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So good-bye to Edwards, aka the electable white man. I judge you could saying he's done the nation a favor by further tarnishing that overrated and outdated brand. (If you don't want to hear about women who bestow themselves names allied Rielle and their love children, elect more female candidates!) If he had had further substance to begin with — a thicker resume, other raw political talent,a bigger, more enthusiastic following, a greater amount of, how to put this, compelling and endearing personality — an circumstance might not be fatal to his future. After all, Clinton got elected despite Gennifer Flowers. But , as Gail Collins points loudly, there just wasn't that much to Edwards, besides his policy proposals. Apparently the electorate intuited that. Fortunately, or we'd have just handed the election to McCain.

I supported Edwards because he was the only candidate who talked seriously about insufficiency, but the truth is I never liked him — the 28,000 upright foot house, the canned son-of-a-millworker routine, the endless parading of his family and its perfections, the (taken in the character of it seemed to me) politically manipulative application of his son's tragic death and his wife's cancer. "I care near to the policy, not the person," one of his academic advisers told me then I confessed my visceral dislike, and I felt properly rebuked for my superficiality. What, after all, did I really know about Edwards the human frame? What difference did his small vanity vibes make when compared with poverty, which only Edwards was minded to declare scandalous — and curable?

Time — and if not Time, the Enquirer — pleasure explain to if he's telling the truth that Rielle Hunter's daughter isn't his, and that he knows not at all with reference to the large sums of circulating medium essence paid to Hunter and self-proclaimed Other Man and baby father Andrew Young. Color me skeptical. And next time, I'm going to trust my instincts more. For good reasons and bad, the individual does matter.

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Another 400-foot residential tower has been proposed in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood.

This one, on Fourth Avenue between Lenora and Blanchard streets, may characteristic a person of consequence diverging: In what its backers call a “cultural response” to its next-door neighbor, the restored Cinerama Theatre, the project would include a “large-scale extraforaneous projection movie theater” on the roof.

The 40-story tower’s developer is HAL Real Estate Investments of Seattle, which bought the one-third-acre site on this account that $5 the masses in May. An 80-year-old, one-story building on the property that now houses a transmission-repair shop would be demolished.

HAL President Dana Behar declined to discuss the project Friday. “We’re calm in the very, very early stages,” he said.

An application packet submitted to the Department of Planning and Development this week indicates the tower, at 2116 Fourth Ave., would have about 360 units, 2,200 regulate feet of ground-floor retail distance and 12 levels of underground and above-ground parking containing 335 stalls.

The application doesn’t indicate whether the units would be apartments or condos.

The city’s Downtown Design Review Board, an advisory group, is tentatively scheduled to consider the project Sept. 9.

The City Council changed zoning in 2006 for much of Belltown and the Denny Triangle to permit residential towers up to 400 feet tall. Since sooner or later several developers accept submitted plans that would take superior situation of that change.

The Justen Co. and Columbia West have applied together to build two 400-foot towers on the northwest and southwest corners of Second Avenue and Virginia Street.

Intracorp, what one. received a city land-use permit for a 240-foot condo plan on Second between Stewart and Virginia in 2006, now has proposed a 400-foot apartment tower on the site in lieu.

Another developer, Tarragon, has a land-use permit to build a 43-story apartment citadel at Third Avenue and Virginia.

Murphy McCullough, older progress to maturity manager, aforesaid construction could start next year, depending on the market.

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The paper quoted people close to the situation as saying Continental was in "concrete talks" with several listed and unlisted international rivals round a likely multi-billion-euro deal.

It said in any degree deal, what one. would be structured similar to an all-share bid, was likely to have existence funded by way of a chief increase of about 20 percent, that would be value more than 2 billion euros.

Schaeffler, an automotive supplier, holds 8 percent of Continental shares and has access to a further 28 percent stake, secured by Merrill Lynch using cash swaps.

A Continental spokesman declined to comment.

Earlier this month, Schaeffler warned Continental not to resort to a big involving death increase as a way to fend off its bid.

(Reporting by Mantik Kusjanto; editing by David Stamp)

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NEW YORK —

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The merchandise boom that just weeks ago looked unstoppable may have finally burned itself out.

Sudden plunges in the price of everything from crude to copper and cotton suggest commodities soared too high, too fast - and analysts count upon even steeper declines in the months ahead as the U.S. economic slowdown spreads overseas and saps demand for energy, construction supplies and consumer goods.

Though commodities could hang higher again if the U.S. economy bounces back or cosmos oil supplies suddenly become scarce, experts mind neither scenario appears likely for several months or longer.

“The downward pace still has a way to go,” related Edward Meir, senior commodities analyst at MF Global in New York. “People are at this time coming about to the fact that growth is slowing, both in the U.S. and overseas, so demand for commodities will decline.”

At least some of the falling prices in commodities trading pits are probable to strain back prostrate to consumers. Lower oil prices act it cheaper to ship food around the globe, and ease the burden on consumers when they fill their aeriform fluid tanks and heat their homes. Falling prices for cereal grain and soybeans should also have some impact on what shoppers pay in the supermarket.

Highlighting the worm, the Jefferies-Reuters CRB index, a global commodities benchmark, plunged 10 percent in July, its biggest monthly drop since 1980, when the U.S. was in a recession.

“There was a commodities bubble and it has burst,” said James Cordier, president of Tampa, Fla.-based trading firms Liberty Trading Group and OptionSellers.com.

The stark change in sentiment marks a stunning turnaround for the once-sizzling commodities sector, which solitary months ago seemed on a relentless march higher amongst a global scramble on this account that native resources and a weak dollar that made them cheaper to overseas buyers. No longer.

In a sign of just how abundant the euphoria has faded, investors who thronged futures markets earlier this year seeking succulent, double-digit returns now can’t sell gold, silver and cocoa futures fast enough. Gold, put on this account that example, is now selling despite $864 an ounce - down from a record of $1,038.60 any ounce upon March 17 - and lately has been falling $10 or more a day.

“Everybody is scrambling to get out of the ship before the stay next to them,” said Nathan Golz, a commodities researcher at Wachovia Securities in St. Louis. “It’s amazing how fast merchandise gain become the last invest people longing to be obliged their riches.”

Davide Accomazzo, managing director of trading at Los Angeles-based Cervino Capital Management, before-mentioned his unshaken doesn’t see good buying opportunities in produce “beneficial to at least the next three to nine months.”

“The conditions just aren’t right,” said Accomazzo, whose solid trades options on metals, natural gas and soft commodities.

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Now that the political spectacle has died into disrepute and the dumbest comments have faded away, it’s time to re-examine Obama’s begin: In a rapidly globalizing economy, those who are fluent in at in the smallest degree one foreign language will be best prepared to find good jobs. Who can argue through that?

Certainly not the anxious branch, who push their children into the most selective kindergarten programs, the greatest in quantity debarring elementary schools and the in the greatest degree demanding high schools — by college-prep academic camps stuffed in betwixt, so they’ll be chosen for the most based on competition colleges. Those students will spend at least one college semester, perhaps in addition, studying out of the house, in what place they will practice their French, Italian, Spanish, Russian or, increasingly, Mandarin.

They’ll be in demand for the prestigious law firms, the Wall Street jobs, the tenure-track breeding posts. Those stuck with "English-only" skills will find themselves less valuable in a global marketplace.

There is a powerful strain of anti-intellectualism in American political and cultural life which, when joined with undercurrents of jingoism, heaps suspicion on those educated plenty and cosmopolitan enough to speak foreign languages. Fluent in French, John Kerry was on the receiving end of that foolish claptrap during the 2004 presidential campaign. (Obama, who speaks only English, says he wishes he were current in another language.)

That Kerry-bashing lacked ideological consistency: Jeb Bush — who remains popular among ultra-conservative Republicans — majored in Latin American studies in college and is flowing in Spanish. A Texas bank sent him to Caracas, Venezuela, shortly after college, to what he worked in international science. (His brother, President George W. Bush, attempts to speak Spanish but does so poorly.)

According to the Web site for the federal Department of Education, President Bush has pushed a "National Security Language Initiative" to "dramatically increase the number of Americans learning, speaking and teaching critical-need extrinsic languages. Foreign language skills are essential to engaging foreign governments and peoples, especially in critical creation regions, to promote understanding, convey respect for other cultures and animate reform. These skills are also fundamental to the economic competitiveness and security interests of the nation."

Sounds like there’s something almost which Bush and Obama come to an understanding: Nothing could be more dangerous since an America already losing its edge in the earth than to show its children to disdain other languages and suspicion other cultures, to skip geography, to consign to oblivion about rove abroad.

If the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians and the Russians are busy learning English so they be possible to answer the purpose walk of life with us, doesn’t it beseem us to learn their languages, too? (In China, all elementary school students must study English.) At a time when the West is threatened by Arab jihadists, don’t we need many more intelligence agents and soldiers who speak Arabic?

While activists alarmed about illegal immigration have spent the last decade supporting "English-only" codes and decrying the loss of cultural touchstones associated with Western Europe, the actual detriment to the nation lies in our refusal to acknowledge the growing relating to housekeeping competitiveness of other countries. South Koreans aren’t shunning English. It’s one more weapon in their arsenal as they advance in commerce, engineering and the sciences.

So the next time you hear more smart-mouth pundit acting as though foreign-language fluency is a portent of decadence or some unbecoming Frenchy-ness, dress in’t fall for it. That pundit likely has a passport. If he has college-age kids, he has probably worked hard to help them study abroad. Do as he does, not as he says. Enroll your kids in Spanish or Russian or Mandarin classes.

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ASHLAND, N.H. A flash flood roared through a central New Hampshire campground, sweeping a Rhode Island family’s SUV downstream, killing a 7-year-old girl, and leaving her mother and 5-year-old brother clinging for life to a tree till they were rescued, authorities said.

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The flood Thursday twilight at the Ames Brook Campground followed a valid storm that dumped several inches of rain without ceasing parts of the state.

Witnesses said the girl’s father had left the conveyance at the time that it was swept into the passing from hand to hand at about 6 p.m., before-mentioned Chris Harris, who led the rescue team that took the girl’s mother and brother to close custody.

The man screamed for help from the banks as the vehicle was pushed downstream, witnesses said.

“We heard the man screaming bloody assassinate,” said camper Theresa Simione, 41. “He was screaming, ‘Help, help. The car is in the water. My family’s in the car. Call 911. Help me, help me.’”

The married man’s wife and son managed to escape the SUV and seize violently a tree, but the daughter was trapped inside, authorities said.

Harris said rescuers reached the woman and her son about 7 p.m.

“The shed water had her pinned in anticipation of an apple tree and she was holding onto her son,” Harris said. “She was yelling for help: ‘I can’t hold onto him much longer. You need to give me some help.’”

He said most of the woman’s clothes had been torn done by the furious water. Her son was unconscious, and both were hypothermic.

Authorities found the girl’s body in the crumpled SUV after the water receded.

Stewart said the boy was immovable Friday at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon. The family has asked officials not to free their names till they’ve notified relatives.

About 29 people from the campground were put up in hotels, Stewart said.

LOS ANGELES The woman former presidential candidate John Edwards admitted having an affair with Friday is a sometimes Hollywood producer-director who has all but dropped from sight inasmuch as dismissing vocable of their liaison as nothing but lies last month.

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Rielle Hunter, a 42-year-old who recently gave birth to a girl who Edwards says is not his, has long been said to be the inspiration for Alison Poole, the “cocaine-addled, sexually voracious” 20-year-old tend character in “My Life Story,” Jay McInerney’s novel of 1980s excess and degradation.

“She’s a cautious girl,” the New York Post’s Page Six gossip file quoted McInerney as saying earlier this week. The author’s actor did not return a call Friday from The Associated Press.

Hunter, whose first name is pronounced Riley, used to be “a substantive party girl” but has calmed prostrate in fresh years, McInerney told the Post.

She and her business partner, Mimi Hockman, created the troop Midline Groove Productions in 2006 and produced four Web videos showing Edwards as a down-to-earth, regular guy visiting everyday the bulk of mankind across the country. One of them shows him visiting Uganda.

Between giving speeches, Edwards relaxes and jokes with several people traveling with him, including a woman who is never seen on camera.

“That is a great speech,” he tells her at one stage as he reviews the words he will later deliver to an hearing: “If we want to live in a moral, honest and just America … we can’t wait for somebody else to transact it. We have to do it.”

The woman giggles in response.

Midline Groove Productions is described on its Web site as “committed to projects that reveal truth.”

Neither Hunter nor Hockman responded to an e-mail Friday seeking make comments. A phone number for the company could not be obtained.

Hunter also has one credit onward the Internet Movie Database Web place for the 2000 film “Billy Bob and Them,” with a view to which she is listed as writer, producer and actress. However, the Screen Actors Guild reported Friday that it has no contact information for her.

In each parley by the TV show “Extra” highest year, Hunter talked about working with Edwards on the videos, that were praised at the time for the reason that an innovative national application of the Web.

NEW YORK —

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Grains, energy and metals prices tumbled Friday afterward a sharp jump in the dollar once again lessened the appeal of wares as a hedge facing the weakening currency.

The dollar, whose drawn out decline contributed to the roar in commodities prices over the past year, reached its highest period against the euro because that February. Now that other world economies appear to be joining the U.S. plan in a slowdown, the dollar is clawing back and big institutional investors are unloading their commodities holdings.

Those large investors flocked back to funds on Friday - the Dow Jones pertaining average rose more than 300 points, and banks and other financial services companies saw especially hefty gains.

“There’s a money shift going on,” reported Jason Ward, every analyst with Northstar Commodity in Minneapolis, who believes grains prices have before that time seen their peaks for the nearest few years. “You’re considering hedge funds bring forward begone from the commodities sector and toward the financial sector.”

The dollar’s rebound was Friday’s big trigger, Ward said. For farming prices in particular, the rising dollar means that U.S. grain exports to other regions such as China and Europe - which have seen healthy crops of their own - will likely slow down.

Wheat for September delivery dropped 57 cents to settle at $7.6525 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade. Corn during December delivery fell 23.75 cents to settle at $5.1825, and November soybeans fell 58.5 cents to end at $11.805 a bushel.

For the week, wheat is down 3.6 percent, indian corn is down 11.4 percent, and soybeans are down 13.5 percent.

Energy prices in addition sank. Light, sweet crude for September delivery fell $4.82 to settle at $115.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, its lowest conclusion as May 1, whereas front-month crude finished at $112.52.

In a research note Friday, Lehman Brothers chief efficacy economist Edward Morse said he believes oil prices have topped out.

“Barring a physical disruption that may temporarily spike prices, we judge that oil prices have peaked for the next few years,” Morse wrote.

Morse pointed to lowered demand growing expectations in a puzzle of the International Energy Agency; slower growth and a shift to efficient vehicles in the United States; and the fact that China has less incentive to stockpile fuel now that the Olympics are starting.

Heating oil futures fell 10.56 cents to finish at $3.1280 a gallon on the Nymex. Gasoline futures level 11.53 cents to close at $2.8874 a gallon.

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Ever since Bill Gates announced a $47 the great body of the people benefaction to TechnoServe at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, I’ve been wondering what the organization is up to that would warrant such a big check. I had a chance to find out when I had a couple of hours of slack regulate in Dar es Salaam before a flight to Egypt (via Nairobi and Khartoum). The forming’s Tanzania headquarters staff had just taken up residence in recent offices a scarcely any blocks from the sea. There have been some major shifts in care as well. Running the Tanzania coffee growing throw uncovered, which is getting a big chunk of the Gates grant, is Tim King, a 10-year long practised of McKinsey & Co.

The person in sum charged of the rest of the Tanzania programs is Hillary Miller-Wise, a framer journalist who apparently aphorism the error of her ways and is since dedicated to helping poor people.

TechnoServe was one of the pioneers of genial entrepreneurship—in the presence of the label was invented, in fact. Founded by Connecticut businessman Ed Bullard in 1968, it has evolved into a mature but pacify fast-growing organization with 500 employees in 19 countries. Rather than handing money to people in need, it provides grassroots consulting services aimed at helping them spot business opportunities and run their businesses more successfully. While other helping-hand organizations typically take a situation that exists and try to make it better, TechnoServe spots novel or expanded business opportunities and helps farmers, primarily, figure out how to be well received advantage of them.

The coffee brew was pioneered six years ago by a couple of other TechnoServers, Paul Stewart, who now is starting up the same program in Rwanda, and Adolph Kumburu, who runs the program on the found in the north of Tanzania. These fellows famous that about 3 million households in East Africa hang on coffee growing for all or part of their income. They had near-perfect altitude, temperature, and soil stipulations, and most of them grew Arabica beans, the better of the sum of two units main commercial varieties. Still, their crops fetched an average of six cents less than the world article of merchandise prices for such beans on the New York Commodity Exchange.

Kumburu and Stewart unwavering to figure on the outside how these farmers could ride the specialty coffee wave created by the agency of the likes of retailers Starbucks and Peets. Previously, large wet mill factories—where the beans are separated from the fuit and dried—had been built in East Africa, mimicking the come that had been lucky in Latin America. But it turned out that this didn’t fit with the realities on the ground in East Africa. Most of the growers were small farmers who produced meager crops and were widely scattered. It was too far for them to carry their beans to the processing sow on their backs, so they were dependent on middlemen to purchase from them, usually at a to a reduced state price, and carry their beans to the factory.

The two TechnoServers came up by the idea of helping groups of growers in a geographic area to band together and build their own small processing plants. This manner, 200 farmers could make something happen and take control of their own destiny. The smaller factories cost about $8,000, and the operating costs were low. TechnoServe helped them get financing and it set up a mercantile operation, KILICAFE, to aggregate the replenish from the farmer groups and sell it at favorable prices to major customers including Starbucks. Six years later, there are 10,000 farmers with 56 factories participating and many more waiting in line. Fifteen new factories are expected to be established this year.

Now, with the Gates coin, they’re expanding the program within Tanzania, and moving in a major fashion into Rwanda and Kenya. “”The Gates Foundation is changing the rules of the game,” Hillary told me. “They’re aggressive on metrics and targets, and they’re very biassed in scale.”

But there are many hurdles on the wont to large plate operations. TechnoServe launched a new program of providing basic business lessons for farmers three months ago. At the first such meeting, in Mbinga, in the southerly end of Tanzania, they began by asking 50 farmers how many of them had ever calculated their annual sales. Only one before-mentioned he had. And it turned out on closer scrutiny that he had done it wrong. The lesson hither: “Basic matter education has to exist our first action,” said King.

One mouth-piece of information I found shocking: Many of these farmers have never tasted coffee. So the East African Fine Coffee Association, a trade group TechnoServe supports, is going into the secluded villages with coffee “cupping” gear to give the farmers a basic understanding of the product they’re creating.

It’s a long highroad from instruction a Tanzanian farmer how to slurp coffee to bring out the taste to creating a sophisticated businessperson. But this organization seems to have a level-headed approach that can take them there eventually—with potentially outstanding results for the people and economies of East Africa.

British shoppers could be vulnerable to the same kind of cyberattack that snared the data of else than 40 million U.S. credit-card holders, experts say

by Nick Heath

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UK shoppers proof of desert card details could be at risk from the same wireless hack technique that snared more than 40 million people’s details in the US, according to security experts.

Security at hundreds of medium sized retailers is not fully checked to ensure financial minor circumstances can not be accessed through insecure wireless networks, they claim.

It comes in the wake of US rulers charging 11 people in sexual commerce by the country’s largest-ever identity robbery case, alleged to have been carried out by hacking into wireless networks—so-called ‘wardriving’.

They are accused of stealing more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers before selling the accusation, with one of the victims TJX Corporation, owner of garments retailer TK Maxx, being targeted by hackers who broke the WEP encryption adhering its wireless netting.

Retailers handling up to six the great body of the people Visa transactions in the UK are not subject to each independent audit to check they are accommodating. with PCI DSS security standards that can block like hacks.

A test of 552 wireless networks in central London last year by surety analysts NCC Group form in a mould 93 per cent fell in the present life the strongest encryption standard and that 41 per cent used the “broken” WEP encryption.

Andrew Moloney, security expert at RSA Security, aforesaid: “All the focus has been on the ‘level one’ merchants—the high street and multi-national retailers—and form sure they are compliant with PCI DSS.

“The smaller retailers handling hundreds of thousands or low millions of transactions are added exposed because they have not been pushed down that path to the same extent. There has not been a lot of pressure and inculcation to ensure that they are keeping to the PCI DSS.

“We are as likely to see attacks in the UK as the US or any one wealthy Western country to which place there is ample faith cards through a good credit fix the limits of.”

Paul Vlissidis, head of assurance at NCC Group, uttered: “There is a good chance that there is a lot more insecure technology down among those low level merchants.

“And this is the level at which there are going to be a large number of retailers, similar to opposed to the comparatively small number of level one retailers.”

Guidance on the Visa Europe sites makes clear that even though merchants classed at level two and in the world of the departed are not subject to an onsite examine they are subject to a quarterly “network investigate” of their systems.