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Assuming the Treasury adheres to its regular financing schedule, government securities dealers expect an announcement Wednesday for a three-part financing the following week. Auctions of an estimated $7 billion of four-year notes March 25, $6.5 billion in seven-year notes March 26 and $5.5 billion in 20-year bonds March 27 would raise about $15.25 billion of new cash to finance the Federal deficit.
An official at First Boston Corporation pointed out that an $800 million offering by the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia was ''possible'' this week, and other market participants said there was talk of a $600 million financing by the Municipal Assistance Corporation of New York. An official at M.A.C. declined to comment on the market reports.
Investment bankers noted that many local governments and agencies would benefit from refinancing their old bonds at today's lower interest rates. Even before the announcement of a delay in the effective date of the tax legislation, low interest rates had led to nearly $3.2 billion of refinancing bond issues so far this month, according to Salomon Brothers data.
James E. Bolin, an analyst at Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Company, estimated that demand for tax-exempt issues should rise as the supply of new tax-exempts increases. He said investors would now be less concerned that interest on newly bought bonds will some day be taxed, and he added that yields of new long-term tax-exempt bonds were unusually high relative to Treasury issues. Last week, for example, an issue of Austin, Tex., municipal utility revenue bonds due in 2013 was offered with a yield of 7.86 percent, only six hundredths of a percentage point less than 30-year Treasury bonds.
American Telephone and Telegraph, $300 million of debentures due 2026. Salomon Brothers.
American West Airlines, $75 million of convertible subordinated debentures due 2011, rated B-2 by Moody's. L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin.
Champion International, $100 million of sinking-fund debentures due 2016, BBB/Baa-1/BBB+. Goldman, Sachs. European Investment Bank, $200 million of notes due 1998, NR/Aaa/AAA. Merrill Lynch Capital Markets.
Federal Realty Investment Trust, $50 million of notes due 1996. Salomon Brothers.
Turner Broadcasting, $440 million of face amount zero-coupon senior notes due 1989-1992, NR/B-2/B-, and $600 million of extendible senior notes due 1991, NR/B-2/B-, and $350 million of senior subordinated debentures due 1993, NR/ B-3/B-. Drexel Burnham Lambert.
Union Bancorp, 700,000 shares of $100 adjustable-rate preferred stock, BBB-/Aa-3/BBB+. Shearson Lehman Brothers. Source: McCarthy, Crisanti & Maffei Inc. Ratings: MCM/Moody's/Standard & Poor's. TAX EXEMPT TUESDAY South Carolina, $85 million of general-obligation bonds. Competitive.
Illinois Educational Authority for Loyola University, $90 million. Shearson Lehman Brothers.
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, $250 million. Merrill Lynch Capital Markets.
New York City, $450 million. Merrill Lynch Capital Markets.
North Carolina Eastern Municipal Power Agency, $675 million. Smith Barney, Harris Upham.
South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority, $200 million. Goldman, Sachs.
Southern California Metropolitan Water District, $150 million of general obligations. Goldman, Sachs.
Southern California Metropolitan Water District, $200 million of revenue bonds. Merrill Lynch Capital Markets.
Backpack, Facebook’s second-generation modular switch, features fully disaggregated architecture that uses simple building blocks called switch elements, and it has a clear separation of the data, control, and management planes. Submitted to OCP in November 2016.
Earlier this week Facebook announced that over some recent period of time traffic between its data centers has been carried by a separate network backbone than the backbone that connects its data centers to the public internet – a major architectural change for the social network which for 10 years had been moving both types of traffic on a single backbone.
The amount of traffic traveling between Facebook data centers today is many times bigger than the amount of traffic that travels between its infrastructure and the internet, where its 2 billion monthly active users access the social network. And while Facebook’s traffic to the internet has grown slowly in recent years, the amount of bandwidth required for replicating rich content like photos and videos across multiple data centers has skyrocketed, forcing the company’s engineers to rethink the way its global network is designed.
Along with implementing a whole new global backbone, dubbed Express Backbone, or EBB, Facebook’s infrastructure team also designed a new control stack for managing traffic flows on it, taking lots of cues from the way network fabric inside its data centers is designed.
Facebook is not unique in having separate backbones for internal and external traffic. Google has B2, an internet-facing backbone, and B4, an inter-data center backbone. But Google is just one example, albeit a massive-scale one.
“All of the hyper-scalers and many financial services companies have private fiber networks that traverse long distances between [data centers] but are not (directly) connected to the public internet,” Kyle Forster, founder of the software-defined networking startup Big Switch Networks, said via email. Internal traffic often runs on a company’s own fiber, which for a hyper-scale platform can be cheaper than using service providers, he added.
Web-oriented companies often use this type of network design to isolate “dirty” network activity from “clean network” activity, explained JR Rivers, co-founder and CTO of Cumulus Networks, which sells a Linux-based operating system for data center networks. In the mid-2000s, Rivers worked at Google, where he was involved in designing the company’s home-grown data center network.
See a detailed technical description of the control stack here.
While particularly well-suited for hyper-scale platforms, they’re not the only type of companies using the approach. Cumulus works with numerous customers of different scale who have similar architectures, according to Rivers. “Some with smaller scale will use virtual networks to provide this isolation, and others will have separate physical networks,” he said.
Toby Keith’s “Made in America” moves to the top of the Billboard country songs chart this week, while Lady Antebellum’s Own the Night continues its uninterrupted reign as the No. 1 album.
In its first three weeks out, Own the Night has sold 547,489 copies, as calculated by Nielsen SoundScan.
The week’s highest debuting album and song are LeAnn Rimes’ Lady and Gentlemen and Kenny Chesney’s “Reality,” which enter the charts at No. 7 and No. 50, respectively.
The other new albums are the soundtrack to Footloose (No. 23), Sonia Leigh’s 1978 December (No. 43) and Elvis Presley’s Young Man With the Big Beat (No. 72).
Trace Adkins’ Cowboy’s Back in Town returns to the chart at No. 73.
Songs also surfacing for the first time include Brad Paisley’s “Camouflage” (No. 51), Dierks Bentley’s “Home” (No. 53) and Jake Owen’s “Alone With You” (No. 56).
Rounding out the Top 5 albums are Jason Aldean’s My Kinda Party (a big gun for the past 48 weeks), Brantley Gilbert’s Halfway to Heaven, George Strait’s Here for a Good Time and Luke Bryan’s Tailgates & Tanlines, in that order.
Next week, we’ll see how Atkins’ Take a Back Road and American Idol winner Scotty McCreery’s Clear as Day albums fared during their first week of release.
Memorial Day is this Monday. Stores like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Kroger, Publix, and many others are open.
National Parks should mostly be open, but one may need to check with individual sites.
Walmart, Target, Macy’s, JC Penney, Best Buy, Home Depot, and more are expected to have some kind of deal or sale. They should be open with normal hours, but like any holiday, check ahead of time.
State and local courts are closed down.
Most state and local municipal offices are closed.
The post office are closed, and mail service is suspended for the holiday.
And the U.S. stock market is closed.
If your bank isn’t on the list, you should call ahead of time to determine if it’s open.
Memorial Day 2016 – What Is Open? Post Office, Mail Delivery, UPS, FedEx, DMV, Banks Closed?
For mail, the only services available are FedEx Custom Critical deliveries and UPS Holiday and Express Critical service.
Mail and package delivery will start up again on Tuesday, May 31 for the USPS, UPS, and FedEx.
“Originally called Decoration Day, from the early tradition of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths and flags, Memorial Day is a day for remembrance of those who have died in service to our country. It was first widely observed on May 30, 1868 to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers, by proclamation of Gen. John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of former Union sailors and soldiers.
During that first national celebration, former Union Gen. and sitting Ohio Congressman James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, after which 5,000 participants helped to decorate the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who were buried there.
The Cubs bullpen suffered a blow Wednesday when Carl Edwards Jr. was placed on the 10-day disabled list with right shoulder inflammation.
Edwards felt discomfort after pitching a scoreless inning Tuesday night in an 8-6 win against the Pirates. An MRI Wednesday revealed the inflammation.
Edwards, 26, is 2-1 with a 2.88 ERA (8 ER/25.0 IP) in 25 appearances.
Right-handed reliever Cory Mazzoni was promoted from Triple-A Iowa. Mazzoni, 28, was 3-2 with a 1.25 ERA in 14 appearances with Iowa this season, striking out 22 and walking five. Mazzoni has not allowed an earned run in his last eight appearances covering 14 innings.
Mazzoni threw a scoreless inning for the Cubs on May 7 against the Marlins.
This morning, two subcommittees of the Energy and Commerce Committee hosted a hearing on the CLASS Act.
The CLASS Act (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act) was one of the nine titles in the Affordable Care Act, and – if you haven’t been watching the news lately – the program has recently been abandoned because HHS could not produce an actuarial model of the program’s long term sustainability. Congress doesn’t normally allow an executive department to simply stop implementing a law that’s been passed, but in this case, the law contained a self-test for the program before it could get started.
The two HHS officials who testified this morning – Kathy Greenlee (Asst. Sec. on Aging) and Dr. Sherry Glied (Asst. Sec. for Planning and Evaluation) – were definitely in the hot seat. Republicans interrogated them about the program’s un-sustainability, and Democrats let them know of their disappointment about the program’s abandonment.
Long term care is an expensive burden for many Americans and their families. Medicare provides coverage only for some short-term needs, and then after that, seniors are on their own. Very few people actually purchase private-market long term care insurance, meaning that when devastating bills do come, many more sick and elderly patients end up on Medicaid, which currently pays for about half of the long term care costs in our country.
To deal with this problem, Congress passed CLASS in March 2010, along with many other reforms to our health care system. But despite their best efforts, HHS officials have not been able to find an actuarial model that suggests that the CLASS program is workable. In its current structure, CLASS encourages adverse selection and would end up with costs far exceeding collected premiums.
Changes to CLASS could be made in order for it to work. These changes involve instituting 15-year waiting periods, adjusting premiums based on risk (underwriting!), or excluding people with preexisting conditions from the program. But wait, you might say, this is just what happens in the private market! Exactly.
It’s clear that government isn’t going to be the solution to the problem of expensive long term care. Perhaps Congress could pass laws that create a better environment for consumers and patients (one Member, Dr. Burgess, suggested Americans be allowed to purchase long term care insurance with pre-tax dollars), but in the end, our government leaders need to eat some humble pie and realize that even government would have to imitate the private sector if economic reality and financial soundness were of first concern (as it is with CLASS, thanks to the Gregg Amendment).
The problem with programs like CLASS, and indeed the trouble with the entire health reform law, is that they come from an arrogant, power-hungry attitude among our leaders – an attitude that believes government alone can fix all of society’s problems.
With all due respect to Rep. Dingell (currently our longest-serving Member of Congress), I must ask, who is this “we?” Democrats? Congress? Government? No. The answer is none of the above. Government doesn’t give rights. God gives rights. If we can’t get this basic founding principle right, then we’ll never get complex issues like health care policy right.
, would house more than 740,000 samples in an Arctic mountain on the Svaldbard archipelago.
The vault is intended to act as a backup for living crop collections around the world; a fire in January destroyed unique varieties of bananas, yams, sweet potatoes and taro being duplicated at the National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory in the Philippines, according to the trust.
— Grains from Tajikistan's Pamir Mountains, including wheat that grows across a wide range of elevations, in hot summers, and harsh, snowy winters. Diversity like this is important now because scientists are looking to develop a strain of wheat that is resistant to wheat stem rust, a fungal disease.
— A variety of wheat, known as Norin-10, which is the source of genes that have given modern wheat plants strong, short stems capable of supporting more grain, contributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
The vault is receiving seeds from amaranth, a plant used to color a traditional South American Day of the Dead drink.
.— Amaranth collected from a family farm in Ecuador in 1979. Amaranth seeds once provided grain to the Aztecs and Incas, and its stems still supply red pigment for "colada morada," a traditional South American beverage used in Ecuador's "Day of the Dead" celebration.
— Several subspecies of barley imported to the U.S. from Poland, and grown in the Pacific Northwest; these subspecies gave rise to modern varieties, including one malting barley called "Klages" that is popular among craft beer brewers.
The vault, which officially opened on Feb. 26, 2008, is dug into the Platåberget mountain ("plateau mountain") located near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard — a group of islands north of mainland Norway. The arctic permafrost offers natural freezing for the seeds, while additional cooling brings the temperatures down to minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius). It has the capacity to hold 4.5 million seed samples — and since each sample contains about 500 seeds, a maximum of 2.25 billion seeds would fit into the vault.
Freight agents work with shippers to move loads between cities, states and countries.
Freight agents connect shipping carriers with people and companies that need freight moved to another location. Several tools make it easier to locate customers, track loads, schedule shipments and manage your finances. These tools may be web-based or a standalone application that runs only on your computer. Web-based services are becoming more popular because they offer the ability to log in from remote locations so you are not tied down to an office.
Efficient dispatching is the key to success as a freight agent. Dispatch management tools such as ITS Dispatch and Arcline 2000 give you the ability to select the fastest route, consolidate shipments to reduce fuel costs, calculate the combined load of multiple shipments and select freight carriers along the chosen route with the best prices. Once the load is in transit, you should have the ability to track its location and make adjustments on the fly if the customer's needs change.
Once you begin shipping, you may find that there are times when you have an open truck and no load to carry while someone else has freight they need to move. Load matching services such as 123Loadboard.com, Get Loaded, Direct Freight provide a way for both sides to get in touch with each other. Some types of freight management software offer a direct interface with the major load boards to make it easy to post when you have extra capacity.
Even if you subscribe to a load matching service, you should have marketing tools to locate clients on your own. You will need to find shippers willing to offer you low rates. Creating a website for your freight business is a good place to start. If you do not know how to build your own website, hire a top-quality designer. You want your website to look as professional as possible so potential customers and shippers feel comfortable doing business with you. Contact management software such as AWeber or Constant Contact helps you stay in touch with your customers and shippers through scheduled email messages.
More complex freight businesses may benefit from using full-service freight software that also helps to manage the financial side of the company. Programs such as BrokerWare and Tailwind Transportation Management can handle various types of shipments, such as rail, air and truck, along with dispatching, routing and expediting. They also can forecast the growth of your company based on your load history so you can add more shippers as they are needed. Some programs also keep track of details such as shippers' insurance certificate expiration dates so you know when to follow up.
Sullivan, Denise. "Freight Agent Tools." Work - Chron.com, http://work.chron.com/freight-agent-tools-30173.html. Accessed 19 April 2019.
The White House is waging an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign to reassure core Democratic activists, following weeks of criticism from liberals who fear that President Obama has given too much ground in his debt-ceiling talks with Republicans.
Senior aides are holding conference calls to take questions from leaders of black and Hispanic organizations, local elected officials, and other political allies nationwide. Obama spoke by phone this week to a group of college student body presidents to seek their help in lobbying for a compromise. And top economic advisers have huddled in the West Wing in recent days with pastors and advocates for seniors, children and the poor — including one session with Easter Seals and families it serves to discuss the importance of Medicaid to disabled children.
The push comes at an unusually tense time on the political left, as liberals fret over how far a Democratic president might go in reducing once-untouchable programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The White House effort, which involves stepped-up contact with Democratic lawmakers, appears designed not just to secure votes for passage of some kind of deal, but also to hold the party together coming out of the debt crisis and heading into next year’s election campaign.
White House officials say outreach has been stepped up to a wide range of groups in the Democratic base but also beyond it, to business organizations, veterans and advocates for military members, some of whom attended a recent White House briefing.
Still, even as the president seeks to gain leverage against House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) and other GOP foes, he has been forced to balance the competing demands of his own restive support network.
The pressure on Obama to embrace steep budget cuts has brought out rivalries among Democratic interest groups as advocates beseech the White House not to decimate their priorities.
The battle has played out most dramatically between those who advocate for programs to aid the poor and those who think Obama’s best political strategy is to present himself as a champion for the middle class.
Some advocates for the poor expressed disappointment this week when the president, in a prime-time address to the nation on Monday, repeatedly spoke out for working-class Americans but did not mention poverty programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and aid for women with infants.
Political strategists are advising the White House to frame the debate in terms that will appeal to independent swing voters, who are considered crucial for Obama’s reelection effort next year in battleground states such as Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Colorado. A strategy memo published this month by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, for example, recommends focusing on how GOP-backed cuts would threaten services to seniors, Medicare and food-safety inspections.
But just as important to Obama’s reelection bid is building enthusiasm among liberals — particularly among Hispanics and African Americans, groups that are struggling economically more than whites and stand to be directly affected by reductions to low-income programs.
Those groups have been Obama’s most loyal backers. And high enthusiasm among minorities in key states, particularly in the Hispanic-heavy West, is a central piece of the president’s reelection strategy. But new Washington Post-ABC News polling suggests that budget talks and the economy may be straining that relationship — and shows why White House officials feel the need to step up the outreach.
Although Obama’s overall approval rating among blacks remains high, 57 percent of African Americans surveyed in the poll said Obama is too willing to compromise with Republicans in budget talks. Combined data from recent Post-ABC polls put Obama’s overall approval rating among Hispanics in the low 50s, about 20 points lower than it was two years ago.
On Wednesday, some black and Hispanic lawmakers indicated that their frustration with Obama goes beyond the debt talks to their belief that he has not done more to stem poverty and unemployment in their communities.
Consternation gripped many liberals last week, when it appeared Obama was nearing a “grand bargain” with Boehner that would have slashed trillions in spending. The speaker walked out on the deal, but several liberal advocates typically aligned with the White House said in interviews that they had planned to fight the proposal had Boehner not abandoned it.
Earlier this month, amid concerns that the president was not sufficiently shielding health-care programs for the poor, about a dozen advocates appealed in a 90-minute meeting to White House senior advisers to make Medicaid a higher priority. Part of the pitch: that voters see value in helping seniors and disabled children.
Staff writer David Nakamura and polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.
One of the oldest surviving classical masterpieces and August Bournonville’s most lasting contributions to dance, La Sylphide is a magical story of forbidden love and heartbreak. Set in the mist shrouded Scottish Highlands, a land of mystery and enchantment, a young Scotsman falls under the spell of a sylph, a fairy-like spirit. He devotes himself to her, but their romance is doomed and a life together an impossible dream. A work of ethereal beauty, La Sylphide is an enrapturing tragic love story that will pull at the heartstrings and dazzle with its technical fireworks.
Photo by Gene Schiavone. Courtesy of Boston Ballet.
Behind every All-State Band student can be found supportive family members, teachers and hours of practice.
But there is another common denominator for seven All-State Band and Orchestra students from Northwest Florida this year, Destin clarinet teacher Nancy Saleeby.
Saleeby said seeing her students make the All-State Band or All-State Orchestra is not unusual, but this year was extra special for more reason than one.
The student that made first chair clarinet for All-State Band was Ryan Murphy, a Niceville High School senior. And the top bass clarinet player for All-State Orchestra was Jazzlyn Tempur, another Niceville High School senior. In fact, Niceville High School had five clarinet players make All-State Band this year, and all were Saleeby’s students.
Saleeby added that while most years she has a mix of high school and middle school students, this year a majority of her students that made All-State were high school age.