LAW: May 8, 2008

Thursday, May 8, 2008

"Idol Gives Back" Cuts The Presidential Candidates, Gives Miley Cyrus Two Spots And Gordon Brown One

The juggernaut that is "American Idol" aired their two and half hour "Idol Gives Back" special Wednesday, with a bevy of celebrities (Watch "Idol Gives Back" clips), but cut Senators Obama, McCain and Clinton for time. Despite two segments with Miley Cyrus, including a long, painful exchange with Billy Crystal, ones with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Maria Shriver, and dozens of other celebrity appearances, the presidential candidates' touted cameos got the ax.
The NYT reports:

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain made taped appeals for charity on a special edition of "American Idol" on Wednesday night that didn't make the cut. The telethon for needy children around the world entitled "Idol Gives Back" drew the likes of Fergie, Bono, Brad Pitt, Mariah Carey and Miley Cyrus, and went too long. The candidates' contributions were kicked back to Thursday night's episode.

It was Simon Cowell, the "Idol" judge, who admonished the nation about the health care crisis in the United States, narrating a short, gauzy film that showed him visiting and consoling a low-income family with no insurance. It was Reese Witherspoon who spoke on behalf of the Children's Defense Fund, the organization for whom Mrs. Clinton worked as a young lawyer. It was Brad Pitt who praised the American can-do spirit in rebuilding New Orleans and received a standing ovation.

Daughtry in Uganda closed the show.

Hale "Bonddad" Stewart: Inflation Is Getting Worse

From the WSJ:

After several years of relative stability, a wave of rising prices is washing over the world economy.
It comes at a most inconvenient time. The Federal Reserve is sharply cutting U.S interest rates -- the opposite of the usual response to rising inflation -- to prevent the housing bust and credit crisis from causing a deep, prolonged recession. That's making the global response to inflation more complicated.

On Wednesday, the World Bank estimated global food prices have risen 83% over the past three years, threatening recent strides in poverty reduction. The IMF forecast consumer prices in emerging and developing countries will rise 7.4% this year, the most inflation since 2001 though still well below the double-digit levels of the recent past.

From the WSJ:

Federal energy officials expect oil to average $101 a barrel this year, a sharp upward revision from its earlier forecast that suggests prices will remain above $100 for some time.
But the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects American drivers, truckers and airlines to use less fuel this year as the economy softens. That could take some pressure off prices for gasoline and other fuels, and could keep the price of gasoline under a U.S. average of $4 a gallon.

Just months ago, $100-a-barrel oil seemed an aberration -- a price surge driven by speculators that would soon slip back to more reasonable levels. But the move by the agency -- usually a price bear that had predicted $87-a-barrel oil in January -- suggests $100 oil could be the new norm this year.The arm of the U.S. Energy Department also doesn't anticipate much relief next year, when it sees prices averaging $92.50 a barrel.

Crude oil for May delivery fell 59 cents a barrel, or 0.5%, to $108.50 Tuesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil hit a record high of $110.33 March 13.

Contrary to warnings from many analysts, the agency believes gasoline prices will remain below $4 a gallon in the U.S. during the height of the summer driving season. The government sees gasoline prices peaking in June at $3.60, up from the national average of around $3.33 now. The U.S., consumer of nearly a quarter of the world's daily crude production, is expected to use 85,000 barrels a day less this year in liquid fuels than in 2007, the agency said.

No one really knows where prices will end up -- despite their best intentions and good faith efforts to try and figure it out. However, here is the basic issue with energy demand: so long as India and China are still growing at strong clips, expect more upside price pressure. Those two countries add 2 billion people to the demand side of the equation.

Let's look at some charts.

On the daily for oil, notice the following:

-- Prices were in an uptrend from early February to early March

-- Prices broke this trend, but have remained above the $100 level

-- Prices are consolidating above $100 level in either a triangle or rectangle formation

-- The 10 and 20 day SMAs are bunched together, indicating they are looking for direction.

-- Prices remain above the 50 SMA

On oil's weekly chart, notice the following:

-- Oil started a rally at the beginning of last year.

-- Throughout the course of that rally, oil has moved through resistance and then consolidated price gains.

-- It has used the 10 and 20 week SMA as support

Short version: oil's charts are incredibly strong and show no sign of reversing.

As a result, prices are the pump are noticeably higher.

As a result of high fuel prices, we're starting to see protests from truckers:

Tons of freight idled across the country Tuesday as independent truckers pulled their rigs off the road while others slowed to a crawl on major highways in a loosely organized protest of high fuel prices.
Using CB radios and trucking Web sites, some truckers called for a strike Tuesday to protest the high cost of diesel fuel, hoping the action might pressure President Bush to stabilize prices by using the nation's oil reserves.

"The gas prices are too high," said Lamont Newberne, a trucker from Wilmington, N.C., who along with 200 drivers protested at a New Jersey Turnpike service area. "We don't make enough money to pay our bills and take care of our family."

On the Turnpike, southbound rigs "as far as the eye can see" staged a short lunchtime protest by moving about 20 mph near Newark, jamming traffic on one of the nation's most heavily traveled highways, authorities said.

While we're looking at commodity prices, let's look at agricultural prices because they have also been spiking

On the daily chart, notice the following:

-- Price have broken through the support of an upward sloping trendline started in late November 2007

-- Prices are below the 50 day SMA and are heading lower

-- The 10 day 20 day SMAs are both headed lower and have moved through the 50 day SMA

-- Prices are consolidating below the 50 day SMA

-- Prices have continually moved through previously established resistance and consolidated those gains

-- Prices are still in a confirmed uptrend

The reason agricultural prices are so important is there are food riots in various countries across the globe and governments are curbing exports:

As well as the riots in Egypt, rising food costs have been blamed for violent unrest in Haiti, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. Protests have also occurred in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia.
China, India, Pakistan, Cambodia and Vietnam have curbed rice exports to ensure there is enough for their own people.

Most commodities are priced in dollars. Therefore a dropping dollar is a de factor price increase.

On the daily chart, notice the following:

-- Prices consolidated in the 74 - 77 range from late November to late February.

-- Prices broke through support and have since fallen about 3.3%

-- Prices are consolidating in a triangle consolidation pattern

-- The 10 and 20 day SMAs are bunched together, indicating a lack of direction.

On the weekly chart, notice the following:

-- Prices have continually moved lower, falling through support

-- After falling through support, prices have consolidated their drop and then moved lower

-- The shorter SMAs are below the longer SMAs

-- Prices are below the SMAs

All of this leads to high inflation in the US:

Omid Memarian: Who can you trust reporting on a closed country?

How can journalists responsibly report on countries to which they have very little access? How can they break beyond barriers to produce good reporting? And more importantly, to what extent can we, as readers, trust stories about such sensitive nations in the news media?

Last week, the International Center for Journalists provided an extraordinary chance for many foreign correspondents to try to answer these questions in a discussion on Iran.

They listened to a variety of Iranian scholars and journalists who spoke about ways to get their readers to understand Iran beyond Ayatollahs, veiled women, ambitious nuclear plans, the 1980 hostage crisis, and its controversial President.

In my experience with journalists who cover Iran, I have found that one of the major obstacles they face in producing accurate, fair, and comprehensive reports is procuring background information.

The information they rely on is mostly provided by Iranian exiles, think thanks (mainly in Washington), Iran scholars and, to an extent, Iranian sources who feel comfortable sharing their stories with foreign journalists -- people who sometimes risk their lives to share their knowledge, insights and analysis on the ground.

Unfortunately, this method of gaining context has become problematic due to politically polarized sources who tend to filter information through different lenses and provide a version of truth that in many cases has nothing to do with what is happening in Iran. To illustrate this, I will share a few examples:

There is no doubt that since Ahmadinejad coming into office, his insufficient economic policies have caused tough times for the Iranian people, who have suffered from high inflation, unemployment and political repression. Numbers support these facts. But I was amazed by the analysis of one of the participants, an American scholar who has written a book on Iran and who had just arrived from Tehran. She said that just six months after Ahamdinejad entered office in 2005, $200 billion of capital fled Iran to other countries. Two hundred billion dollars? How is this possible? Nobody asked about the source and accuracy of the number, which I have heard floating around Iranian scholars' discussions.

I was also surprised when another scholar completely denied a fatwa was issued by Iran's Supreme Leader about Iran's nuclear energy program in 2004, calling nuclear weapons unacceptable under Islam. At the time, this fatwa was on the front pages of Tehran's newspapers and was one of the reasons behind the Iranian leader's defiance in pursuing the controversial nuclear dossier.

I was, however, not surprised when another scholar completely denied the existence of the women's movement in Iran, right before a scheduled talk given by a woman activist from Tehran who is closely involved in this movement. In her talk, she described how women in Iran are battling with the hardliners to change Iran's laws. Despite what the "armchair scholars" in the U.S. may think, she explained that Iranian civil society organizations resist against extensive amounts of intimidation by the government, lobby different layers of power and try to mobilize people with their message of change.

The key issue is that these days in Tehran, any kind of information highlighting the insufficiency of Ahmadinejad's government seems believable. On the other hand, the fear of a possible U.S. attack has led many people concerned about another fiasco in the Middle East to filter the information through certain lenses that do not reflect the truth and can be misleading if journalists take it at face value. Iran is not just Ahmadinejad and hardliners, and without understanding different sources of power it is nearly impossible to give a clear image of one of the most complex societies in the Middle East.

Journalists' very limited access to Iran, which has been reinforced by the Islamic regime during the past few years, has not only blurred reality and produced a series of myths about a country at the core of international concerns, but also has confused many of the scholars and academics who try to understand Iran from outside its borders. The ICFJ seminar was extraordinary in illustrating the peculiar circumstances of reporting on Iran and the challenges affecting the quality of our work.

American Cancels 900 More Flights

DALLAS — American Airlines canceled more than 900 flights Thursday to fix faulty wiring in hundreds of jets, marking the third straight day of mass groundings as company executives offered profuse apologies and travel vouchers to calm angry customers.

American, the nation's largest carrier, has now scrubbed more than 2,400 flights since Tuesday, when federal regulators warned that nearly half its planes could violate a safety regulation designed to prevent fires.

That's more than one in three flights canceled over the last three days.

Daniel Garton, an executive vice president of American, said cancellations could extend into Friday.

A return to normal operations depends on how quickly mechanics can inspect and fix the wire bundles. Airline spokesman Tim Wagner said late Wednesday afternoon that 60 planes had been cleared to fly, 119 were being worked on, and 121 planes had not yet been inspected.

The fallout could be seen at airport ticket counters, where frustrated customers bickered with American employees, and on the stock market, where shares of American's parent company tumbled more than 11 percent Wednesday.

American estimates that more than 100 passengers would have been on each of those canceled flights. That means a quarter-million people have been inconvenienced this week.

Airline executives said they thought they had fixed the wiring two weeks ago, when they canceled more than 400 flights to inspect and in some cases fix the shielding around the wires in their MD-80 aircraft.

But this week, Federal Aviation Administration inspectors, who have been conducting stepped-up surveys of airline compliance with safety rules called airworthiness directives, said 15 of 19 American jets they examined flunked. That left the airline no choice but to ground all 300 of its MD-80s, the most common jet in American's 655-plane fleet.

"We have obviously failed to complete the airworthiness directive to the precise standards that the FAA requires, and I take full responsibility for that," Gerard Arpey, American's chairman and chief executive, said at an industry event in California.

Back at American's headquarters in Fort Worth, Garton apologized for the snafu and vowed the airline would fix the problem this time.

"We simply cannot put our customers through this again," he said.

Garton added that for American, "this certainly couldn't have come at a worse time." The airline faces record fuel prices and fear of a recession, and analysts forecast that its parent, AMR Corp., lost more than $300 million in the first three months of the year.

American declined to say how much it would spend on $500 travel vouchers and hotel rooms for stranded travelers and overtime for mechanics, or how much revenue it would lose by putting some displaced customers on other airlines. But Garton said it would be "significant."

Perhaps worried about that cost, investors on Wednesday sent AMR shares down $1.15 to $9.17.

American's problem _ and Alaska Airlines' cancellation of 14 flights Wednesday to inspect its nine MD-80s _ stems from an FAA order in 2006 covering the bundling of wires in the backup power system for the fuel pump of the MD-80. The FAA says improperly bundled wires could rub, leading to an electrical short or even fire.

American officials said the safety of their planes was never jeopardized, and the FAA said no serious incidents have been blamed on poorly bundled wires.

Some passengers took a jaundiced view toward American's promise to fix the problems.

Kathy Neer of Santa Fe, N.M., was caught up in both waves of cancellations to and from a vacation in Paris. She and her husband were stranded in Dallas on Tuesday on the final leg of their journey home. American gave the Neers a voucher for a hotel room and seats on another flight home Wednesday.

"They say our flight is leaving at 3:55 p.m., but do you think we trust them?" Neer said. "After being burned twice, we're a little skeptical."

___

Associated Press writers Daisy Nguyen in Los Angeles and Jeff Carlton in Dallas contributed to this report.

Rock Band guitar hack enables stompbox to activate Overdrive

Filed under: Gaming

Not even 24 hours after catching a whiff of those sick Mushroom-headed Rock Band drum pads comes yet another mod that oozes awesomeness. The Rock Band Stompbox tackles an issue any digital rocker has faced -- accidental (and often unwanted) activation of Overdrive / Star Power. Put simply, this engineering fellow ripped his axe apart, ganked a spare effects pedal and put his superb wiring skills to good use. Hit up the read link for a pictorial step-by-step, or jump on past the break for a video demonstration.

[Thanks, Brad]