LOS ANGELES, Jan 29 (TheWrap.com) ? Scotty Bowers, a former Marine who claims to have run a gay and bisexual prostitution ring for some of Hollywood's biggest names beginning in the 1940s, is about to spill the details in a tell-all book.
Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh are among those named by Bowers, now 88.
"Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars" is to be published on February 14 by Grove Press. Bowers, who lives in the Hollywood Hills, was interviewed by the New York Times ahead of the release of the book, which was written by Lionel Friedberg.
Bowers, who claims to have plied his trade for nearly three decades, said he has turned down many offers to tell his story over the years.
"I finally said yes because I'm not getting any younger and all of my famous tricks are dead by now," he told the Times. "The truth can't hurt them anymore."
The tales are lurid. Bowers says in the book that he set Hepburn up with "over 150 different women" and recounts the sexual high jinks of Spencer Tracy, Cole Porter, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
Bowers said he got started when he was working at a gas station near Paramount Pictures and actor Walter Pidgeon came in and propositioned him. He accepted, the word spread, and, according to Bowers, a business that flourished until the onset of the AIDS epidemic was born.
Younger readers -- at least those raised in the Internet and TMZ age -- may find nearly as shocking the fact that the stories were squelched by studio publicists and remained largely under wraps back in the day.
(Reuters) ? U.S. Catholic bishops and priests across the country read out letters at Mass on Sunday protesting plans by President Barack Obama's administration to force religiously-affiliated nonprofit groups to offer birth-control coverage to women employees.
On Jan 20, the Obama administration made final a proposal requiring most employer-sponsored health plans to offer women contraceptive services including sterilization without copays, co-insurance or deductibles.
Religious authorities including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the rule as a violation of religious conscience and the constitutional right to religious freedom.
In an organized protest, numerous local media reported on Sunday that Catholic clergy read out letters of protest Mass.
"We cannot, we will not, comply with this unjust law," wrote Phoenix bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in one such letter, adding that the rule was an attack on religious freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
"Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build (America) ... or to have the posterity stripped of their God given rights," he added.
The rule changes ordered by the administration were welcomed
by birth control advocates including the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The government's decision does not apply to churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and some religiously-affiliated elementary and secondary schools, which remain exempt.
But it came as a blow to religious officials who pushed hard for a broader exemption that would have included religious organizations whose main purpose is not to provide religious services for their members. These include institutions such as Catholic-affiliated hospitals.
The Obama administration said it sought to meet those concerns by allowing religious groups an extra year to adjust.
The change is intended to reduce health costs, unwanted pregnancies and abortions, as part of Obama's healthcare overhaul.
The 2010 healthcare reform law, his signature domestic policy achievement, is facing unprecedented challenges in the Supreme Court and from Republicans this year as the president seeks re-election.
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) ? An Afghan man killed his wife for giving birth to a third daughter rather than the son he hoped for, police in Afghanistan's northern Kunduz province said on Monday.
The victim, 28, known by the one name of Storai, was strangled by her husband -- a local militia member -- and his mother on Saturday in revenge for bearing the couple's third daughter three months ago in Mohasili village, police said.
Police said they arrested the victim's mother-in-law in connection with her death, but Storai's husband was still at large, likely sheltered by heavily-armed militia colleagues.
"The existence of militiamen is a huge problem and therefore we face difficulty in arresting him," said Kunduz police chief Sufi Habib.
Nadera Geya, head of the Kunduz women's affairs department, called the killing one of the worst examples of violence against women she had encountered.
Violence against women is commonplace in Afghanistan. In late November in the same province, an Afghan family that refused to give their daughter in marriage to a man they considered irresponsible was attacked at home by assailants who poured acid over both parents and three children.
Police later arrested the rejected suitor and his three brothers for the attack.
With foreign combat troops set to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and moves ongoing to kickstart a peace process involving the ultra-conservative Taliban, rights watchdogs inside and outside Afghanistan fear women's rights may be sacrificed.
"The rights of women cannot be relegated to the margins of international affairs, as this issue is at the core of our national security and the security of people everywhere," the U.S. embassy in Kabul said in a statement on Monday.
(Reporting by Mohammad Hamid and Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Ed Lane)
This is why actress/blogger/best-selling author Mindy Kaling is not getting her own "Office" spin-off: Vulture hears Fox is just about ready to order a pilot for a half-hour comedy written by and starring Kaling as an OB/GYN.
Since the feds shut down Megaupload, there's been concern about what would happen to the user data stored using the service. Turns out that it may just be deleted, as early as this Thursday. More »
MIAMI ? Newt Gingrich slammed GOP rival Mitt Romney on Sunday for the steady stream of attacks he likened to "carpet-bombing," trying to cut into the resurgent front-runner's lead in Florida in the dwindling hours before Tuesday's pivotal presidential primary.
Surging ahead in polls, Romney kept the pressure on Gingrich with a dominant advertising presence that questioned the former House speaker's leadership and ethics. During campaign stops, Romney divided his focus between Gingrich and President Barack Obama.
In what has become a wildly unpredictable race, the momentum has swung back to Romney, staggered last weekend by Gingrich's victory in South Carolina. Romney has begun advertising in Nevada ahead of that state's caucuses next Saturday, illustrating the challenges ahead for Gingrich, who has pledged to push ahead no matter what happens in Florida.
Romney's campaign has dogged Gingrich at his own campaign stops, sending surrogates to remind reporters of Gingrich's House ethics probe in the 1990s and other episodes in his career.
Gingrich reacted defensively, accusing the former Massachusetts governor and a political committee that supports him of lying, and the GOP's establishment of allowing it.
"I don't know how you debate a person with civility if they're prepared to say things that are just plain factually false," Gingrich said during appearances on Sunday talk shows. "I think the Republican establishment believes it's OK to say and do virtually anything to stop a genuine insurgency from winning because they are very afraid of losing control of the old order."
Gingrich objected specifically to a Romney campaign ad that includes a 1997 NBC News report on the House's decision to discipline Gingrich, then speaker, for ethics charges.
After hounding Gingrich during two debates last week, Romney returned more of his attention to Obama, who had been Romney's chief target as he tried to make the case that he was the most worthy Republican to challenge the Democratic incumbent.
But Romney didn't relent in swiping at Gingrich, even as an NBC News/Marist poll published Sunday showed Romney with support from 42 percent of likely Florida primary voters, compared with 27 percent for Gingrich.
"He's now finding excuses ... complaining about what he thinks were the reasons he thinks he's had difficulty here in Florida. But you know, we've got a president who has a lot of excuses," Romney said at a rally in Naples. "And the excuses are over, it's time to produce."
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, trailing in Florida by a wide margin, stayed in his home state, where his 3-year-old daughter, Bella, was hospitalized. She has a genetic condition caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 18th chromosome. Aides said he would resume campaigning as soon as possible.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who has invested little in Florida, looked ahead to Nevada. The libertarian-leaning Paul is focusing more on gathering delegates in caucus states, where it's less expensive to campaign. But securing the nomination only through caucus states is a hard task.
The race began moving toward a two-person fight in South Carolina, and has grown more bitter and personal in Florida.
The intense effort by Romney to slow Gingrich is comparable his strategy against Gingrich in the closing month before Iowa's leadoff caucuses Jan. 3.
Gingrich led in Iowa polls, lifted by what were hailed as strong performances in televised debates, only to drop in the face of withering attacks by Romney, aided immensely by ads sponsored by a political committee run by former Romney aides.
In Florida, senior Romney aides have popped up at Gingrich events to question Gingrich's conservative credentials. Led by Romney's top Iowa adviser, David Kochel, Romney's team cites Gingrich's criticism of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan's Medicare overhaul plan last year, and his appearance with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in an advertisement supporting climate-change legislation.
"That kind of language emboldens the critics of conservatism," Kochel said. "We're out pointing that out correcting the record."
Gingrich has responded by criticizing Romney's conservative credentials. Outside an evangelical Christian church in Lutz, Gingrich said he was the more loyal conservative on key social issues.
"This party is not going to nominate somebody who is a pro-abortion, pro-gun-control, pro-tax increase liberal," Gingrich said. "It isn't going to happen."
But Gingrich, in appearances on Sunday news programs, returned to complaining about Romney's tactics, rather than emphasizing his own message as that of a conservative with a record of action in Congress.
"When we get to a positive idea campaign, I consistently win," Gingrich said. "It's only when he can mass money to focus on carpet-bombing with negative ads that he gains any traction at all."
Romney and the political committee that supports him had combined to spend some $6.8 million in ads criticizing Gingrich in the Florida campaign's final week. Gingrich and a group that supports him were spending about one-third that amount.
Gingrich worked to portray himself as the insurgent outsider, collecting the endorsement of tea party favorite Herman Cain, whose own campaign for president foundered amid sexual harassment allegations.
It was unclear how aggressively Gingrich would be able to compete in states beyond Florida. The next televised debate, a format Gingrich has used to his advantage, is not until Feb. 22, more than three weeks away.
Romney already has campaigned in Nevada more than Gingrich, is advertising there, and stresses his business background in a state hard-hit by the economy. His campaign welcomed the Sunday endorsement of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada's largest newspaper.
Michigan and Maine, states where Romney is well-positioned also hold their contests in February. Arizona, a strong tea-party state where Gingrich could do well, has its primary Feb. 28.
___
Associated Press writers Steve Peoples in Naples and Shannon McCaffrey in Lutz contributed to this report.
RIO RICO, Ariz?? Picking her way into the desert brush, Raquel Martinez gathered scores of plastic water bottles tossed in an Arizona desert valley near the Mexico border, often by migrants making a risky trek into the United States across increasingly remote terrain.
"We need more bags ... there's so much trash," said Martinez, one of scores of volunteers helping clean up the dry bed of the Santa Cruz River about 10 miles north of the Mexico border on Saturday.
Trash tossed by thousands of illegal immigrants as they chase the American Dream has been a persistent problem for years in the rugged Arizona borderlands that lie on a main migration and smuggling route from Mexico.
The problem was compounded as immigrants and drug traffickers responded to ramped up vigilance on the U.S.-Mexico border by taking increasingly remote routes, leaving more waste behind in out-of-the way and hard-to-clean areas, authorities say.
"Migants used to follow the washes or follow the roads or utility poles," said Robin Hoover, founder of the Tucson-based non-profit Humane Borders.
"Now they're having to move farther and farther from the middle of the valleys," he added. "They end up making more camp sites and cutting more trails when they do that, and, unfortunately ... leave more trash."
Those making the punishing march carry food, water and often a change of clothes on the trek through remote desert areas that can take several days.
Most is tossed before they pile into vehicles at pickup sites like the one getting attention on the outskirts of Rio Rico, from where they head on to the U.S. interior.
"One of the problems that we are facing is that these sites are becoming more and more remote as law enforcement steps up its efforts," Henry Darwin, director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, said of the flourishing borderland garbage dumps.
"There's probably sites out there that we haven't encountered yet or don't know about because there's a lot of people out in those areas," added Darwin, who gave testimony on the issue to state lawmakers earlier this month.
There are no numbers to show exactly how many would-be migrants or smugglers take the illegal and surreptitious trek across the border into Arizona from Mexico each year.
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But in an indication of the scale of the migration, federal border police made nearly 130,000 arrests last year in Arizona, where hundreds of Border Patrol agents, miles of fencing and several unmanned surveillance drones have been added in recent years to tighten security along the porous border.
With limited funding for clean up, Arizona environmental authorities draw on volunteers to help in drives like the one near Rio Rico, where an estimated 140 volunteers including residents, community and youth groups took part on Saturday.
Clean up efforts since 2008 by the department of environmental quality have included pulling 42 tons of trash from 160 acres of Cocopah tribal lands in far western Arizona, and clean ups at least seven sites on ranches and public land in areas south of Tucson.
Signs of illegal immigrants and even drug traffickers making the circuitous foot journey abound in the mesquite-studded riverbed near Rio Rico, a vigorous day's walk north of the border.
"I've found about a trillion water bottles," said David Burkett, a lawyer from Scottsdale, who worked up a sweat as he filled his fourth 50-pound trash bag. Nearby are tossed backpacks, food containers, a blanket and a pair of shoes.
He points out that alongside the apparent migrant trash is a large amount of other waste including a couch, kitchen countertops and yard debris, likely tossed by residents and contractors. Still, it is a shock to those living locally.
"We don't realize how bad it is until we come down and see it," said Candy Lamar, a volunteer who lives in sprawling, low density Rio Rico, as she works to pick up trash.
The area getting attention on Saturday lies a few miles from a remote spot where the bodies of three suspected drug traffickers were found shot to death "execution style" last November.
The area is not far from another out-of-the-way spot where Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot dead by suspected border bandits in December 2010. Volunteers working on Saturday were aware of the potential hazards.
As she stuffed a blue garbage sack with trash, retiree Sharon Christensen eyed discarded burlap sacking, blankets and cord -- the remains of a makeshift backpack of the type often used by drug traffickers walking marijuana loads up from Mexico.
"It would make me hesitant to come out here on my own, knowing that this kind of activity is going on ... It is a concern, and we need to be mindful," said Christensen, a retiree and hiking enthusiast.
Clean-up organizers liaise with Border Patrol and local police on security, in addition to warning volunteers of potential danger from snakes, scorpions or even bees that can swarm in discarded vehicle tires, and of potential hazards including medical waste and human excrement.
Equipped with gloves, volunteers such as Burkett, the Scottsdale lawyer, were glad to take part on Saturday.
"As an avid outdoors person in Arizona, I spend a lot of time using the desert," he said. "It's important to me personally to take the time to give back."
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
BERLIN (Reuters) ? Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to deflect growing international pressure on Germany to agree an increase in the euro zone's bailout funds Sunday by saying talks were still continuing.
Amid calls to raise the size of the permanent European Stability Mechanism (ESM) ahead of an EU summit Monday, Merkel was asked by Bild am Sonntag newspaper about "rising pressure" on Germany to "massively increase" the bailout fund.
But the chancellor did not address the issue of whether Germany would back raising the ESM and instead answered a question about what impact increasing the ESM might have on the German budget this year.
"The negotiations are continuing on whether we'll pay in our contribution in one tranche or two tranches," said Merkel, who has resisted calls for Germany to back increasing the bailout funds in part due to opposition in her center-right coalition.
"But independent of all that, our deficit level as far as the European Stability Pact is concerned will not be increased as a result because the money won't be gone. It's only to be transferred from the federal budget to the ESM."
Merkel is keen to avoid the EU summit being sidetracked by debate about whether extra funding should be funneled into the euro zone bailout funds, as the International Monetary Fund and some euro states -- including Italy and Spain -- have suggested.
A close Merkel ally in parliament, Peter Altmaier, said it made sense to first see how effective the ESM is.
"It would be good if we make good use of the amounts that are now available," Altmaier, a senior MP, told German radio.
Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann said in an interview in Der Spiegel news magazine he believed the 500-billion euro ESM firewall may need to be raised, echoing appeals made in Berlin by IMF head Christine Lagarde and Italian premier Mario Monti.
"I wouldn't promise my parliament that 500 billion euros will be enough," Faymann said, adding his government was preparing to contribute to a higher firewall by taking funds from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF).
"This is the direction it should go -- that way we'd come up with a total of about 750 billion euros," he said. "Financial markets are observing us closely and measuring how strong we are by looking at the size of the firewall. If it's too low, we'll be giving the markets a reason to speculate against us."
German government sources have told Reuters Merkel does not rule out boosting funds if the euro zone crisis deteriorates over the coming months. But only the threat of a disaster may persuade her coalition to back more funds for the currency bloc.
The German government believes that there should not be any discussions about increasing the firewall until March.
The leader of Germany's center-left opposition in parliament, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said Merkel was making a mistake by resisting calls to raise the ESM.
"You can argue whether continually coming up with new bailout funds is the right way to go," Steinmeier told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. "But for those who decide in a situation like this to set up a permanent bailout fund, they should realize that this one is definitely not big enough."
Steinmeier, foreign minister under Merkel in the 2005-2009 grand coalition and a possible challenger in 2013, said that Merkel had failed to inspire public confidence during Europe's worst post-war crisis, by repeatedly changing course.
"She has annoyed a lot of people and put them off on Europe by continuously changing direction," said Steinmeier.
"As Europe's strongest export nation we have a fundamental interest in preventing this crisis from becoming a permanent recession for all of Europe," he added. "If Europe isn't doing well, then Germany won't be doing well either."
(Additional Reporting By Andreas Rinke; Editing by Sophie Walker)
A topless Ukrainian protester is arrested by Swiss police after climbing up a fence at the entrance to the congress center where the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012. The activists are from the group Femen, which has have become popular in Ukraine for staging small, half-naked protests against a range of issues including oppression of political opposition. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)
A topless Ukrainian protester is arrested by Swiss police after climbing up a fence at the entrance to the congress center where the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012. The activists are from the group Femen, which has have become popular in Ukraine for staging small, half-naked protests against a range of issues including oppression of political opposition. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)
Topless Ukrainian protesters demonstrate at the entrance to the congress center where the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012. The activists are from the group Femen, which has have become popular in Ukraine for staging small, half-naked protests against a range of issues including oppression of political opposition. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)
Topless Ukrainian protesters climb up a fence at the entrance to the congress center where the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Switzerland Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012. The activists are from the group Femen, which has have become popular in Ukraine for staging small, half-naked protests against a range of issues including oppression of political opposition. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)
A topless Ukrainian protester is arrested by Swiss police after climbing up a fence at the entrance to the congress center where the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012. The activists are from the group Femen, which has have become popular in Ukraine for staging small, half-naked protests against a range of issues including oppression of political opposition. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)
Activists of the Ukrainian feminist nudity group FEMEN clash with Swiss police during a protest at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012. (AP Photo/Keystone/Jean-Christophe Bott)
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) ? Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world's poor. Separately, demonstrators from the Occupy movement marched to the edge of the gathering.
After a complicated journey to reach the heavily guarded Swiss resort town of Davos, the Ukrainians arrived at the entrance to the complex where the World Economic Forum takes place every year.
With temperatures around freezing in the snow-filled town, they took off their tops and tried to climb a fence before being detained. "Crisis! Made in Davos," read one message painted across a protester's torso, while others held banners that said "Poor, because of you" and "Gangsters party in Davos."
Davos police spokesman Thomas Hobi said the three women were taken to the police station and told that they weren't allowed to demonstrate. He said they would be released later Saturday.
The activists are from the group Femen, which has become popular in Ukraine for staging small, half-naked protests to highlight a range of issues including oppression of political opposition. They have also conducted protests in some other countries.
"We came here to Switzerland to Davos to explain the position of all poor people of the world, to explain that we are poor because of these rich people who now sit in the building," said Inna Schewcenko.
Protesters from the Occupy movement that started with opposition to practices on Wall Street held a separate demonstration in Davos on Saturday. A small group of protesters are camped in igloos in Davos to call for more help for the needy.
About 40 Occupy protesters gathered in front of the town hall. Some held placards with slogans such as "If voting would change anything, it would be illegal" and "Don't let them decide for you, Occupy WEF."
They then marched toward the forum, prompting about a dozen police officers to hastily erect a mobile barrier as Saturday shoppers looked on with bemusement.
The demonstrators chanted anti-capitalist slogans, remaining about 100 feet (30 meters) from police lines.
One member of the Occupy camp was invited to speak at a special event outside the forum on Friday night to discuss the future of capitalism; British opposition leader Ed Miliband was also speaking.
Soon after the panel discussion began, some activists in the audience jumped up and started chanting slogans, and the protester panelist walked off the stage.
Other members of the audience told the activists to "shut up" and arguments disrupted the panel for about 20 minutes. The discussion then resumed, without the Occupy panelist.
___
Anja Niedringhaus and Paolo Santalucia contributed to this report.
Today, one-fifth of America?s electricity comes from nuclear power. The federal government wants to gradually expand that fraction in order to phase out greenhouse-gas-emitting coal-fired plants, which generate most of our energy. But nuclear power plants take a long time and a lot of money to build. That?s why the Department of Energy is pushing a new technology called the small modular reactor (SMR). Last week, the department announced that it would invest $452 million toward developing and licensing a smaller and sleeker nuclear reactor.
SMRs will be small enough to be pre-assembled in a factory and shipped to location. These easy-to-install reactors could potentially shave years and millions of dollars off the construction of nuclear power plants, and could make it economical to bring nuclear power to rural areas or developing countries that lack infrastructure. That?s why SMRs are being hailed as the next generation in nuclear technology.
How It Works
First, don?t let the name fool you. "These are not going to fit in your backyard," says Paul Genoa, a policy director with the Nuclear Energy Institute. "They?ll still be industrial facilities, but the footprint will probably be like that of a small shopping mall, but with more land around it." SMR plants could fit inside the footprint of the old coal-fired plants they?re expected to replace, Genoa says.
An SMR would generate one-tenth to one-third the energy of a conventional reactor. Rather than producing 1000 megawatts of electricity, for example, an SMR might produce 300Mw or less. For example, the company NuScale Power is developing a 45Mw SMR that would be able to supply electricity to 45,000 American homes for a year, making it well suited for smaller towns and cities where a conventional reactor would be overkill. And because SMRs are modular, they?re scalable. The power plant can install additional SMRs as electricity demand grows.
There are three main varieties of SMR in development.
Light-Water SMRs
These are basically a scaled-down version of the light-water reactors already working in the United States. Inside a light-water reactor, heat from the uranium core turns water into steam, which spins turbines that generate electricity. The same thing happens in a light-water SMR, with a few modifications.
Unlike traditional reactors, which position the generators outside the reactor, some SMRs, such as the Babcock & Wilcox 125Mw "mPower" reactor, locate the generators inside the reactor. John Kelly, the energy department?s deputy assistant secretary for nuclear reactor technologies, says this makes manufacturing easier and eliminates the piping between reactors and generator, which is a safety liability. (If a pipe breaks, it becomes difficult to deliver coolant back to the hot core.)
Some light-water SMRs also incorporate what engineers call passive safety features?in an emergency, they could cool a reactor core even if the power goes out. At Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, the site of last year?s post-tsunami nuclear disaster, the plant relied on electrically driven pumps to deliver water to the hot core and cool it down. When the power went out and diesel backups failed, operators had to resort to desperate measures to prevent total catastrophe.
By contrast, small reactors such as the Westinghouse SMR would rely on gravity and thermodynamics to circulate coolants. As the radioactive core heats the water surrounding it, that hot water becomes less dense and flows upward toward the heat exchangers that turn the heat into electricity. As the water loses heat to the exchangers, it cools, becomes more dense, and falls back toward the core?no electricity required.
"The new plans are elegant in their simplicity," Genoa says. "Passive features allow reactors to go without operator interaction, and without pumps to move water around." To further improve on safety, several SMRs are meant to be installed and operated underground.
The light-water SMRs in development have been slightly less efficient than normal reactors, meaning less of the uranium?s potential energy is turned into electricity. But small light-water reactors may eventually deliver electricity that is less expensive than what larger reactors can produce simply because construction and installation costs would be lower. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to approve the first light-water SMR power plants in the early 2020s.
Gas-Cooled SMRs
The idea behind gas-cooled reactors, Genoa says, is to rule out even the possibility of a meltdown. "It is physically impossible for the reactor to get hot enough to damage the fuel," he says. That?s because rather than using water as a coolant, gas-cooled SMRs would use helium.
As water boils it can build up pressure inside a reactor. Under extreme heat it can also react with zirconium alloys in the core. At Fukushima Daiichi, water-zirconium reactions caused a hydrogen explosion that blew the roofs off several reactors.
But unlike water, helium doesn?t boil or react. This allows the gas-cooled reactor to operate safely at temperatures up to 1000 degrees C, which increases the reactor?s efficiency. While a light-water reactor typically extracts roughly 34 percent of its core?s potential energy, a gas-cooled reactor would operate at more than 40 percent efficiency. A gas-cooled reactor developed by the Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute has achieved 45 percent efficiency, and General Atomics? Modular Helium Reactor achieves up to 47 percent.
To accommodate the high heat needed to achieve such high efficiencies, engineers must modify other elements of the gas-cooled reactor. The fuel requires a heat-tolerant carbon coating, for example, and metal parts of the reactor are replaced with ceramics, Genoa says. Because gas-cooled reactors require these new technologies, the Nuclear Regulatory Council estimates they won?t come on line until the mid-2020s.
Fast Reactors
Normal nuclear reactors use what are called moderators to slow down neutrons and control the chain reactions that happen during fission. That?s because the "fast neutrons" created when uranium splits are less likely to cause fission in the neighborhood?and keep the chain reaction going?than slightly slower neutrons are.
Fast reactors, though, are optimized for fast neutrons, which allows them to extract 60 times more energy from uranium than a typical light-water reactor can. That also means that fast reactors can digest the nuclear waste of other reactors, reducing the waste?s radiotoxicity while extracting energy in the process.
Fast reactors already in development include Argonne National Lab?s 175Mw reactor, Advanced Reactor Concept?s sodium-cooled ARC-100, and the 25Mw Hyperion Power Module. But because uranium is still in abundant supply, and because fast reactors can be used to breed weapons-grade plutonium, these SMRs are not economical (or legal) at this point.
Potential Snags
Before any SMR can be used in a power plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must create regulations for it. Any new reactor design raises a slew of new questions. Since SMRs are smaller and have lots of passive safety features, are fewer operators needed per reactor? Should the 10-mile evacuation radius mandated for traditional reactors be smaller for a smaller reactor? What are the proper safety protocols for an SMR? Once the NRC figures out how to adapt current regulations, it could go certify SMR designs and issue licenses to operate new power plants.
SMRs may be the reactors of the future, but Genoa says traditional reactors aren?t going away anytime soon. "Small reactors are not a substitute for big reactors, but we can?t build a big reactor everywhere," he says. "Just like when you go to the auto store and you can choose a sedan, a minivan or a truck, the nuclear market needs more options."
Asked at last night's Florida Republican debate if Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich should return money made from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Ron Paul responded:
"That subject really doesn't interest me a whole lot."
The Texas congressman might not be #1 in the polls, but he showed last night that when given a proper forum, he's as substantive as anyone - and funny too.
Asked where he stands on Newt Gingrich's proposal to put a permanent base on the moon by 2020, Paul said, "Well, I don't think we should go to the moon."
"I think we maybe should send some politicians up there."
Paul, who at 76 would be the oldest person ever elected President of the United States also drew cheers in his response to a question about his medical records.
Noting that his records are "about one page, if even that long," Paul challenged his cohorts to "a 25-mile bike ride, any time, any day in the heat of Texas."
But, you know, there are laws against age discrimination, so if you push this too much, you better be careful," he quipped, and he wasn't done by a long shot.
Asked by CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer what he would say if Raul Castro called him in the Oval Office, Paul said, "Well, I'd ask what he called about, you know?"
Which isn't to say Paul's wit was his only asset. He routinely scored points with his strong responses, especially regarding monetary policy and civil liberties.
Brooklyn-born actor Nick Santino committed suicide Wednesday, The New York Post reports.
The soap opera star was wracked with grief after his beloved pit bull Rocco was euthanized Tuesday -- the same day Santino turned 47.
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"Today I betrayed my best friend and put down my best friend," Santino wrote in a suicide note, according to close friend Stuart Sarnoff. "Rocco trusted me and I failed him. He didn't deserve this."
The actor, who appeared on seven episodes of All My Children and six episodes of Guiding Light, had been feeling "harassed" by his building management company, according to his neighbor Lia Pettigrew.
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He was allegedly threatened with a $250 fine for having a barking dog, but according to neighbor Kevan Cleary, "the dog was not a barker, but somebody complained that the dog would bark."
Santino phoned a former girlfriend at 2 a.m. Wednesday. Police found Santino's body in his bedroom later that afternoon. The actor had overdosed on pills.
PHOTOS: Stars gone too soon
The actor's pet Rocco has been cremated; friends tell The New York Post Santino's remains will also be cremated.
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SADADA, Libya (Reuters) ? A militia commander whose troops were driven out of the Libyan tribal stronghold of Bani Walid this week said on Friday that his forces were massing to recapture the town but were holding back at the government's request.
"It is our right to reenter Bani Walid and nobody can prevent us," Imbarak al-Futmani said in an interview with Reuters at his desert camp near Sadada, 30 miles east of Bani Walid.
Futmani's troops were pushed out by angry townsmen who he accuses of being the remnants of loyalists of Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator who was overthrown then captured and killed in October.
Eight hundred of his men were now massed along the eastern flank of the town awaiting his orders to enter by force, said the elderly warrior, who was dressed in an ornate black and gold waistcoast, a skullcap and a white blanket over his shoulder.
Bani Walid, 90 miles south of Tripoli, was one of the last towns to surrender to the anti-Gaddafi rebellion last year.
Hundreds of fighters loyal to the interim government have surrounded the isolated town after hearing word that a pro-Gaddafi uprising had broken out.
Futmani said he faced a couple of hundred "criminals" nostalgic for Gaddafi's time in power, rather than large battalions of organized loyalists.
"We have all the revolutionary fighters with us and we can take Bani Walid in a matter of hours."
"If they don't hand themselves in, they will face what they cannot imagine," he added, his eyes hidden by thick-rimmed, amber Ray-Ban sunglasses.
GADDAFI SUPPORT ALLEGATIONS
On Monday, armed residents surrounded Futmani's brigade, who named themselves the "28th of May," after the date last year when Gaddafi loyalists executed a number of pro-democracy protesters in Bani Walid.
After a battle in which Futmani lost six fighters, his men fled the barracks in the dark of the night.
"Once the Gaddafis broke through the gate and entered the barracks, all they cared about was stealing our tanks. We just walked right out," said one of Futmani's men.
Echoing complaints by residents that the 28th of May Brigade had been harassing people and abusing prisoners, the town elders said they were dismissing the government-backed local council on which Futmani sits and appointing their own local government.
They said they were not Gaddafi supporters but just tired of the militia pushing its weight around their town.
Futmani says the elders profited from Gaddafi and were trying to reclaim their town from its rightful rulers, the western-backed National Transitional Council (NTC) government.
WAITING ON THE PRIME MINISTER
With hundreds of fighters waiting at the gates of Bani Walid, drinking tea and oiling their weapons in the cold desert, why have they have not pushed forward?
Sitting in his base, a former Gaddafi holiday mansion on the top of a rocky hill, Futmani said the prime minister had asked him to hold off to allow civilians to leave the town and, hopefully, for the assailants to surrender.
"The prime minister called me and asked me not to move and I accepted," he said.
"(Prime minister Abdel Rahim) El Keib promised that the government would use force to maintain security, if necessary."
Troops from the nascent National Army, composed of revolutionary fighters who have signed up to the government force, had joined the militias around Bani Walid.
The NTC has been unable to fully establish control over armed revolutionary groups in Libya and has only incorporated a few brigades into a national security force. All of the militias claim loyalty to the government but most are still unwilling to disarm. Instead, they adopt a wait-and-see approach to who comes to power, and if they like them.
Futmani's men cruise around the base in dirty pick-up trucks with machineguns mounted on the back.
He is skeptical of any peaceful solution and saw more violence ahead.
"These pro-Gaddafis, they see us a rats, like Gaddafi did," he said. "They are murderers and criminals, they will never integrate into the new Libya because they know they will face justice now."
Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy has been enjoying this awards' season, but she wasn't quite ready for one aspect of the red-carpet circuit: getting star struck. The Bridesmaids star told The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Thursday that she got a bit overwhelmed meeting fellow nominees like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- There is one thing everybody can agree on: It's cheap, as in economical.
Beyond that, the jury is out on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's pick as the "best spot in NYC" for a first date.
"The Staten Island Ferry!" Hizzoner gushed in a surprise tweet Tuesday in response to a survey conducted by New York magazine.
We're guessing the mayor's unsolicited enthusiasm was prompted by happy memories of his mini-cruise aboard the Spirit of America in the company of main squeeze Diana Taylor after his oath-taking on New Year's Day 2010. There's nothing like a brisk sail to kindle warm feelings.
But hear, hear! to the props, Mr. Mayor!
Now if only there were a Michelin nod-worthy restaurant alongside the St. George Ferry Terminal that took advantage of the romantic waterfront views, or even a hip caf? where you could chat with your love interest while checking out the breathtaking Manhattan skyline.
Because these days, unless you know about the fantastic dining options located just a short stroll away, the date could end up as a quick hop-on, hop-off kind of affair that includes gobbling down a 6-inch Subway sandwich, standing up, before grabbing the boat back again.
For those of you lovelorn New York single gals, who have yet to find a man worthy of taking out for a spin on the big orange boat, why not look for your dreamboat among regulars of Loveboat?
After all, Staten Island was named earlier this month by the dating site Chemistry.com as one of the top 10 spots in the nation to find thoughtful, sensitive and perceptive guys.
So bring on Valentine's Day! This borough is ready and waiting.
DAVOS, Switzerland ? The founder of Wikipedia has hailed the online encyclopedia's role in helping halt U.S. legislation aimed at cracking down on Internet piracy.
Jimmy Wales told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday that the idea to black out Wikipedia's English pages for 24 hours came from the site's volunteer editors, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move.
Wales says the two bills that Congress postponed indefinitely last week were "very badly designed, technologically incompetent, and just something that we felt needed to be stopped."
Wikipedia was among a number of sites that argued the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act would hurt technological innovation and infringe on free-speech rights.
It?s been a bumpy week for RIM. On Sunday, the Canadian smartphone maker?s co-CEOs tried their best to quietly resign and hand over the CEO position to their former Chief Operating Officer, Thorsten Heins. For months, investors and journalists have been calling for Research in Motion?s co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis ? who have each taken turns running the company since it was founded in 1991 ? to step down. Until Sunday, they showed no signs of doing so.
Worse, though RIM?s smartphone market share has been steadily dropping in the months since the company?s BlackBerry 7 device lineup launched (Sept. 2011), new CEO Thorsten Heins repeatedly asserted in multiple interviews that RIM has no real structural problems, and that he doesn?t plan to shake the company up much aside from hiring a new marketing officer. Tech journalists, analysts, and bloggers have been chattering like crazy, and no one seems fond of the new CEO. From a distance, he appears to be a Yes man, planted at the top to carry out already established plans.?
So what?s going on here? Is Thorsten Heins actually in charge of RIM? More importantly, does the company need a huge structural and strategic overhaul, or is it mainly an image problem? Has RIM already made the changes and laid out the plan that it needs to succeed, or is it too little, too late??
Giving up the two-seated throne
Mike Lazaridis founded RIM in 1984 and Jim Balsillie a self-described jock, joined him as co-CEO in 1991. The unique dual-power arrangement had Balsillie tackling the business side of RIM and Lazaridis focusing mostly on the products and technology. For many years, it worked, but since the debut of the iPhone, two CEOs seem to be proving worse than one.
RIM has had a rough few years. The company has gone from being the biggest smartphone maker in the United States (with a massive 80 percent market share on Verizon) to a niche player that seems unable to win over new customers as the market shifts toward touch-based operating systems thanks to the massive success of the iPhone, which debuted in 2007. In 2008, RIM attempted to counter the iPhone with the Storm, its first touch-based BlackBerry, but the device was a failure. After that, the company retreated back to its comfortable, keyboarded lineup of BlackBerry Curves and Pearls. The co-CEOs many times stated that RIM?s focus on QWERTY keyboards was one of its best differentiating features. They?ve introduced more touch-based BlackBerry phones, but none have succeeded in redefining the brand. And so, a couple years ago the CEOs brushed the U.S. under the rug and focused on the international market.?
?The dilemma is that the U.S. went down the high-end smartphone market and the international market grew greatly,? Balsillie said in an interview. ?So the question is where you put your resources? We couldn?t do both. We were explosive growth internationally. Do we leverage core franchise and go international, or do we move higher end for the U.S. market??
The company made the wrong choice. By focusing on the international market, it succeeded in boosting short-term profits, but the United States turned out to be a trend setter for the rest of the world, which has now begun following in its footsteps, leaving Nokia-like feature phones and BlackBerry devices for touchscreen phones running Android and iOS. They have become so popular that users began demanding to use them at work, carving into RIM???s strongest asset: businesses.
The year of hell
2011 proved to be a fascinating year for RIM. The company continued to churn out record revenues from overseas, but its position in the US market began fading fast. From October to December alone, RIM?s market share dropped from 7.7 percent to 4.5 percent due to explosive sales of competing devices. The company?s share of the world smartphone market isn?t better, having dropped to 11 percent in the third quarter of 2011 from 19 percent in mid 2010.?The Canadian company?s stock has followed the same downward arrow. Between June 2008 (when the iPhone 3G came out) and June 2011, RIM?s shareholders lost nearly $70 billion, or 82 percent of the smartphone maker?s value. That same month, RIM also?laid off more than 2,000 employees.?
2011 was also home to two failed product launches: BlackBerry 7 and the PlayBook.
PlayBook: In April, the co-CEOs entered the blossoming tablet market with the BlackBerry PlayBook, a 7-inch tablet running a completely new operating system based on QNX, an OS that RIM purchased a couple years earlier. In an interview in Dec. 2010, Lazaridis spilled that the PlayBook was a sign of things to come from RIM and that future phones would be dual-core and run QNX as well. (These new phones later came to be known as BBX, but due to legal issues it will now be called BlackBerry 10.) This sounds grand and good, except that the launch of the PlayBook was a bit of a disaster.
When the PlayBook launched, it was clearly a nice-looking piece of hardware released before it was complete. The PlayBook software had huge bugs that required a number of bi-weekly updates to fix. Both businesses and mainstream consumers were confused about what it brought to the table. Did we mention that it lacking common apps like integrated email and calendar support? It also had next to no viable apps in its app store, and RIM?s included apps for things like podcasting were woefully broken or incomplete. We were very optimistic in our review of the PlayBook, but RIM also beat down our expectations throughout 2011, promising email, calendar, and Android app support by summer and not delivering it until?well?never. At least, not yet. These updates are supposedly coming next month (Feb. 2012).?
RIM expected the PlayBook to be such a success that it manufactured 2 million of the tablets. Due to lack of demand, it has still only sold about half of its inventory, even after several price cuts, and had to write off $500 million due to the unsold tablets.?Now RIM is distributing PlayBooks to developers who wish to work on the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform.
BlackBerry 7: The second big failure of 2011 was the launch of the BlackBerry 7 platform and devices. While these devices did not have the problems of the PlayBook, they did not help RIM to recapture any momentum. Following the launch of several new BlackBerry Bold, Curve, and Torch phones, RIM?s market share began to dwindle faster than ever. Several BB 7 devices featured touchscreens, but the phones featured no marked improvement in user interface, features, or processing power. They looked a bit slicker, but RIM seemed to be mostly churning out established designs with little innovation. As a result, the company?s smartphone market share fell dramatically over the holidays as?the iPhone and Android both posted record sales in late 2011. RIM became almost a complete non-player in the market, with a market share so low that Windows Phone now has a good shot at becoming the number three smartphone OS in 2012 (though Microsoft definitely has its work cut out).
Time for a ?new? CEO!
Photo by Geoff Robins, Reuters, Financial Post
So, that?s where RIM is at today. For the last year, shareholders and analysts have been calling for the resignation of Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, but neither of the co-CEOs showed any signs of stepping down. In fact, the duo wanted to retain their positions so badly that in December they offered to accept a cash salary of only $1 per year until they are able to turn the company around.
?We are more committed than ever to addressing the issues at hand,? Balsillie told analysts on a Dec. 15 conference call.
However, at that same earnings call, the duo was forced to announce the delay of BlackBerry 10, its supposed revolutionary new platform that will take its smartphones to a new level. BlackBerry 10 phones won?t hit the market until late 2012 now. Previously, it was slated for early 2012 (and that wasn?t the first delay).?
Either by design or a decision by the board, Lazaridis and Balsillie stepped down on Jan. 22, handing the reins over to a single CEO named Thorsten Heins. Heins joined RIM in 2007 working as the VP of its handheld business unit, and was promoted to chief operating officer in mid 2011 in a management shakeup.?
?There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership. Jim and I went to the board and told them that we thought that time was now,? said Lazaridis. ?With?BlackBerry?7 now out, PlayBook 2.0 shipping in February and BlackBerry 10 expected to ship later this year, the company is entering a new phase, and we felt it was time for a new leader to take it through that phase and beyond.? Jim, the Board and I all agreed that leader should be Thorsten Heins.?
Both Lazaridis and Balsillie will retain positions inside the company and on the board.
Thorsten Heins: The great RIM Defender
The startling thing about newly minted CEO Thorsten Heins was just how unprepared he was to deal with the battering of interviews he got on Monday, Jan. 23. He came across as qualified and knowledgeable, but with an attitude quite similar to his predecessors, arguing that RIM is doing quite well, for the most part, and he won?t be making any major changes.?
The interview below, which was published on the official BlackBerry YouTube page, Heins introduces himself and seems overly excited about his job (as Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic also?notes), saying that RIM was more like a startup company when he joined in 2007 (more than 22 years after the company was founded), but has always remained ahead of the curve.?
??At the very core of RIM, at its DNA how I always describe it, is the innovation,? said Heins. ?We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable. And that is fantastic. That is the core of every high-technology company.?
In a teleconference call on the same day and throughout numerous interviews, he maintained that RIM is not in need of any major restructuring changes:??I don?t think there is some drastic change needed,? Heins said. ?We are evolving. We?re evolving our strategy, we?re evolving our tactics, our processes.??
Though journalists have harped on the comment, Heins actually seems to be arguing a different point. He isn?t saying that RIM needs no change. He?s actually arguing that all of the appropriate changes have already been set into place. In effect, he?s arguing that Balsillie and Lazaridis have done most of the hard work for him. The BlackBerry 2.0 software (impressions) and BlackBerry 10 are on track to come out this year. In a sense, Heins has merely been placed at the front door to greet the guests who no longer wish to hang out with Balsillie and Lazaridis. His video interview with CNBC affirms this viewpoint.?
?Mike and Jim took a bold step 18 months ago when RIM purchased?QNX?to shepherd the transformation of the BlackBerry platform for the next decade,? said Heins. ?We are more confident than ever that was the right path. It is Mike and Jim?s continued unwillingness to sacrifice long-term value for short-term gain which has made RIM the great company that it is today. I share that philosophy and am very excited about the company?s future.?
In multiple interviews, he also defended RIM, saying how great the company?s BlackBerry 7 devices are and how well off RIM is financially: ?We have a strong balance sheet with approximately $1.5 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter and negligible debt. We reported revenue of $5.2 billion in our last quarter, up 24 percent from the prior quarter, and a 35 percent year-to-year increase in the BlackBerry subscriber base, which is now over 75 million.?
Heins also says that much of RIM?s problem in the US isn?t its devices, but how it markets them. His big plan: to hire a new head of marketing.
BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook 2.0, RIM?s last big chance?
According to his own interviews, Thorsten Heins has no big plans to shake up RIM or reset its course. This is a marked difference from Nokia, which found itself in a similar position last year. Nokia chose to hire an outsider as its CEO, going with Stephen Elop, who quickly made huge structural changes?to the Finnish manufacturer.?Heins is from RIM and seems to share the same exact vision as his predecessors, Balsillie and Lazaridis. He has repeatedly said that all of the necessary changes have been already made, nearly admitting that his appointment was done almost exclusively to put a new face on RIM.
If RIM has already overhauled its business, it has not been nearly as vocal about the process as Nokia was when it restructured and chose to align itself with the Windows Phone platform. There have been layoffs and the BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 shown at CES was impressive, but it may be too little, too late for the Canadian company. Or perhaps, maybe not.?
The real question is whether RIM can deliver a unique ?must-have? phone experience with BlackBerry 10. After using the PlayBook 2.0, I have to say that the operating system is perhaps the smoothest tablet OS on the market and RIM?s software design seems not only more complete than it was a year ago, but far better looking as well. RIM executives at CES credited the improved look of the PlayBook software to its?acquisition of Tat, an interface and design company. It?s hard to imagine the PlayBook gaining much traction without a new hardware model, but RIM seems determined to revive it using software alone. Somehow, it needs to actually accomplish this. Giving the PlayBook momentum seems key to building developer and consumer interest in BlackBerry 10 (learn more about the upcoming OS here).?
But for the new platform to succeed, RIM is going to have to translate its webOS-like OS to smartphones in a far better way than HP or Palm ever did. The PlayBook has a large screen, but if RIM is to succeed in smartphones, it has to take that OS and shrink it down to a multitude of screen sizes. It will also likely have to better standardize its screen resolutions and greatly improve the power of its phones by using dual-core or quad-core processors. They will all have to be touch-based, and if RIM decides to keep pushing keyboards on a majority of handsets, its image will suffer. As great as the keyboard is, it is also a symbol of RIM?s lack of innovation in recent years. These new phones need to look and feel much different from BlackBerry 7 devices. They also need to be compatible with the PlayBook?s growing app library of more than 50,000 apps (according to representatives at CES).?
Finally, RIM needs to figure out what kind of company it wants to be. The company has been straddling a thin line between being a business-only brand and a consumer brand in recent years. If it wants to win customers on either side, it needs to demonstrate clear advantages for end users over Android or iOS. It needs to be more fun to use a BlackBerry, easier, a more seamless experience, and different. That last bit remains key. It needs to be different from what it is today, and different from the competition. With the collapse of webOS and the continued struggle of Windows Phone, there is still a chance for RIM, but if it doesn?t deliver in 2012, things are going to plummet , and fast.
This article was originally posted on Digital Trends
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(Reuters) ? The Republican candidates for president have some major differences in their policies and their personal lives. But they have one striking thing in common - they all say the federal government is responsible for the financial crisis. Even Newt Gingrich (pilloried for having been a Freddie Mac lobbyist)says: "The fix was put in by the federal government."
The notion that the federal government, via the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and by pushing housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to meet affordable housing goals, was responsible for the financial crisis has become Republican orthodoxy. This contention got a boost from a recent lawsuit the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed against six former executives at Fannie and Freddie, including two former CEOs. "Today's announcement by the SEC proves what I have been saying all along - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played a leading role in the 2008 financial collapse that wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy," said Congressman Scott Garrett, the New Jersey Republican who is chairman of the financial services subcommittee on capital markets and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs).
But the SEC's case doesn't prove anything of the sort, and in fact, the theory that the GSEs are to blame for the crisis has been thoroughly discredited, again and again. The roots of this canard lie in an opposition - one that festered over decades - to the growing power of Fannie Mae, in particular, and its smaller sibling, Freddie Mac. This stance was both right and brave, and was mostly taken by a few Republicans and free-market economists - although even President Clinton's Treasury Department took on Fannie and Freddie in the late 1990s. The funny thing, though, is that the complaint back then wasn't that Fannie and Freddie were making housing too affordable. It was that their government-subsidized profits were accruing to private shareholders (correct), that they had far too much leverage (correct), that they posed a risk to taxpayers (correct), and what they did to make housing affordable didn't justify the massive benefits they got from the government (also correct!). Indeed, in a 2004 book that recommended privatizing Fannie and Freddie, one of its authors, Peter Wallison, wrote, "Study after study has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite full-throated claims about trillion-dollar commitments and the like, have failed to lead the private market in assisting the development and financing of affordable housing."
When the bubble burst in the fall of 2008, Republicans immediately pinned the blame on Fannie and Freddie. John McCain, then running for president, called the companies "the match that started this forest fire." This narrative picked up momentum when Wallison joined forces with Ed Pinto, Fannie's chief credit officer until the late 1980s. According to Pinto's research, at the time the market cratered, 27 million loans - half of all U.S. mortgages - were subprime. Of these, Pinto calculated that over 70 percent were touched by Fannie and Freddie - which took on that risk in order to satisfy their government-imposed affordable housing goals - or by some other government agency, or had been made by a large bank that was subject to the CRA. "Thus it is clear where the demand for these deficient mortgages came from," Wallison wrote in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, which has enthusiastically pushed this point of view in its editorial section since the crisis erupted.
But Pinto's numbers don't hold up. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission(FCIC) - Wallison was one of its 10 commissioners - met with Pinto and analyzed his numbers, and concluded that while Fannie and Freddie played a role in the crisis and were deeply problematic institutions, they "were not a primary cause." (Wallison issued a dissent.) The FCIC argued that Pinto overstated the number of risky loans, and as David Min, the associate director for financial markets policy at the Center for American Progress, has noted, Pinto's number is far bigger than that of others - the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office estimated that from 2000 to 2007, there were only 14.5 million total nonprime loans originated; by the end of 2009, there were just 4.59 million such loans outstanding.
The disparity stems from the fact that Pinto defines risky loans far more broadly than most experts do. Min points out that the delinquency rates on what Pinto calls subprime are actually closer to prime loans than to real subprime loans. For instance, Pinto assumes that all loans made to people with credit scores below 660 were risky. But Fannie- and Freddie-backed loans in this category performed far better than the loans securitized by Wall Street. Data compiled by the FCIC for a subset of borrowers with scores below 660 shows that by the end of 2008, 6.2 percent of those GSE mortgages were seriously delinquent, versus 28.3 percent of non-GSE securitized mortgages.
To recap: If private-sector loans performed far worse than loans touched by the government, how could the GSEs have led the race to the bottom?
Another problematic aspect to Pinto's research is that he assumes the GSEs guaranteed risky loans solely to satisfy affordable housing goals. But many of the guaranteed loans didn't qualify for affordable housing credits. The GSEs did all this business because they were losing market share to Wall Street - their share went from 57 percent in 2003 to 37 percent by 2006. As the housing bubble grew larger, they wanted to recapture their share and boost their profits.
Indeed, the SEC lawsuit specifically says Fannie and Freddie began to do more risky business not to meet their goals, but rather to recapture market share - and they began to do so aggressively in 2006, when the market was already peaking. So while the GSEs played a huge role in blowing the bubble bigger than it otherwise would have been - and the numbers in the SEC complaint are huge - they followed, rather than led, the private market.
It's also very hard to look at what happened in the crisis and conclude that nothing went wrong in the private sector. Note that the other Republican members of the FCIC refused to sign on to Wallison's dissent. Instead, they issued their own dissent. "Single-source explanations," they said, were "too simplistic."
Yet despite all that, the one-note Republican refrain hasn't changed. The explanation is obvious: The "government sucks" rant polls well with conservatives. Mix in an urge to counter the equally simplistic story from the left - that the crisis was entirely the fault of greedy, unscrupulous bankers - and you get a strong resistance to the facts. Maybe there's a deeper reason, too. For many, belief in the all-knowing market was (and is) almost a religion. This financial crisis challenged that faith by showing the market would indeed allow loans to be made that could never be paid back, and by showing that highly paid financial services executives aren't gods, and that many of them are stupid and venal and all too human.
So maybe the Republican orthodoxy is understandable, but that doesn't mean it isn't scary. Of course, there's the great line from Edmund Burke: "Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it." Our housing market is a mess that threatens to drag down the entire economy, and whoever is president in 2013 needs to have a plan. Denying the facts is not a good start.
(Bethany McLean is a Reuters columnist, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and co-author with Joe Nocera of "All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis." Any opinions are her own.)
NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Sitting in a dimly lit New York City bar wearing a trilby hat and a dark suit, no tie, singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen pauses before responding to a question about how his ideas have changed over his lengthy career.
He smiles and recalls something his close friend, the late Canadian poet Irving Layton, once said.
"'Leonard's mind has not been contaminated by a single idea,'" the 77-year-old Cohen quipped dryly, eliciting laughter from an audience gathered for a preview of his first studio album of new material in eight years, 'Old Ideas.'
The album, which sees its release on January 31, touches on themes the Montreal-born poet has spent a lifetime exploring -- love, sex, faith, mortality and others. But there is a lightness to the work, and Cohen refuses to take himself too seriously.
'I love to speak with Leonard/He's a sportsman and a shepherd/He's a lazy bastard/Living in a suit,' he croons in his
gravelly baritone on the opening track, 'Going Home.'
The 10 new songs are minimalist in construction, recalling some of Cohen's earlier and most well-known works, like 'Suzanne,' 'Bird on a Wire,' and the often-covered 'Hallelujah.'
Long-time Cohen collaborators, Jennifer Warne, Sharon Robinson, and Anjali Thomas also lend their voices to the album, which is lightly peppered with guitar, keyboards, horns and strings.
Cohen said the album came together more quickly than many of his previous 11 studio recordings, but it is still a struggle to try to manifest one's self in song.
"You are trying to do one of the few things you barely know how to do," he told Reuters following the listening session. "You are dealing with an almost unbreakable silence, and you're grateful if anything comes through."
Cohen also has released several live and best-of albums, and published 10 books of poetry and two novels.
'OLD IDEAS'; NEW COHEN?
In New York, many of the critics at the preview -- there were dozens -- sat through around 40 minutes of music, listening with eyes closed, heads tilted back, and smiling slightly as though basking in the sunshine of his melodies. Others bobbed their heads gently. Some closely read the lyrics as he sang.
Cohen later entered the room to generous applause and then took questions, offering a glimpse into his reclusive life: His crush on Edie Sedgwick, the beautiful New York socialite, in the mid-1960s; his feelings of deep loss and discomfort after Hurricane Katrina; the honor of sharing a drink from the golden bowl of his 104-year-old Zen Buddhist teacher.
The poet and singer-songwriter, who divides his time between Montreal and Los Angeles, battled depression for much of his life, but in recent years has been in a better mental space.
He said his two-year world tour "warmed some part of my heart that had taken on a chill," and that he would like to go out on the road again in the near future.
The tour, which concluded in 2010, was Cohen's first in 15 years and was born of necessity after his former manager stole the bulk of his savings while Cohen was on a five-year Buddhist retreat in California, forcing the singer to go on the road to rebuild his bank account.
Now, Cohen said he is looking forward to getting back on stage and that it might be a good time to polish another half-dozen songs that he has been working on, but which were not ready for the release of 'Old Ideas.'
"The words are written," he told Reuters. "It's a matter of finding the voice, the right voice, so that it's true, and not just a slogan."
(Reporting By John McCrank, Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
PlayBook: In April, the co-CEOs entered the blossoming tablet market with the BlackBerry PlayBook, a 7-inch tablet running a completely new operating system based on QNX, an OS that RIM purchased a couple years earlier. In an interview in Dec. 2010, Lazaridis spilled that the PlayBook was a sign of things to come from RIM and that future phones would be dual-core and run QNX as well. (These new phones later came to be known as BBX, but due to legal issues it will now be called BlackBerry 10.) This sounds grand and good, except that the launch of the PlayBook was a bit of a disaster.
BlackBerry 7: The second big failure of 2011 was the launch of the BlackBerry 7 platform and devices. While these devices did not have the problems of the PlayBook, they did not help RIM to recapture any momentum. Following the launch of several new BlackBerry Bold, Curve, and Torch phones, RIM?s market share began to dwindle faster than ever. Several BB 7 devices featured touchscreens, but the phones featured no marked improvement in user interface, features, or processing power. They looked a bit slicker, but RIM seemed to be mostly churning out established designs with little innovation. As a result, the company?s smartphone market share fell dramatically over the holidays as?the iPhone and Android both posted record sales in late 2011. RIM became almost a complete non-player in the market, with a market share so low that Windows Phone now has a good shot at becoming the number three smartphone OS in 2012 (though Microsoft definitely has its work cut out).
But for the new platform to succeed, RIM is going to have to translate its webOS-like OS to smartphones in a far better way than HP or Palm ever did. The PlayBook has a large screen, but if RIM is to succeed in smartphones, it has to take that OS and shrink it down to a multitude of screen sizes. It will also likely have to better standardize its screen resolutions and greatly improve the power of its phones by using dual-core or quad-core processors. They will all have to be touch-based, and if RIM decides to keep pushing keyboards on a majority of handsets, its image will suffer. As great as the keyboard is, it is also a symbol of RIM?s lack of innovation in recent years. These new phones need to look and feel much different from BlackBerry 7 devices. They also need to be compatible with the PlayBook?s growing app library of more than 50,000 apps (according to representatives at CES).?