Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/156717501?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Nick is angry video I: Diaz complains of not having the money for a good training camp
An hour removed from the biggest win of his career over B.J. Penn, Nick Diaz should've been jubilant, but he's not wired that way. Diaz entered the UFC 137 postfight press conference looking annoyed and got more agitated.
Over the next 35 minutes, he complained about anything and everything. First and foremost was the money he's making. Watch Diaz make the claim here that he doesn't get paid enough to take care of his training partners (2:12 mark). Diaz brought up boxing's pay scale several times.
Eventually, Dana White couldn't take anymore and snapped back. That's when Diaz's manager Cesar Gracie hopped in (8:28 mark).
Diaz reportedly made $200,000 to show last night and earned another $75,000 for Fight of the Night. He made $175,000 for his win over Paul Daley in April. For his victory over Evangelista Santos, Diaz was paid $150,000. He got $50,000 for that fight before that against KJ Noons.
Where has all this money gone? Or do you agree with Diaz that he's getting screwed?
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Is Funeral Insurance Necessary?
I have been looking into funeral insurance for the first time this past week. Lets? take a look at the pros and cons of a funeral insurance policy and see if it is right for you.
Funeral Insurance is Convenient
Funeral insurance can be useful since it does provide a number of benefits. It can be great to have because it will take care of all of the costs associated with the planning of a funeral and burial. It allows you to have all of the arrangements taken care of in advance with the funeral home and the cemetery. This allows loved ones to grieve without having to come up with money to pay for a burial.
Funeral Insurance is Expensive
One of the problems with funeral insurance is the cost. Although the payments for funeral insurance are low, they quickly add up over time. You could wind up spending a whole lot more money for the policy than the actual cost of a funeral. If you are a disciplined saver, then you could use the money that you would pay for funeral insurance to fund a savings account for the costs instead. If you don?t die unexpectedly early, this self-funded funeral account could end up saving you hundreds or thousands of dollars and your loved ones still would be able to cover the funeral costs.
Funeral Insurance has Hidden Fees
You have to be sure to read the fine print with any funeral insurance policy. These policies often contain hidden fees that can force you to pay a lot more money than you originally expected. You could pay off a policy and your beneficiaries may still be left with a fee for the policy to collect.
Funeral Insurance is Locked In
On the one hand, it is good that your plan is locked in once you have settled on a company since you will be covered, but it can also be bad because you will have a hard time making any changes. Policies do not transfer from one mortuary to another. Plans are also not usually refundable in any way, so you cannot get your money back if you change your mind on where you?d like to be interred. You might wind up wasting a lot of money if you decide to adjust the burial arrangements.
My Take on Funeral Insurance
Since my husband and I want to be cremated and don?t have a particular resting place in mind, funeral insurance is not a good idea for us. It is much cheaper to simply have $10,000 set aside for any cremation or wake costs that we will have to cover. A cremation runs about $3000 here in Houston, Texas, so $10,000 should be able to cover the cost of any cremation and gathering afterwards. We saved up our emergency fund over a year by simply paying ourselves $500 a month and a portion of any leftover money we had after paying the rest of our expenses. We actually continue to fund the account but usually take the excess over $10,000 and apply it towards our mortgage principal instead. After our home is paid off, we may allow that fund to grow indefinitely.
What do you think about funeral insurance?
Related posts:
- Common Life Insurance Questions
- Should You Get Whole Life Insurance?
- What Is Term Life Insurance?
Source: http://stupidcents.com/is-funeral-insurance-necessary/
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Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Rumors of a larger, 15? MacBook Air continue to pile up (Yahoo! News)
Could Apple be ready to give its Pro notebooks an Air makeover?
Apple's super-thin MacBook Air notebooks have already spawned a number of copycats, but the company itself may be poised to add another skinny laptop to its ranks. Rumors of a 15" version of the Air have been piling up for months, and enough reliable sources have jumped on the bandwagon that it appears a larger version is indeed on the way.?The newest credible report comes from japanese Apple site Macotakara, where tipsters have pointed to the development of an ultra-thin 15" display as proof a new Air is in the works.
This news follows whispers earlier this year that Apple is prepping not one, but two new super-skinny notebooks. And not only that, they are said to carry MacBook Pro branding. Could a MacBook Air Pro be in the works? It's hard to tell, but with Apple killing off the base-model MacBooks in July of this year the company seems poised to shakeup its notebook offerings in short order.
Currently, the MacBook Air only comes in 11" and 13" (pictured above) flavors, keeping the svelte notebooks from being a hit among power users who require more screen real estate on the go. A 15" version could certainly change that, and if Apple does indeed intend on revamping its Pro models with the sleek lines ? and super-fast solid state storage ? of the Air, it could be a hit amongst those shopping a laptop for both work and play.
(Source)
This article originally appeared on Tecca
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ABCs of Euro crisis have citizens asking WTF?
BRUSSELS?? From a rescue fund called the EFSF to another known as the ESM, by way of a SPIV trust and an FTT levy, the acronyms and other labels generated by the European Union's fight to contain its sovereign debt crisis range from the arcane to the bizarre.
As pressure escalates on the EU to solve the chaos, so does the tome of technical jargon for programs aimed at regaining stability. But often the capital-letter-laden alphabet soup ends up causing more confusion than it's designed to resolve.
The EU's increasing power, from a new diplomatic corps to a push for more oversight over national budgets, also raises questions over whether it uses jargon to communicate internally, or whether it uses the mystery to its advantage.
"Euro zone leaders do partly rely on the lack of understanding of ordinary taxpayers to push through these crisis measures and distract attention from their shortcomings," said Raoul Ruparel, an economist analyst at the eurosceptic Open Europe think-tank in London. "They gloss over these terms like NPV, net present value, but these are crucial details," he said.
For example: when the EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) expires, the permanent ESM (European Stability Mechanism) will enter into force, but not before a deal on PSI (private sector involvement) in more aid for Greece.
At the same time, politicians working on avoiding more crises are drawing up revisions to MiFID, which will essentially usher in more regulation of financial markets. But there is also MiFID II in the works and proposed revisions to MAD.
The EFSF and the ESM should not be confused with their smaller partner, the EFSM ? while the biggest fight could be over the MFF, the EU's long-term budget, and all that after Basel 2.5, the CRD capital requirements law and a crackdown on CRAs.
"I nearly lost my mind working through Basel," said one European banker, referring to the set of global banking supervisory rules that the EU implements across the bloc.
One summit has become a byword for EU officials to reduce a complex emergency debt package into a single phrase: July 21.
Sometimes that date has been twisted into a more unintelligible reference. "The point now is to implement a decision of the 21st of July-plus," Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said in Brussels in late October.
Even sophisticated money managers struggle with the EU's internal workings. Some investors worried that an October 26 summit had been canceled when they heard of a procedural decision to scrap a meeting of EU finance ministers, known as Ecofin.
Hours after the summit went ahead, journalists jeered European Commission officials as they struggled to disentangle NPV from "notional haircuts" ? a crucial element of an agreement designed to contain the worsening crisis.
Already losing popularity among Europeans over its clumsy handling of the debt crisis, the EU risks further alienating its citizens with the latest tide of opaque and convoluted jargon.
In the EU's latest survey on attitudes to the 27-nation bloc, less than a third of Europeans said they know what is going on at the European Parliament. Asked if they had heard of euro bonds ? a proposal to issue debt jointly by the 17 nations in the euro and which could take budgetary powers away from national parliaments ? 57 percent said 'no', the poll found.
The phrase generates equal but different confusion in debt markets, where 'eurobond' has long been shorthand for a type of international bond.
"The fundamental issue is that people feel almost nervous and anxious about the EU and that translates into insecurity and hostility because they don't understand how the place works," said Paul Adamson, editor of the online European affairs magazine E!Sharp and a campaigner against EU jargon.
Bureaucracies from the U.S. military to multinational companies are renowned for their jargon. But the EU's highly complex institutions are steeped in specialized language ? dubbed eurospeak ? with a tradition of naming policies after the places and people connected with their creation.
Schengen is no longer just a quiet Luxembourg town but a passport-free area; Gymnich, the name of a German castle, is now code for a meeting of EU foreign ministers. Officials responsible for preparing weekly talks between EU ambassadors are known as the Antici group after their Italian founder.
Jargon has grown as more countries have joined the EU to encompass its 23 languages: EFSF becomes FESF in French, FEEF in Spanish, ERVV in Finnish and SECA in Irish Gaelic.
Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the Commission, said in late October that the bloc's complexities are "the single biggest complaint I receive everywhere I go in Europe."
One effort to bring Europeans closer to their officials and representatives is the newly-opened European Parliament visitors' center, built to rival the visitor center at the U.S. Congress in Washington. But beyond the razzmatazz of hi-tech, interactive displays and role-playing games, the debt crisis goes quietly unmentioned.
"We know there's a crisis because we live it every day," said Maria Jose Garrido, a lawyer from Madrid outside the visitor's center. "It's not going to go away just because you don't talk about it clearly."
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45106178/ns/business-world_business/
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Abramovich takes stand in billionaires' legal feud (AP)
LONDON ? Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich hit back against fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky on Monday, telling a court he was never the older man's protege and does not owe him a cent.
Berezovsky is suing Abramovich in a London court for several billion dollars, saying that Abramovich had intimidated him into selling shares in their jointly owned oil company Sibneft at a fraction of their value.
Abramovich, the media-shy owner of the Chelsea Football Club, dismissed that claim as nonsense as he took the stand at London's Commercial Court. The case has fascinated the city's large Russian community and provided a peek into the Wild West years that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Abramovich told the court that he had never made a "legal, binding agreement" with Berezovsky over Sibneft, a Russian oil and gas conglomerate.
And in a written witness statement, he said Berezovsky "has already obtained a very substantial sum of money from me and I do not believe that he has any entitlement to be paid anything more, whether in law or honor."
Berezovsky, who amassed a fortune during Russia's privatization of state assets in the early 1990s, has testified that during the chaotic years after the breakup of the Soviet Union he was a mentor to Abramovich and treated him like a son. Together with a third partner they set up Sibneft.
But Berezovsky, an ally of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, fell out with Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, shortly after he became president in 2000. Berezovsky fled to Britain, which granted him political asylum, and has since become a fierce critic of the Kremlin.
Abramovich sold Sibneft to Russia's state-owned gas monopoly Gazprom in a multibillion-dollar deal in 2005.
Abramovich, 45, said in his witness statement that "I was not his protege and he was not my mentor."
He claimed Berezovsky, now 65, was a political godfather whom he paid for protection. Abramovich used the Russian word "krysha," or roof, to describe their relationship.
"A person giving krysha to another was a person who acted as a protector," Abramovich said in his witness statement. "I had to pay Mr. Berezovsky for the opportunity of creating the oil company under his protection."
Abramovich's lawyer has said that between 1995 and 2002, the younger man paid Berezovsky $2 billion for his patronage, including money for homes in France, private planes, art works and jewelry.
"At times it was difficult to meet Mr. Berezovsky's demands and I thought they were often excessive. However I was concerned about what might happen if we lost the krysha," Abramovich said in his statement. "If Mr. Berezovsky needed to charter a plane in order to fly somewhere, or wanted a yacht to be chartered, he would ask me to pay for it."
Abramovich described Berezovsky as an intensely ambitious man with "far-reaching political ambitions."
"There was at times something of a megalomaniac about him that could lead to fantastic suggestions on his part," Abramovich said, citing one idea to restore monarchy in Russia.
"The grander the plan he entertained at any given time, the more cash he would be after in his almost-fanatical zeal to seek to make those grand plans a reality."
The case is expected to last for two months.
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High court avoids dispute over highway crosses
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Supreme Court won't hear an appeal of a ruling that 12-foot-high crosses along Utah highways in honor of dead state troopers violate the Constitution.
The justices voted 8-1 Monday to reject an appeal from Utah and a state troopers' group that wanted the court to throw out the ruling and take a more permissive view of religious symbols on public land.
Since 1998, the private Utah Highway Patrol Association has paid for and erected more than a dozen memorial crosses, most of them on state land. Texas-based American Atheists Inc. and three of its Utah members sued the state in 2005.
The federal appeals court in Denver said the crosses were an unconstitutional endorsement of Christianity by the Utah state government.
Justice Clarence Thomas issued a 19-page opinion dissenting from Monday's order. Thomas said the case offered the court the opportunity to clear up confusion over its approach to disputes over the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, the prohibition against governmental endorsement of religion.
"Today the court rejects an opportunity to provide clarity to an Establishment Clause jurisprudence in shambles," Thomas said.
Previous high court cases have made it difficult for lower courts to figure out what to do in this area and "rendered the constitutionality of displays of religious imagery on government property anyone's guess," he said.
Thomas referred specifically to a pair of 2005 cases about the Ten Commandments. On the same day, the court upheld a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas state capitol in Austin and declared unconstitutional a display in the McCreary County courthouse in Kentucky.
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