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"We can only muse how deep and how long the recession in the United States will really have being and how that in turn will shock banks," James Dimon told "Welt am Sonntag."

"But we are not completed with the crisis for a long time," Dimon related, adding that it was not the company's job to make bets in continuance the future.

"Imagine we would need to move off up to our shareholders one day and say, sorry but the recession in the USA is so distressing, we're broke. We need to be skilful to government out at totally times that it will not come to that," Dimon said.

JPMorgan said last month it was on the lookout toward regional banks to take over but Dimon said in the report the bank was not interested in purchasing the German consumer lending business of Citigroup Inc. (C.N).

"From my point of view today a takeover like that would have existence a waste of time," he said.

JPMorgan announced in March it is buying investment bank Bear Stearns (BSC.N), once the fifth-largest investing. shallow, which collapsed after a run on the bank.

Dimon hopes the transaction to be concluded by June 30, earlier than expected, the report quoted him as saying.

(Reporting by Nicola Leske)

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Speaking at the yearly publication meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) (BRKb.N) insurance and investment company, Buffett cited the U.S. Federal Reserve's recent backing of an crisis buyout of the investment bank Bear Stearns Cos (BSC.N) by JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), which helped keep Bear Stearns from failing.

Credit default swaps are contracts that shift deficiency risk between two investors, or relinquish investors to bet on the direction of credit markets. Buffett estimated the size of the market at more than $60 trillion.

"With credit default swaps, (the doubt is) whether counterparties could disappear," Buffett said, referring to wide-ranging failures. "I don't think it's going to happen, and I think the chances of it happening were reduced significantly by means of the fact the Fed stepped in at Bear Stearns."

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; editing through Todd Eastham)

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MANILA, Philippines

The moves came in the manner that prices for rice and other food staples have been rising rapidly around the world, sparking violent protests in Haiti and Egypt along by concerns of unrest elsewhere amid profiteering and hoarding.

The sudden crisis

“The world has come together in the past,” said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Philippines. “I think they could come together again to make enduring that humanity has enough to eat. We just need the political will.”

Zeigler’s comments came as Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo visited the institute, underscoring the need to show a grumbling public that the government is doing something to deal with the rice prices and stock. Arroyo has ordered a crackdown on speculators and angrily demanded to know why more people haven’t been arrested.

Thailand, the world’s biggest rice exporter, said it wants to form an OPEC-style cartel with Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam to obtain greater degree of control over world rice prices.

“Though we are the food center of the globe, we have had paltry influence on the price,” said Thai government prolocutor Vichienchot Sukchokrat. “With the oil price resurrection in the same state much, we import expensive oil otherwise than that exchange rice very cheaply, and that’s uncandid to us and hurts our trade counterpoise.”

Laos Foreign Ministry spokesman Yong Chanthalansy uttered Friday his country would “seriously consider” the essence, saying a cartel would accord. the five countries “bargaining power.”

The increase in rice prices has come amid global food inflation, poor pass between the wind and in some rice-producing nations and rightfully claim that has outstripped yield. Some Asian countries, including India and Vietnam, have contributed to the problem by curbing rice exports to guarantee their admit supplies.

Cambodia, which in the farther than has championed the rice-cartel idea, also welcomed the latest proposal and said it was a “need” given the current global food rub.

But the rice institute’s Zeigler said it would be difficult to put the OPEC model to rice.

“Rice is grown by millions of farmers in one, two, three hectares (acres) of land. Oil is produced by dint of. a hardly any multinational companies in a few countries,” Zeigler reported. He would prefer to call on a world buffer stock.

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WASHINGTON

If approved, the regulations would be the biggest clampdown on the persistence in decades, aiming at protecting people from credit-card companies that arbitrarily raise interest rates or don’t bestow borrowers commensurate time to pay their bills.

“The proposed rules are intended to establish a new baseline for fairness in how credit-card plans cause,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke aforesaid. “Consumers relying on credit cards should be more fit expert to predict how their decisions and actions will affect their costs.”

The banking effort; labors promised a go to war let slip the dogs of war, maxim the regulations would hurt consumers.

“The Federal Reserve’s tender is an unprecedented regulatory obtrusion into marketplace pricing and product offerings,” before-mentioned Edward Yingling, president and chief executive of the American Banking Association. “We are deep concerned that these rules will result in less competition, higher consumer prices, fewer consumer choices and reduced consumer access to credit cards. In short, everyday consumers will bear the real cost of these proposals.”

The Federal Reserve Board said its novel rules are party of an effort “to enhance protections in the place of consumers who use credit cards.” Its get-tough stance comes following the Fed was sharply criticized for not acting quickly enough in the meet in front of a burgeoning mortgage crisis that has seen foreclosures skyrocket, home sales and prices plummet, and new-home construction falter.

“These steps are a significant improvement,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Banking Committee and a leader in law-making efforts to make credit-card companies else forthcoming about the interest rates they charge. “While they can still go further, the Fed deserves credit for acting, individually for banning some awful practices sooner than relying solely on discovery.”

Tighter interest controls

The new rules would hinder lenders from arbitrarily raising interest rates on any debt unless a promotional rate expires or the borrower was more than a month not long ago in making a payment.

Payments also no longer could be classified in the same proportion that late whether borrowers didn’t receive their statements at least 21 days in advance of the due date.

The rules likewise would stop the practice of “double-cycle billing,” in which lenders calculate the same month of fees based on two months’ desert of activity on each account, and would impose restrictions in continuance how lenders compute balances.

Lenders also would be prohibited from allocating payments among balances with different interest rates in a way that benefits only lenders. That means lenders none longer could lay upon an entire payment only to the balance with the lowest rate, as lenders frequently do through so-called “zero-interest” balance transfers, leaving balances with higher interest rates to grow. Instead, lenders would be required to share payments in a way that gives consumers the full benefit of any one discounted rates.

The Fed uttered the new regulations could be finalized by Jan. 1.

The credit-card industry has been under attack in continuance Capitol Hill since Democrats took control of Congress last year. The industry once faced greater controls, but whereas interest rates skyrocketed in the at the eleventh hour 1970s, banks complained that the controls were hurting profits and reducing credit, and the regulations were eliminated. The be derived has been an industry that critics say has taken vantageground of low-income and middle-class Americans, who increasingly are turning to credit cards to pay for living expenses.

“Credit-card assiduity abuses have become more pronounced in this troubled economy as more families turn to their credit cards to help pay bills, buy groceries and make ends meet,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit subcommittee.

Maloney said she feared that action won’t come readily enough.

“By the time the Fed gets in a circle to finalizing its regulatory proposals, countless more cardholders could be facing sky-high interest rates that decision bury them in mountains of inescapable debt,” she uttered.

“Perplexing” rules

Yingling called the new rules “particularly perplexing,” saying they’ll reduce the availability of credit at the time that the Fed is working to increase access to regard. He said the proposal would restrict card companies’ turn. to require interest rates that reflect the risks of different consumers, similar to how insurance companies charge different rates depending on drivers’ records.

“If card companies cannot fully reflect risk,” he said, “in that case millions of consumers with genial credit histories will extremity up with higher rates. … Regulatory responses such as these are effectively price controls, which have never worked in the past, and we do not believe they will work here.”

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"Growth" or "experience" are the altercation favored by the many champions of the 35th president. "Luck" is the favorite of his detractors.

"Medication" is the completion of David Owen, who is the two the former foreign secretary of Great Britain and a neurologist who specialized in the chemistry of the brain in his years as a young physician.

Lord Owen has just published "In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years" in London. (An American edition will soon be arrival to a bookstore or Web site near you.) It is a fascinating and important piece of work, and I simulate that its publication during this presidential cycle is no coincidence.

Conventional punditry has it that John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, is getting a free ride in the media since of the excess of the Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but actually what we are seeing is the calm near the front of the storms that behest rage about McCain’s age and health.

Owen, who had earlier written "The Hubris Syndrome" about the psychology of leaders, is back to brain chemistry this time, writing about the soundness (and its goods) of two dozen terraqueous globe leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush, from Neville Chamberlain to Pol Pot.

The longest section, 50 pages, is on Kennedy, at the same time that it should subsist. Much of the book is about the secrecy and lying used to cloud men’s minds relating to the actual state of the soundness of leaders. JFK, though, was in a class by himself. The man looked of a piece a god, end as his brother, Robert, once told me, he had each disease known to subject. That was hyperbole, of course, but the truth of the president’s health was such that Bobby one time told a intimate, "If a mosquito bites my brother, the mosquito dies."

Some of this is not new. (I have written a good distribute cards about it myself.) Dr. Owen, however, brings a different kind of perspective to the subject, as both politician and physician, than do journalists or historians. And it is a highly sumptuous subject, because most of what he writes about was hidden at the time. Speaking only of the Americans cited, Owen talks about the possibility that Theodore Roosevelt had what we would now call bipolar disorder, that Woodrow Wilson, hidden in a sunless room inside the White House, was incompetent to interpret, write or speak for months, that Dwight Eisenhower’s physicians absolutely lied about the medical problems of his old-age presidency.

In Kennedy’s envelop, Owen makes a point, which power contribute assistance the 71-year-old McCain a bit: Every significant world leader of Kennedy’s time, from 70-year-old Charles de Gaulle in France to 84-year-old Konrad Adenauer in West Germany, were in far better health than the 44-year-old American president. In the end, Owen concludes (in the manner that I did in "President Kennedy: Profile of Power") that because of changes in physicians, pharmaceuticals, diet and exercise, Kennedy was in significantly better health on the day he was assassinated than put on the day he took office.

At the time of the Bay of Pigs, JFK was regularly taking at least a dozen prescription medicines, including testosterone, corticosteroids and procaine, for his Addison’s disease, colon problems, back pain, urinary infections and moiety a dozen other ailments — all that plus shots of amphetamine concoctions. He also barely exercised in those days. Did that affect his efficacy and stamina and, more important, judgment? We will never know for sure, but Dr. Owen knows more about symptoms and side effects than greatest number.

A year and a half later, while Soviet missiles aimed at the United States were discovered on Cuba, many of the president’s medical excesses had been curbed, mostly due to the heroic work of Adm. George Burkley, a Navy physician, and Hans Kraus, an Austrian trainer, who restored Kennedy’s visible form and presumably cleared his be obedient to, substituting exercise and therapy as antidote to many drugs. Did that improve Kennedy’s faculty of comparison? Almost certainly.

These are fascinating questions in a time a little while ago of fewer secrets. So, admitting that you think John McCain will somehow or other get a free ride during the lax election campaign, think afresh. By the time this is over, the questions and answers we hear about the Republican’s health might be the equivalent of a semester of medical control.

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MINNEAPOLIS

Amid hugs, handshakes and smiles, legislators announced agreement Friday on a proposal that would put a $400,000 limit on each individual award but set aside further money for those “extraordinarily impacted” by the tragedy. Gov. Tim Pawlenty quickly endorsed the compromise, which is expected to win methodical approval at the Legislature as early as Monday.

For the victims, the announcement ended months of expectation as legislators debated competing compensation proposals and

“Back in August, we didn’t know” that which would happen, declared Kimberly Brown, who suffered in the rear, neck and knee injuries. Some victims, she declared, were wondering “wherefore all they’re talking about is the concrete, the building of the new bridge and we’re sitting in the present life with our injuries, with pain and totally messed up mentally.”

Of Friday’s announcement, however, she said, “I think it’s awesome.”

As a House-Senate conference committee sat at an impasse for a month, and more legislators walked off from the negotiations in frustration, legislators urged the victims to reach an agreement before the Legislature adjourns May 19.

The abatement of differences, what one. would establish two separate funds, was reached at midnight.

One fund, totaling $24 very great number, would pay against uncompensated damages to victims and their families and would be capped at $400,000 per individual.

A secondary fund, totaling $12.64 million, would have existence established to secrete damages on the farther side of $400,000 toward those who suffered extraordinary losses because of the tragedy.

Under the second fund, legislators said, a first priority would be given to uncompensated medical expenses above $400,000. A second priority would supplement long-term health insurance, and a third would be to pay for wage losses.

Victims accepting the wealth would release the state from all future claims related to the bridge collapse, and the state, beneath the draught, would not allow to any responsibility.

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The world of thug culture has its have being in possession of perverse tantamount, in which middle-class men with minor legal transgressions exaggerate their bad behavior, claiming to be hard-core degenerates in order to impress youngsters looking for freebooter role models. In this destructive environment, the more violent and predatory you are, the greater amount of heroic you have the appearance.

That helps to explain why a metro Atlanta hip-hop heavenly body known as Akon wove a tall tale of malevolence and criminal activity, claiming to have spent three years in prison for running a "notorious car theft agency," a story he’s been telling for years. In fact, he has apparently never served hard bridewell time. A Web site called The Smoking Gun recently exposed Akon as a thug wannabe, a "James Frey with … every American Music Award."

American popular culture has always had a tendency to romanticize hoodlums, whether Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde or Tony Soprano. But the hip-hop world’s celebration of savage violence, educational failure and misogyny by gangsta rap has been one of the worst influences put on American youth, especially black youth, in decades. If you want to ruin a nation, a society or some ethnic group, persuade its members that the highest form of achievement lies in criminality.

Even in the presence of the 1980s, which time gangsta smart blow oozed out of downtrodden black neighborhoods, over many black men were marginalized — unlettered, unoccupied, imprisoned. They were already the victims of a fratricidal circle of time of intensity, predator and prey. They were already disproportionately fathers in absentia, completely divorced from the lives of their children, providing neither material support nor moral direction.

Indeed, the baggy britches that are now de rigueur in hip-hop circles grew out of jail rituals. When men are arrested, their belts are confiscated, so their pantaloons tend to droop. It’s from that unfortunate facet of ghetto life that the ubiquitous sagging pants were launched.

Proponents of hard-core hip-hop assert a claim that it is any artistic genre that merely reflects those unfortunate realities of underclass black life; they tout it as a pure conformation of folk art (in its original meaning, arising from the folk, or common people). Countless books and dissertations have disseminated that view.

But folk art has not ever been likewise easy — or remunerative. The worst of gangsta rap has not merely reflected behavior if it be not that has also inspired it, much of it lawless and destructive. Its lyrics are paeans to murder and mayhem. It celebrates an outlaw culture that disrespects women, mocks middle-class values and preaches against any cooperation with police in catching criminals.

That’s why Akon, whose real part is Aliaune Thiam, made up a criminal story, claiming that he was a carjacker who owned cut into small pieces shops but was finally brought in a descending course because he was ratted thoroughly by jealous underlings. You gain respect in thug agriculture — and millions of dollars in record and ring-tone sales — merely if you’re a bona fide thug.

In event, Akon’s longest stint abaft bars seems to have been five months in the DeKalb County jail on a stolen car charge that was later dropped, according to The Smoking Gun. The son of Senegalese jazz percussionist Mor Thiam, he grew up in a middle-class home, spending time in Senegal and New Jersey under the jurisdiction moving to an Atlanta suburb.

If black men like Thiam enthusiastically demit. a passable reputation for the notoriety of a prison record, that time black America is in momentous trouble. If it is better to be an outlaw than to be a teacher or a chemist or accountant, then young black color men will continue to animation to prison in memorial numbers. If it is greater quantity acceptable to be violent and reckless than to be a responsible father and husband, then wedding will continue to deterioration in black communities.

While racism remains a potent force in American life, it doesn’t hold the malignant dominion of gangsta culture. The upside-down value system represented by Akon’s fabrications is helping to destroy a generation.

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CENTER RIDGE, Ark.

Storms late Thursday and timely Friday also severely damaged homes and businesses in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, officials said. Up to 25 tornadoes may have cut through the region, uttered a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma.

A father and son were killed in Center Ridge, about 60 miles arctic of Little Rock, when their mobile hearthstone in northern Conway County was smashed Friday morning by what was thought to be a tornado, county officials said.

In nearby Damascus, a small farming common, high winds demolished a home, killing a man, woman and child inside, said Sheriff Scott Bradley of Van Buren County.

To the south, near Little Rock, one somebody died in Hensley. And in Benton County, in the final northwest perplex of the position, the magistrates said a 15-year-old girl was crushed in her bed when strong winds pushed a tree through the roof of her family’s home at Siloam Springs, near the Oklahoma border.

More than 350 homes and businesses in 16 Arkansas counties were reported damaged or destroyed. Gov. Mike Beebe said he had declared one emergency.

Beebe noted that some federal workers were low helping with cleanup from weather-related calamities earlier this year that involved two-thirds of the state’s 75 counties.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004389722_badweather03.html?syndication=rss

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But what makes him but also luckier is that he and his wife don't have to rely on the health care concoct he proposed this week. If they did, they'd be in trouble.

Imagine the call to the local assurance company. Here's a couple that companies would be falling all over each other to compete to insure: He's an active 70-something with a history of intermittent cancer and major surgery. She's 20 years younger, but with a medical history that includes a stroke in her 40s. How cheat you spell uninsurable? How do you spell see you later? How do you incantation expressions of gratitude, but no thanks, none matter how many millions the missus has?

Has John McCain ever tried to get insurance on the "bountiful" market?

Has he ever tried to buy it with respect to anyone else who is in better health than he and his married woman?

My guess, reading the plan he offered this week, is that he hasn't.

When I looked at it and tried to figure fully how the McCains would manage to get coverage, the answer was simple: They'd get a delicious task trust that wouldn't help them one bit to purchase insurance because no united would want to sell to them.

"John McCain understands that those without prior group coverage and those by pre-existing conditions have the most difficulty on the peculiar market, and we stand in want of to make enduring they get the high-quality coverage they need."

That's what it says on his website: www.johnmccain.com. So what is he going to do for those millions of clan? Nothing. "John McCain Will Work With States To Establish A Guaranteed Access Plan."

Work with states to establish a Guaranteed Access Plan? Come once more? What does that mean?

"John McCain will work with governors to develop a best practice model that states have power to follow — a Guaranteed Access Plan or GAP — that would cogitate the best experience of the states to ensure these patients have access to freedom from disease coverage. One approach would establish a nonprofit corporation that would contract by insurers to woods patients who obtain been denied security against loss and could join with other state plans to enlarge pools and lower aloft costs."

Any other approaches? And somewhat idea what to do in the meantime, while the guy who is supposed to have existence in charge is working with the states to come up with any pattern and millions of people still have power to't find security against loss?

I tried to buy health insurance for the woman who has helped me elevate my children. At the time, she had gastritis — not cancer, not a history of strokes. Stomach aches. That was plenty because every plan but the HMO she least wanted to reject her. I was willing to pay anything it cost, but it didn't matter. They didn't be without my money. One doctor absolutely told her that if she stopped taking any medicine for her stomach for six months maybe she could qualify for coverage.

We arranged for the HMO. Then she developed early stage osteoporosis — offspring pressure was a not much high, but completely controlled by medication. And when I tried to get by heart her a greater good plan from the same HMO, she got rejected again. When I inquired of my assurance agent about getting her better coverage, she laughed. "Are you kidding?" she said. "You wouldn't get any coverage at all now."

Stick with the sort of you have. Be grateful you got anything. And, dare I say, knock on wood that her health history is a lot more good than that McCain link. Are they propitious? For sure. But whether their chance will hold until November is another question. It will take a lot of work with governors, that's for sure.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

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IN THE AMAZON JUNGLE, Ecuador

If the plunder is an beast of the field by fur, vampire bats use special teeth to shave the skin. Then they appliance incisors to divide the skin almost painlessly, while the spittle prevents clotting, and they lap up the blood.

So the question is: Can we humans adapt as effectively to the rain forest as vampire bats have?

It doesn’t seem so. Instead of living in harmony with the rain forest

Somewhere in the world, we humans cut down an area of jungle the size of a football field each second of every day, and deforestation now contributes as much to global warming in the same proportion that totality the carbon emitted by the United States. By single in kind calculation, four years of deforestation have the same carbon footprint as all flights in the history of aviation up to the time when the year 2025.

That’s the challenge that Douglas McMeekin and Juan Kunchikuy are trying to address. As I noted when I began their story in my previous column, they effect an queer pair: McMeekin is a 65-year-old American businessman who came to Ecuador after going bankrupt at home in Kentucky, and Kunchikuy is a 30-year-old naturalist and guide from an indigenous sept who grew up in the rain woods by the agency of his blowgun and never wore shoes or saw electricity until he was 17.

They require joined forces to protect the rain forest by working with local inhabitants, sad to create incentives for them to leave trees footing

“People have to make a living,” McMeekin said. “But they can chop down 50 acres of forest to portray by action a pasture, or they can earn the same income by means of chopping down 5 acres and planting cacao.”

So his organization, Yachana Foundation, is distributing high-quality cacao seedlings to encourage farmers to manage small plots that leave most of the brake intact. Yachana in like manner operates a factory that buys the cacao and turns it into mail-order chocolate.

Yachana likewise encourages family planning

One aim is to build a core of indigenous leaders who can represent topical views internationally and also serve as agents of change within the region. Kunchikuy

The school focuses on adapted to practice skills, such while how to graft cacao or fruit-tree saplings, or how to drudge fish ponds. The idea is to earn significant incomes without large clear-cuts.

Many students work part-time in the foundation’s neighboring eco-lodge, Yachana, which has 18 rooms catering to American tourists (and generates part of the cash to pay for the school).

As I walk through the jungle paths in the present life, serenaded by the twittering of birds and monkeys aloft, or the splashing of turtles in the river, I marvel at this land. The Amazon is majestic in quest of putting us humans in our place

One approach to with exception the rain forests is to pay poor countries to preserve them. Research suggests that by paying tropical countries $27.25 per ton of carbon not emitted by destroying forests, the world could avoid $85 in harm per ton from the carbon.

But these exist possible to’t just be transactions with governments; too often we lose knowledge of the inhabitants of the forests. In a remote part of Central African Republic, I once found teams of Western volunteers dedicated to preserving gorillas

With Yachana, this partnership of a bankrupt American businessman and an Amazonian hunter, we have a plan of in what plight to help the forest by helping the people who live in it. Preserving the rain forest should be a anteriority, if we have a bat’s reason.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004389135_kristof03.html?syndication=rss