Survey: Home prices down in most major US cities

In this Dec. 20, 2011 photo, a carpenter works on a roof of a home in Happy Valley, Ore. U.S. home prices fell in most major cities for the second straight month, further evidence that the housing recovery will be bumpy. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

In this Dec. 20, 2011 photo, a carpenter works on a roof of a home in Happy Valley, Ore. U.S. home prices fell in most major cities for the second straight month, further evidence that the housing recovery will be bumpy. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

This Dec. 20, 2011 photo, shows a new home for sale in Winter Garden, Fla. U.S. home prices fell in most major cities for the second straight month, further evidence that the housing recovery will be bumpy. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

(AP) ? U.S. home prices fell in most major cities for the second straight month, further evidence that the housing recovery will be bumpy.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index released Tuesday showed prices dropped in October from September in 19 of the 20 cities tracked.

Prices in a majority of cities declined for the second straight month, reflecting the typically fall slowdown after the peak buying season. Prior to that, prices had risen for five consecutive months in at least half of the cities tracked.

The Case-Shiller index covers half of all U.S. homes. It measures prices compared with those in January 2000 and creates a three-month moving average. The monthly data are not seasonally adjusted.

Atlanta, Detroit and Minneapolis posted the biggest monthly declines. Prices in Atlanta and Las Vegas fell to their lowest points since the housing crisis began. Prices rose in Phoenix after three straight monthly declines.

David M. Blitzer, chairman of S&P's index committee, said steep price drops in cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Minneapolis were particularly worrisome because their gains earlier this season were so strong.

"Atlanta and the Midwest are regions that really stand out in terms of recent relative weakness," Blitzer said. "These markets were some of the strongest during the spring/summer buying season."

Americans are reluctant to purchase a home more than two years after the recession officially ended. High unemployment and weak job growth have deterred many would-be buyers. Even the lowest mortgage rates in history haven't been enough to lift sales.

Some people can't qualify for loans or meet higher down payment requirements. Many with good credit and stable jobs are holding off because they fear that prices will keep falling.

Sales of previously occupied homes are barely ahead of 2008's dismal figures ? the worst in 13 years. And sales of new homes this year will likely be the worst since the government began keeping records a half century ago.

Prices are also certain to fall further once banks resume millions of foreclosures. They have been delayed because of a yearlong government investigation into mortgage lending practices.

Home prices had stabilized in coastal cities over the past six months, helped by a rush of spring buyers and investors. But this year, prices in many cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tampa, have reached their lowest points since the housing bust more than four years ago.

Foreclosures and short sales ? when a lender accepts less for a home than what is owed on a mortgage ? are selling at an average discount of 20 percent.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-12-27-Home%20Prices/id-59dfed905b65474cbf400256c794460a

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Rhold Insurance Brokerage: Don't worry, we'll take care, Baby | Ads ...

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Published: December 2011

Source: http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/rhold_insurance_brokerage_dont_worry_well_take_care_baby

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In China, a daring few challenge one-child limit (AP)

ZHUJI, China ? Seven months pregnant, Wu Weiping sneaked out early in the morning carrying a shoulder bag with some clothes, her laptop and a knife.

"It's good for me I wasn't caught, but it's lucky for them too," said Wu, 35, who feared that family planning officials were going to drag her to the hospital for a forced abortion. "I was going to fight to the death if they found me."

With her escape, Wu joined an increasingly defiant community of parents in China who have risked their jobs, savings and physical safety to have a forbidden second child.

Though their numbers are small, they represent changing ideas about individual rights. While violators in the past tended to be rural families who skirted the birth limits in relative obscurity, many today are urbanites like Wu who frame their defiance in overtly political terms, arguing that the government has no right to dictate how many children they have.

Using Internet chat rooms and blogs, a few have begun airing their demands for a more liberal family planning policy and are hoping others will follow their lead. Several have gotten their stories into the tightly controlled media, an indication that their perspectives have resonance with the public.

After finding out his wife was expecting a second child, Liu Lianwen set up an online discussion group called "Free Birth" to swap information about the one-child policy and how to get around it. In less than six months, it has attracted nearly 200 members.

"We are idealists," said the 37-year-old engineer from central China, whose daughter was born Oct. 18. "We want to change the attitudes of people around us by changing ourselves."

Freed of the social controls imposed during the doctrinaire era of communist rule, Chinese today are free to choose where they live and work and whom they marry. But when it comes to having kids, the state says the majority must stop at one. Hefty fines for violators and rising economic pressures have helped compel most to abide by the limit. Many provinces claim near perfect compliance.

It's impossible to know how many children have been born in violation of the one-child policy, but Zhai Zhenwu, director of Renmin University's School of Sociology and Population in Beijing, estimates that less than one percent of the 16 million babies born each year are "out of plan."

Liu thinks his fellow citizens have been brainwashed. "They all feel it's glorious to have a small family," he said. "Thirty years of family planning propaganda have changed the way the majority of Chinese think about having children."

The reluctance to procreate is also an issue of growing concern for demographers, who worry that the policy combined with a rising cost of living has brought the fertility rate down too sharply and too fast. Though still the world's largest nation with 1.3 billion people, China's population growth has slowed considerably.

"The worry for China is not population growth ? it's rapid population aging and young people not wanting to have children," said Wang Feng, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy, a joint U.S.-China academic research center in Beijing.

Wang sees a looming disaster as the baby boom generation of the 1960s heads into retirement and old age. China's labor force, sharply reduced by the one-child policy, will struggle to support them.

He argues that the government should allow everyone at least two children. He thinks many Chinese would still stop at one because of concerns about being able to afford to raise more than that.

Penalties for violators are harsh. Those caught must pay a "social compensation fee," which can be four to nine times a family's annual income, depending on the province and the whim of the local family planning bureau. Parents with government jobs can also lose their posts or get demoted, and their "out of plan" children are denied education and health benefits.

Those without government posts have less to worry about. If they can afford the steep fee and don't mind losing benefits, there's little to stop them from having another child. There's popular anger over this favoring of the wealthy but not much that ordinary people can do about it, since the policy is set behind closed doors by the communist leadership in Beijing.

In 2007, officials in coastal Zhejiang province threatened to start naming and shaming well-off families who had extra kids, but the campaign never got off the ground, possibly because it threatened to tarnish the reputations of too many well-connected people.

Hardest hit by the rules are urban middle class parents with Communist Party posts, teaching positions or jobs at state-run industries.

Li Yongan was ordered to pay 240,000 yuan ($37,500) after his son was born in 2007 as he already had a 13-year-old daughter. After refusing to pay the fee, Li was denied a household registration permit for his son, forcing him to pay three times more for kindergarten.

He was also barred from his job teaching physics at a state-run university in Beijing. "I never regret my second child, but I have been living with depression and anger for years," said Li, who struggles to make ends meet as a freelance chess teacher.

Of course, there are surreptitious, though not foolproof, ways to evade punishment: paying a bribe or falsifying documents so that, for instance, a second child is registered as the twin of an older sibling. Or, sometimes second babies are registered to childless relatives or rural families that are allowed to have a second child but haven't done so.

Wu, the woman who made the early morning escape, said she never intended to flout the one-child rule. She had resorted to fertility treatments to conceive her first child ? a daughter nicknamed Le Le, or Happy ? so she was stunned when a doctor told her she was expecting again in August, 2008.

The news triggered a monthlong "cold war" with her husband, Wu said. Silent dinners, cold shoulders. She wanted to keep the baby. He didn't. After a few weeks, he came around, she explained with a satisfied smile.

But family planning officials insisted on an abortion. The principal at her school also pressured her to end the pregnancy.

Desperate, she went online for answers ? and was led astray.

At her home on the outskirts of Zhuji, a textile hub a few hours south of Shanghai, the energetic former high school teacher recounted how she divorced her husband, then married her cousin the next day, all in an attempt to evade the rules.

The soap-opera-like subterfuge was meant to take advantage of a loophole that allows divorced parents to have a second child if their new spouse is a first-time parent.

Wu had helped raise her cousin, who is 25 and 10 years younger than her, and when she asked if he would marry her to help save the baby, he agreed.

The divorce, on Sept. 27, 2008 involved signing a document and posing for a photo. It was over in just a few minutes. The next day's marriage was similarly swift.

"I remember I was very happy that day," Wu said holding the marriage certificate with a glued-on snapshot of the cousins. "Because I thought I'd figured out a way to save my baby."

But her problem wasn't over. When the newlyweds applied for a birth permit, officials informed them conception had to take place after marriage. They were told to abort the baby, then try again. Wu was back to square one.

A popular option that was out of reach for Wu economically is to have the baby elsewhere, where the limits don't apply. Some better-off Chinese go to Hong Kong, where private agencies charge mainland mothers hundreds of thousands of yuan (tens of thousands of dollars) for transport, lodging, and medical costs.

The number giving birth in Hong Kong reached 40,000 last year, prompting the territory to cap the number of beds in public hospitals they are allowed from 2012. However, parents of kids born abroad face the bureaucratic hurdles of foreigners, having to pay premiums for school and other services.

In the end, Wu also fled, but not as far as Hong Kong. Three months from her due date, she kissed her baby daughter goodbye, telling her she was going on vacation, and hopped an early morning train to nearby Hangzhou. There she switched to another train bound for Shanghai, hoping the roundabout route would throw off anyone trying to tail her.

In Shanghai, Wu used a friend's ID to rent a one-room apartment with shared bathroom and kitchen. It was tiny and not cheap for her, 700 yuan a month (US$107), but it was across from a hospital that allowed her to register without a government-issued birth permission slip and it had an Internet connection.

Wu had never used email, so her husband ? the real one ? set up a password-protected online journal that he titled "yixiaobb," or 'one tiny baby.' She posted to the journal up to nine times a day, describing where she was living without ever revealing her exact location. She prefaced every entry with a capital M for mother, and added a number to mark how many messages she wrote in a day. Using the same journal, her husband wrote to her, coding his messages with an F.

It felt like an invisible tether linking Wu to her husband. He didn't know where she was, but knew she was OK. Shortly before her due date, she asked him to come to Shanghai, and he was present for the birth of their son.

More than two years later, she and her former husband, the father to both her children, have yet to remarry ? hoping it will legally shield him from any future punishment.

The marriage with her cousin was easily dissolved after they discovered it was never valid, because marriages between first cousins is illegal in China.

Wu was fired from her job as a public school teacher because of the baby and her ex-husband, who is also a teacher, was demoted to a freelance position at his school. Though told she has been assessed a 120,740 yuan ($18,575) social compensation fee, Wu has refused to pay.

Enforcers of the family planning limits showed up at their house in July, and again in November, threatening legal action. Wu is afraid their property might be confiscated or that she or husband might end up in detention, but she doesn't want to pay the fine because she doesn't believe she's done anything wrong.

"I don't think I've committed any crime," she said. "A crime is something that hurts other people or society or that infringes on other people's rights. I don't think having a baby is any kind of crime."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/china/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111225/ap_on_re_as/as_china_two_kids

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Soldier Surprises Parents During Parade

Some siblings in Massachusetts had a job to do on Christmas Eve -- get their elderly mother to their hometown parade, kicking and screaming if need be.

That's because their sister, an Army sergeant, had cooked up a very big holiday surprise for her.

"Merry Christmas Lynn!"

For the 25th year, the city of Lynn marked Christmas Eve with a parade. But this time, Santa?s sleigh carried a very unique gift.

"I just got back from Iraq 2 weeks ago. I told my brother I was like I'm gonna come home and not tell mom, so it was a big, it was a big surprise.

Army Sgt. First class Brenda Beaton climbed onto one of the floats just a block before it passed her brother's Eucild Ave. House.

Her family got their 78-year old mother to take part in the festivities.

"They all come down here every year for the parade and they said come on ma. I says no it's cold out. Ma you're coming with us."

She didn't see the banner they posted outside but couldn't help notice when the procession came to a standstill.

"I got to stop right now!"

In fatigues, the soldier - a Lynn native - stood up and waved.

"Hi mom!"

"I almost died. I could have fallen through the ground."

Safe and sound from her second tour in Iraq, Sgt. Beaton told her mom she had to stay at Fort Bragg for the holiday.

"She's like well I don't want Christmas, you're not gonna be here. I guess we can have Christmas now."

"I guess we are honey, we certainly are."

Source: http://www.wtvy.com/news/headlines/Soldier_Surprises_Parents_During_Parade_136213943.html

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Satyajit Das on What Went Wrong With Finance ? naked capitalism

No, it?s not ?all BS? (nor did he say that it was!)

He?s making the point that the models don?t perfectly reflect reality (as any good engineer will tell you without first costing you a few trillion dollars). As people start relying more and more on the outcomes of those mathematical models and stupidly believing them without understanding the assumptions and underpinning, they become more aggressive in the pricing in order to gain market share (and bonus money, which is stupidly paid out based on very game-able metrics).

Eventually, that pricing no longer reflects the risk, and eventually when everything blows up (?black swan? if you prefer the now-common misnomer), the risk takers go broke. If those risk takers (or, more accurately, their employers) are big enough, they crash the system in the process.

The key point is this: DON?T MISTAKE YOUR MODELS FOR REALITY! For some unfathomable reason, people have to relearn this lesson over and over and over again in almost every field. Numbers are the output of thought?they can never replace thought.

Source: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/satyajit-das-on-what-went-wrong-with-finance.html

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Cancer patient disability discrimination suit against Wal-Mart settles ...

Wal-Mart has agreed to settle a workplace discrimination lawsuit filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act as amended. The disability discrimination lawsuit involved issues of wrongful termination and the failure to accommodate a cancer patient who had worked for the retail giant.

The worker had worked for Wal-Mart for 12 years before the company summarily fired him, according to the lawsuit. The worker underwent cancer surgery during his tenure with the company. The effects of the cancer surgery left the man with weakness in his shoulder. However, after the procedure, the man returned to work and continued to perform his work as a forklift driver successfully.

Due to the weakness in his shoulder, however, the forklift driver approached management and asked that he not be required to cover a co-worker's 20-minute break. The co-worker was in the shipping department and the job in that department required manual lifting. Wal-Mart reportedly denied the employee's request for a reasonable accommodation for his medical condition, and fired the forklift driver.

A regional attorney with the Equal opportunity Employment Commission says, "There is a solid body of federal law that clearly obligates employers to provide an employee with a reasonable accommodation unless it poses an undue hardship."

In the Wal-Mart case, the company simply fired the forklift operator. The company had claimed that the forklift operator could not perform the essential functions of his job.

Because he requested that the company not require him to cover the break of a co-worker, in a different department, the disability discrimination lawsuit was filed against Wal-Mart for failing to provide the reasonable accommodation to the employee under the ADA as amended by the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act of 2008.

The company will pay damages and provide other relief in a settlement agreement entered into earlier this month.

Source: EEOC, "Wal-Mart to Pay $275,000 to Former Employee Fired after Cancer Surgery," Dec. 16, 2011

Source: http://www.employmentlawattorneypalmbeach.com/2011/12/cancer-patient-disability-discrimination-suit-against-wal-mart-settles.shtml

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Samsung Galaxy S II Duos Headed to China with Dual GSM/CDMA Support

Samsung Galaxy S II Duos Headed to China with Dual GSM/CDMA Support
Samsung Galaxy S II Duos Headed to China with Dual GSM/CDMA Support After revealing a duo of dual-SIM handsets yesterday in the form of the Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos, Samsung will add to their lineup of handsets with expanded radio capabilities. A new variation on the Samsung Galaxy S II is headed to China and will support both GSM and CDMA2000. The phone is known as ? you guessed it Read complete Samsung Galaxy S II Duos Headed to China with Dual GSM/CDMA Support >>

Samsung Galaxy S II Duos Headed to Chine with Dual GSM/CDMA Support
Samsung Galaxy S II Duos Headed to Chine with Dual GSM/CDMA Support December 23, 2011

Samsung Galaxy S II Duos Headed to Chine with Dual GSM/CDMA Support After revealing a duo of dual-SIM handsets yesterday in the form of the Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos, Samsung will add to their lineup of handsets with expanded radio capabilities. A new variation on the Samsung Galaxy S [...]

Samsung Announces Dual-SIM Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos
Samsung Announces Dual-SIM Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos December 22, 2011

Samsung Announces Dual-SIM Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos Take the Samsung Galaxy Y and Galaxy Y Pro, slap on dual-SIM support, and you have the pair of handsets announced by the Korean manufacturer today. Just with the original lineup of Galaxy Y phones, the new handsets feature 830MHz [...]

Related Videos:

Samsung GT-B7722 Unboxing Video - Phone in Stock at www.welectronics.com

Source: http://wwdn.org/samsung-galaxy-s-ii-duos-headed-to-china-with-dual-gsmcdma-support.html

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