World News : Lehman Brothers needs help??

World News : Lehman Brothers needs help??
A last-ditch effort to find a buyer for troubled Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers appeared near collapse Sunday as British bank Barclays pulled out of talks.

As emergency weekend talks on Lehman's woes were being held in New York, a London source at Barclays, who requested anonymity, said it walked away from negotiations because of concerns it would have to guarantee the 158-year-old US firm's trading commitments.

The source did not say whether its position was likely to change.

The news came as US Treasury and Federal Reserve officials scrambled to avert a liquidation of Lehman Brothers which some say could send shockwaves through the global financial system.

"Clearly things are changing quickly and are very fluid," said David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Investments.

"The Fed and the Treasury are trying to get a deal done before the markets open on Monday. It now appears that this original effort to merge Lehman with one party has failed."

Meanwhile specter of liquidation loomed: the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, a group of market dealers, said it was holding a special trading session Sunday "to reduce risk associated with a potential Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. bankruptcy filing."

It said any trades were contingent on a bankruptcy filing Sunday.

"I think the most likely option for Lehman is a bankruptcy filing by the end of the day today," said Peter Cohan of the consulting firm Peter Cohan & Associates.

Barry Ritholtz of the research firm FusionIQ said a bankruptcy could mean further financial market turmoil.

"We are now on bankruptcy watch, with the midnight hour as the key line in the sand." he said. "The Wall Street open Monday in the event of a Lehman failure will be wild."

According to some analysts, the talks on Lehman Brothers were snagged over whether the Federal Reserve would guarantee a deal with Lehman's troubled mortgage securities as was done to avert a meltdown earlier this year of Bear Stearns, bought by JPMorgan Chase.

"We infer that the problem at Lehman is bigger or worse than at Bear Stearns or both," Kotok said.

"That means the Fed is trying to avoid more use of its balance sheet."

Peter Morici, economist at the University of Maryland, said finding a buyer for Lehman Brothers may be difficult because of its "toxic" holdings in soured real estate assets.

"No other large firm should buy Lehman whole -- its toxic real estate and securities are too difficult to value," he said. "Only a fool would think he could fairly assess their value, unless those are assigned them a value of zero."

Meanwhile Bank of America, described in recent days as a leading takeover candidate for Lehman Brothers, was now in advanced discussions to buy Merrill Lynch, another Wall Street giant ravaged by the subprime real estate crisis and credit crunch.

The New York Times said the talks centered around a buyout of Merrill at 25 to 30 dollars a share in stock, making the deal worth some 38 billion dollars. Merrill ended Friday at 17.05 dollars.

Lehman shares have tumbled more than 90 percent this year and failed to recover on plans announced Wednesday to sell off key assets to shore up its finances.

The beleaguered Wall Street firm, seen as in desperate need for a capital injection, lost an estimated 3.9 billion dollars in its fiscal third quarter amid fresh writedowns on mortgage assets.

World News : Lehman Brothers needs help??

World News : The author "Infinite Jest," was found dead??

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 - September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest.

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. James Wallace had recently finished his Ph.D. at Cornell University; the family soon relocated to central Illinois, where James found work as a philosophy instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1962. Sally attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and eventually became a professor of English at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, where she won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996. Wallace's younger sister, Amy, has practiced law in Arizona since 2005.

As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and double-majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize, and he graduated summa cum laude in 1985. He next pursued an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which he earned in 1987.

World News : The author "Infinite Jest," was found dead??
CLAREMONT, Calif. - David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46.

Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.

Wallace taught creative writing and English at nearby Pomona College.

"He cared deeply for his students and transformed the lives of many young people," said Dean Gary Kates. "It's a great loss to our teaching faculty."

Wallace's first novel, "The Broom of the System," gained national attention in 1987 for its ambition and offbeat humor. The New York Times said the 24-year-old author "attempts to give us a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok."

Published in 1996, "Infinite Jest" cemented Wallace's reputation as a major American literary figure. The 1,000-plus-page tome, praised for its complexity and dark wit, topped many best-of lists. Time Magazine named "Infinite Jest" in its issue of the "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005."

Wallace received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997.

In 2002, Wallace was hired to teach at Pomona in a tenured English Department position endowed by Roy E. Disney. Kates said when the school began searching for the ideal candidate, Wallace was the first person considered.

"The committee said, 'we need a person like David Foster Wallace.' They said that in the abstract," Kates said. "When he was approached and accepted, they were heads over heels. He was really the ideal person for the position."

Wallace's short fiction was published in Esquire, GQ, Harper's, The New Yorker and the Paris Review. Collections of his short stories were published as "Girl With Curious Hair" and "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men."

He wrote nonfiction for several publications, including an essay on the U.S. Open for Tennis magazine and a profile of the director David Lynch for Premiere.

Born in Ithaca, N.Y., Wallace attended Amherst College and the University of Arizona.

World News : The author "Infinite Jest," was found dead??

World News : Barbara Warren has died after breaking her neck in a bike crash??

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - Barbara Warren, one of the world's elite endurance athletes in her age group and one-half of a well-known pair of triathlete twins, has died after breaking her neck in a bike crash at the Santa Barbara Triathlon. She was 65.

Warren, of San Diego, died Tuesday at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital when her family told doctors to take her off a ventilator, her twin sister Angelika Drake told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Warren crashed her bike on a downhill road about halfway through the 34-mile cycling section of the race on Saturday, race director Joe Coito said.
Warren was paralyzed from the neck down and was breathing with the aid of the ventilator. Drake said her sister told the family by blinking and nodding that she wanted to die.
"I talked to her and she nodded over and over and over again. She wanted to leave," Drake said. "No athlete would like to have a life with only their eyes talking."
Warren's two daughters and her husband Tom were also with her at the hospital when she died.
Warren won her age group in the 2003 Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii. She competed in the race, the world's top triathlon, 13 times and finished in the top five in her age group eight times.
The two sisters alternated riding bikes in the Race Across America, covering 2,983 miles in less than 10 days.
Warren also competed in a seven-day race across the Sahara Desert, and finished a triple Ironman in France that included a 7.2-mile swim, 336-mile bike ride and 78.6-mile run.
Warren was well-loved among younger triathletes.
Michellie Jones, who won a triathlon silver medal in the 2000 Olympics and won the 2006 Ironman World Title, was also a twin who remembered her fondly.
"She always asked about my sister," Jones said. "She understood the bond."
Warren's twin said she lay next to her sister as she died.
"My heart and my soul are gone," Drake said. "She was everything in my life."

Myanmar Cyclone: Safe food and drinking water could push the death toll above 100,000!!

YANGON, Myanmar (May 8) - Myanmar's isolationist regime allowed the first plane of a major international airlift to land Thursday with aid for cyclone survivors, a U.N. official said, amid fears that lack of safe food and drinking water could push the death toll above 100,000.
But the junta was not allowing U.S. military planes to fly in critical relief goods and continued to stall on visas for U.N. teams urgently seeking entry to ensure aid is delivered to the victims.

A U.N. official said one airplane from Italy arrived in Yangon while three more would land later Thursday. The official did not wish to be named because she was not authorized to speak to the media.

Four planes loaded with high-energy biscuits, medicine and other supplies have waited for the last two days while frustrated U.N. officials negotiated with the military regime to allow the material into the Southeast Asian nation.

The U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Eric John told reporters that U.S. and Thai authorities earlier believe they had permission from Myanmar to land U.S. military C-130s. But Myanmar officials later made it clear that this was not the case.

John said it was not clear if they had reversed an earlier decision or if there was a misunderstanding.

Thailand's Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej offered to negotiate on Washington's behalf to persuade the junta to accept U.S. aid.

Myanmar's state media said Cyclone Nargis killed at least 22,980 people and left 42,119 missing, mostly in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy delta. But a top U.S. diplomat said Wednesday the toll could exceed 100,000.

Entire villages in the delta were still submerged from the storm, and bloated corpses could be seen stuck in the mangroves. Some survivors stripped clothes off the dead. People wailed as they described the horror of the torrent swept ashore by the cyclone.

"I don't know what happened to my wife and young children," said Phan Maung, 55, who held onto a coconut tree until the water level dropped. By then his family was gone.

The World Health Organization has received reports of malaria outbreaks in the worst-affected area, and fears of waterborne illnesses surfacing due to dirty water and poor sanitation also remained a concern, said Poonam Khetrapal Singh, deputy director of WHO's Southeast Asia office in New Delhi.

"Safe water, sanitation, safe food. These are things that we feel are priorities at the moment," she said.

Myanmar's generals, traditionally paranoid about foreign influence, issued an appeal for international assistance after the storm struck Saturday. They have since dragged their feet on issuing visas to relief workers even as survivors faced hunger, disease and flooding.

Even near Yangon, the country's largest city, stricken villagers complained that they had received no government assistance and were relying on Buddhist monasteries, which have been helping the public cope with the disaster.

"The government is not helping us. No aid is coming. There is no money, no rice," said Mu Sanda, one of some 50 people huddled in a monastery dining room converted into an evacuation center in Kyauktan, 15 miles southeast of Yangon.

Even China, Myanmar's closest ally, urged the military junta to work with the international community. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said China would give $4.3 million in aid in addition to an initial pledge of $1 million.

A U.N. spokesman in Bangkok, Richard Horsey, said between 30 and 40 visas requested by various U.N. agencies and private relief groups are pending with the Myanmar government.

"These are mostly people who have key experience in handling disasters of this scale, and so they can bring lessons from other similar disasters," he said. "The agencies are becoming frustrated."

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said some donors were delaying aid for fear it would be siphoned off to the army.

WFP's regional director, Anthony Banbury, indicated the United Nations had similar concerns.

"We will not just bring our supplies to an airport, dump it and take off," he said. "This is one reason why there is a hold up now, because we are going to bring in not just supplies but a lot of capacity to go with them to make sure the supplies get to the people."

Myanmar's state television Thursday showed Prime Minister Lt. Gen. Thein Sein distributing food packages to the sick and injured in the delta and soldiers dropping food over villages. The date of the distribution was not given.

Navy vessels from India and planes from Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Bangladesh had arrived in recent days with medicine, candles, instant noodles, raincoats and other relief supplies, it said.

Although most Yangon residents were preoccupied with trying to restore their lives, activists using the cover of an almost-total power outage have written fresh graffiti on overpasses.

The graffiti include "X'' marks — a symbol for voting "no" in a referendum Saturday on a new military-backed constitution. Voting has been postponed until May 24 in Yangon, some outlying areas and parts of the delta heavily damaged by the storm.

Shari Villarosa, who heads the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, said the number of dead could eventually exceed 100,000 because safe food and water were scarce and unsanitary conditions widespread.

U.N. officials estimated as many as 1 million people were left homeless in Myanmar, which also is known as Burma.

Among them were the villagers in the Kyauktan monastery who said they had nowhere else to seek shelter and lacked food, water and money to rebuild their homes and rehabilitate their ruined rice fields.

Others in Kyauktan sought refuge in a primary school adjacent to the monastery where desks in classrooms were pushed together for makeshift beds.

Monks said they were receiving donations from the public and wealthier shop owners and then distributing them among the victims.

In Yangon, the roof of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was blown off and she was living in the dark after the electricity connection to her dilapidated lakeside bungalow was snapped in the cyclone, a neighbor said.

The detained Nobel Peace Prize laureate was using candles at night since she had no generator in her home, where she is being held under house arrest, said the neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

State radio said "unscrupulous elements" were spreading rumors of an impending earthquake, a second cyclone and looting in Yangon. Residents say some looting occurred at markets and stores in suburbs of Yangon earlier this week.

The warning about rumors appeared to be an attempt to calm the population as well as stop any gatherings that might turn into political agitation against widely detested military rule.

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Storm : Corpses Float Through Flooded Myanmar

YANGON, Myanmar (May 7) - Hungry crowds of survivors stormed the few shops that opened in Myanmar's stricken Irrawaddy delta, where food and international aid has been scarce since a devastating cyclone killed more than 22,000 people, the U.N. said Wednesday.
Corpses floated in salty flood waters and witnesses said survivors tried desperately to reach dry ground on boats using blankets as sails. The U.N. said some 1 million people were homeless in the Southeast Asian country, also known as Burma.

"Basically the entire lower delta region is under water," said Richard Horsey, Bangkok-based spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid.

"Teams are talking about bodies floating around in the water," he said. This is "a major, major disaster we're dealing with."

But a massive international aid effort was being kept on hold by Myanmar's military rulers. Internal U.N. documents obtained by The Associated Press showed growing frustrations at foot-dragging by the junta, which has kept the impoverished nation isolated for five decades to maintain its iron-fisted control.

"Visas are still a problem. It is not clear when it will be sorted out," according to the minutes of a meeting of the U.N. task force coordinating relief for Myanmar in Bangkok, Thailand on Wednesday.

It said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "will contact Myanmar" Wednesday to arrange a meeting with high-ranking officials on the issue.