Vancouver displaced Sydney as the least-affordable housing market after Hong Kong among large English-speaking cities, as home prices rose faster than incomes, a study of 325 metropolitan areas worldwide showed.
Vancouver
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U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron pledged more action to deal with
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Wall Street dealers made it tougher for hedge funds to finance trading of securities and derivatives in the three months through November, a Federal Reserve survey showed today.
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Diplomats frazzled by sleeplessness debated into the early hours of Sunday at a U.N. conference over a complex and far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change for the coming decades.
South Africa’s foreign minister and chairman of the 194-party conference, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, told delegates that failure to agree after 13 days of work would be an unsustainable setback for international efforts to control greenhouse gases.
“This multilateral system remains fragile and will not survive another shock,” she told a full meeting of the conference, which had been delayed more than 24 hours while ministers and senior negotiators labored over words and nuances.
The proposed Durban Platform offered answers to problems that have bedeviled global warming negotiations for years about sharing the responsibility for controlling carbon emissions and helping the world’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations cope with changing forces of nature.
The package must be approved by consensus, and no vote will be called. Determined opposition from even a small group of countries would unravel the deal put together after hundreds of hours of contentious negotiations.
Speakers from many developed countries said the package of documents more than 100 pages thick did not go far enough to help poor nations and did not require industrial countries to make more immediate and serious cuts in their carbon emissions. But most said they would accept it for lack of a better option.
But not Venezuela. “We all know this is a very bad agreement, that it will require more work next year and it cannot be adopted,” chief delegate Claudia Solerno said.
After weeks of being accused of obstructionism and delay, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern voiced surprisingly strong support for the deal.
“This is a very significant package. None of us likes everything in it. Believe me, there is plenty the United States is not thrilled about,” Stern said. But the package captured important advances that would be undone if it is rejected.
Saturday afternoon, as negotiations dragged on with no sign of breakthrough, some ministers and top negotiators left Durban with no assurance of an agreement.
European Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, drawn and fatigued after two nights with minimal sleep, warned that failure in Durban would jeopardize new momentum in acting against global warming.
Introducing the package late Saturday, Nkoana-Mashabane said its four documents, which were being printed as she spoke, were an imperfect compromise, but they reflected years of negotiations on the most central political responses to global warming.
The package would give new life to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, whose carbon emissions targets expire next year and apply only to industrial countries.
A separate document obliges major developing nations like China and India, excluded under Kyoto, to accept legally binding emissions targets in the future, by 2020 at the latest.
Together, the two documents overhaul a system designed 20 years ago that divide the world into a handful of wealthy countries facing legal obligations to reduce emissions, and the rest of the world which could undertake voluntary efforts to control carbon.
The European Union, the primary bloc falling under the Kyoto Protocol’s reduction commitments, said an extension of its targets was conditional on major developing countries also accepting limits with the same legal accountability. The 20th century division of the globe into two unequal parts was invalid in today’s world, the EU said.
The package also would set up the structure and governing bodies of a Green Climate Fund, which will receive and distribute billions of dollars promised annually to poor countries to help them adapt to changing climate conditions and to move toward low-carbon economic growth.
But the document made no specific mention of how those funds would be mobilized. Wealthy countries have pledged $100 billion a year by 2020 to poor countries, scaling up from $10 billion today.
The remaining document of more than 50 pages lays out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.
In the final hours, talks focused on unresolved differences on a clause encouraging countries to pledge greater reductions of greenhouse gases and to close what is known as the “ambition gap.” More than 80 countries have made either legally binding or voluntary pledges to control carbon emissions. But taken together, they will not go far enough to avert a potentially catastrophic rise in average temperatures this century, according to scientific modeling and projections.
Hedegaard said a lack of ambition could derail progress made on a host of other issues.
Countries had made concessions that they had resisted for years, and it would be “irresponsible” to lose that momentum now, she said.
Strong language on curbing emissions is of prime importance to small islands endangered by rising ocean levels and by many poor countries who live in extreme conditions that will be worsened by global warming.
Throughout the talks, the U.S., China and India remained stubbornly opposed to the EU’s plan to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto accord by 2020 that also would put them under legal obligations. The talks would conclude by 2015, allowing five years for it to be ratified by national legislatures. The plan insists the new agreement equally oblige all countries _ not just the few industrial powers _ to abide by emission targets.
Hours were devoted to arcane but diplomatically important questions of whether the objective of the talks was a legal “framework,” an “outcome,” or an “instrument.”
The expiring of Kyoto’s targets have hung over the U.N. process for years, and was the most contentious issue dividing rich and poor nations.
Developing countries were adamant that the Kyoto commitments continue since it is the only agreement that compels any nation to reduce emissions. Industrial countries say the document is deeply flawed because it makes no demands on heavily polluting developing countries. It was for that reason that the U.S. never ratified it.
Agreement by developing countries to accept binding targets essentially redraws the map. “That’s a very big deal,” said Samantha Smith, of WWF International. “That reflects a major macroeconomic and geopolitical change” in climate negotiations.
Ameren Missouri recently signaled plans to slash its energy efficiency budget for electricity customers next year, arguing that reducing energy use was shortchanging its shareholders.
But energy efficiency rebates for natural gas customers are staying intact, at least for the next year.
On Wednesday, the Missouri Public Service Commission voted unanimously to deny Ameren’s request to eliminate rebates on energy-saving items available to its 126,000 natural gas customers.
St. Louis-based Ameren agreed at the beginning of the year to fund rebates for an array of natural gas-saving items, from insulation to Energy Star doors, weather stripping and water heaters. The agreement was part of a broader settlement that allowed the utility to boost gas delivery rates by $5.6 million.
But Ameren sought to eliminate many of the most popular rebates soon afterward on grounds that they weren’t cost-effective. The cost of the improvements did not pay off in energy savings, the company argued.
Consumer advocates at the state Office of Public Counsel and Department of Natural Resources balked at the request because the utility had agreed to fund the program through the end of 2012 and later to have a third party evaluate the results low fee pay day loans.
The PSC ordered Ameren to maintain the natural gas efficiency programs following a hearing last month. The commission said ending the programs prematurely “will undercut the effort to have the agreed-upon usage data necessary to evaluate the programs.”
The agreement that Ameren signed requires the utility to fund the energy efficiency programs for three years at an amount reaching one-half percent of gross operating revenue for expenditures on cost-effective programs.
According to the PSC order, Ameren’s own evidence presented in last month’s hearing showed the utility knew that, using its own tests, some of the rebates weren’t cost-effective at the time it agreed to fund them.
Utility representatives declined to discuss the commission’s decision.
While the PSC will require Ameren to continue funding its gas efficiency program as it had promised, regulators have no similar signed agreement to require the utility to maintain electric efficiency programs.
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PetroChina Ltd., China’s biggest oil and gas company, saw its third-quarter profit jump 7.8 percent as higher crude oil prices and output helped to offset losses in its refining business.
The Beijing-based company reported Thursday a profit of 37.4 billion yuan ($5.9 billion) in July-September, compared with 34.7 billion yuan a year earlier.
PetroChina reported a refining loss of 41.5 billion yuan ($6.5 billion) as higher costs for imported crude oil outpaced the gains in prices for its products.
But weakness in the refining sector was offset by a 45 percent increase in crude oil prices over the same period a year earlier, to $103.78 per barrel. The company’s output in the first nine months of the year rose 5.1 percent, to 959 free credit score.3 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Like other Chinese energy and resource companies, it has actively sought access to resources overseas to help diversify its risks and ensure a steady supply of oil and gas needed to power China’s fast-growing economy.
PetroChina increased its refining by 10 percent in January-September, or about 2.7 million barrels a day. But it derives a larger share of its revenues from oil and gas production than rival Sinopec, which is mainly a refiner, helping to shield it from losses due to government controls on fuel prices.
The conspiracy involved enlisting star-studded bait in an exotic locale for a high-stakes job.
Heidi Fleiss, the infamous “Hollywood Madam,” sat among the fountains at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, pleading for a woman she didn’t know to help trap a man almost everybody in St. Louis knew.
The target: Ray Vinson, the homespun mortgage salesman whose twangy rendition of the “99-99″ suffix on his American Equity Mortgage phone number made him a staple of St. Louis radio and TV advertising.
The point: Vinson was embroiled in a nasty, high-stakes divorce, with tens of millions of dollars hanging on the decision of a St. Louis County judge.
The plan: To coax Pamela Brensinger, a former exotic dancer, to claim that she had an affair with Vinson and that he was a dangerous, abusive boyfriend.
The problem: Brensinger didn’t remember anyone named Ray Vinson.
The intrigue that September day in 2005 ran deep. Unknown to Fleiss, Brensinger’s husband, a driver for a Las Vegas escort service, sat at a nearby table, surreptitiously listening in. Unknown to Brensinger and her husband, private detectives who hired Fleiss were nearby payday advance.
Those detectives were working with Joe Adams, a flamboyant private eye from St. Louis who was the bodyguard of Vinson’s estranged wife, Deanna Daughhetee.
Court records show that Adams enlisted Fleiss after Brensinger refused entreaties from other investigators. They presumed that a dancer couldn’t turn down Fleiss. And Brensinger didn’t.
In 2006, Daughhetee walked out of the courthouse in Clayton with the lion’s share of American Equity Mortgage. Later that year, she married Adams, whose vanity license plates once read “BYE RAY.”
They may have been done with Vinson, but he was not done with them. He filed a lawsuit in Las Vegas, claiming Adams, Brensinger and others had conspired to discredit him with a fabric of lies. The case plodded through the court system for the last few years.
Finally, two months ago, a jury
A federal court judge has ruled that the name of Italian food truck Mangia Mobile is too close to the name of bricks-and-mortar restaurant Mangia Italiano, and the food truck’s owners are scrambling to find a new name.
U.S. District Judge Carol E. Jackson issued a preliminary injunction on Monday. Even if her order is eventually overturned, the food truck will stick with its new name, attorney Al Watkins said. “In effect, they’re changing their name for good,” he said. “My clients don’t want to be confused with Mangia Italiano any more than Mangia Italiano wants to be confused with Mangia Mobile.”
Siblings Thomas, Catherine and Alex Daake own the food truck. “I believe they are holding hands and singing Kumbaya as we speak as they are contemplating name alternatives,” Watkins said. (Actually, they were vending toasted ravioli, arancini deep-fried rice balls and a variety of sandwiches at Forest Park and Euclid avenues.)
The Daakes are asking the public to send suggestions for the name to Watkin’s law firm, Kodner, Watkins and Kloecker, at contact@kwklaw quick guaranteed personal loans.net. They’re looking for a name that, like Mangia, has six letters.
They’ll take down their existing Facebook page and website and inactivate their Twitter account within the next day or so. Because they announce the truck’s whereabouts through social media, selecting a new name is a priority. “It’s going to be a little bit of a logistical problem,” Watkins said.
In the meantime, they intend to stick to their previously announced schedule for this week. In addition to serving lunch today at BJC, they’ll be at Ninth and Locust streets on Wednesday, Eighth and Market streets on Thursday, and Broadway and Pine Street on Friday.
The National Hurricane Center says Tropical Storm Nate has weakened somewhat as it heads toward expected landfall later today in southern Mexico.
The Miami-based center said at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT) Sunday that Nate was centered 60 miles (95 kilometers) northeast of Veracruz. It said Mexican authorities have replaced a hurricane warning from Tuxpan to Veracruz with a tropical storm warning. Nate has top sustained winds of 60 mph (95 kph) and is moving west at 7 mph (11 kph) low fee payday loans.
Meanwhile, U.S. forecasters say Tropical Storm Maria had 60-mph (95-kph) winds early Sunday, intensifying slightly while moving northwest at 13 mph (20 kph) on a gradual course away from the northeast Caribbean toward the open Atlantic. Maria’s center was 95 miles (150 kilometers) east-northeast of St. Thomas early Sunday.
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