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| Moammar Gadhafi |
Seif al-Arab Gadhafi was the sixth son of Gadhafi and brother of the better known Seif al-Islam Gadhafi. The younger Gadhafi had spent much of his time in Germany in recent years to study in German University there but hasn't finished his studies.
Seif al-Arab "was playing and talking with his father and mother and his nieces and nephews and other visitors when he was attacked for no crimes committed,"
Journalists taken to the walled complex of one-story buildings in a residential Tripoli neighborhood saw heavy bomb damage. The blast had torn down the ceiling of one building and left a huge pile of rubble and twisted metal on the ground.
Earlier NATO has reected Gadhafi's truce offer read more
Warren Buffett is not joining the recent gold rush that has sent the commodity to all-time highs above $1500 an ounce.
He tells shareholders that he understands why rising prices can create excitement and draw in buyers, but it's not the way to create lasting wealth.Buffett says he'd rather bet on strong businesses instead of something "that doesn't do anything."
He points out that for all the gold in the world, he could buy all of the farmland in the U.S. and 10 Exxon Mobils, with $1 trillion left over. As far as he's concerned, the only thing you can do with gold is admire and "fondle" it.
Charlie Munger agrees: "There's something peculiar to buy an asset that will only really go up if the world goes to hell." He'd rather own Berkshire shares.
Buffett also says it's unlikely that Berkshire will "make another big currency bet." He still believes the U.S. dollar, and most other foreign currencies, will lose value over time. But he doesn't have a strong enough conviction on the rates of decline to justify putting a lot of money on the line.
He did reveal that Berkshire had what he called a "small" short position in two currencies last year, generating $100 million in profit. Buffett didn't name the currencies. In the past he has bet against the U.S. dollar.
President Barack Obama says oil companies are profiting from rising pump prices and he wants Congress to end $4 billion in annual tax breaks for the oil and gas industry.
Drivers in 22 states are paying more than the national average of $3.91 per gallon. In Alaska, California and Connecticut, it's $4.20 or more.
The price jump has slowed economic growth and hurt Obama's public approval ratings.
Exxon Mobil Corp this week reported nearly $11 billion in profits for the first quarter of this year. Competitors also had huge gains.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says he plans to consider Obama's proposal as early as this coming week.
The president said money recouped from ending the oil and gas tax subsidies should go to new energy resources and research. He said he refuses to cut spending on clean energy initiatives.
"An investment in clean energy today is an investment in a better tomorrow," he said. "And I think that's an investment worth making."
Obama's critics say ending the subsidies would mean tax increases that would end up costing jobs.
"The president may think he's punishing CEOs of big companies, but his plan will hurt the everyday consumer of energy and imperil the jobs of millions of hardworking people in American-based companies," Rep. James Lankford, a first-term congressman from Oklahoma, said in the Republicans' weekly address.
In his address, Obama said the economy was growing again and took note of nearly 2 million new private sector jobs in the last 13 months. But the president did not mention that the pace of the recovery slowed significantly in the first three months of this year. The nation's economy grew at a 1.8 percent annual rate during that quarter, compared with 3.1 percent in the previous three months.
High gasoline prices, bad winter weather and steep government spending cuts were responsible for the slowdown.
Eager to show action on gas costs, Obama has pushed to stop the subsidies while also conceding that would not have an immediate effect on prices. He has also called for the Justice Department to investigate possible price fixing and said this week that he was also prodding oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia to increase production.
Lankford also said that Republicans would not vote to raise the nation's borrowing limit, now at $14.3 trillion, in the coming weeks unless the measure also includes steps to cut government spending.
Presidents have agreed to such deals in the past, and Obama told The Associated Press in a recent interview that some spending restrictions might be necessary to win an increase in the debt ceiling. Without raising that limit, the government would default on its debts.
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| Penny Stocks |
In this article, I would like to explain basics and fundamentals behind the penny stock trading.
In community, some of the investors believe to find hidden gems means go through penny stocks in hope of finding the next Apple or Google but this is not the best strategy to trade penny stocks. Successful companies are not born but they are made.
What Exactly Is a Penny/Micro-Cap Stock?
Technically micro-cap stocks as the name suggests are classified based on their market caps while penny stocks are categorized based on their prices.
In general a stock with a market capitalization of $50 and $300 million is classified as Micro-cap ( Less than $50 million is a nano-cap) and stock under $5 is a penny stock according to SEC ( Securities and Exchange Commission ), but some considers $3 or less than $ 1 as a cut off price for penny stock. Stocks those are trading on the Pink Sheets or OTCBB are considered to be a penny stock.
First and main thing about penny stock is they are much riskier than regular stocks. For example junk bonds (bonds with a rating lower than BBB ) vs investment grade bonds ( bonds with a rating higher than BBB ). In terms of stocks it will be called penny stocks vs blue chip stocks.
What's the Problem with These Stocks?
What makes penny stocks risky? Four major issues arise when you decide to buy these securities:
1) Lack of Information Available to the Public
Investors are always rely on enough tangible information regarding key developments of the companies, and follow the news releases for informed and secured investments. This has less probability that their investments are at risk and wipe out over night.
For micro-cap stocks, information is much more difficult to find. Companies listed on the pink sheets are not required to file with the SEC and are thus not as publicly scrutinized or regulated as the stocks represented on the NYSE and the Nasdaq exchanges; furthermore, much of the information available about micro-cap stocks is typically not from a credible source.
2) No Minimum Standards
Stocks on the OTCBB and Pink Sheets do not have to fulfill minimum standard requirements to remain on the exchange. Sometimes, this is why the stock is on one of these exchanges. Once a company can no longer maintain its position on one of the major exchanges, the company moves one of these smaller exchanges. While the OTCBB does require companies to file timely documents with the SEC, the Pink Sheets has no such requirement. Minimum standards act as a safety cushion for some investors and as a benchmark for some companies.
3) Lack of History
Many of the companies considered to be micro-cap stocks are either newly formed or approaching bankruptcy. These companies will generally have a poor track record or none at all. As you can imagine, the lack of histories of companies only magnifies the difficulty in picking the right stock.
4) Liquidity
When stocks don't have much liquidity, two problems arise:
First, there is the possibility that the stock you purchased cannot be sold. If there is a low level of liquidity, it may be hard to find a buyer for a particular stock, and you may be required to lower your price until it is considered attractive by another buyer.
Second, low liquidity levels provide opportunities for some traders to manipulate stock prices, which is done in many different ways - the easiest is to buy large amounts of stock, hype it up and then sell it after other investors find it attractive (also known as pump and dump).
The Problem for Investors
Penny stocks have been a thorn in the side of the SEC for some time because micro-cap stocks' lack of available information and poor liquidity make these groups of stocks an easy target for fraudsters. There are many different ways these people will try to part you from your money, but here are two of the most common:
Biased Recommendations – Some micro-cap companies pay individuals to recommend the company stock in different media, i.e. newsletters, financial television and radio shows. You may receive spam e-mail trying to persuade you to purchase particular stock. All e-mails, postings and recommendations of that kind should be taken with a grain of salt. Look to see if the issuers of the recommendations are being paid for their services as this is a giveaway of a bad investment and make sure that any press releases aren't given falsely by people looking to influence the price of a stock.
Off-Shore Brokers– Under regulation S, the SEC permits companies selling stock outside the U.S. to foreign investors to be exempt from registering stock. These companies will typically sell the stock at a discount to offshore brokers who, in turn, sell them back to U.S. investors for a substantial profit. By cold calling a list of potential investors (investors with enough money to buy a particular stock) and providing attractive information, these dishonest brokers will use high-pressure "boiler room" sales tactics to persuade investors to purchase stock.
Buying These Stocks
Two common fallacies pertaining to penny stocks are that many of today's stocks were once penny stocks and that there is a positive correlation between the number of stocks a person owns and his or her returns.
Investors who have fallen into the trap of the first fallacy believe Wal-Mart, Microsoft and many other large companies were once penny stocks that have appreciated to high dollar values. Many investors make this mistake because they are looking at the "adjusted stock price", which takes into account all stock splits. By taking a look at both Microsoft and Wal-Mart, you can see that the respective prices on their first days of trading were $28 and $25 even though the prices adjusted for splits is $0.09722 and $0.02444 (at time of writing). Rather than starting at a low market price, these companies actually started pretty high, continually rising until they needed to be split.
The second reason that many investors may be attracted to penny stocks is the conception that there is more room for appreciation and more opportunity to own more stock. If a stock is at $0.10 and rises by $0.05, you will have made a 50% return. This together with the with the fact that a $1,000 investment can buy 10,000 shares convinces investors that micro cap stock are a rapid surefire way to increase profits. For some reason, people think of the upside but forget about the downside. A $0.10 stock can just as easily go down $0.05 and lose half its value. Most often, these stocks do not succeed, and there is a high probability that you will lose your entire investment.
Conclusion
Sure, some companies on the OTCBB and Pink Sheets might be good quality, and many OTCBB companies are working extremely hard to make their way up to the more reputable Nasdaq and NYSE. However, the flip-side is that there many good opportunities in stocks that aren't trading for pennies. You need to understand that this is a high risk area that isn't suitable for all investors. If you can't resist the lure of micro-caps, make sure you do extensive research and understand what you are getting into.
( Source: Investopedia )
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| Sony Inc. |
Sony To Hold Sunday News Conference On PlayStation Hacking
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- Japanese electronics and entertainment conglomerate Sony Corp. (SNE, 6758.TO) said Saturday it would hold a weekend press briefing to explain the breach at its online game network that compromised the personal information of millions of users and forced the company to shut down the service for the past 10 days.
Sony said it will hold the briefing at its Tokyo headquarters on Sunday, over a holiday weekend in Japan, to explain the breach at the PlayStation Network and Qriocity streaming video and music services. Kazuo Hirai, head of Sony's videogames and consumer-electronics business, will take part.
The briefing will come a few days after two U.S. Congress members asked Hirai, whom the company has identified as the front runner to eventually replace Chief Executive Howard Stringer, to explain when it first learned of the breach, why the company waited days to notify its customers and how it intends to prevent future incidents.
Sony has said that a hacker penetrated the security of its PlayStation Network earlier this month and gained access to the names, birth dates and possibly credit-card information for the 77 million registered accounts on the service. The company said it discovered the breach between April 17 and 19 and shut down the network on April 20.
It waited until April 26 to notify its users about the hacking. Sony has said there is no evidence that data from the encrypted credit-card database was stolen, but it couldn't rule it out. Sony said it is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law-enforcement groups to investigate the intrusion.
Smaller companies, with less than Rs 100 crore revenue, are likely to spend 32% of their IT budget on business opportunity and 25% on innovation in the current fiscal, says an industry study.
As per a survey carried out by by Ernst & Young India for the CIO Klub--an association of chief information officers --larger companies would be spending less on IT this year considering the maturity of their operations.
The third annual study titled, ''The enterprise IT investment trends survey 2011,'' was released here last evening and is based on a survey of over 170 CIOs of companies with annual revenues of Rs 100 crore-over Rs 1,000 crore.
"The survey reflects the confidence in the India growth story and many companies are taking steps to further increase IT spends with a focus on providing business with innovative IT solutions, being more customer-centric and investing in technologies that aid in giving their business a competitive edge," said E&Y partner and IT advisory practices leader Samiron Ghoshal while releasing the report.
This year, firms will spend 35% of their total IT budget for IT system maintenance, 28% on enabling business operations to capitalise on business opportunities; 23% on innovative technologies to compete better; and 14% towards compliance, says the survey.
As per survey, the five top objectives of higher IT spend this fiscal are business alignment, business continuity, information security, customer management and cost reduction.
For over 70% of CIOs from companies with under Rs 500 crore revenues, business alignment is the top priority for FY12, this is only 50% for the CIOs from companies with over Rs 1,000 crore revenues. The second top priority is business continuity with 54% identifying this.
Information security comes third with 47% of confirming this, while 69% of CIOs from companies with revenues over Rs 1,000 crore this is the key priority. This is very low at 26% among smaller firms.
As per a survey carried out by by Ernst & Young India for the CIO Klub--an association of chief information officers --larger companies would be spending less on IT this year considering the maturity of their operations.
The third annual study titled, ''The enterprise IT investment trends survey 2011,'' was released here last evening and is based on a survey of over 170 CIOs of companies with annual revenues of Rs 100 crore-over Rs 1,000 crore.
"The survey reflects the confidence in the India growth story and many companies are taking steps to further increase IT spends with a focus on providing business with innovative IT solutions, being more customer-centric and investing in technologies that aid in giving their business a competitive edge," said E&Y partner and IT advisory practices leader Samiron Ghoshal while releasing the report.
This year, firms will spend 35% of their total IT budget for IT system maintenance, 28% on enabling business operations to capitalise on business opportunities; 23% on innovative technologies to compete better; and 14% towards compliance, says the survey.
As per survey, the five top objectives of higher IT spend this fiscal are business alignment, business continuity, information security, customer management and cost reduction.
For over 70% of CIOs from companies with under Rs 500 crore revenues, business alignment is the top priority for FY12, this is only 50% for the CIOs from companies with over Rs 1,000 crore revenues. The second top priority is business continuity with 54% identifying this.
Information security comes third with 47% of confirming this, while 69% of CIOs from companies with revenues over Rs 1,000 crore this is the key priority. This is very low at 26% among smaller firms.
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| Infosys Office |
The other contender for the post was Kris Gopalakrishnan, the current CEO of Infosys, who is both a co-founder and the man responsible for making Infosys one of the top three IT firms in the country. Kris has been elevated as the executive co-chairman.
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| iPad 2 |
The new iPad 2 tablet features a dual-core processor called A5 and is slimmer and lighter than the earlier version. Apple's original iPad defined the tablet computer market and was swiftly followed by offerings from the tech industry's main players, from Samsung and Dell to BlackBerry maker RIM and Toshiba.
Here are 10 things to know about the new iPad.
Slimmer & Lighter
New Apple iPad 2 is mere 8.8mm thin. "The new iPad 2 is actually thinner than your iPhone 4," said CEO Jobs during its US launch. "It is dramatically thinner, not a little thinner, a third thinner."
It weighs 1.3 pounds (590 grams) down from 1.5 pounds. It is said to be 33 percent thinner and 15 percent lighter compared to its predecessor.
Same Display Size as of iPad 1
Apple iPad 2 retains iPad 1 screen size with 9.7-inch LED-backlit display. Also, iPad 2 has the same RAM as the iPad 256MB.
Front and Back Camera
iPad 2 features both front- and rear-facing video cameras to enable video chat. The back camera supports video recording, HD (720p) up to 30 frames per second with audio. While on front there is VGA-quality still camera.
Nine times faster
Apple has used in-house designed dual-core 1GHz A5 system-on-chip processor. It would enable multi-tasking, video recording, FaceTime video calls and load apps faster.
Apple claims that iPad 2 is dramatically faster due to its new A5 chip. According to the company, A5 doubles the speed, and graphic display by nine times.
Smartcover
iPad 2 comes with a SmartCover that has built-in magnets for a fit more than just protects. On closing Smart Cover, iPad automatically goes off to sleep. Open it, and iPad instantly wakes up (there is just no need to press any buttons).
Also, SmartCover folds into a perfect typing stand. Its magnetic hinge holds iPad in place so that users can type quickly and comfortably. Is can also be set up for hands-free video calling or watching.
Apple has also start selling its Smart Cover for iPad 2 in India. The cheapest version of the cover costs Rs 2,100.
Wireless Streaming
Apple iPad 2 is said to support wireless streaming of music, photos, and video to HDTV and speakers via AirPlay-enabled speakers or Apple TV (second generation) on a Wi-Fi network.
The facility of wireless printing of email, photos, web pages, and documents from iPad2 is also claimed possible.
HDMI Adapter
iPad 2 offers 3G network support along with Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n) and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR. There's also a new HDMI cable connector that promises 1080p HD video output when connected to the 30-pin dock connector port on the iPad 2. This means HDMI is not built into the iPad 2, users need to purchase a special HDMI Apple adapter to use it.
HDMI adapter will work with iPad 1, iPhone 4 and 4th generation iPod Touch.
RAM and Battery Life
While Apple has not given iPad 2's full specs, according to tablet's teardowns, it certainly has 512 MB of RAM.
The battery life remains same as in iPad 1, 10 hours when in use and a month long stand by time. iFixit teardown reveals iPad 2's Li-Ion polymer battery made up of three cells and is rated at 3.8 volts, 25 watt-hours. This is slightly more than the original iPad's rating of 3.75 volts, 24.8 watt-hour.
White iPad is available
While white iPhone may have come now, Apple is shipping white iPad from the day one. As Jobs also jokingly said during iPad 2’s US launch, "And we are going to be shipping white from Day One."
When Apple announced iPhone 4 last year, it showed off both black and white version of the smartphone. However, the company has only recently launched white iPhone 4.
Pricing
The iPad 2 with Wi-Fi will sell for a maximum retail price of Rs 29,500 (including VAT) for the 16GB model, Rs 34,500 for the 32GB model and Rs 39,500 for the 64GB model. iPad 2 with Wi-Fi + 3G will be available for a maximum retail price of Rs 36,900 for the 16GB model, Rs 41,900 for the 32GB model and Rs 46,900 for the 64GB model.
( Source : The Times of India )
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| Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs |
Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs has been the visionary force behind the company's success. Steve has achieved $320 billion market cap for Apple Inc in his last 13 years of job as a CEO. He introduce and innovate ideas like the iPod, Apple retail Stores, IPhone, IPad and Apple TV, help the company to be the top of the tech world.
Jobs relied on his group including Design Chief Jony Ive, Marketing Chief Phil Schiller and hardware chief Bob Mansfield for his vision implementation. But none is more important than Tim Cook.
At Apple, the CEO succession picture could hardly be more clear: Though it's unofficial, Cook, the company’s chief operating officer, is likely the guy.
He has already taken over for CEO Steve Jobs three times in the last seven years. And if Jobs were to hand over the reins at Apple, because of his known health problems or any other reason, Wall Street fully expects that Cook would be the board's choice.
Who is Tim Cook?
Not a Steve Jobs clone. Cook is known for his operations. Before he came to Apple in 1998, Cook spent most of his career at IBM, as an operations executive in the PC group. He brought that experience to Apple, which had trouble managing inventory when he arrived. Now? Apple's arguably the best in the business.
But that doesn't mean a Cook-led Apple would be drama-free. When Jobs announced his latest medical leave in January, traders panicked, shaving nearly $20 billion off Apple's market cap in a week, though the stock soon recovered.
The biggest unknown about Apple under Cook: How would he do at retaining his own inner circle of executives—particularly in design and marketing—two Jobs trademarks that aren't known to be Cook's strong suits?
As much confidence as investors have in Cook, you can be sure they're hoping it's a long time before we have to worry about that.
( Source : CNBC )
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| Mela Sciences |
