Eeyore's News with a view

Nothing will come of it, but it is noice to see them try to scare them a little.
FBI investigating companies at heart of meltdown September 23, 2008 - 8:09pm
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, right, accompanied by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008, before the Senate Banking Committee hearing on the credit market turmoil. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
By LARA JAKES JORDAN Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The FBI is investigating four major U.S. financial institutions whose collapse helped trigger a $700 billion bailout plan by the Bush administration, The Associated Press has learned.
Two law enforcement officials said Tuesday the FBI is looking at potential fraud by mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and insurer American International Group Inc. Additionally, a senior law enforcement official said Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. also is under investigation.
The inquiries will focus on the financial institutions and the individuals that ran them, the senior law enforcement official said.
The law enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigations are ongoing and are in the very early stages.
Officials said the new inquiries bring to 26 the number of corporate lenders under investigation over the past year.
Spokesmen for AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not immediately return calls for comment Tuesday evening. A Lehman spokesman did not have an immediate comment.
Just last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller put the number of large financial firms under investigation at 24. He did not name any of the companies under investigation but said the FBI also was looking at whether any of them have misrepresented their assets.
Over the past year as the housing market cratered, the FBI has opened a wide-ranging probe of companies across the financial services industry, from mortgage lenders to investment banks that bundle home loans into securities sold to investors. Mueller has previously said the FBI's hunt for culprits in the nation's subprime mortgage crisis focused on accounting fraud, insider trading, and failure to disclose the value of mortgage-related securities and other investments.
The investigations revealed Tuesday come as lawmakers began considering whether to approve emergency legislation that would give the government broad power to buy up devalued assets from troubled financial firms.
The bailout proposed by the Bush administration is aimed at helping unlock credit and stabilize badly shaken markets in the United States and around the globe.
In the past two weeks, the government has taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the country's two biggest mortgage companies, with a bailout plan that could require the Treasury Department to put up as much as $100 billion for each of them over time if needed to keep them afloat as mortgage losses mount.
Last week, the Federal Reserve provided an emergency $85 billion loan to AIG, which teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Lehman Brothers was forced to file for bankruptcy after attempts to engineer a private rescue fell apart. All the companies were laid low from bad bets on complex mortgage-related securities.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made the joint decision last week that the only way to stop the carnage was to deal with the root cause of all the troubles, billions of dollars of bad mortgage debt sitting on the books of major financial companies. This debt has triggered the worst credit crisis in decades, causing credit markets to essentially freeze up despite the fact that the Fed joined with major central banks around the world to pump billions of dollars of reserves into the financial system.
Additionally, the FBI is investigating failed bank IndyMac Bancorp Inc. for possible fraud. Countrywide Financial Corp., formerly the nation's largest mortgage lender and now owned by Bank of America Corp., is also under scrutiny.
http://wtop.com/?nid=116&sid=1483896

Who did not know there was price fixing? Who does not know it goes on all the time?
Tomato processing, egg products industries probed September 23, 2008 - 8:07pm
By PAUL ELIAS Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Federal investigators say food broker Randall Rahal liked to use a simple little test to see whether he could bribe purchasing agents at the country's biggest food companies to buy from the tomato processor he represented.
Rahal would drop a $100 bill and then pick it up and ask the potential bribe recipient: "Is it yours?" If the agent said yes, Rahal knew they were open to a "business offer," he would boast, according to an FBI search warrant affidavit filed last month in Sacramento federal court as part of a bribery and fraud inquiry that also involves Rahal's client, tomato processor SK Foods of Lemoore, Calif.
That investigation was launched in August 2005 and has since expanded into a price-fixing probe of tomatoes, 95 percent of which are processed in California.
At the same time, Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona said Tuesday that investigators also were looking into price-fixing allegations in the egg industry.
Federal prosecutors already had been looking at possible price-fixing in the citrus industry as food companies wrestle with increasing costs of key food ingredients. Prices for vital ingredients such as corn and oil are soaring as demand rises around the world. And the cost pressures aren't expected to abate anytime soon.
Although federal law bars competitors from collaborating when setting their prices, Congress has created antitrust exemptions intended to help small farm groups and cooperatives bargain with large food processors. There are also exemptions for exports.
Inquiries into whether food producers overstepped those limits are being run by federal prosecutors in Sacramento and an antitrust division of the Justice Department based in Philadelphia.
In Sacramento, FBI agents tapped Rahal's telephones late last year and allege to have uncovered buyers at six food companies taking payments from him. Federal investigators also raided SK Foods on April 16. Investigators say they subsequently coaxed admissions from purchasers receiving payments at Agusa Inc., Kraft Foods Inc., Safeway Inc. and Frito-Lay, which is a division of Pepsico Inc.
Kraft Foods declined comment about the investigation.
Frito-Lay spokeswoman Aurora Gonzalez said the buyer who admitted taking payments no longer works for the company.
"We have been working with federal authorities since we first became aware of the investigation," Gonzalez said.
Investigators also say they have bank records and other evidence that buyers at B&G Foods Inc. and ConAgra Foods Inc. also took payments from Rahal, allegedly to ensure that the companies bought tomato products from SK Foods.
ConAgra spokeswoman Stephanie Childs said the company was not a target of the investigation and that the employee suspected of taking bribes was placed on administrative leave in April. Safeway spokesman Brian Dowling said the purchaser there accused of taking bribes is no longer employed by the grocery chain.
Investigators also allege that Rahal paid the bribes in exchange for bid information submitted to the companies by SK's competitors.
Rahal owns Westwood, N.J.-based Intramark USA. He could not be reached for comment because the company's telephones appear to have been disconnected.
Brian Maschler, an attorney for SK, confirmed the company was being investigated for possible price-fixing practices. He denied that SK was involved in any bribery scheme and fired Rahal in April. FBI agents allege in a court filing that they eavesdropped on telephone conversation in which SK founder and chief executive Scott Salyer encouraged Rahal's behavior.
No charges have been filed in the tomato investigation.
Two egg producers in Minnesota _ Golden Oval Eggs and Michael Foods _ noted in filings with the SEC this spring that they had been subpoenaed by the U.S. attorney's office in the Eastern district of Pennsylvania.
The subpoenas requested documents for the period between Jan. 1, 2002, through March 27, 2008, relating "primarily to the pricing, marketing and sales of our egg products," both companies wrote in their 10-Q filings.
Both companies said in the SEC filings that they intended to cooperate.
Sandie Wohlman, executive assistant of Golden Oval Eggs of Renville, Minn., referred questions on Tuesday to an attorney, who did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking an interview.
Mark Witmer, treasurer and secretary of Michael Foods Inc. in Minnetonka, Minn., said: "We have fully responded to the request for information."
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Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in Minneapolis, Emily Fredrix in Milwaukee and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.
http://wtop.com/?nid=111&sid=1483599

Hope none of my friends are using this type of inhaler.
Inhaler lung drugs tied to heart problems, deaths September 23, 2008 - 5:07pm
By LINDSEY TANNER AP Medical Writer
CHICAGO (AP) - Inhaler drugs used by millions of people with emphysema and bronchitis may slightly raise the risk for heart attacks and even death, a study suggests.
The results aren't conclusive and inhalers provide significant relief for these patients struggling to breathe. But the study authors urged doctors to closely monitor patients who use the inhalers.
Most affected patients have both emphysema and chronic bronchitis. The condition's formal name, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, is the nation's fourth leading cause of death.
The study's increased risks were small, and the drugs' marketer said both medicines are safe. Outside experts called the study compelling but said it has limitations that make it hard to know if the drugs or something else was at fault.
The drugs are tiotropium, sold as Spiriva Handihaler by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and ipratropium, available generically and also sold by Boehringer under the brand name Atrovent.
Spiriva, approved in 2004, and the decade-old Atrovent are used once or more daily to relax muscles and open lung airways. They've been used by 8 million patients worldwide.
A Veterans Affairs study published last week linked ipratropium with an increased risk for heart-related deaths in men.
The new study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
The company told the Food and Drug Administration earlier this year that its own data had linked Spiriva with a possible increased risk for strokes. But Boehringer and Pfizer Inc., which jointly market Spiriva, said Tuesday that they had recently given the FDA a new analysis of that data plus new long-term data, which they said shows initial concerns about strokes were unfounded.
"We strongly disagree with the conclusion" in the new study, the companies said in a statement.
COPD affects as many as 24 million Americans and kills more than 100,000 each year. It involves thickened and narrowed lung airways and excess mucous. Symptoms include persistent coughing and severe shortness of breath; smoking is a leading cause.
Patients describe COPD breathing problems as feeling like they're "living the entire day under water, unable to come to the surface," said Dr. Aaron Milstone of Vanderbilt University medical school.
The new study pooled results from 17 randomized studies comparing mostly older patients on either of the drugs with those on different medicine or dummy drugs. Randomized studies are the most rigorous kind of medical research, but Milstone said drawing conclusions from a pooled analysis can be problematic because of differences in patients' characteristics.
It found that using either drug for more than one month appeared to increase chances for fatal and nonfatal heart problems including heart attacks by more than 50 percent.
Among about 7,400 patients on either inhaled drug, 1.8 percent or 135 people developed fatal or nonfatal heart problems over a period of several weeks to several years. By contrast, among about 7,300 patients on other drugs or dummy medicine, 1.2 percent or 86 had those problems.
In absolute terms, out of 40 patients using either drug for one year, there would be one extra drug-linked death, said study author Dr. Sonal Singh of Wake Forest University's medical school.
Other drugs are used for COPD, but they also can have serious side effects, Singh said. This puts patients in "a very tough spot," he acknowledged.
He said before starting drugs, patients should try to reduce heart risks by quitting smoking, keeping blood pressure and cholesterol under control, and using oxygen.
Dr. Mark Rosen, former president of the American College of Chest Physicians and a lung specialist on New York's Long Island, said the data "are very compelling but they're not conclusive."
He said it's unclear what caused the apparent increased risks since the drugs aren't known to affect the heart. The authors said that damaging proteins involved in inflammation are thought to play a role in both COPD and heart disease.
Rosen noted that the analyzed studies weren't designed to look for heart problems, and said it's possible patients on the drugs had more heart problems to begin with.
Still, Rosen said the study "is an excellent reason to do more research to figure out why this is true, if it is true and not a statistical fluke."
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On the Net:
JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org

So much for trying to prove the big bang, their junk just broke down, it could not even work for a day. They will impress me when they can make a atom out of nothing. And then make the atoms smash together without their help. Pityfull really, what a waste of money.
See you next year, LHC: Atom smasher will restart in '09
So much for the end of the world. European physicists at CERN have put off the restart of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest atom smasher, until next year. "The time necessary for the investigation and repairs precludes a restart before CERN’s obligatory winter maintenance period, bringing the date for restart of the accelerator complex to early spring 2009," the lab says in a statement.
“Coming immediately after the very successful start of LHC operation ... this is undoubtedly a psychological blow,” CERN Director General Robert Aymar said in the statement. “Nevertheless, the success of the LHC’s first operation with beam is testimony to years of painstaking preparation and the skill of the teams involved in building and running CERN’s accelerator complex. I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigor and application.”
Researchers outside CERN are supportive of the decision. Peter Limon, who commissioned the Tevatron (superconducting accelerator) at Fermilab said: "The LHC is a very complex instrument, huge in scale and pushing technological limits in many areas. Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases."
By Dan Vergano
http://blogs.usatoday.com/sciencefair/2008/09/see-you-next-ye.html?loc=interstitialskip