Memories of a 'Phantom" past - Lee Falk to Columbo of Peter Falk

BBC News - Phantom comics reissue keeps early masked hero alive: "When Lee Falk created the The Phantom in 1936 its hero was a comic strip trailblazer.

The protagonist was among the first masked characters fighting bad guys with powers of only a mere mortal.

Among the Phantom's early victories were battles with Japanese forces, mirroring the global tumult of the time.

The BBC spoke with Daniel Herman, publisher of Hermes Press which has published its fifth instalment of Phantom reissues.

Mr Herman says that what keeps The Phantom appealing is the comic strip's strong character development."

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Times of India - losing it hrough 'Loosing" it

B-schools increasingly loosing shine in India, Assocham says - The Times of India: "B-schools increasingly loosing shine in India, Assocham says"

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Owner of a Healthy Heart - VeggiEater

Vegetarian Diet Cuts Heart Risk by 32%, Study Says - Bloomberg: "Vegetarians were 32 percent less likely to be hospitalized or die from heart disease than people who ate meat and fish, scientists at England’s Oxford University reported.

The researchers followed almost 45,000 adults, one-third of them vegetarians, for an average of 11 1/2 years and accounted for factors such as their age, whether they smoked, alcohol consumption, physical activity, education and socio-economic background, according to the study published today in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“Probably most of the difference is accounted for by the fact that the vegetarians had lower cholesterol and lower blood pressure,” Francesca Crowe, one of the authors of the study and a nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford, said in a telephone interview. “Diet is an important determinant of heart disease.”

Cardiovascular disease is the biggest cause of death in developed countries and accounted for an estimated 17.3 million deaths in 2008 worldwide, including 6.2 million deaths from strokes, according to the World Health Organization."

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Lowering the lowest common denominator- U.S. multinationals

Report: U.S. companies shifting more profits to tax havens - chicagotribune.com: "mong the findings: American multinational companies reported 43 percent of their overseas profits in the tax havens studied -- Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland -- in 2008, the most recent year data were available.

These same companies hired only 4 percent of their foreign workforce and made just 7 percent of their foreign investments in these same countries.

"By all indicators examined in this report, profit shifting has generally trended upward over time," the report, dated Jan. 18 said.

The analysis found this trend increasing since 1999.

CRS, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress used by lawmakers, analyzed data compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a unit of the Commerce Department that collects economic data from non-financial companies with foreign affiliates."

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Fleeting permanence of the new economy

The Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy - NYTimes.com: "Politicians across the political spectrum herald "job creation," but frightfully few of them talk about what kinds of jobs are being created. Yet this clearly matters: According to the Census Bureau, one-third of adults who live in poverty are working but do not earn enough to support themselves and their families.

A quarter of jobs in America pay below the federal poverty line for a family of four ($23,050). Not only are many jobs low-wage, they are also temporary and insecure. Over the last three years, the temp industry added more jobs in the United States than any other, according to the American Staffing Association, the trade group representing temp recruitment agencies, outsourcing specialists and the like.

Low-wage, temporary jobs have become so widespread that they threaten to become the norm. But for some reason this isn't causing a scandal. At least in the business press, we are more likely to hear plaudits for "lean and mean" companies than angst about the changing nature of work for ordinary Americans."

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Investing in nature, not harvesting.

Giving to get: how taking care of nature saves money - The Irish Times - Thu, Jan 24, 2013: "Juniper spent 30 years working with bodies such as Friends of the Earth and the Wildlife Trust and learning just how much we rely on the generosity of Mother Nature. And he brings these experiences together in a book released earlier this month, What Has Nature Ever Done for Us – How Money Really Does Grow on Trees.

The idea that we receive all of these services at no cost and that we can pursue sustained economic growth without looking after the environment represents “one of the greatest misconceptions in history”, he told The Irish Times. “We need to look at economics differently.”"

Economic growth is pursued without regard for what impact it will have on the natural world, he says. It is a “false economy” when built on a battleground where it is humankind against nature. “We too often see nature as something that we can plunder for economic advantage.”

There are limits to Mother Nature’s patience, however. We can undermine her generosity but at a genuine cost that burns up real money. For example, more than 90 per cent of our food is grown in soil, yet a third of the world’s farmed soil has been degraded since the 1950s due to bad agricultural practices, says Juniper.

The response is to try and drive more production by adding nitrates and other chemicals, additional inputs that carry a financial cost. But this in turn also delivers a downstream cost, with Europe spending about €70 billion a year dealing with nitrogen pollution, says Juniper.

Pollination 

The benefits – and the potential losses – are also clear when looking at the crop pollination services provided by nature. Annual crop sales dependent on natural pollinators are worth an estimated €770 billion a year, he says, but we are threatening the very source of this wealth.

Changed habitats and urban growth are putting many key pollinators under pressure. Mites and viral infections are also spreading through bee and bumble bee populations, greatly reducing the potential for essential crop pollination.

And it is not just bees. We are also causing difficulties for other important pollinators such as bats, birds and butterflies. Butterfly Conservation Europe estimates that a third of all European butterfly species are in decline and a 10th of the total are at risk of extinction, says Juniper.

Insects of all kinds are the “essential workers in the fields”, he says, and are difficult to replace, as seen in Maoxian county in Sichuan, China. Over-use of pesticides has wiped out insect pollinators that used to fertilise apple and pear trees.

Left without an alternative, the farmers have taken to climbing the fruit trees , pollinating the flowers by hand using brushes made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters, Juniper says.

Going with nature 

In many cases, preventing these kinds of difficulties for ourselves means going with rather than against nature, he says. “Once you show the problem and the solution it makes sense to start building our economic future by going with nature.”

For this reason he advocates building a “bioeconomy”, one that meets human needs while also protecting the natural systems that provide us with essential services. It also means protecting biodiversity, which he describes as “eco-innovation”. Every species carries within it unique DNA, genetic coding that produces unique proteins. These provide a rich resource that can be used to produce new medicines. A quarter or more of the products developed by the pharmaceutical industry depend on genetic diversity, Juniper says.

Tony Juniper will deliver a talk on January 31st at the Environ 2013 conference at NUI Galway.esaiweb.org/environ,

tonyjuniper.com

Loss of vultures led to 48,000 rabies deaths in India 
The sudden wipe-out of the Indian vulture population provides one of the clearest examples of how the loss of “natural services” can trigger economic and societal loss.

The veterinary use of the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac in the mid-1990s across India caused the deaths of between 97 and 99 per cent of the vulture population. This loss directly resulted in about 48,000 human deaths and has cost India an estimated €26 billion.

The vultures provided a “free” cleaning service, collectively removing up to 12 million tonnes of dead livestock a year. When diclofenac began to appear in carcasses, up to 40 million vultures died, leaving dead livestock rotting in the fields.

This caused the wild-dog population to rocket to about seven million and increased the transmission of rabies, with the human death toll from the disease rising by 48,000.

The cost of dealing with the health issues and disposal of the carcasses has cost India billions, says author Tony Juniper. “This was a service done for nothing by the vultures.”

The veterinary use of diclofenac has been banned, but efforts to increase the vulture population have been thwarted by the continued illegal use of the drug in livestock.

There are similar stories from around the world showing how we can put at risk the services provided to us by nature, delivering costs to society as we attempt to reverse the damage. 

Apple- a billion a week, most of it evading taxes

Amazon expected to reveal cash pile of up to $9bn after record Christmas | Technology | guardian.co.uk: "In the sights of many MPs are the major US companies that use a complex web of offshore havens to minimise their tax payments. Filings by Apple have revealed it is putting $1bn a week beyond the reach of the UK and US tax authorities. The iPhone maker has amassed $11bn in offshore havens in the last three months of 2012 and shielded $94bn from tax authorities around the world, mostly since 2005 when iPhone sales took off."

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Amazon - piling on cash, piling on tax-evasion, piling on ill-will

Amazon expected to reveal cash pile of up to $9bn after record Christmas | Technology | guardian.co.uk: "Record Christmas takings have swollen Amazon's cash pile to as much as $9bn (£5.7bn), the online retailer is expected to declare on Tuesday in results that will inflame the debate over its tax contributions around the world.

In just 13 weeks, Amazon's savings, which are held in cash and investments, have ballooned to between $7bn and $9bn, from $5.2bn in September, say analysts. The group's performance helped topple a number of its UK high street competitors, with the camera shop Jessops and music store HMV going into administration earlier this month.

The UK generates an estimated 10% of Amazon's revenues, pushing the proportion of the cash pile collected in the British Isles to an estimated $900m.

The retailer is under fire for paying low levels of corporation tax in the UK and other markets. With politicians across Europe casting about for ways to restore public finances, the sums are eye-catching. The issue will be forefront this week as parliament's influential public accounts committee resumes its inquiry into tax avoidance by taking evidence on Thursday from the four largest accounting firms."

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Digging dirt but burying Executive negligence, Caterpillar way

Wrong Way to Admit You Blew Millions of Dollars - Bloomberg: "Somewhere in the vast interior of China last year, almost a half-billion dollars of cash belonging to Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) vanished. So how did the company soften the blow when it broke the news to investors?

Easy. Caterpillar said the loss was “non-cash.” See? Accounting tricks don’t have to be complex after all.

This sort of abuse of the English language is routine in corporate disclosures and has long been a pet peeve of mine. Here’s the drill: First a company like Caterpillar makes a big acquisition. It pays cash. Then the company it bought turns out to be a wreck, maybe even a fraud.

The rules say Caterpillar must write down the value of what it bought -- or, more precisely, what it mistakenly believed it had bought, because the assets it paid for never existed in the first place. Calling the loss non-cash makes it seem like Caterpillar didn’t lose any real money. It’s like reverse alchemy, turning gold into straw, at least for public-relations purposes."

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High Cost of Progress- Not a flowering endorsement

The Hindu : Cities / Madurai : Whatever happened to all those nandavanams...: "Floral offerings to the deity are an integral part of rituals followed in temples. It has been a time-honoured practice to pluck fresh blossoms of different colours and weave them into garlands that would eventually adorn the deities. And as the legend goes, Kodai — also known as Aandal — wove garlands for Lord Vishnu every day with the flowers collected from the ‘nandavanam,’ the temple garden.

What has happened to the ‘nandavanams’ over the years? With the expansion of the city, less rainfall and changing sensibilities of contemporary society, the once blooming acres have faded out of sight. Most ‘nandavanams’ in and around Madurai have either shrunk in size or simply disappeared. Unavailability of funds and manpower, and shortage of water are often cited as reasons for the disintegration of an age-old institution."

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Movies and Society

Javed Akhtar rues the decline of language in cinema - The Times of India: ""Khayalo main kisi ke aaya nahi karte kisi ko khwabo main aake yun tadpaya nahi kerte. You wont find this 'tamiz' in today's songs. Today it will be 'Baby Baby Aaja Aaja' types. It is not just about language but also about etiquettes," said Akhtar.

The 68-year-old writer and poet in the session "Bollywood and National Narrative" elaborated on the journey of films, in India, which is celebrating one hundred years of cinema this year.

"If you see the profile of villains in Indian movies over the years you can easily make out the profile of our country over the years. In the 40s we had the zamindar (as the villan), in 60s when we were dealing with the ideas of socialism we had the industry owners as the villains. Then you had the urban mafia," said Akhtar.

"Then we had politicians as villains and after that there was a time when we had the Pakistanis as villains and then we got tired of all this. Now, we don't have any villain because whatever we looked for in the villain has become our ideal," said the writer."

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Quality of IT services

Quality slips as IT companies may be taking shortcuts to preserve margins - The Economic Times: "Indian companies, which have earned a reputation for delivering quality services at affordable rates and built a $100- billion ( Rs 5.3 lakh crore) sector, could be risking their image in pursuit of short-term gains, analysts and industry observers said.

The method they are adopting is quite simple - deploying less experienced and hence less expensive but more error-prone engineers where earlier they would put the best available resource on the job. And the main reason they are doing so is because the proportion of fixed-rate contracts in their revenue mix is rising - nearly 50% for some. At the same time, contracts where companies get paid for the number of hours an engineer works are on the decline.

From profit margins of over 30% during the outsourcing boom years that followed the Y2K crisis, profitability has now fallen to around 20% and is expected to be further dragged down by rising costs and competition. Revenue growth, too, is down substantially and will barely cross 10% in the year to March 2013."

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Billions on software, nothing to fly for it

Senators to Probe Air Force’s $1 Billion Failed Software - Bloomberg: "Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC)’s performance on a failed $1 billion software project for the U.S. Air Force and the service’s management of it are under investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“I have directed the committee’s investigative staff to conduct a comprehensive investigation” to determine “the causes of the failure and assess steps that can be taken to avoid similar failures,” Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the panel, said in an e-mailed statement.

The Expeditionary Combat Support System, once described as “revolutionary” by the Air Force, was canceled in November after the service determined the supply-chain management project was “no longer a viable option” to help meet a goal of having its financial books in shape for a federal audit by 2017."

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Yahoo, Dell, Google, etc. - Eating a Dutch Sandwich and laughing all the way to Swiss banks, while the taxpayers are getting whipped

Yahoo, Dell Swell Netherlands’ $13 Trillion Tax Haven - Bloomberg: "Through Yahoo! Netherlands BV, headquartered at Dooves’s suburban home, Yahoo has also routed European and Asian revenues from Web ads to a subsidiary incorporated in Ireland that claims its residency in the tax-friendly Cayman Islands, according to filings.
In 2009, for example, the Dutch unit collected 101.5 million euros in royalties from around the world -- and promptly paid out 98.7 percent of that to the Cayman subsidiary, records show. If those payments went directly from, say, Yahoo’s France sales arm to the Cayman unit, they could trigger a 33.3 percent withholding tax in France.
‘Beneficial Owner’
In 2011, a Yahoo French sales subsidiary reported 66 million euros of revenue, yet paid just 462,665 euros in income taxes, records show.
A typical Dutch tax avoidance arrangement may violate the tax treaties of various countries, said Peters, the Rotterdam tax adviser. Only a small percentage of royalties stays in the Netherlands in these transactions, records show, yet treaties typically require that, in order to avoid withholding tax, the Netherlands unit must be the “beneficial owner.”"

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Picking up plastic waste, rather than reducing it

FMCG companies like HUL, Dabur woo ragpickers to clean up sachets & lighter plastic packaging - The Economic Times: ""Involving ragpickers, we have thrashed out an arrangement for door-to-door collection of waste," says Dabur India's senior ED Jude Magima. "The programme was initially rolled out at the stockist and warehouse level, where ragpickers would collect all the damaged packs from these stockists and warehouses, sort and segregate them and sell them to paper mills.

" Over one lakh ragpickers, who earn Rs 75-100 a day, help partially clear Mumbai of the 8,000 tonnes of waste of all kinds generated daily, says IIP's Saha. The municipal corporation, by itself, will be unable to manage such large volumes of junk.

"In smaller towns and pilgrimage places, it's very difficult to manage our waste management initiative," says Ramesh Chauhan, chairman of Bisleri International. Two years ago, Bisleri put in place an elaborate recycling chain that linked ragpickers with companies that could buy and recycle the scrap they collected.

An expert committee set up by the ministry of environment and forests almost two years ago had suggested that consumer product makers using plastic packaging should partner local municipality bodies to ensure recycling of waste."

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Returning space to the wild

Should Ireland be returned to the wild? - The Irish Times - Sat, Jan 19, 2013: "He cites rediscovery of Leinster woods by the great spotted woodpecker and the new spread of buzzards across a more tolerant countryside.

Ireland has virtually no wild habitats, except the strip between the tides (and not always then). Most of the nature we know is a human construct, both in what we’ve added over centuries and – much more often – what we’ve taken away. Even the kind of natural world we might prefer is put together from Victorian books and paintings. The line between ecological repair and much-derided “wildlife gardening” can be lost in a confusion of science and human aesthetics.

At Ireland’s size, we have no room for rewilding: there are far too many deer already, and a few introduced wild boar are now hunted as an “invasive alien species”. Conservationists can argue that bringing back kites and eagles helps to turn people on to nature, respecting and preserving the homes of lesser creatures as well as filling BBs. It heals a few scars from our gamekeepered past while ignoring, too often, the modern rise of predators – mink, rats, foxes, grey crows – that are wrecking the landscape’s natural inheritance of species.

Red kites, meanwhile, once the specialist scavengers of every European city, have been paying a high price for their reintroduction to the northern fringes of Dublin. Following the success of introducing kites from Wales to Wicklow, beginning in 2007, 39 young birds were released in Fingal in 2011 and quickly spread out between the coastal estuaries and Meath. By the end of their first winter, nine of them were dead, most poisoned by rodenticide in rats they had scavenged. Go to the Golden Eagle Trust website ( goldeneagle.ie) for advice on taking greater care.

Rich Pay for Poor Performance- From Carly to Meg, the HP way

HP’s Whitman Earned $15 Million in 2012 After Target Miss - Bloomberg: "Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Meg Whitman received nearly $15.4 million in fiscal 2012, her first full year as chief executive officer, receiving only 70 percent of her targeted compensation as it posted a net loss for the year.

Whitman, who took a salary of $1 last year, reaped a performance-related bonus of $1.7 million, more than $7 million in stock awards and $6.4 million in options, Hewlett-Packard said in a filing yesterday. Whitman, who was already on the board, became CEO in September 2011, just before the end of that fiscal year. In that period, her compensation was $16.5 million."

Shares (HPQ) of Hewlett-Packard have declined 39 percent in the past year, as Whitman works to turn around the world’s biggest supplier of personal computers after five straight quarters of declining sales and years of botched deals, management tumult and strategic missteps. Some units may be disposed if they don’t meet goals, the company said in a Jan. 1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The stock decline has reduced some executives’ pay from previous years, according to today’s filing. The final amount of certain restricted stock awards for Hewlett-Packard executives granted in November 2009 depended on the company’s share price performance against theStandard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) over three years.

China- maker and consumer of i-stuff

Apple CEO Cook Says China Will Overtake U.S. as Biggest Market - Bloomberg: "“I believe it will become our first,” Cook said in an interview with state-owned Xinhua News yesterday. No timeframe was given for the prediction. The Cupertino, California-based company had $5.7 billion of sales in China during the quarter ended September. U.S. revenue was about $14.4 billion, based on figures in an Oct. 25 earnings statement.
Cook also met the chairman of China Mobile Ltd. (941) while in the country, as he seeks to boost cooperation with a wireless operator that has 707 million customers and no agreement to sell iPhones. The CEO is making his second visit to the country in less than a year as Apple tries to reverse its shrinking share of the local smartphone market."

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Hot news that's too hot to bear- hottest year on record

Last Year Wasn’t Just Hot – It Was a Habanero: Chart - Bloomberg: "To say that 2012 was hot is an understatement. The average temperature in the contiguous U.S. last year was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees hotter than the 20th century average and 1 degree hotter than the previous record.
One degree may not sound sound like much, but the chart above, by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, shows just what a big deal it really is. Each line displays year-to-date temperature anomalies, going back to 1895. Significant deviations from the average temperature are rare; a small fraction of a degree separates each year. Just 0.2 degree separates the previous record average temperature holder -- 54.3 degrees in 1998 -- from the one before that, 1934.
Last year’s departure from the normal temperature exceeded the previous record's by 29 percent. It’s as if a baseball player smashed Barry Bonds’s juiced-up 73 home-run record with 102 homers in a single season. It’s as if Exxon Mobil’s $45.2 billion profit in 2008 were surpassed by a company raking in $63.3 billion. If last year’s weather were edible, it would make habanero peppers taste mild. "

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Next step in the Connection Cycle

Google Android Baked Into Rice Cookers in Move Past Phone - Bloomberg: "Intelligent Systems
Building Android directly into devices can make it easier for electronic equipment and appliances to exchange information with less human intervention. A television, for example, might show a pop-up message from a clothes dryer in the basement, indicating that the homeowner’s jeans are not yet dry. The user could press a button on the TV remote to automatically add 15 minutes to the dryer cycle. A connected rice cooker could determine what type of rice is being used and set cooking instructions accordingly.
Making more intelligent, connected appliances and electronics has been a goal of manufacturers for years. And recent efforts to broaden Android beyond phones and computers haven’t all panned out. Google tried to push into the living room via its Google TV product. The set-top boxes and software for televisions made by Sony Corp. and Logitech International SA didn’t meet sales goals after their introduction in 2010. LG, Hisense Electric Co. and Vizio Inc. plan to demonstrate models that boast an updated version of Android for TVs in Las Vegas."

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Megabus, BoltBus - not your grandma's bus journeys

Megabus, BoltBus Overcome U.S. Stigma With Cheap Travel - Bloomberg: "A U.S. bus-transportation boom that began seven years ago is accelerating as travelers ditch their cars and avoid airport security lines to buy cheap tickets on Wi-Fi equipped motorcoaches.
Bus transportation was again the fastest-growing form of U.S. intercity travel last year, with scheduled departures up 7.5 percent, the most in four years, according to a DePaul University study released yesterday. The study excluded so- called Chinatown lines that don’t publish regular schedules."

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WHite House needs New-Delhi type protest rallies

White House squares up for fight with NRA over sweeping gun reforms | World news | guardian.co.uk: "The Obama administration is reportedly preparing to confront the might of the National Rifle Association and its gun-supporting allies in Congress with a sweeping package of proposals for tighter firearms controls that would go beyond previous attempts to combat gun violence.

An article in the Washington Post claimed on Sunday that a White House taskforce led by the vice president, Joe Biden, is looking at a range of proposals that would beef up federal monitoring and checks on all gun sales, seek to improve systems to prevent mentally-ill people acquiring weapons and introduce new penalties for carrying guns near schools. The taskforce, which was set up in the wake of the 14 December Newtown school shooting, in which 20 children and six school staff were killed, is expected to present its proposals to President Obama later this month."

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Obseity

http://www.forbes.com/sites/daniellegould/2012/12/28/2013-food-trends-get-technical-sustainable-healthy/

A staggering two-thirds of adults and one-third of children in the United States are overweight or obese. Earlier this year, the Institute of Medicine reported that obesity-related illness treatments cost an estimated $190.2 billion annually  and cost businesses $4.3 billion in losses as a result of obesity-related absenteeism. Food Marketing Institute and Prevention Magazine’s annual “Shopping For Health”annual survey also indicates that consumers are increasingly looking for healthier food options.