Economic rescue plans fail to impress investors

By Calvin Palmer

If the Obama Administration’s economic rescue plans were designed to restore confidence, they clearly fell on deaf ears today as far as investors were concerned.

The announcement of $2 trillion of public and private funds to be spent on bringing stability to the U.S. financial system by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the passage through the Senate of the $838 billion economic stimulus bill, by 61-37 votes, did little to assuage investors’ fears.

Stock prices tumbled. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 381.99 points points, or 4.6 percent, to close at 7,888.88. It fell as much as 420 points in the last half-hour of trading.

The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 4.9 percent or 42.73 points, to 827.16, its worst day since the broad sell-off on Inauguration Day.

Geithner backed away from the widely-anticipated creation of a bad bank in which the Government would buy toxic assets from banks to boost their balance sheets.

Instead, he said that the Government would partner with the private sector to create an investment fund that would buy the assets. The Government would initially spend $500 billion on this project but could expand the fund up to a value of $1 trillion but further details were sketchy.

Introducing a private-sector element to the buyout plan will eliminate the danger of the Government mis-pricing the assets, the Treasury Secretary said.

Financial analysts were left far from impressed and longed for a greater degree of clarity.

“We’re not impressed, and I don’t think the market’s impressed either,” said Ryan Larson, head equity trader at Voyageur Asset Management. “It’s clear the administration is still trying to work on something concrete. I think the market sensed that, too.”

Quincy Crosby, chief investment strategist at The Hartford, one of America’s biggest investment companies, said that the White House’s financial rescue plan had disappointed the financial markets with its lack of detail.

“Markets need clarity and this was precisely the opposite,” Ms Crosby said. “The market had been hoping for more than just a general framework.”

She said that dropping the concept of a bad bank introduced further uncertainty because the Treasury had not spelt out what role it would play in investing in toxic assets, nor how the assets would be valued.

Geithner’s speech was also light on detail about other aspects of the revised plans for the heavily criticized Troubled Assets Relief Program (Tarp) introduced by the Bush Administration.

In Europe, shares fell as $6.9 billion loss by the Swiss banking giant UBS and uncertainty about the latest American bank bailout plan kept investors on the sidelines.

The FTSE 100 closed down by 2.2 percent in London. The DAX in Frankfurt, Germany, closed down 3.5 percent.

“What we are seeing is that the market has settled into a volatile trading range at low levels,” said Christoph Riniker, an equity analyst at Julius Baer in Zurich. “There’s not enough optimism on the outlook for it to push significantly higher in the short term.” 
 
[Based on reports by The New York Times, The Times and Forbes.com.]

Additional warning systems and safeguards delay the restart of LHC

By Calvin Palmer

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  has been delayed by two months by officials at CERN to allow engineers to install and test early warning and protection systems designed to avoid the catastrophic faults that occurred days after it was switched on last September.

This further delay will mean that the machine, which aims to prove the existence of the Higgs boson or “God particle” and answer other questions about the nature of the universe, will not have been in operation for a full year.

The first particle collisions are now scheduled for late October. CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research, will also take the unusual step of running the particle accelerator through most of next winter, to make up for lost time in collecting physics data.

Atom-smashers are generally shut down over the winter months, to allow for maintenance and to avoid incurring peak charges for their very high electricity needs.

The decision to run the $5.8 billion (£4 billion) accelerator over the winter, with only a short break for Christmas, will cost CERN an extra $10.1 million (£7 million), a 40 per cent increase on its usual operating costs. However, it means physicists will be able to start working on real data from all four of the LHC experiments next year. This could prove crucial in competing with the US Tevatron, a less powerful accelerator that is already running.

A faulty splice in the wiring shut down the LHC on September 19, nine days after the machine started up with a wave of publicity and fears, by some, that it would cause the destruction of the planet.

The resulting electrical arc damaged a section of the equipment and punctured an enclosure holding the liquid helium used to keep the collider at a temperature colder than outer space for maximum efficiency.

It has taken months to determine the full extent of the damage, which was limited to one of the eight sectors in the collider housed in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border on Geneva’s outskirts.

After the shutdown, 53 of the massive magnets designed to guide and focus the beams of protons that whiz at the speed of light through the tunnel had to be brought to the surface to be cleaned or repaired.

To prevent a recurrence of the problem, CERN is installing a new, highly sensitive protection system to detect any unwanted increases in resistance on the electrical connections so that it can shut down the current before anything is damaged, CERN said.

Scientists also are installing new pressure relief valves for the liquid helium in two phases. The first set of valves will ensure that any damage would be minor should there be a repeat of the September failure.

The second set, to be installed this year and next year, “would guarantee” only minor damage “in all worst cases over the life of” the collider, according to a CERN.

The aim, said spokeswoman Christine Sutton, is to “ensure that this machine is going to work beautifully for the coming decade or more”.

“With these additional valves we should really be safe against this kind of incident. Any damage that will occur will only be minor and not anywhere near as disruptive,” she said.

The massive machine was built to smash protons from hydrogen atoms into each other at high energy and record what particles are produced by the collisions, giving scientists a better idea of the makeup of the universe and everything in it.

They hope the collisions will show on a tiny scale what happened one-trillionth of a second after the so-called Big Bang, which many scientists theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe. The theory holds that the universe was rapidly cooling at that stage and matter was changing quickly.

[Based on reports by The Times and Associated Press.]

Driver of Bentley kills himself after leading police on a three-hour chase

By Calvin Palmer

A businessman believed to be of Pakistani origin led police on a three-hour chase in a luxury Bentley sedan before shooting himself in the head, as more than a dozen police cruisers surrounded his stationary vehicle near Universal City, police said.

The man, whose identity was not immediately released, died early today at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Sgt. Ernest Fisher said.

The shooting occurred at 12:41 a.m., about an hour and a half after the suspect had stopped near the scene of an alleged assault with a deadly weapon against his girlfriend in the 4000 block of Lankershim Boulevard.

Police suspected the man was armed from the start of the chase, which crossed Los Angeles County along the Hollywood Freeway and Interstates 5, 10 and 405, said Officer Karen Smith of the media relations office.

It began at 8:00 p.m. Monday and the Illinois-registered white sedan, worth more than $100,000, traveled at or below the speed limit.

The car finally came to a halt on Lankershim Boulevard near a well-lit Toyota dealership. An unidentified dark-haired woman approached the car and and attempted to open the passenger door, but it was locked and she retreated to the safety of the police cars and officers with guns drawn on the suspect.

The driver of the Bentley popped open the trunk.  Police are not sure whether it was an accident or intended to provide a shield across the back window.

About 90 minutes later, television news video showed three large armored vehicles surround the car and SWAT team members approach it with guns drawn. They broke the passenger window of the Bentley and opened the door, but the man had already shot himself.

He was later identified as former Chicago-area resident Mustafa “Moe” Mustafa and was believed to have been in his late 20s, according to the Los Angeles Times.

He had once operated luxury car rentals in the Loop and in Las Vegas. However, a dispute with a longtime girlfriend who lives in Los Angeles sparked the incident. Mustafa had recently moved to Los Angeles to be with the woman, said a family member, who did not want to be identified.

[Based on reports by the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press.]

Police officer charged over murder of teenage model

By Calvin Palmer

A female police officer appeared at Bolton Magistrates’ Court today charged in connection with the murder of teenage model Amy Leigh Barnes.

Amy, 19, was found with stab wounds to her face and chest at her house in Farnworth, Bolton, on November 8 last year. The teenager, whose friends included a number of Premier League footballers, died hours later in hospital.

Melda Wilks, 49, from Hollyhill Road, Rubery, Birmingham, a constable with West Midlands Police, made an initial appearance before magistrates charged with assisting an offender in connection with Amy’s death.

No further details were heard and no plea was entered. Wilks was released on conditional bail.

She is due to appear at Manchester Crown Court on February 20.

Wilks worked as a West Midlands Police schools-based officer in inner-city Birmingham.  She has been suspended from duty.

A West Midlands Police spokesman said: “We can confirm that Melda Wilks is a serving West Midlands Police officer. She remains suspended from her duties while inquiries continue.”

Her son, Ricardo Morrison, 21, an aspiring footballer formerly from Birmingham, appeared before Bolton Magistrates’ Court on November 12 last year charged with Amy’s murder and was remanded in custody.

Wilks was arrested by Greater Manchester Police later that day on suspicion of helping her son.

Morrison will also appear before Manchester Crown Court for a hearing to enter a plea on February 20.

Amy had only recently moved to her house on Moss Street from her parents’ house in Egerton. She had modeled for Nuts and Cosmopolitan magazines as well as appearing in the Channel 4 teen soap Hollyoaks.

[Based on reports by the Manchester Evening News and The Birmingham Post.]

Psychiatric evaluation for man accused of stabbing wife with ice pick

By Calvin Palmer

A New Jersey man is due to appear in court again today after being charged with attempted murder and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, according to court documents.

Terry Vanderbilt, 62, of Mount Arlington allegedly stabbed his wife 17 times with an ice pick.

Vanderbilt, who is blind, suffers from diabetes and heart problems, had recently been a patient at Morristown Memorial Hospital.

He woke his wife around 2:10 a.m. on Sunday and repeatedly stabbed his wife about the chest and abdomen with the wooden-handled ice pick.

Anna Vanderbilt, 59, managed to call 911.  When police arrived at the scene, they heard her screaming and, through the window, saw Vanderbilt straddling and stabbing her.

Sgt. William Lowry and Patrolman Dennis McCoach broke into the house and took Vanderbilt into custody after a struggle, authorities said.

After the attack, the tip of the ice pick was still in his wife’s lung, according to court documents.

She was airlifted to Morristown Memorial Hospital where she had surgery.  Her condition is described as stable.

Vanderbilt was charged Sunday with attempted murder, aggravated assault and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose in connection with the attack, the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office said.

He is being held at the Morris County jail in lieu of $500,000 bail and is due to appear today before a Superior Court judge in Morristown for a bail review.
 
[Based on reports by The Star-Ledger and Daily Record.]