Yet how many people can correctly cite Atlantic City's tourism slogan, "Always Turned On"? The resort is thinking of a new slogan.

The effort has been going on for three years.

Election Upset in West New York

2011-05-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

Election Upset in West New York
Hudson Reporter, 15-May-11
By Santo Sanabria

Roque slate wins by large margin

The community of West New York was surprised Tuesday night when longtime Mayor Sal Vega and his Board of Commissioners lost their re-election bids to a band of largely political newcomers led by local doctor Felix Roque.

After the town’s high taxes spurred Roque to begin a thwarted recall effort against Vega two years ago, Roque continued his political involvement, putting together a slate of candidates to take Town Hall.

In West New York’s form of government, voters elect five commissioners to run the town, and that group elects one of them mayor.

Roque said on Wednesday that he will be the mayoral choice when his slate takes office this coming Tuesday.

The West New York election results turned out to be a surprise for many in the community. Felix Roque had the highest vote total, with 3,763.

Count Wiley had 3,236, Caridad Rodriquez had 3,349, FiorD’ Aliza Frias had 3,219, and Ruben Vargas had 3,215.

Just behind them, Mayor Silverio “Sal” Vega had 3,137, Michele Fernandez-Lopez had 2,809, Lawrence Riccardi had 2,864, Albert Rodriguez had 2,830, and Gerald Lange had 2,802.

Independent candidate Ercides Aguasvivas got a mere 238 votes.

New leaders in Town Hall

Tuesday night, at Roque’s 60th Street headquarters, his supporters chanted repeatedly, “Llego papa,” which means “Dad has arrived.”

“We are going to make a difference,” Roque announced after learning he had won. “Your children can now have the same dreams I had as a kid”

Count Wiley asked the crowd of supporters “what do you want? What do you have?” while the crowd shouted “freedom!”

Roque and Wiley continually thanked God for the victory.

Walking to Town Hall

Roque and his slate and followers then walked to Town Hall, where Vega and his supporters had been counting votes earlier in the evening. But Vega had already left.

Initially Roque was not allowed up the steps to address the people, but soon, the police allowed him to climb the steps.

A Town Hall worker came outside and read the results aloud.

“Tomorrow we are going to have a party,” shouted Roque to his supporters. “God is great.”

He added, “I was told I won, but you truly won. You made me win. I am excited for the people. The people put me on this mission, and I spearheaded the movement.”

“These whole three years I did it for the people,” Wiley said. “I put my heart and soul into this and I am glad it did not go in vain. I am happy with the outcome.”

Ruben Vargas said, “I feel great to liberate the people from the last administration, where crime was sky high.”

A changing of the helm

The newly elected commissioners will be sworn Tuesday, May 17 at 12 p.m. at West New York Town Hall.

Roque said that his goals for the future include lowering taxes and cutting the crime rate.

Vega spokesman and political consultant Paul Swibinski said Wednesday that he believes the results can be attributed to “February 2009 when the town needed to raise taxes. Nothing could have repaired the damages of the taxes, but it is part of a democracy. We congratulate the Roque team in running a good campaign. We will cooperate during transition for it to run smoothly for the best interest of the people of West New York.”

Other sources said that the county’s political machine, the Hudson County Democratic Organization, did not come through to help Vega fend off Roque’s challenge.

Roque Campaign Manager Joe Demarco said, “We always believed we could do it. Those voters that wanted to vote, we made sure they had an opportunity. We had great passion and the people’s support to help us during the elections.”

He said that the supporters who were involved in the recall effort were involved in the win.

Profile: Arianna Huffington

2011-05-08T05:33:00.000-07:00

Arianna Huffington: mover and shaper
The Telegraph, 7-Feb-2011
By Mick Brown

Arianna Huffington this week became an internet mogul. Mick Brown examines her unstoppable rise

In a career spanning some 40 years, Arianna Huffington, once described as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus", has worn many faces.

She has been an author, polemicist, radio talk-show host, sometime staple of British newspaper gossip columns, a Republican political wife, a failed gubernatorial candidate, a woman who has journeyed across the political spectrum from ardent conservative to committed liberal. Indeed, looking at her CV, it can sometimes seem that Huffington has not so much had several cycles in one life, but several lives – to which can now be added yet another incarnation: media mogul.

This week it was announced that the The Huffington Post, the "internet newspaper" (as she describes it) that she edits, has been acquired by the internet provider AOL in a deal worth $315 million. Founded in 2005 by Huffington and the former AOL executive Kenneth Lerer, the HuffPo – as, excruciatingly, it has become known – has risen from being a marginal voice in the blogosphere to a prominent outlet for liberal opinion, and one of the most influential new-media platforms in America.

The HuffPo mixes content aggregated from traditional news outlets with in-house journalism, usually trumpeted in shouty upper-case headlines, and leavened with the obligatory dosage of celebrity gossip ("Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem"). But much of its following has been generated by a cast of bloggers that has included such disparate figures as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Scarlett Johansson and Neil Young, as well as Huffington herself.

Its front page yesterday made no pretence at modesty, proclaiming the birth of "A BRAND NEW MEDIA UNIVERSE – Arianna: The Huffington Post & AOL – A Merger Of Visions".

Under the deal, Huffington will be president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media group, which will integrate all Huffington Post and AOL content, including news, entertainment, video and such AOL sites as Moviefone, MapQuest and TechCrunch. It is claimed that the new combined media group will reach 117 million Americans and 270 million globally.

Overnight it makes Huffington one of the major players in the rapidly changing world of global media. It is a position that all who know her say that Huffington will relish.

What Arianna Huffington has always craved is not so much power as influence. It seems that her life's journey has been to get to the centre of the action, wherever that action may be, in the process accumulating as many useful allies as possible. An indefatigable networker and name-dropper, she is on first-name terms with a who's who of American life, from entertainment, politics and business. It would be tempting to say that she has the most compendious Rolodex in America – except that Huffington, of course, does not do Rolodex, instead running her life with three BlackBerries, which she claims to hide in the bathroom at night to ward off temptation.

Huffington was born Arianna Stassinopoulous in Athens in 1950. Her parents had been active in the Greek resistance movement during the war. Her father Constantine was a journalist who edited a resistance newspaper, survived internment in a Nazi concentration camp and later became a publisher and management consultant. When Arianna was 16, her parents separated and she moved to Britain with her mother and her younger sister Agapi to take the entrance examinations for Cambridge. Arianna was duly awarded an exhibition to Girton to study economics.

Displaying the ambition and determination that would become her salient characteristics, she rose to become president of the Cambridge Union, earning herself the unkind sobriquet "Staryanna Comeacroppalos". Chris Smith, the former Labour minister and now Lord Smith of Finsbury, and a contemporary at Cambridge, recalls her as "a very prominent figure", who became known for her habit of leaving her Alfa Romeo parked on double yellow lines, accumulating parking tickets.

"She was very striking and very glamorous, probably more of a socialite than a political figure but the liberal icon she has since become was not very evident in her student days. She was very much of the Right. I was regarded as being of the Left, and therefore the enemy."

After graduating in 1972, she was romantically linked with the Conservative MP John Selwyn Gummer and the journalist Simon Jenkins, before meeting Bernard Levin, The Times columnist and polymath, and the man she would later describe as "the big love of my life". She was 21. Levin was 42. She prepared for their first date by boning up on the latest developments in the Soviet Union and the music of Wagner. The relationship would last eight years, finally ending in 1980 over Levin's reluctance to have children. Following his death in 2004, she described him as her "mentor as a writer, and a role model as a thinker".

Huffington once recalled that Levin used to tell her "that going to bed with him was a liberal education". And education – or rather a furious appetite for self-improvement – has been a Huffington hallmark. At the age of 23 she wrote The Female Woman, a rebuttal to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch; she has since written serviceable biographies of Maria Callas and Picasso, self-help manuals, spiritual tracts and a novel about Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

With Levin, she became enamoured of the controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Rolls-Royce loving leader of the "Orange People", who promulgated a melange of traditional spiritual teachings and pop psychology nostrums. She departed from Rajneesh before he was engulfed in scandal, but her enthusiasm for new age thinking has been a constant in her life.

She went on to date Werner Erhard, a former encyclopaedia salesman whose organisation est made him one of the foremost self-help gurus of the 1970s, and she would later become a follower of another new age guru, Roger Delano Hinkins, known as "John-Roger", whose Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness was the subject of a series of exposés in the Los Angeles Times in 1988, in which former members described it as sexually and financially exploitative.

She was reportedly "ordained" as a minister in the movement, and her former husband Michael Huffington, the Republican politician and scion of a Texas oil family to whom she was married for 11 years, would later describe John-Roger as having "more influence on her than anyone else in the world". Much of Huffington's philosophy remains steeped in the conviction that mankind is on the verge of, as she puts it, "a breakthrough in our evolution". She continues to pray, meditate and practise yoga daily and is an ardent exponent of green issues.

Her introduction to Michael Huffington came in 1985. Following the break-up with Levin, she had left London for New York with her mother, heeding the advice of the publisher Lord Weidenfeld to befriend the wives rather than the husbands of the East Coast power-broking elite. It was advice that would ultimately lead to her friendship with the philanthropist Ann Getty, who not only introduced her to Huffington but graciously footed the bill for their wedding in 1986. Henry Kissinger was among the 500 guests, observing that it had everything but ''an Aztec sacrificial fire dance''. Barbara Walters was a bridesmaid. Huffington's ascendancy to the summit of American society was complete.

The couple based themselves in Washington, where Michael Huffington was a deputy assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan administration, before moving to California in 1988 where he ran for, and won, a seat in Congress. In 1994 he ran for a senate seat, exhausting almost $30 million of his fortune but losing. The Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who managed Michael Huffington's campaign, would later describe Arianna as "domineering" and "the most ruthless and ambitious person I'd met in 30 years in national politics".

The couple divorced three years later, with Huffington explaining that "Michael decided that he wanted to go off to Europe and go on a boat, and I wanted to pick up my life and continue writing". The marriage produced two daughters, Christina, 21, and Isabella, 19.

Arianna, meanwhile, was advancing her own entry into politics. In 1995, she became a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, and hosted a talk-show on a conservative cable-channel, National Empowerment Television.

But she was undergoing a sea change in her political views. In 2003 Huffington entered the California gubernatorial race as an independent against Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her campaign came to a swift close when it was revealed that she had paid only $771 in taxes for the previous two years. (Huffington claimed that the bulk of her income was child-support payments.)

Huffington has attributed her move from Right to Left to a growing belief that the private sector could not solve America's problems. Much of the Huffington Post's rising popularity came from her support for Barack Obama (at least at the time when his popularity was in the ascendant). And while her enthusiasm for Obama has waned, she has remained a strident critic of the far Right and the Tea Party movement - her sentiments summarised in the wordy title of her 2008 book Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe. (Sarah Palin, we may surmise, is not on the Huffington BlackBerry.)

Her merger with AOL, she has promised, will not temper the HuffPo's line. ''Far from changing our editorial approach," she wrote in an editorial yesterday, ''our culture, or our mission, this moment will be, for HuffPost, like stepping off a fast-moving train and on to a supersonic jet. We're still travelling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.''

Quite what this destination might be, she does not specify. But for Arianna Huffington, just getting there quickly has always been the point.

Sudhir Sherchan Wins CMS Cup Golf

2011-04-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

Sudhir Sherchan Wins CMS Cup Golf
myrepublica, 9-April-11

Sudhir Sherchan won the title of the CMS Cup Golf Championship at the Royal Nepal Golf Club (RNGC) on Saturday.

Sherchan scored 36 points to win the trophy and Omega watch in the amateur golf championship sponsored by International Society of Medical Education (ISME).

Lakshman Pun, who scored 34 points on Friday, finished runner-up while DT Sherpa won the award for best gross. Pun received a Samsung Mobile and runner-up trophy and Sherpa bagged two-way air-ticket to Kathmandu-Bangkok-Kathmandu along side the trophy.

Overnight leader LP Gurung claimed the title in the senior category, where Kiran S Thapa finished second. Gurung had a score of 35 points while Thapa had scored 32.

Rekha Ghimire scored 29 points to claim the award for ladies winner. Sumitra Dayananda was runner-up with 26 points.

Likwise, Jayendra Shah and Sameer Acharya were winner and runner-up respectively in the guest section.

Shree Jay Acharya won the award for longest drive while Rabin Rana hit three birdies to bag most birdies award. Kajiman Gurung got the award for closest to the pin and Gaurav SJB Rana received best sportsmanship prize.

Krishna Nepal was adjudged best caddy of the year while Gopal Chitrakar received a special prize.

CEO and Chairman of ISME Nagender Pampati expressed his delight on the successful completion of the event. "I´m happy to see increasing number of participants," said Pampati.

RNGC President Prachanda Bahadur Shrestha handed a token of appreciation to Pampati for sponsoring the tournament.

Altogether 96 golfers participated on the championship played over 18 holes under stable ford format with 7/8 Handicap allowance. Among them, 32 teed off on Friday and the remaining 64 golfers teed off on Saturday.

2009 Median Household Income: New Jersey Counties

2011-03-22T07:24:00.001-07:00

Book Review: "Leben oder gelebt werden"

2011-03-03T05:43:00.000-08:00

Book Review: "Leben oder gelebt werden"
Bloomberg, 3-Mar-11
By Catherine Hickley

Some parents cast a really huge shadow.

Pity Walter Kohl, whose colossus of a father, Helmut, was Germany’s longest-serving chancellor since Otto von Bismarck.

Now 47, Walter recounts a troubled childhood, struggles with depression and suicidal urges in “Leben oder gelebt werden” (“Live or Be Lived”), currently topping Spiegel magazine’s non-fiction bestseller list.

His book depicts a preoccupied father who retreated to his study after meals on the rare occasions he was home and only played with his two sons for magazine photo shoots.
Unsurprisingly, they are estranged.

“Politics is his elixir of life, everything else is secondary,” Kohl writes.

Helmut Kohl’s wife, who killed herself with an overdose in 2001, took responsibility for the family and household.
Portrayed by Walter as a strict yet loving mother and a long- suffering, dutiful spouse, Hannelore Kohl felt torn between her husband’s public role and her sons’ need for normalcy.

The two were irreconcilable, Kohl writes.

There was nothing normal about going to school with a police escort, taking vacations surrounded by diplomats and journalists, or facing the daily threat of kidnapping -- and worse -- during the peak of the Baader-Meinhof gang’s terror campaign.

Escape to Harvard

After a spell in the army, Kohl fled to Harvard University, and made friends who had no interest in German politics.

He then joined Morgan Stanley as an IPO analyst. He recalls proudly showing his father his workplace in a Wall Street tower block.

Helmut Kohl, who had “not the faintest idea what an investment bank did,” was horrified at the informal, partitioned offices and functional furniture.

In July 1990, as German reunification approached, the cover of Time magazine caught his eye in a New York supermarket. His father’s face, emblazoned with the headline “Mr. Germany,” hit him “like thunder,” he writes. “There was no peace, no anonymity anywhere -- not for me.” He does seem very sensitive.

Kohl moved back to Germany in 1994, deciding he no longer wanted to be a rootless immigrant or an investment banker for life.

Funding Scandal

Helmut Kohl lost the 1998 election and his party became embroiled in a funding scandal in 1999. His family was shaken to the core -- besieged by journalists and tarred with the same brush, Walter Kohl writes.

Driven to despair by the scandal and a bizarre allergy to light, Hannelore Kohl ended her life in 2001. Grieving and depressed, her son considered taking the same path, he writes.

In the years after her death, Kohl’s relationship with his father deteriorated. He wasn’t invited to Helmut’s wedding in 2008 and thinks new wife Maike Richter wanted nothing to do with the ex-chancellor’s family.

After giving a television interview that displeased his father, all contact ended. Kohl Senior hasn’t commented publicly on the book.

Writing “Leben oder gelebt werden” clearly served as therapy for a man who says he hit rock bottom in his late 30s.

Since then, Kohl has hauled himself out of a hole that he admits he partly dug for himself: He sank into self pity, constantly bemoaning the injustice of fate.

With his Korean wife, a son from his first marriage and a successful business importing car-making tools from Korea and China, Walter seems on the way to becoming his own man.

Folk singer Kalyan Sherchan dies aged 64

2011-02-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

Folk singer Kalyan Sherchan dies aged 64
Nepalnews.com, 7-Feb-11

Veteran folk singer and folk/traditional song collector Kalyan Sherchan passed away on Monday. He was 64.

Sherchan, who was suffering from pancreatic cancer from the past one year, breathed his last while undergoing treatment at the Manipal Teaching Hospital in Fulbari, Pokhara at 2 am today morning.

The folk singer had been admitted to the hospital about two months ago after suffering from chronic jaundice.

Active in Nepal’s popular folk singing scene since 1974, Serchan is always remembered for such classics as “Kalilo Tama Lai, Sodha Rama Lai”, “Sorha Barshe Umeraima Mai Pani Jhilke Hudo Ho” and “Sukhi Jyanlai Gudari Kamlo”.

His most popular folk song “Chyangba ho chyangba, Chyangba le aja ke bhancha” still remains in the public imagination as the much loved folk song. The tune of the popular song is also the signature tune of BBC Nepali Service.

Relatives, friends, well-wishers as well as fans reached his Ranipauwa located residence in Pokhara to pay their last respect to the departed soul.

Sherchan is survived by his wife and two daughters.

NYC: Where Do All the Cabs Go in the Late Afternoon?

2011-01-22T16:31:00.000-08:00

Where Do All the Cabs Go in the Late Afternoon?
NYT, 11-Jan-11
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Ever feel as if you can’t get a cab around 5 o’clock? Now there’s scientific proof that you’re right.

There is new data to confirm what generations of New Yorkers have long known in their bones: just as the afternoon rush is about to begin, the taxicabs disappear by the hundreds.

From 4 to 5 p.m., the traditional hour for cabs to change shifts, the number of active taxicabs on the streets falls by nearly 20 percent compared with an hour before, according to a city review of GPS records taken from thousands of cab trips over the past year.

In fact, the number of cabs that pick up at least two fares during that taxicab witching hour is the lowest of any hour between 7 a.m. and midnight, the data show. This vanishing trend turned up in the data regardless of time of year or day of the week.

The hour from 4 to 5 p.m. has long been considered a low tide of taxi service, the maddening moment when, in apparent violation of the laws of supply and demand, entire fleets of empty yellow cabs flip on their off-duty lights and proceed past the outstretched hands of office workers seeking a way home.

But despite decades of complaining from New Yorkers, taxi officials have never been able to gauge the true extent of the shift changeover’s effect on service, until now.

“It’s not just urban legend,” said David S. Yassky, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, who asked his agency to investigate the phenomenon. “It’s a real dip.”

The Bloomberg administration, which prides itself on data-driven policy, is still grappling with how to handle the discovery. Mr. Yassky said that, so far, he had no plans to ask for any changes to the industry’s schedule, although his team is still considering its options.

Mr. Yassky said the city “should be circumspect about substituting its judgment for the judgment of business people.” But he acknowledged that any attempt at regulation would have to take into account the forces that have kept the practice in place for years.

The explanation for the 5 p.m. dip is steeped in the history and economics of the taxi industry. Many taxicabs are used by two drivers a day, each working a 12-hour shift. To ensure that each leg is equally attractive, taxi owners schedule the shift change in the middle of the afternoon, so each shift gets a rush hour.

But the switch cannot happen too early, either: a 2 p.m. changeover, for instance, would require a day driver to start his 12-hour shifts in the wee hours of the morning. And cabbies say the midafternoon offers brisk business not evident 12 hours later, when fares mainly consist of late-night revelers.

Hence the 5 p.m. compromise. When the changeover became standard, its timing did not pose a big problem for passengers. Many taxi garages were situated on the Far West Side of Manhattan, requiring cabs to make only a short trip to 11th Avenue before heading back to Midtown with a fresh driver.

But in the 1980s, as commercial rents rose, taxi fleets began migrating across the East River, particularly to Long Island City, Queens. The 5 p.m. shift change now included a journey over the often-packed Queensboro Bridge, not to mention the return slog to the city. Drivers started going off duty between 4 and 4:30 p.m., to ensure that they had enough time to make it to the garage; even today, tardy cabbies can be hit with a $30 fine.

If the system changed, “I’d be very upset,” Youssef Kamel, 34, a day driver from Brooklyn, said the other day. Mr. Kamel was at the BP station on Houston Street, which is among several places that serve as transfer points for driver-owned taxicabs, unaffiliated with a fleet. The gas station gets so busy after 4 p.m. on weekdays, with dozens of cabs gassing up and changing drivers, that managers wave off private automobiles, asking them to return after 5.

The rising popularity of the driver-owned model means that more cabbies today coordinate a handoff in Manhattan, which may be lessening the impact of the 5 o’clock dip.

“There are more drivers changing shifts in Manhattan today than ever before,” said David Pollack, the publisher of Taxi Insider, a monthly industry publication.

Some of the 5 p.m. frustration, Mr. Pollack added, could be about perception. “It’s like Fred Flintstone at 5 o’clock: the whistle blows and everybody wants a cab,” he said.

There is precedent for the city to regulate livery drivers so that they better meet customer demand.

A publication from 1839, “By-laws and Ordinances of the Mayor, Aldermen and Commonalty of the City of New York,” decrees that the mayor can make rules “respecting the standing of horse coaches and carriages at or near the theaters and other places of amusement at night, and at and near steamboats and other vessels at all times, and at and upon the stands designated and specified for such coaches, as may be necessary to preserve order and decorum.”

Indeed, the issue has not gone ignored by the taxi lords. A 1987 dictate by the City Council ordered the taxi commission to investigate the feasibility of staggering shift changes throughout the afternoon, in an attempt to free up more cabs during rush hour. That report has since been lost to history, and the practice continued unabated.

In 2004, the city took a more aggressive approach, implementing a $1 surcharge on fares between 4 and 8 p.m. on weekdays in an explicit attempt to encourage more drivers to work in the afternoon rush. “We believe that the 20 percent dip would be even worse if it weren’t for the surcharge,” Mr. Yassky said.

Still, Mr. Yassky acknowledged that the afternoon taxi drought remained “one of the two or three things that people routinely bring up to me.” One recent complainant was former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who mailed a letter to Mr. Yassky a few days before Christmas, asking about “a dearth of available cabs in the late afternoon.”

“One of my law partners remarked on the fact that at 4 o’clock, you can’t get a cab,” Mr. Koch said in an interview last week. “Wouldn’t it make sense to have a substantial number of cabs on duty at all times?”

“In government,” Mr. Koch added, “nothing goes away. This is a perennial.”

Big tuna fetches record $396,000 in Tokyo

2011-01-07T01:47:00.000-08:00

Big tuna fetches record $396,000 in Tokyo
AP, 5-Jan-2011
By Tomoko A. Hosaka

A giant bluefin tuna fetched a record 32.49 million yen, or nearly $396,000, in Tokyo on Wednesday, in the first auction of the year at the world's largest wholesale fish market.

The price for the 754-pound (342-kilogram) tuna beat the previous record set in 2001 when a 445-pound (202-kilogram) fish sold for 20.2 million yen, a spokesman for Tsukiji market said.

"It was an exceptionally large fish," said the official, Yutaka Hasegawa. "But we were all surprised by the price."

The massive tuna was bought and shared by the same duo that won the bidding for last year's top fish: the owners of Kyubey, an upscale sushi restaurant in Tokyo's Ginza district, and Itamae Sushi, a casual, Hong Kong-based chain.

Reporters thronged Hong Kong entrepreneur Ricky Cheng after his big win, which reflects the growing popularity of sushi around the world, particularly in Asia.

"I was nervous when I arrived in Tokyo yesterday, but I am relieved now," he said after the auction, which began shortly after 5 a.m.

The giant tuna, caught off the coast of northern Japan, was among 538 shipped in from around the world for Wednesday's auction.

The record-setting price translates to a whopping 95,000 yen per kilogram, or about $526 per pound.

Japan is the world's biggest consumer of seafood, with Japanese eating 80 percent of the Atlantic and Pacific bluefins caught. The two tuna species are the most sought-after by sushi lovers.

Fatty bluefin — called "o-toro" here — can sell for 2,000 yen ($24) per piece at high-end Tokyo sushi restaurants.

Japanese wholesalers, however, face growing calls for tighter fishing rules amid declining tuna stocks worldwide.

In November, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas voted to cut the bluefin fishing quota in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean from 13,500 to 12,900 metric tons annually — about a 4 percent reduction. It also agreed on measures to try to improve enforcement of quotas on bluefin.

The decision was strongly criticized by environmental groups, which hoped to see bluefin fishing slashed or suspended.

Obituary: Govind Bahadur Malla "Gothaale" (1921-2010)

2010-12-28T11:27:00.000-08:00

Obituary: Govind Bahadur Malla "Gothaale" (1921-2010)
TKP, 17-Dec-10
By Ujjwal Prasai

Imagine a child born and brought up in a home from where a famous literary magazine was published and whose father was a writer, editor, and publisher of the same magazine. The home was regularly visited by other writers who interacted rigorously about the state of literature in Nepal and about the ways to develop it, and it was but obvious that he would grow up listening to them. The natural path the child would follow would be that of writing.

That child was none other than the acclaimed writer Govind Bahadur Malla, who many knew also as Gothaale. He grew up under the tutelage of his father Riddhi Bahadur Malla who edited and published the magazine Sarada—often heralded as a milestone in Nepali literature. Sarada first came out in 1934 and served as a space for many in the Nepali literary firmament of the time, becoming a platform for writers to hone their talent. No wonder that Gothaale once said in an interview, “Siddhi Charan Shrestha inspired me to write; Gopal Prasad Rimal infused modern consciousness in me; and Laxmi Prasad Devkota taught me the importance of hard work.”

Gothaale, who passed away on Monday after a long battle with asthma and anaemia, was regarded as one of the foremost writers of the human condition. He drew from the zeitgeist of his time, speaking out against the tyranny of the Rana regime when needed, and commenting on his native Newari culture later. He was 89.

The nom-de-plume of Gothaale has an interesting story behind it. Malla once submitted a short story Usko Bhaale—a contemptuous take on the Rana regime—for publication to Bhawani Bhikshu, who was then-editor of Sarada. Bhikshu was scared that the Ranas wouldn’t let Malla go unscathed, and decided to publish the story under the pseudonym Gothaale (cowherd).

Gothaale didn’t look back after that. In a long and illustrious career, he brought out masterpieces like Pallo Gharko Jhyal (1959) and Ma Jujuman (1959) and plays like Chyatieko Parda (staged in 1988). His death has been described by litterateurs and critics alike as the end of the Gothaale era. Critic Tulsi Bhattarai says, “Gothaale brought modern consciousness in his writings and added to what B.P. Koirala and Bhawani Bhikshu were trying to do with their writings at the time.”

Gothaale was always put on the same pedestal as B.P. for his presentation of the human psychology. But that would be undermining his understanding of Nepali society. Gothaale was among the first writers to infuse Freudian psychoanalysis in Nepali literature; his novel Pallo Gharko Jhyal being the perfect example. The novel tells the story of a man who starts loving a woman whom he usually sees in the window of his neighbour’s house; the woman has recently married the owner. Gothaale depicts the mental state of both the characters and describes how the relation between them intensifies as time passes, ultimately resulting in the woman rejecting her own husband. The novel, which caused uproar at the time of its publication, weaves the two characters’ psychologies in a simple and lucid way.

B.P. was a master at writing about sexuality within a conservative Nepali society, whereas Gothaale perfected his craft by taking up social issues, especially those of Kathmandu’s Newar community—the community he belonged to. “Most of his characters are from the Newar community of Kathmandu; he wrote about someone who owned a bhatti pasal (local wine-bar) to about those who had mouja (farmlands) in the Tarai,” says theatre director Sunil Pokharel. In Ma Jujuman, Gothaale presents the mental state of a village-shopkeeper Jujuman who is overly self-conscious of his reality and his social state, someone who is constantly troubled whether he fits in, and ultimately loses his self in this dichotomy.

Gothaale’s plays are equally successful in infusing modernity into Nepali writing while depicting social and psychological issues. “Gothaale was influenced by modern playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov. He was able to give a totally unique and modern outlook in his works,” says cultural critic Satya Mohan Joshi. As Pokharel says, Gothaale was one who was aware about the “social realities” around him and peopled his plays and stories with “subaltern characters.” While the playwright Bal Krishna Sama wrote philosophical dramas, Gothaale focused on the subaltern and presented their psychological states.

As a person, Gothaale was very studious. Joshi remembers him as someone who spoke little but thought and wrote more. Gothaale loved solitude so he used to leave for his farm in Saptari reading books of Ibsen, Maupassant, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. He was quoted as telling journalist Devendra Bhattarai, “I used to carry a dictionary and read Shakespeare, though with great difficulty.” He also read a lot of Premchand’s and Sarad Chandra’s Hindi writings. This reading habit helped him break free from traditional trends of Nepali literature. During Gothaale’s time, people subscribed to the view that prose and plays weren’t literary writing. Most writers at the time focused on writing poetry—Mahakabya or Khandakabya. But the influence of the Western and Indian writers played a vital role in shaping Gothaale’s worldview that celebrated modernity.

The last book Gothaale wrote was Dui Praani whose manuscript was submitted to Nepal Academy in 2000. The book hasn’t been published yet.

Gothaale, who experimented and brought a new taste to Nepali literature, is no more with us. But he has left his writings behind which will remain a treasure trove for many generations of Nepali readers. A very important fact that Gothaale established, something every aspiring writer should realise, is that one should always strive for newness. In doing so, he continued what Devkota has once said as a suggestion to upcoming writers: “Repetition of a work along the same lines has no meaning.”

Pukar Malla: President of Harvard Graduate Counci (2010-11)

2010-12-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

Nepali gets US varsity top post
6-Dec-10

Pukar Malla, a Nepali student in the United States, has been recently elected as the President of Harvard Graduate Council for the academic year 2010-11.

Malla is a Masters in Public Administration candidate at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

According to a press statement issued by the council, this is the first time that a Nepali national has been elected to such esteemed position at Harvard.

The graduate council is a representative student government of the 12 graduate and professional schools at Harvard and serves the interests of more than the 13,600 graduate students at Harvard.

National Geographic Documentary: Dr. Sandeep Rohit & Lisa Ling in "Inside North Korea"

2010-12-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

A Brief History of the Hot Texas Wiener

2010-12-22T03:38:00.000-08:00

Paterson NJ's Hot Texas Wiener Tradition
A Brief History of the Hot Texas Wiener
Library of Congress

According to Chris Betts, the Hot Texas Wiener was invented around 1924 by "an old Greek gentleman" who owned a hot dog "stand" (a loose restaurant-business term for a small restaurant; this one apparently sat ten or fifteen customers at a counter) on Paterson Street in downtown Paterson. This gentleman was experimenting with various chili-type sauces to serve on his hot dogs, and apparently drew upon his own culinary heritage for the first Hot Texas Wiener chili-sauce recipe.

As Betts and Nick Doris mentioned when I questioned them about the sauce's origins, it resembles Greek spaghetti sauce, which contains tomatoes, meat, and a similar combination of spices. As Betts's account also suggests, the chili sauce is considered the crucial ingredient in this new food, its invention defining and separating the Hot Texas Wiener from the hot dogs the "old Greek gentleman" was serving before.

Two important aspects of this early history remain undocumented: the name of the "old Greek gentleman" and his business, and his reasons for naming his new food the " Hot Texas Wiener ." Documentary research in newspapers, other local periodicals, and business directories of the period, as well as interviews with older workers, may well identify the Hot Texas Wiener's inventor and his place of business, although smaller businesses in working-class areas did not often receive much coverage in mainstream publications.

The specific reasons for his choice of "Texas," unfortunately, are more likely to remain unexplained. I suppose that, seeking to give a unique and, for Paterson, exotic name to his new and somewhat spicy food — itself characterized by a sauce whose name ("chili") carries Western, Latino, and cowboy associations — he might have chosen the "Texas" designation to give his creation what today we'd call an "image."

For several years the Paterson Street location was the major outlet for Hot Texas Wieners, but in 1936 a Paterson Street employee named William Pappas left and opened Libby's Hot Grill on McBride Avenue and Wayne Street, across the street from the Great Falls on the Passaic. Libby's —still in operation today in the same location — was extremely successful, in part because of the quality of its food and in part because of its location, near to its clientele of workers in Paterson's textile mills and other plants, and on one of the main highways to and from New York City.

In its heyday, Libby's employed over thirty people. Several of these employees took the knowledge and skills they gained at Libby's into their own Hot Texas Wiener businesses. For example, former Libby's employees opened Johnny and Hanges, on River Street, in the north end of Paterson, in 1940, and many long-time employees in other Hot Texas Wiener businesses received valuable experience at Libby's. (Johnny and Hanges is still in operation, though under different ownership.)

In May 1949, Paul Agrusti, another Libby's employee, left to open the Falls View Grill — two blocks east of Libby's, at the bottom of the hill where Market and Spruce Streets intersect, even more centrally located in the Paterson Falls mill area — with three Greek brothers, Chris, George, and William Betts. After they returned from military service in World War II, the Bettses had gained experience in the Hot Texas Wiener business by leasing the Olympic Grill — which sat directly across McBride Avenue from Libby's — from John Patrelis, who had founded it in 1940. Also with an excellent location, convenient to working people from the mills and to major highways of the time, the Falls View was also quite successful for many years.

For two years, 1964 to 1965, the partners also operated a second location — the Falls View Grill East — in Elmwood Park, east of Paterson. Though the Bettses sold the business after a few years, it is still in operation as the Riverview Grill. Thus the three most-remembered Hot Texas Wiener restaurants of the post- World War II period — Libby's, the Olympic, and the Falls View — were located within a stone's throw of one another, of the mill buildings which were once the most important working-class workplaces in town, and one of the major east-west highways through Paterson.

Paul Agrusti left the Falls View in 1978 to open the Colonial Grill on Chamberlain Avenue; his son Leonard now runs it. The Betts brothers sold the Falls View business in 1984, but its buyers were not successful in operating the business and sold it in 1988. The building, in the midst of Paterson's historic manufacturing district, now houses a Burger King. Chris Betts's son now is part owner of the Haledon Grill on Haledon Avenue.

Nick Doris emigrated to the U.S. from Greece in 1954, and began working as a French-fry cook at the Falls View just after his arrival. Over the next several years he worked his way into knowledge of the whole occupation. In 1961, he and three partners — another Greek, Peter Leonidas, who has since passed away, and two Italians, Carlo Mendola and Dominic Sportelli — opened the Hot Grill on the site of Gabe's, a car lot and Hot Texas Wiener operation on Lexington Avenue, just over the city line into Clifton.

Since that opening day the Hot Grill has become quite successful, and is recognized throughout the area as perhaps the most authentic of Paterson's many Hot Texas Wiener restaurants. As Chris Betts said of the Hot Grill, "We were the old champs, and they're the new champs." The Hot Grill now employs thirty-five people, and the partners own two other restaurants, one serving Hot Texas Wieners, and the other more of a full-service restaurant.

Prince William - Kate Middleton Post Engagement Interview

2010-11-16T17:23:00.000-08:00

TheOnionTV: CIA Accidentally Overthrows Costa Rica

2010-11-14T06:44:00.001-08:00

O-SPAN Classic: CIA Accidentally Overthrows Costa Rica

Mr. Guman Singh Khatri of Galkot Hatiya (Baglung)

2010-11-08T17:09:00.000-08:00

Sustainable Soil Management Programme
Farmer Profiles from the Mid-hills of Nepal
April 2009

Portrait of Guman Singh Khatri of Baglung District

Introduction
Guman Singh Khatri, aged 33, a father of 2 young children and originally from Dudilabhati VDC, started his career as a Primary Level School Teacher. After 6 years of teaching, he left the job in 2001 and migrated to Hatiya VDC where he purchased 1 ropani of land and began a small poultry farm. He used to grow just maize on his 1 ropani. In Hatiya VDC, vegetables are mostly imported from Palpa, and Pokhara, thus they are expensive and not very fresh. Observing the situation, Mr.Khatri thought growing vegetables would provide a good living so in 2006 he joined the Shiva Krishak group through whom he received training on vegetable production from the Chartare Youth Club (CYC), a local NGO working with SSMP.

Impact
Mr Khatri owns only 1 ropani of land in Hatiya Bazaar village. Motivated by CYC, Mr.Khatri rented a further 1.5 ropani of land at a cost of NRs 5,000 per year, and in 2006 started to grow cauliflower, cabbage, potato, and off-season tomato in a 120 m2 polytunnel. He had actually tried to use a polytunnel before collaboration with CYC, but it failed due to lack of technical know how. This time he had better success.

From his first season producing off-season tomato in the new polytunnel, he produced 15 quintel (1,500 kg) in four months, from which he earned NRs 52,500 with a net profit of NRs 22,000. He utilized this first profit for investment in a savings scheme and for admitting his son and daughter in a boarding school.

Guman Singh feels happy when he takes fresh vegetables to sell in the market, where he receives a "reasonable price", and proud when farmers from nearby villages come to visit his farm to see his model polytunnel and learn about polytunnel cultivation of tomatoes. 15 other farmers have invested in polytunnels through the knowledge and advice obtained from Guman Singh. His success with the polytunnel have been aired on Nepal Television and published through the Kantipur newspaper to encourage others. He says: "one does not have to go aboard to earn money, if you search you will find dollars in your own land!".

One interesting aspect of Guman Singh’s farming system, is that he does not have any livestock except the small poultry unit. He therefore buys in both un-decomposed fym at NRs 30 per doko, which he prepares properly before adding to the land, and urine at NRs. 1 per litre. He often buys in 200 doko of fym in one batch. In previous times, he used to dump the poultry manure in the nearby river - now he incorporates the poultry droppings in with the fym prior to proper preparation. After employing SSM practices in his land for just three years, he already recognizes that it is easier to plough and he is happy with the yields.

In 2008 on his 2½ ropani of land, he grew tomato all the year round, off-season cucumber, potato, bittergourd, onion, bean, squash, sponge-gourd, cowpea and smaller areas of other vegetables and legumes – but he mainly focuses on offseason vegetables, in order to obtain a better price. He likes doing experiments and trials, and recently he has been trying off-season onion, with the Agri Found Dark Red variety, to obtain higher yields and better prices. He has also recently improved his polyhouse to improve ventilation, and now uses string, not bamboo, to train his tomatoes in order to save costs and
labour.

Mr Guman Singh keeps good records of his activities, costs and profits; for example, for his polyhouse tomatoes:

Total income Total cost
Year 1 (06/07) NRs.70,000 NRs.30,000
Year 2 (07/08) NRs.65,000 NRs.20,000
Year 3 (08/09) NRs.76,000 no data yet

Currently, there are still 10 quintal (1000 kg) of tomato to harvest, and his expected return from this will boost his income for 2008-09 by NRs. 40,000.

His total income from all the vegetables he has sold in 2008 is NRs. 120,000. Usually, the total inputs for his vegetable farming activities is around NRs.14,000 annually. Guman Singh reckons that the income from vegetable sales usually contributes about 50% of his total cash income. Besides the income from vegetables, he also makes money from his poultry and a small village shop which raise about Rs.150,000 annually. This additional income is used to pay off a loan of NRs.175,000, taken on when he purchased the 1 ropani of land on settling in Hatiya VDC. His plan for the future is to buy more land and build a house as he still lives in rented accommodation.

Guman Singh is pleased that he joined his farmer group and worked with CYC – his income has improved beyond recognition, and he feels a great change in his social status. Now he feels people trust him more, and he does not have difficulties in managing his household financial matters. The vegetable farming has given him confidence, and he now feels he can care for the family properly, because even if his poultry business failed, he now has an alternative.

Galkot Hatiya Bazaar (Baglung District) - Now & 20 Years Ago

2010-11-07T18:03:00.001-08:00

Early 1990s (2048 BS - 2051 BS)

Today

US$ 100K per year for high school

2010-10-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

Swiss School at $71,760 is Bargain for Some When Skiing is Free
Bloomberg, 27-Oct-10
By Jennifer M. Freedman

Nitasha Silesh’s Swiss education is costing her father almost twice what the parents of presidents, prime ministers and heirs to the British throne have paid.

Silesh started last month at Leysin American School in the Swiss Alps northeast of Geneva. Her tuition is 69,500 francs ($71,760). Students are charged 29,862 pounds ($46,969) a year at Eton College, where Prince William, England’s future king, and Prime Minister David Cameron were educated. At Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where both Bush presidents got their high school diplomas, annual tuition is about $41,300.

Swiss boarding schools are the most expensive in the world, with annual costs of as much as 120,000 francs per pupil, said Christophe Clivaz, founder of Geneva-based Swiss Learning. At Leysin, teenagers from more than 60 countries study, schmooze, ski and snowboard. The local resort is open to students every Tuesday and Thursday during the winter term.

“My dad said this is a lot of money, but don’t focus only on your studies,” said Nitasha, 15. “He wanted me to travel and to do all the activities possible.”

Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and children from royal families in countries such as Saudi Arabia are among Leysin’s graduates.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and Swatch Group AG Chief Executive Officer Nick Hayek studied at the Institut Montana Zugerberg in Zug, about a 30-minute drive south of Zurich. Kerry graduated in 1962 from St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and then went to Yale University. Most Swiss schools keep secret the identities of their students.

Most Expensive School

The world’s costliest school is Le Rosey, which has campuses in Rolle and Gstaad, Switzerland, said Valerie Scullion, director of admissions and marketing at Bishop’s College School in Quebec. Le Rosey, dubbed the “school of kings” for its royal alumni, charges 92,000 francs for tuition alone.

“Schools like Rosey are up there with Eton when it comes to academic opportunities, but at that price, the offer must go beyond education,” said Tom Parker, the dean of admissions at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “The food must be pretty good.”

Le Rosey has a 25-meter heated indoor pool with a sauna, steam bath and Jacuzzi, two beach volley ball courts, a skateboard park, shooting and archery ranges, a private equestrian ring, a sailing center and a circus tent, according to the school’s website.

The costs for Swiss boarding schools mean they exclude “a great many bright, but under-resourced students,” said Philip Smith, a former dean of admissions at Williams College in Massachusetts, which is rated America’s No. 1 liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Report. He added that students who have attended Williams after graduating from schools such as Leysin and Le Rosey “have succeeded and done well.”

Textile Profits

Silesh’s father wanted to be educated in Switzerland, but he wasn’t able to, according to his daughter. He sent his only child there after his textile company in India became profitable enough.

Le Rosey is a for-profit institution, while Leysin is not- for-profit. Neither makes its financial accounts open to the public.

“No country in the world has been able to market itself as strongly as Switzerland as the image of quality, stability, safety,” said Marc Ott, 38, Leysin’s director.

With the number of millionaires in the Asia-Pacific region equaling Europe’s for the first time in 2009, more parents have the money to send their kids abroad to study. The gross domestic products of emerging market countries such as China, India, Russia and Brazil may match the world’s most-advanced economies, excluding the U.S., within five years, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund.

Brazil to Russia

Applications from Brazil for spots at Switzerland’s 12 boarding schools for international students climbed 20 percent this year, and the increase was 10 percent from China and up 9 percent from Russia, according to Swiss Learning.

“For customers we talk to, money seems to be less of an issue,” said Bernhard Gademann, president of Institut auf dem Rosenberg, a 121-year-old boarding school in St. Gallen near the Swiss border with Austria. “It’s academia they’re after, and they’re willing to pay for it.”

Even with stock markets in the U.S. and Switzerland down as much as 55 percent during the past three years, most Swiss schools had waiting lists, with Le Rosey turning away two-thirds of applicants to keep its headcount at 380 students.

“In Swiss schools, it’s not uncommon to sit next to a prince from Saudi Arabia,” said Patrick Gruhn, a German national who founded Montreux-based Rayan Partners Sarl, which offers advice on education to rich foreigners. “Once you create the bond in school, these are friendships for life. Maybe you pay 120,000 francs, but a few years down the road it pays off.”

“Better Food”

Private boarding schools in the U.K. and North America also have stepped up recruiting from emerging markets.

“In Switzerland, you’re also paying for the nicer rooms, the better food and the more varied sports opportunities,” said Eric Brodka, an educational consultant in Munich. “In England, schools are paying less attention to the bank account of the parents and look closer at the qualifications.”

Along with algebra, biology and history, Leysin advertises whitewater rafting, sailing, rock-climbing and overnight trekking as outdoor pursuits along with winter sports. Travel abroad organized by the school includes trips to Venice, Paris and Istanbul, with optional journeys for an additional cost to destinations such as Tanzania, Nepal and Egypt.

The average class size at Swiss boarding schools is a dozen students. Classes are taught mainly in English and French, and lead to international diplomas.

China to U.S.

Yangzeyu Yang said she plans to attend university in the U.S. after she graduates from Leysin next year. That’s the “typical path of Chinese students,” the 17-year-old said.

About 95 percent of the students graduating from Swiss international boarding schools go on to university, said Clivaz of Swiss Learning. “Many” students end up at top-ranked universities such as Harvard, Oxford or Yale, he said.

Maria Luiza Lopes Camargos, 17, of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, has other thoughts about the rigors of life as a boarding-school student in Switzerland.

“It’s quite hard to be here,” she said. “I would recommend it, but Brazilians like to party and I would tell them to be aware, you have to study a lot.”

Movie Review: Kites

2010-06-21T01:34:00.000-07:00

Vegas Meets Bollywood as Stunts Fail to Lift ‘Kites’: Review
Bloomberg, 26-May-10
Review by Indranil Ghosh

Cars smashed to smithereens,adrenalin-pumping chases, the brawn of Hrithik Roshan and aSpanish beauty shedding inhibitions and clothes all helped“Kites” become the first Bollywood movie to open in the top10 in the U.S. and Canada.

The heady cocktail was mixed by Roshan’s father Rakesh, anactor-turned-director-turned-producer. The movie made almost $1million in its opening weekend as movie-goers forgave itswafer-thin plot.

“Kites” has a backdrop of glitzy Las Vegas and ruggedNevada and New Mexico. It is boosted by high-octane adventureand the star’s looks. He plays Jay, a conman who gets by withhis green card, wits and salsa-dancing skills. Blinded bymoney, he romances the beauteous Kangana Ranaut, daughter ofcasino don Kabir Bedi.

Things go wrong when he falls in love with Barbara Mori,fiancee of Kangana’s brother. As it turns out, Barbara is oneof Jay’s many “wives” he married for cash. What follows is aforbidden romance, with Hrithik and Barbara taking off in arunaway adventure to escape the villainous don.

Originally an illegal immigrant from Mexico, Barbara hadmade a marriage of convenience with Hrithik. Then, they hadgone their separate ways, she to transform into a classy ladylove of the rich don’s son Nick and he, to the arms of Kangana.

Scanty Clothes

While Mori makes obvious attempts to sizzle with scantyclothes and come-hither smiles, she is simply too old-lookingfor the fresh-faced Hrithik. Instead of passionate romance, weget zero chemistry.

Hrithik, a dancer-cum-stuntman-cum-body builder-cum actor,contorts in the usual gravity-defying manner to indifferentmusic. To complete the adventure, there’s a Western-style bankrobbery thrown in.

For the Indian audience, bewildered by the rapid-fireSpanish rattled by the heroine, there’s a Hindi-speakingstranger. He gives over his car to the escaping duo, and is outof the script as fast as many of the other side characters.Kangna Ranaut is convincing in her role of a disturbedyoung beauty. Kabir Bedi and Nicholas Brown, who plays his son,are more comical than menacing, even with ear-slicings andrandom killings.

“Kites” is helped by sleek editing and the build-up ofthe pace toward the end. Still, director Anurag Basu showslittle of his lifelike touch displayed in other films,particularly “Life in a Metro.” Perhaps he was thrown out ofhis depth by the genre -- bordering on an improbable unionbetween a Western and a fantasy. While Basu knows a lot about Western cinema, what he does best is tell an Indian story.

Rakesh Roshan’s attempt to get his son’s entry into Hollywood via a global cast, American locales and a sleek pace,fails because of a simple flaw: It’s a poor copy.Western consumers want authentic Indian fare: hence thepopularity of chicken tikka masala or films such as “Lagaan.”

This is an age-old lesson Roshan failed to pick up fromduds going way back to “Shalimar” (1978), starring RexHarrison, Dharmendra and the hip Zeenat Aman, which tooattempted a Hollywood-Bollywood concoction. “Kites,” from Filmkraft Productions India, isdistributed worldwide by billionaire Anil Ambani’s Mumbai-based Reliance Big Pictures. This review is of the 130-minuteversion. “Kites: The Remix,” is due on May 28 edited down to 90 minutes by U.S. director Brett Ratner, with changed background music.

Information: http://www.kites-thefilm.com/
Rating: ** (Good)

Manisha Koirala Marries Samrat Dahal

2010-06-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

Manisha's swayambar: A private affair
The Himalayan Times, 18-Jun-10
Abhilasha Subba

The bride-to-be looked more ravishing than one had imagined in a baby pink chiffon sari with silver embroidery as she welcomed the early guests to her swayambar ceremony.

Yes, acclaimed actor Manisha Koirala was busy making guests feel welcome and comfortable for her swayambar that was to take place in the afternoon of June 18. Showing much interest in the little ones around, one could hear her remarking, “Arré kati thulo bhayechha (Oh! How big he’s grown).”

The venue — Gorkarna Forest Resort — was decked just as beautifully for the swayambar of the year on this day. As per their wishes, the decoration was not overdone, it was more subtle and understated in keeping with the private affair. Traditional music filled the air, a huge white tent was set up in the courtyard where guests could relax and enjoy a lavish spread.

Renowned Bollywood actor and Koirala’s good friend Deepti Naval, the bride-to-be’s first co-star (leading man) Vivek Mushran, Suman Ranganathan and Govinda’s better-half Sunita with son Harshvardan along with some business honchos from Delhi had made it to the Capital to bless the couple.

One of Koirala’s co-stars in many films Jackie Shroff is expected to fly in tomorrow.

Koirala is marrying Nepali businessman Samrat Dahal on June 19. It is believed the two met around six months ago at a private gathering.

The swayambar ceremony took place in the Mrighatrishna Banquet Hall, right next to the courtyard.

Looking like a million dollars in a golden yellow coloured sari for the ceremony, the bride completed her look with a dazzling diamond set. The groom looked dashing in a black suit, striped tie and Nepali topi.

The swayambar started at around 2:00 pm and continued till the evening as groom’s family arrived with the saipata, a traditional ritual where the groom’s family brings trays filled with gifts for the bride. The bride’s wedding sari is part of the saipata.

No stone was left unturned to make this swayambar a memorable one. The seating arrangement in the courtyard was more intimate with tables and chairs placed conveniently for a gathering of close family and friends.

The cuisine served had a mixture of both traditional Nepali dishes and international delicacies. The typical Newari dish samay baji was the centre of attraction for foreign guests.

Though the media were not allowed in the venue initially, however, the couple were considerate enough to open the gates for the lensmen to get a few shots.

The wedding is scheduled to take place at Gokarna on June 19 and the reception will take place at Soaltee Crowne Plaza on June 20.

Brazilian Soccer Stars: One Name Is Better Than Two

2010-06-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

One Name Is Better Than Two
The Wall Street Journal, 15-Jun-10
By JOHN LYONS

Brazil Keeps Up Its Tradition of Nicknamed Stars; Cheering for 'Duck,' 'Goose' and 'Dopey'

Júnior Silva is outraged about the World Cup team his nation is fielding.

"It's madness that Dopey left Duck and Goose off the team," Mr. Silva, a shop worker in downtown São Paulo, says in Portuguese.

Brazil may take soccer more seriously than any other nation. Some banks will close and even many nursery schools are letting out early in honor of the country's World Cup debut Tuesday against North Korea.

But conversation about the sport can sound like a page from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." A controversial figure in Brazil just now, for instance, is Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri, the national coach whose player selections have sparked reaction even from a member of the nation's highest court.

But most participants in that debate have no idea who Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri is. They know Mr. Bledorn Verri as "Dunga," which is the Brazilian name given to the dwarf "Dopey" of Snow White fame. As a child, it turns out, Mr. Bledorn Verri was short, earning him a nickname that he never outgrew.

Why would he want to? By serving as captain of the nation's World Cup-winning 1994 team, he turned Dunga into a nationally revered nickname.

This year, Brazil's team is the highest-ranked squad in the World Cup, and its star—Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite—is arguably the most talented player on the planet. But even in Brazil, where his celebrity is unparalleled, few people know who Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite is. They know him as "Kaká," a nickname that evolved from a younger brother's attempt to pronounce "Ricardo."

As he grew famous, Mr. dos Santos Leite did manage to change the spelling of his nickname, from the previous "Cacá." The word Cacá is an accent away from Brazilian slang for feces.

Even newspapers never mention the real names of these stars. "If you talk to 10 people, you might find one who knows Dunga's real name, but it's probably zero. The same for Kaká," says Reinivaldo Gomes, who runs a magazine stand in São Paulo. Nicknames have a way of sticking in Brazil. The nation's 64-year-old president, Luiz Inácio da Silva, is known far and wide as "Lula," which is Portuguese for squid and a common nickname in Brazil's northeast for Luiz.

Nickname mania is part of a broader cultural penchant for keeping things casual. Brazilians, for instance, prefer first names to last names, which is why the nation's richest man, mining tycoon Eike Batista, is known as Eike. To anyone wanting to show deference, he is Mr. Eike.

But not everyone's first name is as uncommon as Eike. "My sister's name is Camila, and her three best friends are called Camila," says Andres Tavares, an executive who has been known since childhood as "Gordo" (tubby), even though he no longer carries many extra pounds.

Although nicknames pervade Brazilian society, the best-known world-wide have been soccer players, and that's no surprise: Brazil has won more World-Cup championships than any other country. Ever heard of Edson Arantes do Nascimento—the man widely regarded as the greatest soccer player of all time? How about his more-famous nickname—Pelé? A member of three of Brazil's five World Cup-winning squads, he reportedly received the nickname as a child, when he mispronounced the name of a goalkeeper called Bile.

By now, global soccer fans are used to seeing first names or nicknames on the backs of Brazilian soccer jerseys instead of the traditional last names most athletes use. But as with most things in freewheeling Brazil, there are no hard-and-fast rules to name changing.

On this year's squad, for instance, is the veteran midfielder known as Kléberson. He was born José Kléberson Pereira. His second name was so overpowering it became his whole name.,

At times, soccer nicknames get upgrades for marketing reasons. A striker on Brazil's team in South Africa, Edinaldo Batista Libânio, is known as "Grafite."

But back in 1999, when he showed up at a small soccer club in São Paulo, he was known as Dina—a nickname his coach thought sounded weak. As Grafite, he rose to the top of the national sport.

Theories abound as to why nicknames have such staying power here. But the custom is fitting for a country whose name itself is a kind of nickname. Centuries ago, the Portuguese were extracting so much Brazil wood that the name soon applied to the entire colony.

At least one Brazilian athlete brought his nickname to the National Basketball Association.

As the youngest child in his family back in São Carlos, Maybyner Rodney Hilário became known as "Nenê"—Portuguese for baby.

In 2003, at the outset of his NBA career, the nearly seven-foot tall, 250-pound center for the Denver Nuggets legally changed his name to Nene. As Brazil prepares for its first game, many here remain mystified by Coach Dunga's decision to leave off the team two young stars named Paulo Henrique Chagas de Lima and Alexandre Rodrigues da Silva.

Of course, nobody knows them by those names. They're known as "Ganso" (Goose) and "Pato" (Duck).

Ravi Singh: "I am not a great fan of lists or literary awards"

2010-06-08T01:46:00.000-07:00

I am not a great fan of lists or literary awards
The Kathmandu Post, 30-May-2010

Ravi Singh is the editor-in-chief of Penguin India, India’s largest publishing house. He spoke to Amish Raj Mulmi about his reading habits, and why no author has been able to write like Dostoevsky.

What are you currently reading?
I am reading a manuscript by Patrick French, whose most recent work was The World Is What It Is (V.S. Naipaul’s biography). His new book is tentatively titled India: A Portrait, and is about contemporary India.

What’s the last book that you read?
I read a very interesting book called The Lost River: On the trail of the Sarasvati (Michel Danino). The issue is a very contentious one, and there are very sharp divisions because of questions on nationalism, the Aryan theory, etc. Danino makes a very logical case that the Sarasvati was a very major river, and that it was as important, if not more, than the Indus.

Before that, I read The Hindus: An Alternative History (Wendy Doniger), which is the best tribute to a great, yet flawed, religion.

Who are your favourite authors, except the ones you publish?
I suppose I am old-fashioned, but the one writer who I would name is Dostoevsky. I don’t think there is anybody who has reached that level of genius. Then, there is the Mahabharat—probably the greatest story ever told—which you can’t attribute to a single author. Among the more contemporary ones, V.S. Naipaul is a favourite, who’s a fantastic writer. Then there is this fairly underrated author called Christopher Isherwood, who championed transparency and simplicity in prose. If you are judging only by the writing, then he’s probably among the greats for me.

Any favourite books?
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), definitely. The Mahabharat has to be on this list, even though I don’t know whether it qualifies as a book. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) is great, as is Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad). Then, A Passage to India (E.M. Forster), which many people find strange. But I wish I would read more translations, and that there were more translations in English. For instance, among Hindi writers, I can’t identify a single work, but if you look at their whole body of work, Dharamvir Bharati and Manohar Shyam Joshi are the two authors I really like.

Any overrated and underrated books?
There are many overrated books, and the ones that I remember are obviously contemporary books. But I am not going to identify them; a couple of them are Booker winners. But I personally think Martin Amis is overrated.

There are many underrated authors; Christopher Isherwood is one. From India, there is this author called Arun Joshi, who wrote this phenomenal book called The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Globally, I think Elfriede Jelinek, who’s won a Nobel Prize, is also underrated. Another writer, who I think should be read more in this part of the world, is Alice Munro, the best living short story writer. Then there is this Japanese writer called Yukio Mishima, who’s kind of going out of fashion now because Haruki Murakami has become ‘the great Japanese writer’.

Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction?
Both, actually. I find reading a really great work of fiction a transformative experience. But I read more non-fiction, which is like knowing an aspect of the world you weren’t really clued into. I think the books that do that are near-miraculous. Travel writing interests me quite a lot; I would also really like a popular science book. And the large theme-books, like The Hindus.

What do you think of book lists?
They are fun, but you shouldn’t take them too seriously. Of course, out of a 100 books’ list, 30 would appear on any list. So there is some value in that if you are looking for recommendations on what to read. I am not a great fan of lists or literary awards, because this is not a horse race. You can always tell a bad book from a good book, but if you are looking at really-good writing, how do you distinguish one great book from another? If you are a sensitive reader who has been reading a lot, you will make your own list. It’s better to discover books that way than being recommended all the time.

And book reviews?
They are absolutely necessary, because they sustain a culture of reading, and they are crucial for writers and publishers. Even a bad review often works in your favour. What is really damaging is no review or notice at all. But most reviews tend to be amateurish or irresponsible.

Why should one read?
I might sound facetious, but the world is not going to end if you don’t read. And I am not even sure if reading makes you a good person. But there is a lot to be said in favour of reading; it helps you make sense of the world that you are living in, it helps you connect with people, and it broadens your mind. Of course there are fanatics and bigots who may be great readers too, so I am not going to make any large claims about reading, but it is essential for any person interested in his or her world.

Applying for Non-Immigration Visa in Nepal

2010-05-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Applying for Non-Immigration Visa in Nepal

If you are applying on or after Monday, May 31, 2010 you must apply using the free, online, DS-160 visa application form. We will no longer accept applications submitted through the EVAF from Monday, May 31, 2010.

Applying with the online DS-160 application form

To apply in Nepal for a non-immigrant visa for temporary travel to the United States, you must:

• Complete the online visa application form, and click “Submit”
• Print your DS-160 confirmation page
• Bring confirmation page and $131 equivalent in Nepalese rupees to Nabil Bank to schedule your visa interview
• Interview for your visa at the U.S. Embassy’s Consular Section
• After successful interview, pay visa issuance fee, if any, at U.S. Embassy

How to use the DS-160 Online Visa Application Form

1. Before scheduling your visa interview, you must first complete the free, online, DS-160 visa application form. This online application replaces the Electronic Visa Application Form (DS-156 EVAF). Read the “Instructions” page for details on completing the form.
2. To fill out your online application, click “Start Application,” and answer all the required questions.
3. Upload a digital photo of yourself. Photo requirements can be found here. If your photo is not accepted, submit your application and bring a passport photo with you to the U.S. Embassy at the time of your scheduled interview.
4. To complete your online visa application, click “Sign and Submit” and print your confirmation page (with bar code). You will need to bring this page with you to Nabil Bank to schedule your interview. Nabil Bank will return the confirmation page to you after you schedule your interview. Bring the confirmation page with you to the U.S. Embassy on the day of your interview.

Please note: The online system will time out after 15 minutes of non-use.

How to schedule your visa interview

Nabil Bank is responsible for collecting the visa application fee and scheduling visa interviews for the U.S. Embassy. Please do not call the Embassy's consular section for any appointment information. Applicants should bring with them to Nabil Bank the following items:

• A passport with at least six months of validity beyond the initial date of travel,
• A clear printout of the completed online visa application’s confirmation page (with bar code),
• The equivalent of $131 in Nepalese rupees to pay the visa application fee.

Please note: the application fee is a non-refundable administrative processing fee. It is collected whether or not a visa is issued.

These should be brought to any of the following Nabil Bank locations in Nepal to schedule a visa interview:

• Maharajgunj, Kathmandu
• Biratnagar
• Birgunj
• Pokhara
• Butwal
• Nepalgunj

Nabil Bank will inform the applicant of the date and time when he or she should come to the U.S. Embassy’s Consular Section for a visa interview. At the scheduled appointment time, applicants need to bring to the Embassy their passport, their printed application confirmation page, and the yellow fee receipt they receive from Nabil Bank. Applicants will not be allowed into the U.S. Embassy if they do not have their yellow fee receipt with them. At that time, applicants are welcome to bring any additional documents they wish in support of their application. If your photo was not accepted by the online application, you need to bring a passport-sized photo with you to the interview (see photo requirements here).

Interviewing for a visa at the U.S. Embassy's Consular Section

After you have scheduled your interview at Nabil Bank, bring your yellow fee receipt to the U.S. Embassy at your scheduled interview time. You may also bring any additional documents to the interview that you feel may support your case. Please note that supporting documentation is secondary to the interview itself.

Visa application fees

There is a standard application fee of $131 for all visa types. This covers the administrative expenses of processing your application and the interview. This fee is payable at Nabil Bank when scheduling your visa interview appointment. It is non-refundable, regardless of the outcome of your interview.

In addition to the $131 application fee, some visa types require additional issuance fees. These are paid in cash (rupees or USD) at the U.S. Embassy only after a consular officer has told you that you qualify for your visa. The issuance fees are as follows

Note: These are the current visa application and visa issuance fees, as of December 2009. Fees are subject to change.

Richard Morley and Jayaram Khadka

2010-05-18T01:43:00.001-07:00

How We Met; Richard Morley and Jayaram Khadka
The Independent, 25-May-1997
Interviews Phil Sweeney

Richard Morley, 43, millionaire entrepreneur and social experimenter, was born in London and spent periods as a naval officer, actor and producer. In 1982 he founded his "molecular family", currently eight members who live in a castle in the Forest of Dean. In 1990 he brought to England Jayaram Khadka, son of a man who had saved his life in Nepal; after a long, much-publicized fight with the previous government, Morley has just won residential status for him. Jayaram "Jay" Khadka was born, he thinks, 20 years ago in a village south of Kathmandu. From his early teens he worked to support his mother - until meeting Richard Morley, whom he now refers to as his father

By Richard Morley
In 1984 I went to Nepal to research tribal groups: I wanted to go to the most remote part of the planet to find people not influenced by outside society. One day I walked too far, too fast, too high, and got a collapsed lung. I was taken to a village coughing up blood. An ex-policeman called Mr Khadka said he'd go and get help; I later learnt that he'd covered six days distance in three, even though he himself was not well.

After I recovered, I went to thank him, and he told me how ill he was. I thought he was going to touch me for money, which I would have given gladly. But he asked for a favor: he wanted a photo of me and he asked me if I'd take care of his son if he died. I said yes, and off I went - I didn't really pay much attention, I just thought this was a way of expressing friendship.

Some five or six years later, myself and members of my molecular family had the opportunity of going back to Nepal, so we decided to go and visit Khadka. When we got there we were told he had died, and the son had moved to another village, Bhaktapur. We took an overnight bus there, arrived early in the morning, and went to a restaurant for tea. As we sat down, we saw a serving boy sweeping the floor, and he started staring at me in a strange way. Eventually he came up and, in half English, half Nepalese, said: "Are you the man who has come to rescue me?" I thought he was slightly round the twist or after money or something. I wasn't being very friendly first thing in the morning, I wanted a cup of tea. Eventually I said: "Look, who are you?" He said: "I am Jayaram Khadka."

He was tall, fresh-faced, taller than the other people around him. He told me his age was 17, almost 18, and that fitted. Then he told me his father had given him a photograph and told him one day the man in the photo would come and rescue him when he was in trouble. I thought: "My god, this is the boy I'm looking for."

I said, "Can I help you with some money?" And he refused point blank. That was the thing that struck me most, the sincerity with which he refused the money. He asked me to promise to come and see him again. We were on our way to Indonesia, but had a return flight through Nepal, so I said I could come back in two or three months.

In Indonesia we discussed how to help him, and decided the best way was to take him to England for six months, get him some language training, and then he could go back and get a better job. So I went back to Nepal, made my way to the restaurant, and there he was again, beaming away. I outlined the plan, but Jay didn't leap at it like I thought he would. He had been exploited, so was wary of all adults - he didn't trust me and he just couldn't decide what to do.

Eventually we went for a few days to a little tourist resort where you could see the big peaks of the Himalayas. We spent two days together walking and talking and it was very quick -he trusted me and I trusted him, and we then agreed he should come over to England.

Jay had said he was 18, but back in England we realized he was much younger. On the first or second day he had to have a bath which he'd never had before, he was terrified, so we helped him into the bath, and as we did we noticed he wasn't as physically developed as an 18-year-old. Also in England he seemed more of a child, playing with teddies and Lego bricks, so we soon realized he wasn't capable of going to college, he wasn't emotionally mature enough. So I asked the Home Office for three years to let him grow up a little.

During the fight to keep Jay here there were bad moments, very distressing times, but we never thought the family would lose him, because if he'd had to go we'd have gone, too. Obviously I feel paternal towards him. If you brought any kid up, you'd feel paternal.

My position in the family is due to democracy. I'm thought to be the person most suited to be captain. When everybody thinks I'm not, I'll be told, and I'll step down. I want to hand over to somebody who can deal with it properly.

Jay is the most likely candidate because of his personality, his style: he is in no way polluted by society. When he arrived he had no concept of dishonesty, aggression, theft, deceit, and, though I was aware that our family's wealth might make him arrogant, he has no greed. He's heir to the entire family.

By Jayaram Khadka
I was born in a very rural mountain area when my parents were both in their forties. My father had more than one wife and rarely visited our home. On one visit he gave me a photograph and said one day this man will come and help you. I didn't think much of it and then life moved on.

After my father died in 1988 of heart illness, my school life ended and I had to earn money. I found work in a restaurant in Bhaktapur. I slept on the restaurant floor, got up at six in the morning and spent most of my time washing up, shopping and helping in the kitchen, getting pounds 4 a month. I should explain the caste system. I'm from the Chetri caste, traditionally warriors and rulers, but my father didn't live his life in a dignified way - he drank and had a lower-caste wife - so I didn't have the best of my background. Basically, I got onto the bottom of the pile. Every day in the restaurant was the same. I didn't have a watch, radio or calendar, so I told the time by looking at the sun. I was feeling pretty miserable, but that was the best I could get. I didn't really think of the picture of the man, it was just like a dream; but then eventually came the time when my new father walked in the door.

I went up to him and started asking questions and he didn't quite know what I was talking about. But eventually we started having conversations in mixed English and Nepalese. He offered to help me with money. But I received money in the restaurant, I was fed, so I didn't think money was important to me. Also, I think money had a bit of tastelessness ... you earn your money rather than be given it. I suppose that comes from being Chetri. So I said no thanks.

He went away and my normal lifestyle resumed. I think during our first meeting there was something unspoken, something had connected. When he came back we sat down after breakfast and discussed his proposal. It was so different, it was something I had to think about, going to the other side of the world. Also I felt a sense of duty, I couldn't just leave the restaurant, or my mother.

We talked for some days. My father drew a map of Europe on the breakfast table and he told me about his castle. I got hold of a Nepalese dictionary and looked up "castle" and it meant literally a fortress, a round wall or something you build quickly to defend yourself, and I thought how the hell can you live in this place?

I left the restaurant and we travelled round the sights and talked about what was to come. By this time I understood my father much better. I had a bad foot, cracked, and he applied some antiseptic cream and a human rapport began to build up. He was somebody who cared about me, wanted to help.

Landing at Gatwick was like being picked up and put on Mars - a hi- tech, completely different planet. There were things like escalators, automatic doors, strange food - ham, red wine. I tried it and was almost sick, like drinking paraffin.

When I got to the house the thing that hit me was the carpet - so soft, better than what I slept on. For six weeks I didn't communicate with the other members of the family. I couldn't understand anybody in the house. But my father had picked up how to communicate with me. He understood a lot of things without me saying them in words.

The family itself didn't really surprise me. I come from a culture where everything is shared with your mates. If you buy a sweet and your friend hasn't any, you bite off one half and give half to your friend. And Nepalese family life prepared me for a family which includes people who are not directly related to you: a man can have more than one wife and keep those wives and children together.

I made a formal, permanent commitment to the group two years ago. I understand everything about the family, what we are doing, what is involved. I know it is not straightforward like an average household, we are pioneering a new concept and it's something I'm proud to be a part of. I consider my growing up was my previous life in Nepal. And my life here is my new adult life. I'm married into the family - as far as outside relationships are concerned, if I get involved (which I am at the moment) with anybody, I make it perfectly clear what it involves having a relationship with me.

The family is very important to me. They were prepared to give up everything for me, and when people suggest that it is not a proper kind of relationship, it's most hurtful. I think if my family were just a normal household of father, mother and children, we couldn't have survived, we would have cracked up ages ago. Because we are such a diverse bunch of people, we were able to sustain the constant fight with the Home Office. So this is central to me and no one can change it. My father's worked hard on this, and he's got a brilliant mind and I admire him for that. I look at him as a sort of guru. I certainly intend to follow in his footsteps by taking on his responsibility in eight to 10 years' time. !

Mr. Indra B. Tamang inherits $8.4 million estate including 2 coops in Dakota in UWS (NYC)

2010-05-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Butler Did It—at the Dakota
WSJ, 10-May-2010
By JOSH BARBANEL

After Decades as Caretaker and Cook for Ruth Ford, He Inherited Valuable Apartments

Indra B. Tamang, who grew up in a mud house in a farming village in Nepal, has reached a pinnacle of society after more than three decades of loyal service as a butler, cook and caretaker to a socially prominent American family.

The cook became the master—as the inheritor of two apartments at the Dakota, the legendary West Side apartment building, and a valuable collection of Russian surrealist art—after the death last year at the age of 98 of Ruth Ford, a film and stage actress who was the wife of Zachary Scott, a dashing Hollywood star.

At a time when many Americans are puzzling over how an immigrant from Pakistan could turn on his adopted country and plant a bomb in Times Square, the rare fortune of Mr. Tamang, a new American citizen, shows another side of immigrant life: how many years of painstaking dedication is sometimes richly rewarded.

In her will, accepted for probate last month in Surrogate's Court in Manhattan, Ms. Ford turned over her entire estate including the apartments and an art collection, with the exception of her clothing and costume jewelry, to Mr. Tamang.

She specifically disinherited her daughter, Shelley Scott, and her two grandchildren in favor of her Nepalese employee, but did not give a reason for doing so.

Court records show Ms. Scott filed an objection to her mother's will and received a modest settlement. Through her attorney, Arnie Herz, she indicated that she was "very happy" for Mr. Tamang.

The value of the estate is about $8.4 million, according to court records, though it may be worth somewhat less with the sagging real estate market.

Mr. Tamang was brought to the U.S. in 1974 by Ms. Ford's brother, Charles Henri Ford, a surrealist poet, novelist, photographer and collage artist, who had lived for several years in a house in Katmandu.

In the 1940s Mr. Ford published the "View," an influential avant-garde magazine that featured contributions from the likes of Pablo Picasso and Albert Camus.

When he arrived, Mr. Tamang was in his early 20s. He soon went to work for Mr. Ford. After Mr. Ford's death in 2002, he went into service for Ms. Ford.

Now 57 years old, Mr. Tamang has a wife and three daughters and owns a two-family home in the Woodside section of Queens. Mr. Tamang also owns the house in Katmandu where he first worked for Mr. Ford.

In addition, he now has a multimillion-dollar inheritance and the views of a co-op board to consider. He became a U.S. citizen last year, more than 20 years after first applying for citizenship, with the help of Ms. Ford.

"I was always hearing about America," Mr. Tamang said. "I took my chance and I came. I had no idea how the work was going to go and how long I would stay."

When Mr. Ford brought Mr. Tamang to New York, they moved into the Dakota—into a studio apartment on the 10th floor owned by Ruth Ford. The apartment was built under the eaves of the roof and had once been a maid's room, albeit one with a park view.

Mr. Tamang said he shopped and cooked for Mr. Ford and looked after him as he traveled around the world. He took up photography, and collaborated with Mr. Ford on collages and other artistic endeavors. In recent years he became a caregiver as the Fords became frail.

Ms. Ford and Mr. Scott moved into a larger three-bedroom apartment at the Dakota in the early 1950s and Ms. Ford lived there until her death more than half a century later.

She turned her apartment into a salon, throwing parties where artists, playwrights, novelists and composers would gather. Leonard Bernstein, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and Andy Warhol spent time there.

The 14-foot-high walls were covered with gold-flecked wallpaper and scores of paintings and drawings by Pavel Tchelitchew, a Russian-born surrealist who was her brother's partner for several decades before he died in 1957. Mr. Tamang was often assigned to assist in her soirees.

Several brokers said it was unlikely that the Dakota's co-op board, known as one of the most fastidious and unpredictable in the city, would let a former staffer live in the building. A spokeswoman for Prudential Douglas Elliman, which manages the building, declined to comment.

Even though an heir can be the beneficiary of shares in a co-op, the board can refuse to approve the transfer of the shares or can block the right of the beneficiary to live in the building under the basic co-op document known as a proprietary lease.

The issue may not even come up. Karin P.E. Gustafson, an estate attorney who is Mrs. Ford's executor, said that after discussing the taxes and other expenses of the estate, Mr. Tamang agreed to put one of the units, Ms. Ford's three-bedroom apartment, on the market.

Asked if he thought the board would approve him, Mr. Tamang said he didn't know. "I am satisfied living where I am," he added. The larger apartment was listed in December for $7.5 million with Alexander Peters of Prudential Douglas Elliman, but the price has since been cut five times, including a 10% drop at the end of April, to $4.5 million.

The apartment, half of a much larger corner unit, faces north toward 73rd Street and south toward the Dakota's interior courtyard.

While it doesn't have the prized views of Central Park of more expensive apartments in the building, the park can be glimpsed from the living-room windows.

The lowered asking price for the apartment may be offset in part by the rising prices for Tchelitchew's work. For years a portrait of Ms. Ford hung over a fireplace in the Dakota apartment. Tchelitchew painted it in 1937 when she was 26 and had just moved to New York from Mississippi.

Last month, the painting sold for $986,000, including commissions, at Sotheby's spring sales of Russian Art, far above the $150,000 minimum and the highest price paid for a Tchelitchew's work.

Ms. Scott, Mrs. Ford's daughter, had been estranged from her mother for many decades, but according to Mr. Herz kept track of her and was occasionally in touch with Mr. Tamang.

"The one thing that everyone seemed to agree upon is that the guy who took care of her mother and the uncle is a very well liked and well respected," Mr. Herz said. "Shelley also liked this guy and is happy for him."

Mr. Tamang said he hoped to hang onto the second apartment, on the 10th floor, for a while because it is still full of Mr. Ford's photographs and artwork.

In the meantime, Mr. Tamang said he had not decided what to do with the new wealth headed his way, except to pay down some of the mortgage on his house in Queens.

Bisundev Mahato receives coveted Harvard Award

2010-05-01T04:19:00.000-07:00

Nepali scholar receives coveted Harvard Award
Nepalnews.com, 24-Apr-2010

A Nepali scholar Bisundev Mahato has been awarded with Steven A. Schroeder Fellowship award 2010 at Harvard Medical School for his proposal titled "Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions, High Variation Conditions, and Regional Variations in Health Care Utilizations and Costs."

Mahato is the first Nepali national to win this highly competitive this award at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, USA. The award is awarded to only one person every year.

Bisundev is a researcher, an educator, and a social entrepreneur, based in the US. He was educated in acclaimed institutions including Harvard University, Brown University, and Columbia University

CA Election: Who voted for who

2010-04-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

CA Election: Who voted for who
TKP, 14-Mar-2010
Sudhindra Sharma and Bal Krishna Khadka

A small news item on March 11 which did not make it to the headlines or TV discussions mentioned that a former assistant minister and Nepali Congress central committee member Hari Shanker Pariyar had joined the Maoists with some of his Dalit followers. With the Maoists threatening to launch a people’s revolt come end of May, and the other parties in the coalition government considering this merely a bluff, it would be pertinent to explore the support base of the Maoists. Who are the supporters and sympathisers of the Maoists? What are their demographic characteristics in terms of age, educational qualifications and caste/ethnicity? Does Pariyar’s quitting the Nepali Congress and joining the Maoists have any significance?

Three months after the completion of the Constituent Assembly election in April 2008, Interdisciplinary Analysts (IDA) had undertaken a nationwide survey in July-August 2008 with its statistically stratified random sample spread across 30 districts asking which party the respondents had voted for. A few months after the collapse of the Maoist-headed coalition government in May 2009, IDA had conducted another nationwide survey in July where an equal number of people across the country had been asked what they thought of the row over the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and who they thought was right — the then Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda or President Ram Baran Yadav. From the responses to these two questions, it is possible to ascertain the demographic characteristics of the supporters and sympathisers of the Maoists, at least in very broad terms, and to glean valuable insights.

In the survey carried out in 2008, the following question was asked: "Which political party did you vote for under the proportional system?" As is well known, surveys such as those done by IDA allow for disaggregating the data by variables such as age, sex, urban-rural settlement, development region, ecological region and caste/ethnicity. Disaggregating this question by a respondent’s caste and ethnicity reveals that a person’s choice of a political party is related with his/her caste and ethnicity. This is shown in the Table 1.

Among the eight broad caste/ethnic groups, support for the Maoists is the strongest among the hill Dalits followed by Tarai and hill ethnic communities. While two out of three hill Dalits reported voting for the Maoists in the CA elections, so did almost every other ethnic voter (both among the hill and Tarai ethnic communities). The data also reveals that the Maoists have a fairly good presence among the hill castes. The support base of the Maoists is the weakest among the Madhesi groups — among Madhesi castes, Muslims and Madhesi Dalits.

After the row over the COAS and the collapse of the Maoist-led coalition government, IDA in its nationwide public opinion survey had asked the following question: “On May 3, 2009, the government under the premiership of Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda sacked General Rookmangud Katawal from the post of Chief of Army Staff. Late in the evening the same day, President Ram Baran Yadav wrote to the army headquarters informing General Rookmangud Katawal to stay in the post of Chief of Army Staff and continue his job. What is your opinion in this regard — who do you think was right, Prime Minister Prachanda or President Ram Baran Yadav?”

A high proportion was ambivalent with regards to the row over the COAS: 50 percent said “don’t know/cannot say” on this issue. Among the people who did express their opinion, 25 percent thought that Prime Minister Prachanda’s action was right while 20 percent thought that President Ram Baran Yadav’s action was right. What is revealing is the response to this question by educational attainment levels of the respondents.

When disaggregating the public’s opinion on the COAS row, one notices that a high proportion of the illiterate said “don’t know/cannot say”. With a rise in the educational attainment, people begin to form a definite opinion on the matter. If, for instance, 76 percent of the illiterate said "don’t know/cannot say", this comes down to 13 percent for those who have passed Bachelor’s level. Likewise, once educational attainment increases, those who say that the prime minister was right also increases. It, however, reaches the zenith among those who have passed School Leaving Certificate. With a further increase in the level of education after SLC, those who think the prime minister was right begins to decline. Among those who have passed the Bachelor’s level, only 24 percent think the prime minister was right compared to 41 percent among those who have passed SLC.

The data reveals a clear correlation between the level of educational attainment and the thinking that the president was right with regard to the row over the COAS. Unlike support for the prime minister, it does not taper off after reaching its zenith at a particular point. However, among those who have passed the Intermediate and Bachelor’s level, there is a substantial number of ambivalent opinions that consider neither of them to be right. The fact that support for the then Prime Minister Prachanda in the COAS row is highest among those who have passed SLC need not be construed as being highest among young people in general. Those who have passed SLC could be young people; it could also be older people who were not able to continue their education after SLC.

Combining the findings of the two surveys allows one to form some ideas of the support base of the Maoists. It, however, also leads to the following question: What could be the common feature behind hill Dalits (and hill and Tarai ethnic communities to a lesser extent) and those that have modest educational attainment levels? Though these are quite different entities — one a caste category and the other an educational level — hill Dalits and those who could not continue their education after SLC are those sections of society that feel that they have somehow been disadvantaged by the existing system. Feelings of having been deprived of the things in life that others have, and thus being “stuck” to where they are, could be the feature that ties together and links these disparate entities.

In a much-discussed op-ed piece in Kantipur on March 3, 2010, Pradeep Poudel, chief of the student wing of the Nepali Congress, lamented that Dalits were no longer attracted to the Congress, the political party which had been at the vanguard of the equality movement for half a century. What the news report mentioned above of Hari Shanker Pariyar’s joining the Maoists only said was that he was all praise for the Maoists for uplifting the Dalits. It did not give any clue as to what may have been his real reasons. With two out of three hill Dalits having voted for the Maoists during the CA elections as revealed by the IDA survey, one can only imagine the pressure exerted on Pariyar from the rank and file to join the Maoists!

Sudhindra Sharma, a sociologist, is executive director of IDA and Bal Krishna Khadka is a statistician at IDA.

Muluki Ain to become history soon

2010-04-09T04:17:00.000-07:00

Muluki Ain to become history soon
TKP, 1-Apr-2010
By KAMAL RAJ SIGDEL

The government has prepared a complete and comprehensive body of criminal and civil laws to replace the entire Muluki Ain, the one-and-a-half-century old legal code enforced by first Rana oligarch Jung Bahadur Rana during his reign in 1854.

The new body of laws, organised into two codes, namely Criminal Code and a Civil Code, will modernise Nepal’s justice system, claim officials involved in preparing the drafts. For these laws to come into effect, the Cabinet and the Parliament will have to endorse them.

The Ministry of Law and Justice (MoLJ) will submit the final drafts of the codes to the Cabinet in the next few days, said MoLJ Secretary Madhav Poudel.

For the last two years, two expert committees under the leadership of Justice Khil Raj Regmi and Kalyan Shrestha were engaged in codifying the laws.

The new legal codes, said Poudel, are urgent for the country, given the changes following the Rana rule such as the country’s increased dealings with the international community, emergence of new types of crimes, and new perspectives on crime and punishment. “The Muliki Ain—despite over a dozen amendments—has several weaknesses.”

Structured in 6 Parts, 51 Chapters and 728 Sections, the Civil Code is the longest ever law to be enacted in the country, according to Poudel. The code includes chapters on “law of persons”, “family law”, “property law”, “law of obligation”, and “private international law”. The law, however, does not recognise gay marriage.

For the first time, the chapter on property law has defined servitude, trust (Guthi), usufruct to effectively resolve all legal disputes relating to land and property issues.

Considering Nepal’s obligation to the Hague Convention on inter-country adoption, the new civil code has provisioned separate section on the same. Nepal became signatory to the convention in April 2009. The new codes are prepared by codifying the SC precedents, and inheriting the best of Muluki Ain.

The move has evinced mixed reaction from legal experts. While former Nepal Bar Association Chairman Bishwo Kant Mainali said a country should shed off old systems to mark its entry into a new era, advocate Bhimarjun Acharya said replacing the legal document of historic significance would cost dear.

Day Traders 2.0: Wired, Angry and Loving It

2010-04-07T02:10:00.000-07:00

Day Traders 2.0: Wired, Angry and Loving It
NY Times, 26-Mar-2010
By DAVID SEGAL

REMEMBER the day traders?

They were hard to miss during the tech-stock mania a decade ago, when the Nasdaq seemed like a casino built by morons and a chimp with darts could pick winners. You would hear about these guys — nearly all of them were guys — and wonder: Could anyone make a living this way? And if the answer was yes, why were the rest of us suckers still holding down regular jobs?

No doubt, it’s been a long time since a question like that troubled your imagination. And perhaps you assumed that the twin calamities of the Internet crash and the Great Recession had doomed the day-trader species in the unruly jungle of American capitalism. But some dreams refuse to die, and few, it seems, are more resilient than the dream of beating the market while wearing nothing but tighty-whities.

Or, if you are Andy Lindloff, a pair of jeans and a black waffle-pattern shirt.

“Banks are seeing a nice little lift,” he says, staring at computer screens one recent Wednesday morning, sipping coffee from a Denver Broncos mug. “The European banks are up, so that may bleed over to ours. Bank of America might be one to watch.”

Mr. Lindloff, 49, is sitting in his living room here in a city known as “surfer’s paradise,” about 25 miles north of San Diego. Surrounded by the playthings of his daughter — a toy oven, a doll house — he appears to be alone. In fact, he has plenty of company. With a hands-free headset, he is speaking to Steve Gomez, his partner in Today Trader, a two-year-old Internet venture that is “about helping traders find success through virtual technology,” as it says on the company’s Web site.

The company charges aspiring traders $199 a month for a live, real-time view of Mr. Lindloff’s computer screen, along with the running banter, commentary and advice that he and Mr. Gomez provide through the morning. (After lunch, it’s just Mr. Lindloff.) The service is billed as a chance to look over the “virtual shoulder” of two veteran stock traders, but you don’t really see anyone’s shoulder. It’s more like staring at the instrument panel of a jet while eavesdropping on the pilots, plus the ceaseless tap-tap of a keyboard.

By the opening bell, 21 subscribers are logged in.

“Citigroup’s at $4.10,” says Mr. Gomez, 43, who is in his home in San Diego. “Probably going to hang around that strike price.”

“AMD is at an interesting stop there, too,” says Mr. Lindloff, hopscotching from one chart to another.

“Keep it tight,” says Mr. Gomez. “Don’t fight the momentum.”

All the while, subscribers send questions and share ideas in a chat room that is part of the service.

“DRYS over 6.”

“MNKD short?”

“Watching this ALD.”

“HBAN?”

It might read like a teenager’s idea of a haiku, but this is the new frontier in do-it-yourself trading. Today Trader and its rivals are tiny operations, and they have modest followings. But they are harnessing all the crowd-sourcing features of the Internet circa 2010: YouTube, Twitter, and companies like GotoMeeting, a Web conferencing service.

They are also harnessing a lot of market-related rage. The gruesome stock plunge of late 2008 and early 2009 was a searing, fool-me-twice moment for many people. The market again seemed hopelessly treacherous, a mug’s game. And if you had an account with the brokerage arm of any number of Wall Street stalwarts — like Lehman Brothers, Citigroup or Merrill Lynch — your losses were doubly galling. Your team helped put a sleeper hold on the economy, the near-collapse of which then ravaged your portfolio.

Even many of those who took the safe route and years ago bought index funds have seen little upside. Look at the performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500, the most popular index out there. If you put $1,000 in it in 1999, you now have slightly less money in your account (about 0.3 percent less, actually).

If the motto of the original day-trade boom was, “If the pros can do it, so can we,” the motto today is, “We can’t do much worse than the pros.”

“There’s this idea out there that retail investors are dumb,” says Howard Lindzon, the co-founder of StockTwits, which curates a gusher of stock tips and financial news alerts tweeted by 20,000 regular contributors. “Well, it turns out that the institutional investors are pretty dumb. They nearly blew us all up with leverage.”

Of course, anyone hoping to join the day-trade caravan had better wear a seat belt, as Mr. Lindloff’s experience on this Wednesday morning demonstrates. Before lunch, he will buy and sell about 44,000 shares, in 17 trades. He starts off poorly, losing about $500. But a timely bet on a company called Rackspace Hosting (“I don’t know what they do,” he says), as well as quick investments in Applied Materials, Eagle Bulk Shipping and a few others, have turned things around.

“Up $210,” he says, removing his headset. Factoring in commissions, he’s made $60.

IT is hard to say how many day traders are currently plying their craft, if that is the right word, in this country. Brokerage firms track the activity and demographics of their customers, but they have been reluctant to share that data. About the most we know is that the day traders skew male, and the number of trades per $100,000 in client dollars is a little less than half what it was back in 2000, according to the Charles Schwab brokerage firm.

Even that figure seems high. As a job, “day trader” registers in roughly the same way as “disco ball manufacturer” or “Brooklyn farmer.” You know that someone has to be making disco balls and that maybe there are still a few plots of arable land in Brooklyn.

Still, it can seem strange to see TV ads for an Atlanta company called Long Term Short Term, which offers two-day investment seminars, as well as DVDs, CDs and online tutoring, in cities across the country. Price: $3,995 a person. Part of the pitch taps into the simmering anger at professional investors.

“People put their trust in stock brokerages that are now out of business, and have seen their 401(k) drop by 40 percent or more,” says Michael Hutchison, an executive vice president of Long Term Short Term, which does business as Better Trades. “Meanwhile, mutual fund companies are making $85 billion a year, and look at their performance. There are people who see all this and think, ‘Why don’t I educate myself?’”

Mr. Hutchinson hastens to add that his company doesn’t encourage anyone to quit a job and trade full time. But more than a few attendees may be looking for a change in career. Many of the new day traders are people who recently lost jobs and can’t find work.

“I get e-mails from people saying, ‘I worked for XYZ company for 20 years and I just got laid off,’” says Brian Shannon of Alphatrends, which, for $60 a month, offers proprietary online videos and a once-a-week live chat. “They’ve got a severance package or a nest egg that they want to invest themselves.”

Mr. Gomez and Mr. Lindloff are among the few who started day trading in the late ’90s and never stopped. At a late breakfast, just after that $60 morning, the two are sitting at a sidewalk cafe. You expect them to be revved up and antsy. Instead, look like members of a mellow Southern California rock band that split up 15 years ago. The most agitated either gets while trading online is the occasional “goddangit,” Mr. Lindloff’s idea of an outburst.

For years, Mr. Gomez was a manager at a self-storage facility, but he couldn’t resist trading commodities during office hours, and he had a hard time keeping his mind on his work. Mr. Lindloff worked at an Isuzu dealership for years, then made cold calls — knocking on doors — for Edward Jones, the brokerage firm. He left after three months.

“I knew I wanted to trade,” he says.

How good are they? Mr. Lindloff, who Mr. Gomez says is the more skilled of the two, says he has averaged somewhere between $100,000 and $120,000 a year for the last 10 years, even during the worst part of the Great Recession. With low expenses, he lives comfortably, though hardly extravagantly.

“I basically have $80,000 to $100,000 in my trading account every day,” he says, “and take my earnings out of that account to live.”

It is, to be sure, an odds-defying performance. The great mass of studies point to the same conclusion: trading is hazardous to your wealth, as an academic paper memorably put it. The losers far outnumber the winners.

Exactly how far is clear from one of the most comprehensive looks at the subject in a yet-to-be-published study conducted in Taiwan. (The country is ideal for this kind of research because all trades go through one place, the Taiwan Stock Exchange, which is willing to share the information.) The authors sifted through tens of millions of trades, from 1992 to 2006, and found that 80 percent of active traders lost money.

“More importantly, we found that if you were to look at the past performance of these traders, only 1 percent of them could be called predictably profitable,” says a co-author, Brad M. Barber, a finance professor at the University of California, Davis. Everyone else, it seems, was on a short-term winning streak. Even those who did modestly well found their that profits were wiped out, and then some, by transaction fees like commissions and taxes.

“It’s not impossible to make money actively trading,” Mr. Barber continues. “There are slivers of people out there who are quite good. And everyone thinks they will be in that group of 1 percent.”

So why do people persist in this line of work?

“The technical term is thrill-seeking,” says Hersh Shefrin, a professor of behavioral finance at Santa Clara University in California and author of “Beyond Greed and Fear,” an exploration of investors’ mindscapes. “There’s an adrenaline rush. And the thing about day trading is that it gives you pretty quick feedback. If you buy and hold, a lot of things need to happen before you see a result, and much of what happens relates to external factors that are beyond your control. With day trading, you’re in charge.”

Also, he says, “people enjoy trading.”

IF Mr. Lindloff is earning steady six-figure returns, he is squarely in the rarefied 1 percent of winners. But for $199 a month you sort of expect a man with a mansion, a hot tub and hyperbolic claims of double-digit returns. Why do a few dozen subscribers pay to watch these quite appealing but hardly world-beating guys at work?

“Eighty percent of it is camaraderie,” says Mr. Lindzon at StockTwits. “Look, my wife watches cooking shows and I tell her, ‘That’s not going to make you a better cook.’ With these guys, you get a community, you get to hang out with people who love stocks, and if you get a couple great ideas in a month, even better.”

Services like Twitter are naturals for traders, and not just because they offer a geyser of pointers, whispers and news flashes. They also give a far-flung group of people a simulacrum of fellowship, which is something that day traders need almost as much as good ideas.

Asked about the Today Trader method of buying and selling, both men seem momentarily stumped, as if they never saw the question coming. Then they talk about the search for “set-ups,” which seems to translate roughly as “golden opportunities,” but they struggle to put a finger on what set-ups are, or how to spot them.

It has something to do with tracking trading volumes of stocks and buying heavily traded stocks as they rise in price. But how to know a stock will keep rising? Intuition, they say. It tells them whether they’ve arrived at the party too late (in which case they won’t buy), at the right time (in which case they buy), or just before it ends (time to sell).

“A common phrase in this business,” says Mr. Lindloff, “is ‘the trend is your friend.’”

The more you listen, the more you realize that for all the high-tech gadgetry behind Today Trader, at its core is a Newtonian principle formulated more than 300 years ago: a body in motion tends to stay in motion.

The problem is that stocks aren’t bodies and their motion is subject to forces Newton could never have fathomed. Some of those forces are hard for the Today Trader duo to fathom, too. Mr. Gomez says that day trading has become far trickier in recent years because of the rise of robo trading — the use of computers to automatically buy and sell huge numbers of shares in superfast bursts, based on algorithms.

Big, muscular Wall Street veterans like Goldman Sachs have the money, smarts and brute power to dominate this computerized battle, and many day traders may not even be aware how outgunned they now are.

“It’s not something we fully understand, but algorithms don’t have emotions,” says Mr. Gomez. “It’s like these machines can smell a human. They can smell the fear of a discretionary trader. Stocks will still go from Point A to Point B. But what used to be a waltz is now more like mosh pit.”

Daily hand-to-hand combat with a bunch of robots? It seems kind of crazy. But is it any crazier than leaving your money in the same place where it languished for the last decade?

This is a not a simple question. Fortunately, one man is ideally suited to answer it.

UNFORTUNATELY, Charles Schwab doesn’t do interviews.

This is ironic, as has been noted by reporters who have come calling of late, because the company has spent five years and a fortune on an ad campaign whose kicker is “Talk to Chuck.” But in 2008, Mr. Schwab vacated the C.E.O. job — he is now chairman — and the company would like to wean the public off the idea that Charles Schwab is the public face of Charles Schwab.

No small feat, given the name of the company and given the ubiquity of that face in many years of advertising. Mr. Schwab once said he took his grandchildren out trick-or-treating on Halloween and some people thought he was wearing a Charles Schwab mask.

Though he wore a jacket and tie in his TV spots, he seemed to have the heart and soul of a revolutionary. The idea behind the company was to cut commission rates so low — they started off at $70 a trade in 1975, which was then a steal — that the average investor could trade without paying exorbitant fees to Wall Street. If day trading had a patron saint, it was this man.

The current C.E.O. is Walt Bettinger, 49, who is sitting one morning in his San Francisco office, which is next to Mr. Schwab’s and has a killer view of the Bay Bridge. He knows the subject is day trading, and you can tell he finds this topic slightly annoying, the way a movie star would find it annoying if you asked about a film he made 20 years ago.

“I think the day-trade concept is a paragraph in the story of Charles Schwab,” he says. “But it’s not the book.”

The book, he says, is Schwab’s evolution from a company that was just focused on what he calls “self-directed investors” to a company that also offers advice to those who seek it and full-on portfolio management for those who prefer to leave their investment decisions in someone else’s hands.

As a strategy, this makes sense because it turns out that traders are fickle customers. Even during the banner years, Mr. Bettinger said, the company had to constantly replenish its base of very active traders.

The push to advise clients and to manage portfolios started gaining traction in 2005, and the company says that last year, customers moved $21 billion into assorted fee-based advice offerings — which suggests that the era of professional hand-holding in the wealth-management world is hardly over.

Schwab now offers every item at the steam table of financial offerings, and Mr. Bettinger will not say he prefers one investment strategy to any other. He is, in fact, completely agnostic on the question and surpassingly unhelpful at opining about day trading. If that works for you, do it, he’ll say. Unless you’d like someone to manage your money — in which case, do that.

It is a politic, even-handed answer that proves just how over the whole trading phenomenon the company is. Schwab today is a bit like that part-time insurrectionist you knew in college who denounced “the man” and later became a management consultant. You can understand the evolution and appreciate the maturity, but you can still think fondly of the days when he stood outside the dining hall pushing copies of The Workers Vanguard.

About the most Mr. Bettinger will say about day trading is that it’s a “tough gig.” “You’re competing against mega-institutions that are trading in hundredths of a second.”

HE’S right, and the Today Trader team keeps clashing with those mega-institutions. At one point, Mr. Lindloff buys shares in Patterson-UTI Energy, because he thinks it looks ripe for an uptick. Instead, it dives a few cents, and because Mr. Lindloff has an automatic stop on the trade — which sells the shares if they dip below a certain threshold — they are sold for a loss. A moment later, the shares shoot up.

Mr. Lindloff thinks he has been juked and jived by a robo trader.

“That was nothing but an algorithm boogie,” he mutters to the Today Trader faithful. “Goddang it. Drives me crazy.”

“My analogy is that whole sector is doing great and they find one weak animal in a herd,” replies Mr. Gomez, “and they’ll attack it.”

Mr. Gomez trades his own accounts but spends much of his time answering questions posted in the chat room. One is from a subscriber, Rick, who asks, “What do you guys do to stop kicking yourself (emotionally) about missed opportunity?”

“The only thing you can control is your attitude,” Mr. Gomez replies into his microphone, moments after the question is posted. “Not looking back, not kicking yourself for not catching the whole move. You’re never going to be perfect. Nobody is going to be perfect.”

Not even Today Trader. By the end of the day, Mr. Lindloff has traded 60,000 shares and is up $165. It would be a satisfying return, but commissions on those trades cost $300.

“You know,” says Mr. Gomez, “a lot of people tell us that our down days are every bit as instructive as our ups.”

The Next Small Thing

2010-04-07T01:03:00.000-07:00

The Next Small Thing
NY Magazine, 4-Apr-2010
By Christine Whitney

The Yotel chain—purveyors of tiny, chic hotel rooms inspired by Tokyo’s famous “Kapseru Hoteru” capsule lodgings—recently announced plans to open an outpost in Times Square. Inexpensive “Kapseru Hoteru” are the SROs of Japan—some capsule-hotel “rooms” are simply three-foot-high sleeping units stacked on top of one another. But the Yotel is a higher-end version, part of a larger city trend toward smaller accommodations.

Yotel Amenities
Large single bed, foldout desk and stool, private bathroom with shower, flat-screen TV, free wi-fi. “We use the language of first-class airline travel,” says Yotel founder Simon Woodroffe. The company’s three existing hotels are all near European airports—London’s Gatwick and Heathrow and Amsterdam’s Schiphol.

Not Yet Turning Japanese
The Japanese capsule trend began with the 1972 opening of a Tokyo apartment building, Nakagin Capsule Tower, that catered to businessmen with 140 rooms the size of shipping containers (104 square feet). The first capsule hotel opened in 1979. Most are equipped with only a radio and a small TV that hangs down from the ceiling like the screens on buses and airplanes.

Mini-Rooms
A traditional hotel room at the Hilton New York in midtown is 320 square feet and rents for $309. But cool new hotels are going smaller:

The Standard
meatpacking district
245 square feet
$195

Yotel
midtown (planned)
170 square feet
$150

The Ace
Flatiron
140 square feet
$209

The Pod
midtown
70 square feet
$99

The Jane
West Village
50 square feet
$99

Whitehouse
Bowery SRO turned hotel
24 square feet
$33.50

Capsule facts
109
Number of capsule hotels currently in Tokyo

21.5 square feet
Average size of Japanese capsule-hotel unit (cost: $38)

18 square feet
Size of smallest available Japanese unit

16 square feet
Size of an average casket

NCAA Expands March Madness To Include 4,096 Teams

2010-03-21T03:24:00.000-07:00

NCAA Expands March Madness To Include 4,096 Teams

139A: Suresh Acharya

2010-03-19T07:34:00.001-07:00

Intoxicated DIG Parshuram Khatri beaten up in a restaurant

2010-03-15T06:48:00.000-07:00

Intoxicated DIG beaten up in a restaurant
Nepalnews.com, 14-Mar-10

A Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) was beaten up severely at a restaurant in Thamel over a minor dispute when he was heavily intoxicated with alcohol late night Friday, Kantipur reported.

The beaten up DIG is Parshuram Khatri of the investigation department in the Police Headquarters.

Khatri had gone to Gambesi Dohori Sanjh, Thamel without his body guard. He had gone with his friends Deepak Khadka and Ashok Bhandari.

Khatri and his friends have sustained serious injuries. After the fight, he came out of the restaurant blood oozing out from his head at about 1 am, Saturday. He was immediately rushed to Bir Hospital where doctors treated him with ten stitches on his head. He went back to his home at around 3 am.

Khatri said, he was attacked over a brawl about a bag that he had given to the security guard of the restaurant to keep for a while.

They attacked over a dispute on hiding the bag, he said. I think they attacked me with firewood sticks.

Police from Durbarmarg reached the restaurant after somebody informed the Police Control about the incident by calling at the number 100.

“Some body informed us about the incident by calling the Police Control number 100, and we reached the place based on that,” said Inspector Sudip Raj Pathak of Durbarmarg. “Later we found one of the injured was a DIG of the Police.”

They have arrested security guard of the restaurant Kumar Shrestha, Chef Som Majhi and proprietor Arjun Sherchan.

The restaurant owner claimed, the incident took place as the heavily intoxicated DIG started attacking the restaurant staff.

Police Headquarters has taken the issue seriously. “It is inappropriate for a police officer of DIG rank to stay at a public place without his security guard till late night and drink heavily,” said an Additional Inspector General (AIG). “The Police Headquarters is serious on this and there will be a probe.”

New York Cabs Gouged Riders Out of Millions

2010-03-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

New York Cabs Gouged Riders Out of Millions
New York Times, 12-Mar-2010
By Michael Barbaro

About 3,000 New York City taxi drivers routinely overcharged riders over two years by surreptitiously fixing their meters to charge rates that would normally apply only to trips outside the five boroughs, according to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.

The drivers’ scheme, the commission said, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip. The drivers, officials said, flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million.

The 1.8 million fares represent a tiny fraction of a total 360 million trips over the 26-month period in question.

Agency officials said, however, that they were alarmed enough that they immediately ordered the companies that manufacture the meters to create a system to alert riders when the higher rates are being charged.

That is likely to be done through the digital screens facing the back seats of the cabs.

The commission said it began an inquiry after investigators, responding to a rider’s complaint, determined that a cab driver from Brooklyn, Wasim Khalid Cheema, had overcharged 574 passengers in just one month last year. Mr. Cheema’s license has been revoked. He could not be reached for comment.

The commission then used GPS data, collected in every cab, to review millions of trips in New York City and found a huge number in which the out-of-city rates had improperly been charged, officials said.

The investigators determined that 36,000 drivers improperly activated the higher rate at least once, and that about 3,000 drivers did it more than 100 times.

The higher rate, reserved for rides in Nassau and Westchester Counties, is 80 cents per one-fifth of a mile — twice the rate charged for rides in the five boroughs.

As described by officials, the fraud might rank as the biggest in the taxi industry’s history.

“We have not seen anything quite this pervasive,” said Matthew W. Daus, the taxi and limousine commissioner. “It’s very disturbing.”

The commission has turned over its probe to the city’s Department of Investigation.

“Some of these people could face serious charges,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Friday.

Applying the higher rate in New York City violates the commission’s rules. The penalty for it varies, from a fine of $200 to the mandatory revocation of a cab license, depending on how much was overcharged.

The taxi industry vigorously challenged the city’s findings, saying it was unimaginable that such a pervasive problem could be the result of deliberate fraud. The city said that 35,558 out of the city’s roughly 48,000 drivers had applied the higher rate.

“This is clearly a systematic failure on the part of the meters and the technology,” said Bhairavi Desai, the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents cabbies.

“For this to be so widespread — nearly every single driver — makes no sense,” she added.

The taxi commission refused to comment on the alliance’s claim, citing its continuing investigation. “We have to sort through the numbers,” Mr. Daus said.

In interviews on Friday, taxi drivers expressed dismay at the city’s findings, which they said threatened to tarnish the image of their industry.

“We are ashamed,” said Bagicha Singh, of Floral Park, Queens, who was on East Houston Street on break from his shift. “People will look at us as a thief.”

Several cabbies defended themselves and their colleagues and said it was easy to accidentally activate the higher rate because of the way the meters were designed.

On some models, they said, the buttons for the New York City and out-of-town rates are extremely close together.

“You’re driving, your fingers are small, the buttons are tiny,” said Rana Singh, 38, of Maywood, N.J. “You look up at traffic; you look at the car ahead.”

Cab drivers are supposed to charge the higher rate only when they cross the border between New York City and Nassau or Westchester.

But according to the taxi commission, drivers often pressed a button on the meter that categorized the fare as Code No. 4, which is charged for trips outside the city, rather than Code No. 1, for those in the city limits.

Currently, passengers can see which rate is being charged by looking at the meter, which displays a No. 1 or a No. 4 — something few riders are aware of. The rate is also printed on every taxi receipt.

The system demanded by the city would require an acknowledgment from the passenger that the higher rate is to be charged before the alert disappears from the digital screen, the commission said.

Eventually, officials said, the changes would remove the ability of drivers to manually activate the higher rate, by creating a GPS-based mechanism that automatically charged it based on the location of the cab.

“We will make sure that this problem comes to an end,” Mr. Daus said.

Visit Nepal 2011 - Nepal, the Most Amazing and Beautiful Place on Earth

2010-03-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

The Onion TV: NASA Scientists Plan to Approach Girl by 2018

2010-03-08T05:38:00.000-08:00

NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018

The Onion TV: Report: American Schools Trail Behind World In Aptitude Of Child Soldiers

2010-03-08T05:28:00.000-08:00

Report: American Schools Trail Behind World In Aptitude Of Child Soldiers

US lottery winner cheated by Nepali store clerk to receive $395k

2010-03-03T18:54:00.000-08:00

US lottery winner cheated by Nepali store clerk to receive $395k
Nepalnews, 18-Feb-2010

A US district judge has ruled that nearly $400,000 seized from the accounts of the Nepali man who stole a Texas maintenance worker's lottery ticket must be handed to the scammed jackpot winner, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Authorities are searching for the Nepali convenience store clerk who they believe stole the ticket from Willis when he asked for confirmation that he had won $1 million.

Pankaj Joshi is believed to have fled to his native Nepal after receiving a check for $750,000.

Austin police and the Travis County Attorney's Office have seized or frozen about $395,000 from Joshi's accounts and gifts to his relatives in the US, according to the report.

On Tuesday the judge ordered those funds to be given to Willis, who says he wants to pay off medical bills, pay his daughter's college tuition and buy new golf clubs.

Khan Academy

2010-02-23T05:40:00.000-08:00

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere, through YouTube. It was started by Mr. Salman Khan, not the Bollywood star, but a Harvard (MBA) and MIT (engineering) trained former hedge-fund analyst.

Related Items
YouTube! Khan Acacademy Channels

BBC debate on minority issues in the new Constitution

2010-02-22T07:35:00.000-08:00

BBC's Narayan Shrestha moderates a discussion on minority issues in the new Constitution with three CA members Lal Babu Pandit (लालबाबु पण्डीत), DB Karki (डिबी कार्की), and Amrita Thapa (अमृता थापा).

BBC Talks to NRNA President Dev Man Hirachan

2010-02-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

BBC Nepali Service's Ms. Rama Parajuli talks to NRN's President Mr. Dev Man Hirachan (देवमान हिराचनसंग) on a variety of topics including government's decision to give IDs to NRN and NRNs' investment in Nepal.

Map of Baglung

2010-02-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

The Prabal Gurung Girl Is Sexy and Smart

2010-02-11T05:05:00.000-08:00

The Prabal Gurung Girl Is Sexy and Smart
New York Magazine, 9-Feb-2010

New York's fashion director, Harriet Mays Powell, paid a visit to Prabal Gurung's studio to talk about his cultural influences, his spring collection, and who the ideal Prabal girl is. Gurung, who is Nepalese, draws influence from the draping of saris. "If I can pinpoint one thing about the way that Nepalese women, or even in India, it's the way they drape their saris," he says. "If you look at my clothes, when it's like draping, it's always influenced by that." Prabal was also influenced by YSL's Rive Gauche perfume bottle. And what makes a girl a Prabal girl? "A beautiful girl with brains — that's a lethal combination." Find out more by watching the video.

Divide and rule

2010-02-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

Divide and rule
ekantipur, 10-Feb-10
Bipin Adhikari

The Constituent Assembly Committee on State Restructuring and Allocation of State Powers (CSRASP) has finally published its report reaffirming its controversial commitment to re-design Nepal on the basis of federalisation along ethnic lines and resulting discontent.

As a principle, it is not uncommon to see various in-built constitutional mechanisms around the world for addressing the priorities and desires of minority or ethnic groups on a state or sub-state level. A number of institutions and procedures have been internalised by new democracies to ensure that the human rights of all communities and cultures are protected, and justice is proactively done to all those who have been exploited in the past in different ways, deprived for generations and marginalised. There have been many success stories which could serve as the point of departure for learning how to do what is best for this country along the most democratic traditions.

That was not the temperament of the CSRASP. It would indeed be very naive for anybody to expect any committee to show this temperament when one realises how fraudulently the stage was organised to set the scene for the Fourth Amendment to the Interim Constitution. The country was declared a federal state outright in December 2007 while a jumbo Constituent Assembly was being convened — precluding discussion in the house over this important issue for ever. There was no more any choice as to whether this country should “go” federal or not; the choice was only what type of federal arrangement it should seek. The house was accorded only a limited right to self-determination in this matter.

A country can certainly go for federalism if this is the decision of its Constituent Assembly. But, as a visiting British scholar pointed out recently, federalism is not inherently a superior form of democracy. It cannot guarantee democracy or good governance any more than a unitary government can. Its success depends on so many important political and other variables. If these variables contribute, even unitary states can have high performance. The house was deprived of the opportunity to debate it.

This critique always recommended asymmetrical devolution arrangements in Nepal, based on reasonable claims, capacity and potentials of each province in the country. This arrangement could provide a means for accomplishing the goal of addressing ethnic, regional, lingual and cultural discontent by granting different powers to different provinces, with an emphasis on local demand and their regional ability to control their own affairs. The constitution could have provided the necessary framework for a negotiated settlement of all issues based on given models. Such measures could have addressed or prevented disputes that otherwise would have the potential to destabilise the country’s democratic process. But it is important that these mechanisms are not based on discriminatory arrangements.

A 14-province Nepal is a big joke. It is not economically workable. It is a recipe for disaster in terms of organisation and management. It is not, as claimed, based on “identity” and “ability to stand”. There is cynicism in the demarcation of the provinces, and also the basis on which their size is determined. Most of these provinces will not be able to survive with the blueprint of autonomy that the draft intends to demonstrate for even six months.

Again, the proposal that seven of these provinces be given identity based on ethnicity and the others should go ahead on non-ethnic categorisation is going to be the bête noire of this arrangement. It links Rai-Limbus, Sherpas, Newars, Gurungs, Magars and Tamangs with their so-called lands, leaving the other 96 ethnic groups in the country to manifest themselves or their language, culture, religion and ethnicity through the remaining seven provinces.

The report does not explain anywhere why the identity of a few ethnic groups is more sacred than the identity of others. It does not explain why Khasas or Tharus should not have exclusive “Khasan” or “Tharuhat” the way “Kirantis” have an exclusive Kirant. If there could be a “Jadan” out of the blue, why cannot there be a “Yadavdesh” in the Tarai? If the history of relationship with the land is the factor, which has been accepted as the criteria for naming and shaming communities this way, then the committee report should be able to demonstrate some rigorous research on what is the communal history of Nepal.

There are many potential pitfalls to this approach. If a certain region can have an ethnic name even though 60 percent of the people in that province are people outside this group, why should not this same categorisation work in the case of Tharus. After all, there is little controversy that Tharus along with some other identical smaller communities are the original inhabitants of that territory. Why should the so-called “Tharuhat” share its name with non-Tharuhat people simply because the demography has changed over the last few decades? There is no reply to this question as well. The charge of in-built constitutional discrimination, and potential fault lines in this framework, cannot be avoided with such an arrangement.

It is quite one thing to create a formal political space for ethnic identities and harness the country’s available political strength in support of this, but it is quite another to beef up discriminatory ethnic arrangements. These political variables apart, the symmetrical approach that the committee has applied in the matter of centre-state relations may not make this federalisation a workable model. The way the province of Jadan has been created and the Sherpa province has been established, nobody needs to doubt that developing a viable economy and an effective financial resources management will not be easy. The committee has not even tried to ensure administrative viability for most of the provinces, nor has it been able to see the farmland capacity of the demarcated territories. This is another funny part of the report.

Finally, the committee seems to have taken the challenges of globalisation as a non-issue. In the 21st century, globalisation has placed new demands on organisational systems of all types, including the restructuring of states. Whether a state is federal or unitary, its interests in relation to the rest of the nations have to be protected creating a competitive economic advantage for it. The report contains nothing about how a tribal state is going to secure a competitive advantage for Nepal. What it has done instead is create space for those who want to divide and rule this country based on ethnic strife.

Cheap Broadway Eats Before Showtime, From Tofu to Oxtail Soup

2010-02-03T20:33:00.000-08:00

Cheap Broadway Eats Before Showtime, From Tofu to Oxtail Soup
Bloomberg, 2-Feb-10
Review by Yvette Fernandez

Chez Napoleon (French)
365 W. 50th St. [bet 8th & 9th Ave]
Ph: 212-265-6980 www.cheznapoleon.com

It’s a family affair at Chez Napoleon, a restaurant in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen that opened in 1960. On its walls are oil-lamp sconces, framed jigsaw puzzles and old family photos of its current owners, the Brunos.

For theatergoers willing to walk an extra block or two before or after a Broadway show, numerous eateries west of Eighth Avenue and east, closer to Sixth, offer great food at prices lower than many central theater area restaurants.

At Chez Napoleon, the family’s 88-year-old matriarch, Marguerite, can still be found in the kitchen on busy weekend nights. Her daughter Elyane takes care of the front of the house, while grandson Guillaume mans the bar.

French bistro classics make up the menu: escargots ($8) or frogs’ legs ($23) in garlicky butter, coq au vin ($19), beef Bourguignon ($20), and rabbit in a mustard and wine sauce ($22).

A $30 three-course, prix-fixe menu is served all evening. The night we dropped in, main courses included a whole trout with brown butter and lemon juice, and pork medallions with mushroom sauce.

We ended with a fluffy Grand Marnier souffle ($16) large enough to share.

Kyotofu (Japanese)
705 Ninth Ave. [bet 48th and 49th St]
Ph: 212-974-6012;
www.kyotofu-nyc.com

Kyotofu’s streamlined cream-colored space feels like a downtown nightclub with its dim lighting and thumping music, which needs some volume adjusting before we ever go back.

Still, we enjoyed tasting plates ($4 each) of barbecued eel in phyllo, pork sausage in puff pastry, grilled teriyaki chicken sliders, and a patty of curried rice, shimeji and shiitake mushrooms with arugula.

Cold green tea soba noodles came with scallion and wasabi ($8), an orb of soft tofu was served with a miso-dressed salad of greens, beets and onions ($9).

Great signature desserts included silken bean curd drenched with sugar syrup and green tea tofu cheesecake ($12), along with complimentary fudgy little cupcakes.

Kellari Taverna (Greek)
19 W. 44th St. [bet 5th & 6th Ave]
Ph: 212-221-0144
www.kellari.us

Kellari Taverna is the fanciest on this list, a warmly lit space with high ceilings, wooden beams and floors, and fresh whole fish displayed on ice. Go for the bargain $32.95 three- course prix-fixe menu served daily between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.

We started with spinach and feta cheese pie and grilled whole sardines. Next, baked sea bass wrapped in grape leaves, orzo with shrimp, mussels and clams, or simple roast chicken with mashed potatoes. For dessert, honeyed walnut cake and fig ice cream.

Regular dinner main courses usually run from the roast chicken for $25.95 to a New York strip for $37.95. Fresh fish and other seafood are sold by the pound starting at about $26.95.

Utsav (Indian)
1185 Sixth Ave. [bet 46th and 47th St]
Ph: 212-575-2525
www.utsavny.com

Utsav, which is Sanskrit for “festival,” serves dishes from various regions in India. Its $30 pre-theater menu is available daily from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Saffron-tinged fabrics are draped, tent-like, from the ceiling of the airy room. Request a banquette next to the large picture windows for a view of the sidewalk trees dotted with pin lights.

We started with deep-fried samosas and lightly battered cauliflower dressed in a garlic tomato sauce. Next, yogurt- marinated chicken in a tomato cream sauce or a tender lamb stew.

For vegetarians, there’s roasted eggplant, spiced spinach with cubes of soft cheese, or a mixed vegetable curry.

For dessert, an ultra-sweet rice pudding, and even sweeter kulfi, a frozen milk dish similar to ice cream.

Wondee Siam (Thai)
792 9th Ave
Ph: 212- 582-0355

Pam Real Thai Food (Thai)
404 W. 49th St.
Ph: 212-333-7500

Q2 (Thai)
788 9th Ave
Ph: 212-262-2236
q2thainyc.com

Hell’s Kitchen is home to a number of Thai places that are easy on the pocket. For years we’ve headed to hole-in-the-wall Wondee Siam for its beautifully lacquered duck with tamarind sauce ($13.95) and beef sauteed with basil, garlic and onions. Friends swear by the rich oxtail soup with lime and chilies ($10.95) and rice with anchovy paste ($7.50) at Pam Real Thai Food.

We recently dropped by Q2, with newer, slightly sleeker decor than the other two. We liked its flat noodles sauteed with shrimp, egg and basil ($9.95) and its fried rice flecked with crabmeat, carrots and tomatoes ($9.95).

Five Napkin Burger (Burgers)
630 9th Ave
Ph; 212-757-2277
www.fivenapkinburger.com.

For a quick bite, there’s Five Napkin Burger with its eponymous dish ($14.95): over half a pound of ground chuck topped with gruyere cheese, caramelized onions and aioli.

We liked the pub-like atmosphere and quirky decor: Naked light bulbs and meat hooks hang from its high ceilings; weighing scales are scattered about.

Other sandwiches (all served with fries): the 5N foot-long dog ($14.95) with mustard, cheddar, relish, tomatoes, onions and pickled jalapenos; and the Buffalo chicken ($13.50) with hot sauce and blue cheese dressing. I thought about its dense chocolate layer cake for days.

Eatery (Comfort Food)
798 9th Ave
Ph: 212-765-7080
www.eaterynyc.com

At Eatery, we squeezed in with a crowd of skinny young people who nibbled on small plates and talked loudly to hear each other above the din.

We fed ourselves well with riffs on comfort food: greens with Southern fried chicken, cheddar cheese, corn, pecans and buttermilk dressing ($12.95), and baked macaroni with jack cheese and fried onions ($13.95).

UK suspends Nepali student visa applications

2010-02-01T06:57:00.000-08:00

UK suspends Nepali student visa applications
ekantipur, 31-Jan-10

Britain has temporarily suspended new student visa applications under the “tier 4 Point Based System” from Nepal after a sharp rise in applications, the British Embassy in Kathmandu said on Sunday. The move will not affect applicants in other visa categories.

The embassy informed in a statement that it has stopped accepting applications from Monday onwards and the suspension will be reviewed after a month.

The embassy did not release figures, but it is estimated that the number of applicants have gone up dramatically in recent months after Britain introduced tier 4 Point Based System in March last year. Under this system, students wanting to pursue further studies in Britain do not have to show source of income or property evaluation.

British officials said the move was a response to the unexpectedly high number of student visa applications from South Asia.

The suspension of visa applications also follows recent media reports of unscrupulous use of the student visa to settle in the UK. Only last week, Britain suspended at least 60 UK-based bogus institutions.

Chris Dix, Regional Director of UK Border Agency (UKBA), said in the statement that the suspension would allow UKBA to continue to scrutinise applications thoroughly and to manage the visa process efficiently for all customers in Nepal.

The appointments of Tier 4 visa applicants at the visa application centre in Kathmandu have also been suspended from Monday until the UKBA begins the process.

This move will badly affect educational consultancies for whom Britain is the main source of business. Of late, Britain has emerged as the main education destination for Nepali students, overtaking the US and Australia. Ministry of Education data show that 4,200 students get ‘No Objection Letter’ from the ministry every month. In the last two months, 6,000 students got the letter from the ministry.

Educational Consultancy Association of Nepal (ECAN), the umbrella organisation of educational consultancies, said the move would have a negative impact on genuine students who wouldn’t get there in time for their courses.

“It is not good to suspend the application without prior notice as it will adversely affect applicants, who have already made appointments at the visa application centre in Kathmandu,” said Uttam Pant, president of ECAN. He fears the suspension will not be reviewed anytime soon.
Rising number of students going abroad for higher studies means more money flowing out of the country.

Nepal Rastra Bank data show students studying abroad, including Britain, have taken away Rs. 12.12 billion from the country in the last fiscal year. And, in the first four months of the current fiscal year, Rs. 5.59 billion flowed out of the country for this purpose. The availability of sterling pound was also affected by increment in the number of students leaving for Britain. According to a banker, shortage of sterling pound still exists in the banking system

An Electoral History of Nepal

2010-01-30T11:16:00.000-08:00

Compiled by NepaliEconomy.com

First Election: 1959
The first democratic election for national Parliament in Nepal's history took place on February 18, 1959. Nepali Congress (NC) won 74 of 109 seats, Gorkha Parishad won 19 and Communist Parties 9. 1.79 million or 44 percent of electorate voted in this first election.

BP Koirala became the Prime Minister (PM) on May 27, 1959. While the PM was the head of the government, the supreme power resided with the King. The 1959 Constitution which the King promulgated himself one week before the election gave him the right, under Articles 55 and 56, to cancel/suspend the Constitution in cases of emergency. King Mahendra used that authority to banish BP Koirala's government on December 15, 1960.

On December 16, 1962 a new Panchayat Constitution written under Chairmanship of Rishikesh Shah was promulgated. The 1962 Constitution did not explicitly forbade political parties but the amended Constitution of 1967 did. Prior to 1967, banning of political parties was made possible by the Royal Ordinances of December 15, 1960 and later Control of Organization and Association Act. During this period Parliamentarians (MPs) were chosen indirectly. There were 125 members, elected from different segments of the society - Monarchy (16), Zonal Assemblies (90), Class Organizations (15) and Graduate Constituency (4). This electoral arrangement remained intact until 1981.

Although Rastriya Panchayat was nominally the Supreme legislative body of the country, it acted more like an advisory council to the King. The King had the pejorative to chose the PMs and ministers and to veto any laws. Implicitly that meant the Royals were above the law. The 1967 Constitution gave PMs a maximum of 5 year long tenure but in practice they were appointed and discharged at whim least they created an alternative center of power to the monarchy. During the first 20 years of the Panchayat system, there was rapid turnover of PMs - Tulsi Giri (Dec'60-Dec'63), Surya Bahadur Thapa (Dec'63-Feb'64), Tulsi Giri (Feb'64-Jan'65), Surya Bahadur Thapa (Jan'65-Apr'69), Kirti Nidhi Bista (Apr'69-Apr'70), Mahendra Bikram Shah (Apr'70-Apr'71), Kirti Nidhi Bista (Apr'71-Jul'73), Nagendra Prasad Risal (Jul'73-Dec'75), Tulsi Giri (Dec'75-Sep'77) and Kirti Nidhi Bista (Sep'77-May'79).

Second Election: 1980
In April-May 1979 (2036 BS), there were series of students protest against the Panchayat system. Instead of giving in to the protestors, the King announced on May 23, 1979 that he would hold a referendum to allow people to chose between Panchayat system and multi-party system.

Surya Bahadur Thapa was appointed the PM on May 30, 1979.

In a May 2, 1980 referendum, Panchayat system won with 54.7 percent of votes. Voter turnout was 4.2 million or 66 percent of eligible voters. In December 1980 the 1962 Constitution was amended for the third time, and it allowed (a) direct election of MPs (b) MPs to select a single candidate for the PM; hiterto, selection of the PM was the pejorative of the King.

Third Election: 1981
On May 9, 1981 election was held to elect 112 members of Rastriya Panchayat - 28 were nominated by the King. Since major political parties boycotted the election, the voter turnout was only about 52 percent.

Surya Bahadur Thapa retained his post as the PM following the election. The direct election of MPs and the selection of the PM by MPs took away the built-in patronage system and created factionalism and rivalry within the Pachas. This led to the downfall of PM Thapa in July 1983 following a no-confidence motion prompted by serious food crisis and charges of corruption.

Lokendra Bahadur Chand was appointed the PM on July 12, 1983 but was immediately hit with a no confidence motion, which he survived.

Fourth Election: 1986
On May 12, 1986 election was held again for 112 members of Rastriya Panchayat. Officially, the voter turnout was about 60 percent, and this despite Satyagraha or civil disobedience campaign by NC to disrupt the election. Results showed a huge turnover in MPs. Almost 40 percent of the incumbents lost their seats, and half of that, or around 20 percent of seats were won by reformists or opposition posing as independents.

Marich Man Singh Shrestha became the PM on June 15, 1986. On March 23, 1989 Nepal's trade and transit treaty with India expired, and India closed all the transit points but two. The country went through a severe economic crisis. This put enormous pressure on the Panchayat system.

The Panchayat era came to an end in 1990. On January 15, 1990 seven Communist parties united under the United Left Front (ULF) and formed an alliance with NC to bring an end to the Panchayat system. After two months of protests, strikes and mass demonstrations, the King succumbed. On April 15, he dissolved the transitional government under PM Lokendra Bahadur Chand who had replaced the hardliner PM Marich Man Singh Shrestha on April 6.

Krishna Prasad Bhattarai (KP Bhattarai), a NC leader, was appointed the PM and the head of interim government on April 19, 1990. That government constituted a 9-person Committee to draft a Constitution, and the Constitution was promulgated by King Birendra on November 9, 1990.

Fifth Election: 1991
On May 12, 1991 election for 205 member lower house of the Parliament was held. NC won the absolute majority with 110 seats followed by UML with 69 seats. The voter turnout was about 65 percent.

Girija Prasad Koirala (GP Koirala) became the Prime Minister on May 26, 1991. PM Koirala could not complete his full-term because of mutiny within his party. In July 1994, following the defeat of KP Bhattarai in a by-election, 35 MPs from his own party abstained in (or rather did not show up for) a parliamentary vote to approve the government's annual programs and policies. The government resigned and called for a mid-term election. This decision was challenged in the Supreme Court (SC) but SC sided with the Koirala government.

Sixth Election: 1994
On November 15, 1994 a mid-term election took place. UML became the largest party with 88 seats followed by NC with 83 seats.

UML leader Man Mohan Adhikari formed a minority government on November 30, 1994 but it did not last a year. The government tried to preclude its fall by calling a mid-term election but the SC rejected the petition - this decision was contradictory to its previous one in 1994. NC tabled and won a no-confidence motion against the government in September 1995 and the UML government fell.

Sher Bahadur Deuba (SB Deuba) became the PM on September 12 1995. He was the leader of NC's parliament party (PP) and his was a coalition government of NC, Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) and Nepal Sadvavana Party (NSP). On February 4, 1996 the Maoists made 40-Point demand to the PM asking him to respond by February 17. But on February 13, the Maoists launched the "People's War" with attacks on police stations in Rukum, Rolpa, Gorkha and Sindhuli districts. Deuba government fell in March 1997 when several RPP MPs supported UML's no confidence motion against the government.

Lokendra Bahadur Chand became the PM on March 12, 1997 with the support of UML and NSP. This government lasted only 7 months. It fell when most of RPP MPs joined hands with NC against its own government.

Surya Bahadur Thapa became the PM on October 7, 1997 with the support of NC and NSP. The political turmoil took a toll on the parties and RPP split into RPP (C) and RRP (T) in January 1998 and UML into UML and ML in March 1998. NC became the largest party in the Parliament. Surya Bahadur Thapa resigned under pressure from re-surging NC.

GP Koirala became the PM on April 15, 1998 leading a minority government backed by UML. He announced plans to hold election in May 1999. However in August that year he was able to bring in ML to form a majority government but by December there was a fallout with ML. He resigned from the government but returned as the PM on December 25, 1998 with the support UML and NSP with promise of holding election in May 1999.

Seventh Election: 1999
General elections were held in two stages on May 3 and May 17, 1999. NC returned as a majority party with 113 seats. UML won 68 seats and the breakaway ML none.

KP Bhattarai became the PM for the second time (1990) on May 31, 1999. The intra-party scwabble between GP Koirala faction and KB Bhattarai-SB Deuba faction continued. On March 14, 2000 69 GP Koirala-affiliated NC MPs tabled no confidence motion against the PM with their PP for failing to uphold law and order. KP Bhattarai was forced to resign.

GP Koirala became the PM on March 20, 2000 after defeating SB Deuba on NC PP vote (69 vs. 43 with 1 invalid vote), the first ever for NC.

On June 1, 2001 there was a Royal Massacre. In a bizarre incident, Crown Prince Dipendra allegedly slaughtered his entire family - King, Queen, brother and sister - along with 5 other aunts and uncles before killing himself. Gynendra, who was out-of-town during the massacre ascended the throne on June 4, 2001.

PM Koirala resigned on July 19, 2001 because of (a) Lauda scandal (b) his disagreement with the Army and the King over the deployment of Royal Nepal Army (RNA) against the Maoists (c) peace talks with the Maoists became impossible with Koirala at the helm. SB Deuba became the leader of NC PP beating Sushil Koirala (72 vs 40)

SB Deuba became the PM on July 26, 2001. He initiated peace talks with the Maoists in August and September but it failed in November because the government refused to entertain their demand that monarchy be replaced by a Constituent Assembly (CA). Maoists walked out and ended their 4-month long ceasefire.

On November 23, 2001 the Maoists attacked RNA for the first time killing 14 soldiers at Gorahi base in Dang District. On November 25, they attacked several parts of the country including Salleri, the district headquarter of Solokhumbu. Until then the Maoists rebellion had only targeted ill-equipped police. With the entry of RNA into the conflict, stakes as well as causaulties rose significantly. In the first 6 years of the conflict, about 2,100-3,000 had been killed, but in the next 4 years another 10,000 would lose their lives.

On November 26, 2001 Deuba government declared a State of Emergency for 3 months, which was extended by another 3 months in February 2002. When the renewal time came up again in May, Deuba government realized it did not have the support to extend it for another six months. To preclude a constitutional crisis PM Deuba dissolved the Parliament on May 22, 2002 and called for a new election. On May 27, 2002 the King announced mid-term election for November 13, 2002. This announcement caused a serious rift between GP Koirala and SB Deuba, and on June 18, 2002 the party split vertically into GP-led NC and SB-led NC (Democratic). Interestingly, on February 15, 2002 UML and ML re-merged into UML.

On October 4, 2002, the King invoked Article 127 of the Constitution to dismiss the PM and the Parliament. The purported reason was that the government was not able to hold the mid-election scheduled for November 13, 2002.

Lokendra Bahadur Chand became the PM for the fourth time (1983, 1990, 1997) on October 11, 2002. He did not last long because of the agitation by major political parties - NC, NC (D) and UML.

Surya Bahadur Thapa became the PM for the fifth time (1963, 1965, 1979, 1997) on June 3 2003. Political parties continued their agitation and that led to his downfall.

SB Deuba became the PM for the third time (1995, 2001) on June 2, 2004. He was re-instated with the support of UML, NSP and RPP (RPP-T and RPP-C had merged following 1999 election). This divided the political parties into those in the government and those outside. NC, which remained outside continued to protest against the government calling for the re-instatement of the Parliament.

On February 1, 2005 King Gynendra dismissed SB Deuba government for the second time and declared a State of Emergency. The King himself became the head of the government with the title Chairman of Council of Ministers. On February 14 two acolytes Tulsi Giri and Kirtinidhi Bista were appointed Vice-Chairmen.

On May 8, 2005 major parties including NC and UML formed Seven Party Aliance (SPA) and announced "common agreement and commitment" that called for the restoration of Parliament and holding of an election thereafter. SPA spearheaded agitation against the King's rule.

On November 22, 2005 SPA and the Maoists signed 12-Point Agreement in New Delhi. This brought together the two most powerful political forces in the country. Protest against the King's rule continued and surged ahead of February 8, 2006 local election. The SPA announced second Peoples' movement with 4-day nationwide general strike starting April 5. On April 9, SPA announced indefinite strike. On April 21, the King bent to the political pressure and asked SPA to form a government which it rejected. On August 24, after 19 days of protest, the King succumbed and re-instated the Parliament.

GP Koirala was elected the PM for the fourth time (1991, 1998, 2000) on April 25, 2006 by the re-instated Parliament. On May 18, the Parliament voted to strip most of the powers of the King.

On November 7, 2006 SPA and the Maoists signed 6-Point Agreement that formally ended the 10-Year Maoist insurgency. On November 21, they signed Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

On January 15, 2007, as per the Agreement, the Parliament that was elected in 1999, dismissed by King Gynendra in 2005 and reinstated in 2006 was dissolved and replaced by a 330-member Interim Parliament. It included members of SPA and the Maoists but not RPP because they did not participate in People's movement. An Interim Constitution was promulgated and it set the date for CA election for June 20, 2007.

The Interim Constitution did not fully take into account grievances of Tarai people. On January 16, 2007 Madhesi Jana Adhikar Forum (MJF) called for general strike in Tarai calling for the amendment to the Constitution. Unrests in Tarai flared up. Madeshi politicians affiliated with major parties (NC, UML and Maoists) started to coalesce around Mahesh-centric parties.

On March 9, 2007 the first amendment to the Interim Constitution gave in to Madheshis' demands that (a) Nepal would have a federal structure (b) reference to explicit numbers of CA seats were removed. Prior to the amendment, 205 were elected through first-past-the-post (FPTP) basis, 204 through proporational representation, and 16 were nominated by the Interim government.

On April 1, 2007 a new cabinet with 5 Maoists were sworn into office.

On June 13, 2007 the second amendment to the Interim Constitution postponed CA election to November and provided provision for the immediate removal of the King with two-thirds majority if he conspired to disrupt it.

On Septmber 18, 2007 the Maoists in the government resigned when their demands to make Nepal a Republic and to elect CA members through proportional representation were not met.

On September 25, 2007 NC and NC (D) re-merged into NC in preparation for CA election.

On December 28, 2007, the third amendment to the Interim Constitution made certain provisions (a) the deadline for CA election was moved from 15 December 2007 to 12 April 2008 (b) CA’s FPTP seats were increased to 240, proportional representation seats were increased to 335 and PM's nomination were increased to 26 (c) Nepal would be declared a "Republic" in the first sitting of CA with a simple majority.

On December 30, 2007 the Maoists re-joined the government with 5 Ministers and 2 State Ministers.

On February 9, 2008 MJF, SP and Tarai-Madhesh Loktantrik Party (TMLP) formed the United Democratic Madhesi Front.

Eighth Election: 2008
On April 10, 2008 election for 240 FPTP members of CA was held. About 60 percent of eligible voters participated. Maoists won 120 seats, NC 37, UML 33 and Madhesh Jana Adhikar Forum (MJF) 30. Combined with proportional representation seats, Maoists had 229, NC 115, UML 108 and MJF 54 in the 601-seat CA.

On May 28, 2008 the first session of CA made fourth amendment to the Interim Constitution whereby the 240 year-old monarchy was abolished. It also created ‘constitutional president’ and ‘executive prime minister’.

On June 11, 2008 King Gynendra left Narayanhiti Palace to spend his life as a commoner.

On July 13, 2008 the fifth amendment to the Interim Constitution allowed the formation and dismissal of government, President, Vice-President and Chairman and Deputy Chairman of CA through simple majority.

Ram Baran Yadav (RB Yadav) become the First President of Nepal on July 21, 2008 with the support of NC and UML in the second round of voting defeating Maoists supported Ram Raja Prasad Singh (308 vs 282).

On July 23, 2008 GP Koirala submitted his resignation to the newly sworn President RB Yadav.

Prachanda was voted as the PM defeating SB Deuba on August 15, 2008 (464 vs 113). He was sworn in 3 days later. He formed a coalition government with UML and MJF. He resigned on May 4, 2009 over his disagreement with the President over the dismissal of Army Chief Rukmangad Katuwal.

Madav Kumar Nepal was elected the PM on May 23, 2009 unopposed and sworn in on May 25 as the head of 22-party coalition government. This caused the split in the third largest party MJF into MJF and MJF (Loktantrik). MJF (L) led by Bijay Kumar Gachchhadar joined the government while MJF led by Upendra Yadav stayed in the opposition.

The new Constitution must be written before May 28, 2010 - two years after the first sitting of the CA - but at the current pace, it is a tall order. Mr. Surya Dhungel, a constitutional expert, has an OpEd piece on what could happen if the deadline is missed.

To be continued.

Bibliography

General
40-Point Demand Letter from Baburam Bhattari to PM Deuba (1996)
12-Point Agreement Between the Maoists and SPA (2005)
6-Point Agreement Between the Maoists and SPA (2006)
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Savada, Andrea Matles, ed., 1991. Nepal: A Country Study
Wikepedia, Maoists Insurgency
Wikepedia, Prime Ministers of Nepal
Yang, Eunmo, 2007. Modernization of Nepal under the Shah Dynasty, 1951-1991

Elections
1986 Election Statistics
Nepal Election Portal: Nepal's Electoral History
Wikepedia, Referendum: 1980
Wikepedia, General Election: 1981
Wikepedia, General Election: 1991
Wikepedia, General Election: 1994
Wikepedia, General Election: 1999
Wikepedia, CA Election: 2008

Time Line
Whelpton, John: A History of Nepal (Ancient Time-2003)
Cornell University:, Maobadi Timeline 1949-2002
Nepal Election Portal: Chronology of Important Events (Ancient Time-2008)
Nepal HomePage: A Brief History of Nepal (Ancient Time-1999)

Books
Brown, T. Louise, 1996. The challenge to democracy in Nepal : A political history
Parajulee, Ramjee P., 2000. The democratic transition in Nepal.
Whelpton John, 2005. A history of Nepal
Bajracharya, B.R., S.R. Sharma, S.R. Bakshi. ed., 1993. Political development in Nepal

Story of Chipotle Mexican Grill

2010-01-21T17:58:00.001-08:00

Knowledge@Wharton
20-Jan-2010

It's a classic variation of the American success story: An aspiring entrepreneur starts a hole-in-the-wall restaurant serving food that's quick and unpretentious. Pretty soon, he starts a second restaurant, and then a third. Investors flock to the company, attracted to the owner's relentlessly perfectionist style. Before long, identical versions of that hole-in-the-wall have popped up in food courts and strip malls all across the country. And it's only a matter of time before this simple fast-food joint decides to take on the world.

On one level, that story describes the career of Steve Ells, who in 1993 founded a burrito restaurant in Denver that he called Chipotle Mexican Grill. Today, that restaurant is a publicly traded company with $1.3 billion in revenues from some 900 restaurants across North America. On November 14, 2009, Ells formally announced plans for the first European Chipotle, on London's Charing Cross Road, set to open next April.In January, Chipotle announced that it was also scouting potential locations in France and Germany.

But, as he made clear in a November Wharton Leadership Lecture, Ells is not your average chain-restaurant tycoon, a Colonel Sanders in trendy eyewear. And the chain he founded is not your average fast-food behemoth. As such, it provides a case study in whether a firm can thrive even as it spends extra money to honor a set of non-economic values. Ells believes the answer is yes.

"Chipotle now buys more naturally-raised meat -- antibiotic-free and no growth hormones, and fed an all-vegetarian diet -- than any other restaurant company in the world," he said. "I'm very proud of that, and it's more sustainable than the mass-produced commodity way." The chain has also begun buying organic beans and trying to source vegetables locally in-season. "All of a sudden I find myself with this team of 25,000 Chipotle employees who are excited about feeding people really good, sustainably raised food."

According to Ells, "We have an opportunity to change the way people think about fast food, which is what most people in this country eat." Much of it, he said, is based on the Ray Kroc model and the standard set by McDonald's. "Now we have a business model that's based on spending more for sustainably raised foods, and also making a very handsome profit and providing real growth opportunities."

A graduate of the famous Culinary Institute of America, Ells never meant to re-invent fast food. Quite the contrary: Having trained in classical French cooking and apprenticed at nationally celebrated gastronomic landmarks like San Francisco's celebrated Stars restaurant, his goal was to start his own white-tablecloth, haute-cuisine palace. But restaurant start-ups are costly and risky. So he decided to move home to Denver and open a local version of the cheap, tasty taquerias that he had loved in California. The plan was to use Chipotle as a cash cow to fund the "real" restaurant he dreamed about.

That didn't happen. Opened in an 800-square-foot former ice cream shop, Chipotle was an instant hit, making $30,000 a month. A rave newspaper review followed. The reviewer "said things like, 'Everything has depth and character, nuance, layers and layers of flavor,' describing it like it was some fine restaurant," even though the dish in question was an oversized burrito that came wrapped in tinfoil, Ells noted. "After that, there was not only a line, but a line out the door. We ran out of food."

Precision Cooking

Using cash flow and a loan from his father, Ells opened a second Chipotle, which "blew away the first." Despite his good fortune, Ells said, he actually felt guilty: He wanted to be a legendary chef, not a hustling fast-food entrepreneur. "So it was like, 'Okay, I'm going to start just one more, and then I'll start a real restaurant.'" But the chain's growth kept putting that off. Eventually Ells chalked up Chipotle's success to the fact that, unwittingly, he had been treating it like a real restaurant all along.

"Every single customer who came through that door was precious," he stated. "I had to give them a very special experience. I had a small crew. I taught them how to cook. I taught them how to grill the chicken just right and how to make beans -- you have to toast the cumin seeds until they just start smoking a little bit, and then grind them in the mortar and pestle -- and how to chop garlic so it doesn't oxidize, so you get a nice, fresh garlicky flavor.... It was very precise. We're cooking burritos and tacos here, but I was applying the classical French chef mentality that I had learned in cooking school. I would throw things and yell, and I had a temper. It was really quite a scene."

Ells, whose chain was on track to add roughly 120 new restaurants in 2009, says he is "opening three real restaurants a week, sometimes four." The Chipotles that have spread out from Denver still look a lot like the first store, right down to the simple corrugated metal surfaces that Ells installed back when he was doing his own manual labor. It's been a lot trickier, though, to maintain his fastidious French chef-style control over ingredients and techniques.

Much of his disdain for "mass-commodity" ingredients is a question of personal values. Once he became a big enough buyer of pork, he asked to see the facility the meat came from. "It really is terrifying," he said. "There's so much exploitation that I witnessed there, not only from the animal-protection point of view." He was also disturbed by the environmental consequences of the waste run-off from the facility -- and the public-health implications of having a pork supply kept on low-dose antibiotics to ward off diseases that could spread in industrial confinement.

"I knew at that moment I did not want my success to be based on this kind of exploitation," he said. "So we started buying all naturally-raised meat." But it wasn't just a question of being humane. His initial curiosity about the meat supply was actually prompted by the fact that he was unimpressed with the quality. By switching sources, he said, he wound up with a product that, to customers, just tasted better.

Ells' status as the anti-Ray Kroc is not without its ironies. As Chipotle began to take off and Ells began looking for sources of capital beyond family and cash flow, he wound up doing business with a certain global hamburger chain that was looking to invest in new business: McDonald's. Following an initial investment in 1998, the company held a majority stake as of 2001. By the time McDonald's divested, in 2006, Chipotle had 540 stores -- up from 18 when they first linked arms.

Lords of the Rings

"Culturally, Chipotle and McDonald's are just worlds apart," Ells noted, joking that his casually-dressed office staff referred to visiting McDonald's bigwigs as "the rings" because of the jewelry on the men's fingers. But he described the relationship as productive. "They really liked what I was doing," he said, recounting how he took executives into his kitchens and commissaries to show them cooking procedures that must have looked extraordinarily cumbersome to a firm accustomed to taking an industrial approach to flavor. One of them, Ells recalled, said the young Chipotle founder reminded him of Kroc.

The firms decided to part ways in 2006, Ells said, because McDonald's was eager to focus on its core business. And Ells was happy he no longer had to navigate the contrasting corporate cultures. "We just didn't see eye to eye," he said. Chipotle went public in an IPO that saw its share price double in one day -- the second-best restaurant IPO of all time. McDonald's, Ells added, ultimately made $1.2 billion after putting some $360 million into the chain.

Among the major differences with the golden arches: McDonald's wanted Chipotle to follow its franchise model. Ells -- ever the detail-obsessed chef -- resisted. "We wanted to own the economic model. You franchise if you want money and people. We had plenty of money for our growth rate, and we had great people." Ultimately, he decided, the firm was going to grow the way he wanted.

As someone with no particular business background, Ells has surrounded himself with seasoned pros, although he prefers not to hire top executives with a chain-restaurant background for fear that too much conventional wisdom will seep into the corporation. Four years ago, for example, Ells brought in as co-CEO an old friend named Montgomery F. Moran, whom he describes as an incredible leader of people. "He's a trial lawyer. And he said, 'Steve, I don't know anything about the restaurant business. I can't do this.' And I'm like, 'Perfect.... I don't want another seasoned fast-food executive.' In fact, I don't want any of them. I want them to think differently about things. This was one of my big mistakes during the McDonald's years: I let some of that [attitude] come into the organization.... We're very proud of doing things on our own terms."

One of the favorite innovations with Moran, Ells said, is something called the "restaurateur" program, under which Chipotle managers are designated restaurateurs, a status that comes with significant possible financial benefits. To be a restaurateur, a manager has to have a perfect store -- including a top-notch staff. "Every single person on the staff has to be somehow inspired and have characteristics that you can't teach: infectious enthusiasm, honesty, clean, presentable, good hygiene, fun to talk to, great eye contact, the kind of stuff you look for in a friend," he said.

The result, he added, was that turnover went up as managers looked to rid themselves of subpar staffers who might keep them from becoming a restaurateur. In addition, restaurateurs get a $10,000 bonus whenever one of their staff becomes a store manager. "We want them to assemble a team of high performers," he said. "The fast food business is plagued with people who are generally low performers.... No fast-food chain fires staff. They're like: 'Please! Come work!'" Chipotle, with a reputation for better pay than many chains, according to Ells, is also in a better position to replace entry-level staff who have been pushed out. "Chipotle has been built on word-of-mouth primarily, and I think we have developed a good bond with a lot of our customers." He said that sort of reputation could be extended through social media and a style that reflected Chipotle's unpretentious stores.

The son of a pharmaceutical executive, Ells grew up in Colorado and studied art history at the University of Colorado before switching gears and going to culinary school. He still lives in Denver, where Chipotle is headquartered. And, he says, he still loves a good burrito.

The Chipotle model -- with its better ingredients, better staffers and slightly higher prices -- is the wave of the future, Ells states, mostly because it matches the health, taste and philosophical priorities of the modern market. "We had a period of extraordinary, double digit same-store growth. I think it's a testament to what people want to eat. I'm hoping that more companies use Chipotle's model: Good food and not having preservatives or artificial [ingredients].... I hope it displaces the stuff that's based on exploitation, not only of the land and animals, but of people's taste buds and health."

Up in the Air

2010-01-16T19:43:00.001-08:00

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Burj Khalifa: World's Tallest Building

2010-01-05T06:41:00.000-08:00

The world’s tallest building opens in Dubai

Economist, 4-Jan-2010

AT 828 metres (2,717 feet), the Burj Khalifa, which opened on Monday January 4th, dwarfs Taipei 101, which was previously the tallest tower anywhere, by 320 metres. The tower has more than 160 floors and cost some $1.5 billion. It is in danger, however, of being seen as the height of folly. Construction began in 2004, when the economy of the United Arab Emirates was growing at 9.7%. It is forecast to grow by just 2.4% this year and probably shrank by 0.2% in 2009. This is not the first tower to be planned in the good times and then opened in a slump. Countries home to many of the world's highest buildings (when they opened) saw their economies slump in the years between the start of construction and the official opening. Our chart compares economic growth of the relevant country when a tower was opened, with the respective annual growth rate enjoyed half a decade earlier.

Gordon Ramsay Story

2009-12-27T18:18:00.000-08:00

Gordon Ramsay Flees Kitchen as TV Fame Saves Restaurant Empire
Bloomberg, December 2009
By William Green

On a gray morning in October, Gordon Ramsay bursts into the kitchen of his south London house, pop music blaring from the radio. At the heart of the room stands a 67,000-pound ($109,000) French cooking range that weighs 2.5 tons and had to be lowered by crane into the celebrity chef’s home.

Ramsay, who is 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 meters) tall and weighs 215 pounds (98 kilograms), is wearing jeans, a tight black T-shirt that accentuates his muscles and a Bell & Ross watch -- a Swiss brand marketed to soldiers, bomb-disposal experts and other “men facing extreme situations.”

The 43-year-old Scot pours himself a juice, sits at the kitchen table and looks back on his own extreme situation: a year in which his global restaurant empire almost went bankrupt.

In the fall of 2008, his London-based Gordon Ramsay Holdings Ltd. breached the covenants on a 10.5 million-pound loan and overdraft facility from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. The bank hired KPMG to perform an independent review of the firm, 69 percent of which is owned by Ramsay and 31 percent by his father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson. In late December, Ramsay says, KPMG recommended that the company declare bankruptcy, fire hundreds of people and close all but its best-performing restaurants.

On the Line

“Everything was on the line,” Ramsay says. “December, January, February and March were the most highly pressurized, s---tiest, most awful four months I’ve ever had in business.” Ramsay was in Hollywood for most of the first 12 weeks of 2009 shooting the U.S. version of Hell’s Kitchen, the reality show he fronts for the Fox network. After a day of filming, he’d often be on the phone for hours at night, talking with Hutcheson about how to save their business.

The stress was so intense, he says, that he’d go for runs in Malibu at 4:30 a.m., wearing a black vest loaded with 20 kilograms of weights. “I just ran and ran and ran,” he says. For Ramsay, bankruptcy was unthinkable even if it made financial sense.

“There was no f---ing way that was ever going to happen,” he says. “That was never even an option.”

Ramsay’s fame would have made it the most public of failures.

“He’s one of the great chefs,” says Jean-Luc Naret, Paris-based director of the Michelin Guide series, which awards the stars that are the Oscars of the food world. Restaurant Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road is London’s only dining spot with three Michelin stars. In all, Ramsay boasts 12 stars, surpassed only by Frenchmen Joel Robuchon (25) and Alain Ducasse (18).

Television Chef

By 2009, Ramsay had about 20 restaurants as far afield as Dubai, New York, Paris, Prague and Tokyo. He also starred in five TV shows that reinforced his image as a master chef who swears and shouts in pursuit of perfection.

In the U.K., he earns more than 2 million pounds annually from Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and The F Word, in which his culinary adventures with celebrities have included creating breast-milk cappuccinos. In 2009, Hutcheson says Ramsay’s talent fees from U.S. shows alone hit $9 million.

Ramsay has also published two autobiographies and lent his name to 23 cookbooks. According to Nielsen BookScan, his books, which have been translated into 18 languages, have generated almost 25 million pounds in U.K. sales alone. Ramsay also endorses pots, pans, glasses and china branded as Gordon Ramsay by Royal Doulton, and he’s Diageo Plc’s U.K. pitchman for Gordon’s Gin. Hutcheson says Ramsay makes about 3 million pounds a year from endorsements.

All of this has placed Ramsay at the vanguard of a generation of celebrity chefs with such myriad business interests that they barely cook.

International and Sexy

“Television made our profession really international and sexy,” says Austrian-born chef Wolfgang Puck, who began appearing on U.S. morning television in the 1980s. Today, Puck, 60, has more than 90 restaurants and says he generates $50 million a year in sales of cookware and appliances.

Ramsay, too, has focused on TV in amassing a fortune that London’s Sunday Times estimated in April 2008 at 50 million pounds.

“He’s perhaps the most media-enhanced chef in history,” says Bill Guilfoyle, a restaurant marketing expert at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

Ramsay’s empire expanded just as the global recession deepened. He opened eight restaurants in 2008 and was particularly exposed as diners cut their spending. Brand-name chefs like Ducasse and Robuchon seldom own their restaurants outright; instead, they sign consulting deals under which they provide chefs, create a menu and run the operation. Ramsay’s company owned almost all of its restaurants and was on the hook for everything from rent to salaries.

Bitter Irony

“We weren’t unlucky,” says Hutcheson, 61, chief executive officer of Gordon Ramsay Holdings. “We were clumsy. We’d put too many risks in front of us with too much confidence that nothing would fail.”

For Ramsay, this was especially embarrassing because Kitchen Nightmares showcases him as a savior of other people’s restaurants.

“It’s not great if you’re making a show called Kitchen Nightmares and advising people on how to fix their businesses for you to go bankrupt,” says Pat Llewellyn, producer of the program and Ramsay’s partner in a production company called One Potato Two Potato.

Tough Childhood

Ramsay was, at least, no stranger to hardship. The son of a failed musician who worked as a day laborer, he grew up poor in Glasgow, Scotland and Stratford-upon-Avon, England. In his 2006 autobiography, Humble Pie (Harper), he describes his late father, also named Gordon, as a wife-beating alcoholic and thief, whose favorite punishment was to thrash the back of his son’s legs with a belt. Ramsay’s mother, Helen, raised their four children, baking bread when she couldn’t afford to buy it and cooking them dishes such as ham hock soup or sausages and beans. His father’s view, Ramsay writes, was that “only poofs cook.”

A knee injury wrecked Ramsay’s dreams of a soccer career. So he stumbled into a hotel management course before taking a series of junior cooking jobs.

In 1989, his fascination with haute cuisine was awakened at Harvey’s, a London restaurant run by Marco Pierre White, the first British chef with three Michelin stars. Ramsay then moved to London’s top French restaurant, Le Gavroche, as an apprentice chef. Michel Roux Jr., now its head chef, says Ramsay was late for work in his first week after being arrested for jumping over a London underground turnstile to avoid the fare.

Ruthlessly Hardworking

While Roux says Ramsay was unruly, he made up for it in the kitchen. “He was beautiful to watch,” Roux says. “He’s a very naturally gifted chef. He has the taste, the eye of an artist, the efficiency, and he’s ruthlessly hardworking.”

Ramsay spent three years in France, including a stint with Robuchon, where he mastered the essentials of French cuisine. Then, in 1993, he became head chef at Aubergine in London.

“He was an animal, a monster; he was horrible,” says Angela Hartnett, who worked with him there. Hartnett says Ramsay once threw oysters at her after she’d opened them imperfectly. “He’d always say, ‘Why are you diluting my standards?’”

Nonetheless, Hartnett has worked with Ramsay for 16 years and is currently head chef at Murano, one of his London restaurants. One reason she stayed was the quality of his cuisine, which features lighter sauces using less butter and cream.

“He took classic French cooking and modernized it,” Hartnett says.

Pursuit of Perfection

Friends say Ramsay is hard-wired for perfection.

“If he were in a line of washer uppers in a prison, he’d want to do it the best and fastest,” producer Llewellyn says. Aubergine won two stars in 1997, and Ramsay decided he deserved more than the 25 percent stake its owners had given him. Ramsay quit, triggering a lawsuit for breach of contract that the parties settled out of court.

Ramsay had just married a schoolteacher, Tana Hutcheson, with whom he now has three daughters and a son between the ages of 7 and 11. Tana’s father, Chris, who owned a printing company, risked 1 million pounds in cash and loan guarantees to bankroll the Royal Hospital Road restaurant in 1998.

He and Ramsay have been partners ever since, and their bond goes beyond business. “He’s my son-in-law but, actually, he’s my son,” Hutcheson says.

Boiling Point

The Royal Hospital Road restaurant, with signature dishes like lobster ravioli in a lemon grass and chervil sauce, won its third star in 2001. By then, Ramsay was as famous for his temper as his cooking. A British TV documentary called Boiling Point showed him spitting out food and firing a waiter for serving the wrong appetizer. Ramsay even ejected restaurant reviewer A.A. Gill -- along with his guest, actress Joan Collins -- for criticizing him in print.

“I’ve become more mature,” Ramsay says now. “I wouldn’t say mellow. I still get incredibly frustrated.”

Many employees defend him, saying he’s generous and loyal. “He’s definitely not malicious,” says Josh Emett, head chef at Gordon Ramsay at The London in New York. “He’s passionate.”

Ramsay’s breakthrough came in 2001, when private-equity firm Blackstone Group LP asked him to run the restaurant at Claridge’s, one of four landmark hotels it then owned in London. Since the 1850s, Claridge’s had been patronized by famous guests ranging from Queen Victoria to Cary Grant.

“I thought it would be clever to have a bad boy there, and Gordon was the baddest,” says John Ceriale, Blackstone’s senior adviser for the lodging industry.

Dining Sensation

Ramsay’s arrival attracted a thousand calls a day for dining reservations, Ceriale says, and the restaurant has since made Gordon Ramsay Holdings as much as 2 million pounds a year. In 2002, Ceriale also put Ramsay in charge of all food at the Connaught and installed him at the Savoy Grill, a 120-year-old restaurant in the Savoy Hotel once run by French culinary legend Auguste Escoffier. A year later, Ramsay opened two restaurants in the Blackstone-owned Berkeley hotel.

In 2004, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares debuted in the U.K., making him a household name. Mike Darnell, Fox’s president of alternative entertainment, saw him in a reality series, Hell’s Kitchen, and signed him to make U.S. versions of both shows. According to Hutcheson, Ramsay earns about $250,000 per episode. On Nov. 3, Fox announced that Ramsay will also star in MasterChef, an American version of the British cookery contest.

“He can’t walk the streets of New York without people shouting and screaming,” Darnell says. “He’s like a rock star.”

Critics Complain

The TV work, along with his international restaurant expansion, has triggered accusations that Ramsay is spread too thin. Richard Harden, co-founder of the guidebook Harden’s London Restaurants, says he was the city’s best chef for 10 years.

“Many of his restaurants have lost their way,” Harden says. “If you’ve got so many interests that are so geographically diverse, you can’t give them all proper attention.”

Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for the Observer newspaper, says Ramsay’s food is “out-of-date” as he doesn’t have time to create new dishes. “It’s no longer top-notch,” Rayner says.

While Ramsay bristles at such criticism, saying consistency is more important to him than being avant-garde, he makes no apology for spending less time at the stove. “You tell me a chef anywhere in the world that’s prepared to turn down quarter of a million dollars for an hour’s work on TV, and they’re the biggest lying bastard that ever put on a chef’s jacket,” he says.

Overseas Expansion

By 2006, Ramsay had nine restaurants in London. Ceriale then asked him to create restaurants in Blackstone’s overseas hotels, too. Ramsay opened in New York that year; Prague and Boca Raton, Florida, in 2007; and Hollywood and Paris in 2008. He rented the properties from Blackstone and used his non- restaurant earnings to equip the kitchens -- a strategy he says made sense because it deployed income that would have been taxed at 40 percent in the U.K.

Every one of these overseas ventures has lost money. In New York, where he opened two restaurants in Blackstone’s London NYC hotel, Ramsay says losses reached $4 million a year, with a unionized staff costing 80 percent of revenue.

Hutcheson says he and Ramsay didn’t think locally. For example, they neglected to take into account how little alcohol New Yorkers would order at lunch. Ramsay’s foray into Prague failed in early 2009. He also tripped up in France where he opened at the Trianon Palace Versailles, on the outskirts of Paris. Hutcheson says they lost as much as 200,000 euros ($295,000) a month there in 2008, with wages consuming 90 percent of revenue.

Emotional Approach

Ramsay’s ambitions in France were fueled by ego, Ceriale says, as he dreamed of winning three stars in the home of haute cuisine.

“I totally agree,” Ramsay says. “The French have been brilliant over the last 20 years at coming over to our country and telling us how crap our food is.”

Hutcheson says this emotional approach became a liability once the credit crisis struck. In late 2008, when RBS wanted to assess whether its loan was at risk, he says his accounts department couldn’t provide the relevant financial data. The company was also 7.2 million pounds in arrears on U.K. taxes. At the time, Ramsay and Hutcheson had 1,250 employees, up from 45 in 1998.

“The company just grew too quickly and no one kept on top of it,” Murano’s Hartnett says.

Crisis Moves

To avert bankruptcy, Ramsay and Hutcheson poured nearly 9 million pounds of their personal savings into Gordon Ramsay Holdings in 2009, 69 percent of it from Ramsay. They worked out an extension of tax payments with the British government and cut the staff at their London headquarters to 58 from 86.

Hutcheson says he told Ceriale the company would go bankrupt unless they could renegotiate their contracts with Blackstone.

“Shuttering the restaurants would not have been the best outcome for us or Gordon,” Ceriale says. “They needed to restructure the business, and we were the key to restructuring it.”

After weeks of negotiation, Blackstone agreed to assume ownership of the restaurants in Hollywood and Versailles, paying Ramsay a consulting fee to run them. The restaurant in Prague was closed in February. In November, Blackstone also took control of Ramsay’s restaurant in Boca Raton and his two restaurants in New York, paying him a percentage of revenues to oversee them as a consultant.

“Financially, we weren’t going to come out with much,” Hutcheson says. “But you just want to stop these apparently endless losses.”

Cutting Costs

In Ramsay’s remaining restaurants, everything is now about cost control. In London, his bistro Foxtrot Oscar has closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Stuart Gillies, his head chef at Boxwood Cafe in The Berkeley, has saved 1,500 pounds a month by no longer ordering flowers, and he now uses cheaper cuts of meat, such as beef shoulder, that he says require more skill to prepare.
Hutcheson says the worst is over and Gordon Ramsay Holdings should generate 7 million pounds to 8 million pounds in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the fiscal year ending in August. The company is also moving ahead with two new projects in 2010: Petrus, which had two Michelin stars, will relocate in London’s Belgravia neighborhood in January, and the Savoy Grill will reopen after a renovation.

New Life

Still, Ramsay will focus as much as ever on TV. “I want a life out of my kitchen,” he says.

In the future, Hutcheson says restaurants may become even less of a priority for Ramsay.

“I can run the business in Gordon’s name,” he says. “TV is his forte. That’s what he likes doing.”

Ramsay says his restless ambition stems from his childhood. He sometimes forces himself to recall those days as a reminder of how far he wants his life to be from that misery.

“Trust me,” he says. “That’s enough to keep anyone f---ing moving a thousand miles an hour.”

Pokhara: Construction of Regional International Airport Commences

2009-12-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

Construction of new airport commences in Pokhara
Nepalnews, 9-Dec-09

Finally, construction works of a regional international airport in Pokhara, a major tourist hub of the country, have commenced.

The preliminary phase of the construction saw the light of the day after Minister of Tourism and Civil Aviation Sarat Singh Bhandari himself steered dozer and excavator to level the land acquired for the purpose of building international airport.

Government had acquired 3,106 ropanis of land in the Chhinedanda area of Pokhara sub-metropolitan some 34 years back to build a new airport. Due to lack of budget, political instability and other land-related hassles, the plan of constructing new airport had long been confined to shelf.

Earlier, efforts to build a new airport in the city under the concept of BOOT (Build-Own-Operate- Transfer) had also faced a debacle.

This time, the plan of construction new airport is being executed with the financial assistance extended by the Chinese government. Processes like preliminary survey and grading are estimated to cost around Rs 1.5 million. According to the minister, out of US $ 200 million extended by China for financing the Upper Trishuli Hydropower, some US $ 88 million will be mobilized for constructing the airport and Lumbini-Pokhara Fact Track.

The government has estimated some Rs 13 billion in order to accomplish the construction of new airport. The full-fledged construction will begin after the preparation of DPR.

The proposition of building a new regional airport in Pokhara was forwarded as an alternative to Tribhuwan International Airport (TIA) based in Kathmandu.

Tourism entrepreneurs of Pokhara are optimistic that the construction of new airport will help to give a whole new boost to the tourism business of the city.

Related News
International Airport Vital for Pokhara (24-Sep-06)

Shake Shack Taking Over the World

2009-12-17T06:14:00.000-08:00

The Accidental Empire of Fast Food
NYT, 15-Dec-09
By GLENN COLLINS

CONSIDER, now, the not-so-fast-food rollout. Of the anti-chain chain.

Indeed, to comprehend the prudent and eccentric global-expansion vision of Shake Shack, Danny Meyer’s mini-chain of burger-and-custard stands, it is useful to consider the essence of contemporary American fast food.

“The whole experience is to cram people into a cookie-cutter space, to feed them as many unhealthy calories as possible — then get them to leave,” said Mr. Meyer, the president of the Union Square Hospitality Group and the Yoda of Shake Shack. “That stripping away of human experience? That is where fast food went astray.”

Contrast and compare, then, with the three Shake Shacks in New York City, where patrons are cheerfully welcomed at the counter of a neighborhood-centered, urban-fantasy version of a burger roadhouse. On the menu? Whole-muscle, no-trimmings, fresh-ground, antibiotic-and-hormone-free, source-verified-to-ranch-of-birth, choice-or-higher-grade Black Angus beef.

Furthermore, “people have to wait in line just to place their orders,” Mr. Meyer, 51, said on a recent afternoon. “After that? They have to wait for us to cook their orders. And then? We hope they’ll stay awhile, as they eat. To enhance the communal experience.”

And since Mr. Meyer’s team is on the case, the imminent proliferation of the concept — four Shacks will open in 2010, and a long-range plan calls for even more — will be persistent. Thoughtful. Considered. Crafted. Correct. In short, exactly what might be expected in a venture where the entire burger-management team honed its skills in three-star restaurants.

And it’s all so Danny.

“A hamburger stand is a very democratizing amenity,” he said. “We hope that each new Shake Shack can become both a citizen of, and mirror of, their communities.”

The Shake Shack rollout is precedent-shattering for the Union Square Hospitality Group. “We’ve always resisted expanding anything, ever,” Mr. Meyer said. “We resisted offers in Las Vegas. We resisted reality TV shows. And it took six years with Shake Shack before we decided to go forth and multiply.”

He has put David Swinghamer — his longtime business partner — in charge of the Shacking of America. As Mr. Swinghamer says of the ramp-up: “This is not a formula that anyone else has, or would do.” (Mr. Swinghamer had supervised the Blue Smoke barbecue restaurants, which Mr. Meyer would like to replicate, but others will lead that push.)

If the deliberate pace of expansion hardly seems to suggest a world-domination strategy, nevertheless a global future is in Mr. Meyer’s sights. Next year Shake Shack plans to plant its standard in Kuwait — way beyond its well-worn subway stops.

Mr. Swinghamer said the Shack in Kuwait will be managed by Alshaya, a local company that handles 50 brands in the Middle East, including Starbucks, Dean & DeLuca and Le Pain Quotidien.

In the United States, however, Shacks will not be franchised. Mr. Swinghamer said that “in five years we could have 20, mostly up and down the East Coast.”

Scheduled to open next year is an outpost on the ground floor of a Miami Beach building on Lincoln Road designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron. (It designed the bird’s nest stadium at the Beijing Olympics.)

Another new Shack will land at Prince and Mulberry Streets, to be opened this spring.

On the Upper East Side, Mr. Swinghamer has leased a ground-floor space next door to the Barnes & Noble on the southeast side of East 86th Street near Lexington Avenue.

It is to open sometime next year, around the time another Shack will make its debut in the theater district at the southwest corner of 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, Mr. Swinghamer said.

Schnipper’s Quality Kitchen, three blocks south at 41st Street and Eighth Avenue — whose menu includes premium burgers — seems sanguine about the impending Shack.

“We serve a much more varied menu,” said Andrew Schnipper, its chief executive, who is also looking for more locations.

Mr. Swinghamer professes not to see competition with Schnipper’s. “All boats rise with the tide,” he said.

Shake Shack has also been trying to transplant its Noo Yawk sensibility to an octagonal outpost on the Boston Common (in a crumbling former men’s room). So far Bostonians have mostly greeted the prospect with snark. Some said that since hometown milkshakes are called frappes, the interloper might more properly be emblazoned with the words Frappe Shack.

Mr. Swinghamer said Boston Common is still on his radar. After all, Mr. Meyer brought a Chicago-style hot dog — celery salt, sport peppers and all — to condescending Manhattanites.

Mr. Meyer’s accidental empire began with a hot dog cart in 2001, part of an art installation in Madison Square Park. “To our astonishment, every day, a line would form,” Mr. Meyer said. The cart expanded into a burger stand, “and none of us had any idea that that could be a success.”

The Shake Shack prototype cost a bit shy of $1 million, even though the prefabricated building, designed by James Wines, “arrived like the falling house” among the Munchkins, Mr. Meyer said. “One day it wasn’t there? And the next day it was there.”

In future, Mr. Swinghamer said, each new Shack will cost over $1 million and will be in what he called “special places in each community.”

Thus, the popular Shack satellite at Columbus Avenue and 77th Street “is across from a museum and has a distinctive glass ‘sidewalk shed’ that is an indoor cafe,” said Randy Garutti, chief operating officer of Shake Shack.

And at Citi Field in Flushing, Queens, home of the New York Mets, Shake Shack is crowned by the beloved skyline silhouette that once topped the demolished Shea Stadium scoreboard.

Mr. Meyer said that keeping a sense of community was one challenge in expanding the Shacks, along with maintaining the original’s quality, hospitality and “glint in its eye.” He referred to the bad puns that he seems to favor, such as the fall “Shacktoberfest,” and the winter “Have Yourself a Merry Little Custard.”

The Union Square Hospitality Group does not discuss revenues, which have been estimated at $70 million by trade publications.

Shake Shacks “are profitable,” Mr. Meyer said. “They don’t need a robust economy to work. They have a highly focused menu. They are replicable. There is no reservation operation. There is no florist. And it’s a fun thing.”

The premium burger market “is a really hot niche,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads a restaurant consulting firm in Manhattan that bears his name.

He said of Shake Shack: “They can make a lot of money. Burgers are not only American comfort food, but they are also American ethnic food.” This is why “Americans go abroad hankering for a burger,” Mr. Knapp said, and why a global premium-burger strategy could be well received.

The popularity of the Shake Shacks has been wildly beyond expectations, partly due to their humble order average of $13, “perfect for this economy,” Mr. Swinghamer said.

Remarkably, with more than $4 million in yearly sales, each of the Manhattan Shacks outdistances both premium and mass-market burger chains. McDonald’s, for example, has an average of $2.29 million in yearly revenues from each of its 13,958 outlets, according to Technomic, a Chicago-based restaurant consultant. The Shacks also outdo a premium-burger legend, the Virginia-based Five Guys Burgers and Fries; its 535 stores each average $1.03 million in sales.

Some customers think the Shack rollout is long overdue. “The quality is there, so if they don’t screw it up, they’ll be O.K.,” said Sandy Hawkins, a 61-year-old inventor from TriBeCa who was consuming his Shackburger under heat lamps on a recent frigid afternoon in Madison Square Park.

So how fast and how far can the Hospitality Group take this? Five Guys began franchising only in 2003, and has now ballooned to 535 stores. “Our focus is not on how many you do,” Mr. Swinghamer said bluntly. “If we can’t do it right? We won’t do it.”

Mr. Meyer commented that “we will grow as broadly as we can, without losing the quality, the hospitality, the community. And the sense of humor.”

Obituary: Dr Saubhagya Shah

2009-12-17T04:57:00.000-08:00

Professor Shah no more
Nepalnews, 16-Dec-09

Renowned anthropologist Prof. Dr Saubhagya Shah passed away after a heart attack on Wednesday. He was 45.

Shah was admitted at Alka Hospital in Lalitpur when he complained of a heart attack Tuesday evening.

Shah, who did his Ph.D in Anthropology from Harvard University, was a professor at the TU's sociology department. He was also the programme coordinator of the Conflict, Peace and Development Studies of TU.