Datasets:
Recag
/
C4_3

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
Community
text
stringlengths
12
69.1k
Michele Ice has been a firefighter for over 25 years with Cobb County (Ga.) Fire and Emergency Services. She is currently assigned as Firefighter II at Truck Company 13 in West Cobb. Michele is also a CPR/first aid instructor, Community Emergency Response Team Instructor, child safety seat technician instructor, hazardous materials technician, Firefighter Cancer Support Network state director, Critical Incident Stress Management state team member, fire explorer advisor and on the GEMA Incident Management Type III Team. She is a wife and mother of two (Denver, 18; and Brooke, 20). Both her husband and daughter are career firefighters with Cherokee County (Ga.) Fire and EMS, and her son is a fire explorer. To reach her, email IPSauthor@apus.edu. To receive more articles like this in your inbox, please sign up for In Public Safety’s bi-monthly newsletter.
North Western Province Chief Minister Dayasiri Jayasekara who was admitted to the Badulla Hospital last night due to a sudden illness has left the hospital on his own accord this morning, hospital sources said.
He had undergone several tests at the hospital, sources said.
Mr. Jayasekara was engaged in the election campaign in Badulla district when he suddenly fell ill.
Predatory businesses were the topic of a discussion between N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper and a group of Marines from Camp Lejeune on Wednesday morning.
More than 100 Marines attended a presentation from the office of the state�s attorney general on how to avoid identity theft, payday loans and car sales scams. Nationally, the military generated 3,455 complaints toward predatory businesses.
Some of the factors that contribute to a service member�s vulnerability include their age, a lack of financial education and being on their own for the first time, Cooper said.
One Marine targeted by a �shady business� is Sgt. Jonathan Tantinarawat.
The price tag for the uncompleted work was upwards of $5,000 at an auto shop in Wilmington.
The business has been offering Tantinarawat store credit but that�s not satisfactory he said. He has also gotten Camp Lejeune legal assistance representatives involved who are assisting him in handling the situation.
Tantinarawat said he contacted the attorney general�s office about a month ago but has not gotten a response.
The North Carolina Department of Justice offers these tips to service members to avoid getting ripped off by scam artists who target the military.
Never pay up-front to get a loan or a credit card: To steer clear of advance fee loan scams, watch out for loan brokers who promise or suggest that they can get a loan for you if you pay a fee first. Under North Carolina law, it�s illegal for a loan broker to charge an advance fee to obtain a loan or a credit card for a consumer.
Don�t get taken for a ride: When you go car shopping, don�t be in a hurry. Pentagon officials have seen patterns of unfair business practices targeting military personnel buying cars. Make sure you�re getting a fair deal, especially if you�re buying a used vehicle. Research the car�s history and get a mechanic to look it over before you sign anything. And remember, a used car is usually sold �as is.� If it breaks down after you drive it off of the lot the dealer isn�t responsible for fixing it.
Watch out for people who try to exploit a military connection: Just because a business puts a military reference or term in its name doesn�t mean it provides good service to military personnel. If someone seems to be using your shared military service to get you to purchase a product or make an investment, be wary. Don�t let anyone exploit your patriotism or cause you to set aside your healthy skepticism about spending or investing your money.
Avoid self-serving �Financial Planners�: Despite recent crackdowns on companies that target members of the military for investments that carry high fees, military personnel remain at risk. Roth IRAs and the military�s Savings Deposit Program are among the safest ways to protect your hard-earned dollars.
Get insurance you need, not what someone wants to sell you: Some insurance agents try to use high-pressure tactics to maneuver military personnel into purchasing insurance they don�t need. Agents are now barred from trying to sell insurance at mandatory-attendance meetings on base, and they can�t use senior personnel to help them pitch their policies. But outside the gates, many insurance agents still try to convince service personnel to buy inappropriate insurance. Instead, max out your government-provided insurance. The Servicemember�s Group Life Insurance (SGLI) provides outstanding insurance at a great price.
Think you�ve been taken in by a scam? If you�ve been a victim of a scam or bad business deal, File a complaint with the N.C. Attorney General online at ncdoj.gov or call toll free within North Carolina 1-877-5-NO-SCAM.
It’s a dog’s world and we’re all just living in it! A new study from researchers at the University of Salford, in Manchester, England finally put a highly debated question to rest — canines are, in fact, smarter than cats.
The study shows that dogs have the most neurons of any carnivore, despite not having the biggest brains, leading to the analyzation that pups are smarter than felines. Dogs have around 530 million neurons, which calculates their behavior, versus the 250 million found in cats.
Cats, meanwhile, have roughly the same amount of neurons as brown bears.
“I believe the absolute number of neurons an animal has, especially in the cerebral cortex, determines the richness of their internal mental state and their ability to predict what is about to happen in their environment based on past experience,” neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel from Vanderbilt University noted in the study.
The study — which is published in the science journal Animal Cognition — also identifies 47 different gestures that a pooch uses in an attempt to communicate with their human. Scientists managed to decode what 19 of them meant and revealed the meaning in a dictionary form.
See the decoding of dog’s actions below!
Jumping up and down, either onto an object or not, while in the same location.
Are You Sure You Don't Want to Jailbreak Your iPhone?
Reader Paul Brown sent along images of a new iMario theme he created for the iPhone 4. The catch? You'll need to jailbreak your phone to install it.
Makes me wish I had an iPhone 4... a jailbroken iPhone 4.
Smythe, who had moved from South Africa to Dubai where he set up his Filmworks company in 1998, died April 16 following a battle with cancer. He was 54.
Besides being instrumental to luring Hollywood shoots to the UAE, Smythe also played a crucial role in building the local industry. He produced the first Emirati feature, Ali F. Mostafa’s Dubai-set romancer “City of Life,” a local hit which held its own against yank blockbusters at the home box office.
Smythe is survived by wife Julie and three daughters, Kaya, Maya and Livia.
How subprime player Carrington Investments is milking a housing crisis it helped create.
Back before the housing bubble burst, sending America’s economy into a tailspin, hedge fund manager and former CitiGroup banker Bruce Rose was marketing himself as the guy who single-handedly invented subprime mortgage-backed securities. Indeed, Carrington Investment Partners, part of a cluster of related companies founded by Rose, competed with the big investment banks to package and sell mortgage debt to investors. Now Rose and his companies are positioning themselves to feed off the tail end of the meltdown their business practices helped create, joining a foreclosure-to-rental trend that some experts say could hurt homeowners even more.
Earlier this year, Carrington announced a partnership with another hedge fund to buy nearly half a billion dollars worth of foreclosed single-family homes and convert them into rental properties. Carrington is by no means the only one doing this. Silicon Valley-based private equity firm GI Partners is investing more than $1 billion in similar ventures. Other foreclosure-to-rental players, according to Bloomberg, include the $19-billion investment fund Starwood Capital Group,* the billionaire media magnate Sam Zell, and Apollo Investment Management—the New York buyout firm led by the billionaire Leon Black.
While renting out houses has typically been the province of mom-and-pop landlords, it should come as no surprise that Wall Street wants in. For years, a glut of foreclosures has suppressed home prices even as tighter lending standards and a sluggish economy have kept many buyers away. Banks, meanwhile, still sit on huge “shadow” inventories of foreclosed and abandoned properties, which means fewer places for people to live. The result of all this is a red-hot rental market—primed for speculation.
Federal regulators see the foreclosure-to-rental frenzy as a way to resuscitate the moribund housing market. In February, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced a pilot program to sell discounted batches of Fannie Mae-owned homes to large investors in six major urban areas on the condition that the buyers lease out the properties. Advocates claim the program will give blighted properties a makeover and provide displaced homeowners with more rental options. “If you are a distressed family coming off of a foreclosure, the last thing you need is escalating rental rates,” Rick Sharga, executive vice president of Carrington Mortgage Holdings, told the trade publication Housing Wire last month.
Perhaps no major player exemplifies those concerns more than Carrington, which already manages thousands of rental homes and is regularly accused of shoring up its bottom line at homeowners’ expense. Although Carrington has been in business for less than a decade, it has been sued at least 100 times by borrowers, investors, and business partners.
Rose, an airline pilot and mechanic turned investment banker, launched Carrington in 2003 with $25 million in seed money from New Century Financial, a major player in underwriting subprime loans. During the heady days of the boom, Carrington’s value swelled to more than $1 billion as New Century supplied mortgages that Carrington then packaged and resold as bonds at various grades of risk—”such an intimate tie between a lender and a hedge fund is highly unusual,” BusinessWeek later noted.
Carrington held the riskiest (and highest-yielding) bonds for itself, which meant it was first in line to take a hit in the event of defaults. In 2007, as the subprime market imploded, New Century went bankrupt. But rather than going down with the ship, Carrington raised $188 million to purchase its partner’s infrastructure and mortgage-servicing business. According to a lawsuit filed by a company that managed foreclosed homes for Carrington, the hedge fund avoided booking losses on its high-risk bets by delaying the sale of the homes—a strategy that hurt the management company and holders of Carrington’s less-risky bonds, who would have recouped at least some of their cash when the houses sold.
Carrington charged exorbitant fees, pushed unconscionable home loan modifications, and claimed it had modified loans when it hadn’t, an Ohio suit alleged.
In 2008, after being sued over New Century’s mortgage practices in Ohio, Carrington signed an agreement with the state’s attorney general to engage in “good faith” loan modifications with eligible borrowers. A year later, though, the AG took Carrington back to court, alleging that it had violated the agreement by ignoring borrowers’ requests for assistance, misrepresenting its ability to help them, charging them exorbitant fees, pushing loan modifications that were “unconscionably” favorable to itself, and claiming that it had modified loans when it hadn’t. Without admitting fault, Carrington settled that case last year.
To date, however, Carrington has faced dozens of suits from homeowners accusing the company of fraudulent or negligent lending practices. In an ongoing case filed against Carrington last year, John Thornton of Bonner County, Idaho, has accused the company of slapping him with $1,400 in unexplained fees and forcing him to accept an abusive loan modification. According to the suit, Carrington told Bonner that if he made the payments on his mortgage, he would be deemed to have accepted the modification he didn’t want. But if he didn’t, Carrington could foreclose on his home.
In another case, Los Angeles Homeowner Eladio Guerra accused Carrington of duping him into signing a predatory loan and then misleading him about getting a loan modification so that it could collect more fees before foreclosing on him. The suit (which was ultimately dismissed at the plaintiff’s request) claimed that Carrington and its partners had a motive in taking the Guerras’ home: The companies “have substantially more money than the average homeowner and are in a better position to maintain and rent out the property until equity values in the marketplace rise.” In other words, Carrington would make more money as a landlord.
“For the record,” Carrington’s Rick Sharga notes in an email response to questions from Mother Jones, “our company has never set out to purposefully shortchange homeowners, and in fact has one of the best track records in the industry in terms of successful loan modifications…Foreclosure, from our perspective, is always the last alternative, but is sometimes, unfortunately, unavoidable.” He included Carrington’s response to American Banker, in which a lawyer for the company defends its business practices.
While injecting new rentals into a hot market might lower rents in the short term, some observers worry that the rise of hedge fund landlords could end up making housing less affordable. “As properties concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, there is a theory that that has the effect of driving up rents,” says Matthew Desmond, an assistant professor in Harvard University’s sociology department. In a 2010 Chicago Tribune op-ed, Desmond fretted about the Walmartization of the rental market. Unlike the homeowner who buys a second property to generate a little income, he says, mega-landlords can raise rents by cornering the market and setting prices using advanced speculating technologies.
What’s more, in home-sales markets that have hit bottom, big players like Carrington might bid prices beyond the reach of low-income buyers, denying locals the chance to benefit from post-crash appreciation. Lower rates of home ownership can have negative affects on a community, too: According to a study published in the journal Housing Policy Debate, for instance, homeowners typically report higher self-esteem and happiness than renters. A study of homeowners in the New York City suburbs found that they were less likely than demographically similar renters to be crime victims.
Some insiders have questioned whether Carrington’s plan to rent out foreclosed homes is just another way to conceal its bad subprime bets. “Our feeling was that letting things pile up in [foreclosure] and then trying to rent out foreclosed homes was largely just forestalling the inevitable, and they were doing it because they owned [the riskiest] portions of the capital structure,” an anonymous Carrington investor told American Banker.
But now that the stars of the rental and foreclosure industries have aligned, Carrington could end up in a better economic position than when it started. It has grown from a mere hedge fund into what its website describes as a “vertically integrated operating business that direct[s] every aspect of the life cycle of single-family assets,” with its own real estate brokerage, mortgage origination and servicing firms, property management company, building restoration contractor, and marketing outfit. Converting foreclosures to rentals “is one of the best ideas to come along relative to the housing market in a long time,” Sharga told industry website MortgageOrb last month.
At any rate, it seems like a good bet for Carrington.
Correction: The original version of this article stated that Starwood Capital Group owns the Westin hotel chain. Starwood divested from the chain in 2000.
Last time we checked in on Bill Simmons’ new HBO show, Any Given Wednesday, ratings had just risen 39 percent from the first to the second episode.
So let’s just real quick see how things have gone since then, and… AHHH, avert your eyes!
Yiiiiiikes, that’s not good. It’s never a positive sign when fewer and fewer people give you a shot week-to-week. It’s also not a good sign when you’re getting beaten by some truly mediocre movies intended to fill time in the lead-up to your highly anticipated show.
Just for fun, here are the Rotten Tomatoes scores of the four movies that have beaten or nearly matched Any Given Wednesday.
Early returns aside, Simmons deserves some slack here, given that he’s starting from scratch on a medium he’s not abundantly comfortable with. HBO gambled that Simmons’ big name and strong persona could differentiate Any Given Wednesday in a saturated sports-talk market. Since that hasn’t happened, the show will have to seek out some sort of niche or gimmick or risk being lost in the shuffle. HBO has invested a lot in Simmons and AGW, so they’re not going to give up on the show no matter what terrible movies it lags behind.
Maybe in a couple years, a reimagined Any Given Wednesday will be drawing a million viewers a week, Simmons will be the new Johnny Carson, and we’ll look back and laugh at bumpy start. Oooooor maybe not.
But hey you never know, no one watched Breaking Bad at the beginning, either!
Magnificent vocal melodies and exceptional songwriting craft collide on one of the finest metal albums of early 2006.
For those who don't usually delve into the heavier, more extreme side of rock music, the make-or-break factor when it comes to today's metal bands is often the vocals, and with the more popular bands (Mastodon, Lamb of God, The Red Chord) utilizing robust, albeit monotone howls, screams, and roars, the common refrain among curious new listeners is always, "I liked it until the guy started screaming." Admittedly, it's becoming more and more infrequent to hear metal bands, especially all-male acts, take melodic vocals in new directions. Such is the nature of heavy metal: it's always been huge, loud, theatrical, and generally over the top. The singing/screaming style has always been just as bombastic, whether it's the "cookie monster" grunts of Chris Barnes or the flamboyance of DragonForce's ZP Theart. And if a singer does manage to sound accessible enough (Sonata Arctica's Tony Kakko, for instance), it comes with a heavy dose of '80s rock star goofiness that many of today's more mainstream-oriented listeners find off-putting. Opeth's Mikael Akerfeldt possesses an incredible singing voice that has very broad appeal, but when he makes with those harsh growls of his, skeptical newbies abandon hope. More often than not, if someone wants to hear some subtlety in the metal vocal department, he or she has to go to the female-fronted acts, such as The Gathering and Lacuna Coil.
This is where Sweden's Katatonia come in, who, thanks to singer Jonas Renske's inability to emit a redundant death metal roar due to medical reasons, have been forced to approach their vocals from a completely different direction, and on their seventh full-length album, the shift in style has achieved near perfection. As strong as 2001's Last Fair Deal Gone Down and 2003's Viva Emptiness were, The Great Cold Distance has Renske honing his vocal delivery to the point where he rarely rises above a soft-voiced, brooding croon, and with the languid, at times dreamy doom arrangements behind him, it makes for an absolutely sumptuous, hypnotic combination that dares to match the artistry of The Cure's Disintegration, and very nearly pulls it off.
Like their past work, the new album cruises in the same mid-tempo gear, but as simple and repetitive as the prospect may seem, the band provides ample -- yet subtle -- variations throughout the 50-minute running time. So focused is The Great Cold Distance, though, that Katatonia creates that pensive atmosphere better than they've ever done before. Ripples of tremolo guitar underscore the maelstrom of dark chords on "Leaders", as Renske sings in his measured voice enigmatic lyrics that appear to seethe with rage ("I split my heart in two/But you don't have it in you/Do you?"), while similar contrasts punctuate the forlorn "Soil's Song", as E-bowed guitar adds a hint of foreboding to the forceful chorus. The sudden rise of tension in "Consternation" is counterbalanced by a beautiful guitar solo interlude, and the intro of "Rusted" comes closest to a truly mellow moment, before those clouds of doom return. Drummer Daniel Liljekqvist puts in a stellar performance on "Increase", the closest thing to a complex song on the record, as his assured beats, reminiscent of Meshuggah's Tomas Haake, anchor the song's slyly rigorous riffs, without which, the entire song would implode.
The album's first single, "My Twin" fully deserves attention from mainstream audiences, a flat-out gorgeous Goth ballad carried entirely by Renske's impassioned performance as he shifts from haunting imagery ("The neck and then the chain/The head is hung in shame") to a devastating, deeply personal chorus ("Was it all for nothing?/Are you strong when you're with him?"). Opeth's Akerfeldt might be today's master of modern metal poeticism, but it's been a while since we've heard a song this genuinely emotional, especially from a male singer. Very nearly as powerful is "In the White", whose instrumentation is highly reminiscent of Opeth, from Renske's vocal melodies, to Mattias Norrman's undulating bass line, but this song is more focused on melody, and less on structure (as opposed to their peers), and works brilliantly.
The Great Cold Distance is a sly little record, one that sounds rather simple upon first listen, but which slowly reveals itself as being quite the Pandora's Box the more it's explored. The feel good album of the year this is not, but with Renske's unique singing, which, given the chance, would win over anyone who loves those "dark night of the soul" albums, feeling forlorn rarely is this exhilarating. If there's a 2006 metal release that merits a wider audience than it probably will get, it's this one.
The St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office is seeking public assistance in locating two juvenile runaways.
Henry Bieber Jr., 15, from Branch, is believed to have taken his mother's white 2001 Mercury Sable sedan, picked up 12-year-old Ariel Robin from her Leonville home and driven off Sunday afternoon.
Robin was last seen running from her front door into the vehicle, according to a SLPSO press release.
Bieber, a Church Point High School student, and Robin, homeschooled, are close friends, according to Capt. Megan Vizena with SLPSO.
"There's no indication where they've gone or if they're coming back," she added.
Both juveniles are believed to be at risk since they both suffer from severe depression.
Authorities believe the missing juveniles are in the New Orleans area.
Those with information as to Bieber's and Robin's whereabouts are urged to call SLPSO at 337-948-6516, St. Landry Crime Stoppers at 337-948-8477, the Acadia Parish Sheriff's Office at 337-788-8700 or the Leonville Police Department at 337-879-2601.
A Phoenix father is accused of sexually abusing and murdering his 1-month-old daughter.
Duryea Bennett, 39, was arrested Thursday on first-degree murder and child abuse charges, authorities said.
The suspect called 911 about 1 p.m. Wednesday to report that one of his twin daughters had stopped breathing, according to local media.
Paramedics noticed that the girl had several bruises, upon arriving at the family's address near 43rd Avenue and Baseline Road, reported KPHO.
The little girl was rushed to a nearby hospital where she was declared dead, according to the local station.
Medical staff determined that her skull and rib were fractured and that she had bite marks that are consistent with sexual assault, said Sgt. Trent Crump.
Crump said seven children ranging from 1 month to 14 years old were in the home at the time of the incident.
Their mother was not present, making Bennett the only adult in the house, according to Crump.
Bennett was booked into a jail in Maricopa County. It was not immediately clear whether he has an attorney.
The idea of incentivizing actions in mobile apps has been around for a little while, most notably through Tapjoy, which lets users win virtual currency in exchange for downloading an app, watching an ad or filling out a form. Kiip, a monetization platform, has innovated on the idea of rewards, offering users branded gifts when they reach certain in-game milestones.
But a new startup is trying to take the idea of incentives and real-world rewards one step further by creating a rewards platform that incentivizes all kinds of engagement in apps with the goal of helping developers ultimately do more in-app transactions. Gimmie lets developers reward its users for a variety of actions without forcing them to leave the app, one of the friction points for other incentivized programs. Users can earn Gimmie points for reaching new levels in a game, buying virtual goods, signing up for newsletters or reaching other achievements with better rewards available as users progress further into a game. When they are ready, users can visit a marketplace where they can apply their points for free or toward discounted things like phone accessories, T-shirts and shoes.
Gimme was started by Roy Liu, a former lead developer for PopCap’s (s erts) Plants vs. Zombies, and CEO David Ng, who came from ChinaCache, a content delivery service in China. Ng told me that the idea for Gimmie is to build an incentive program that encourages people to keep playing regularly and ultimately steers users toward in-app purchases. He said as more developers look to go freemium, it helps to have a tool that keeps users engaged but in a way that doesn’t take them out of their app experience and offers them choices in rewards. Developers are able to integrate Gimme’s SDK within an hour, said Ng, and they can choose what to incentivize and when to message users.
Ng said Gimmie can work alongside existing banner ads and even systems like Kiip and Tapjoy, so developers can experiment with it if they want. Brand sponsors can also reach out to specific mobile app users with coupons and free products. Gimmie requires users to register through Facebook. That allows brands to incentivize social sharing through additional offers. Some of the initial reward partners include accessory maker BodyGuardz, custom pillow maker Throwboy and other retailers offering T-shirts and shoes.
Gimmie has raised $200,000 from Tandem Entrepreneurs, a mobile incubator in San Francisco. It is the second company to launch out of Tandem.
I think there are some good ideas at work in Gimmie. As developers move to freemium, they absolutely need to keep users engaged or there will be no way to make money through ads or in-app purchases. That is something app analytics firm Localytics reaffirmed recently in a study. And Gimmie’s approach makes sense, keeping users inside a game or app and letting them choose what they want. If done well, this can help some users stick with a game if the rewards are reachable and appealing. That is going to be a key point: The system will depend on good rewards. And the process of earning points to get them at a discount or ultimately for free needs to be tuned to encourage a lot of use but still seem worth it.
University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, is searching for a investment consultant for its $709 million 403(b) plan.
The current consultant could not be learned. TIAA-CREF is the plan's current administrator, according to the RFP.
The RFP is available on the university's website. Proposals are due by 3 p.m. CDT June 5. Finalist presentations are tentatively anticipated to be sometime during the week of June 18, with a selection expected to be made shortly thereafter.
Michelle C. Byers, human resource services director, and Jon Westhoff, university purchasing agent, could not be reached for comment.
Masala bonds, the rupee-denominated overseas bonds issued by Indian borrowers, have been gaining traction in recent times.
It is, therefore, right that the RBI has made further changes to the guidelines governing these instruments in order to plug existing loopholes and to make them more attractive.
Masala bonds are superior to external commercial borrowings (ECBs) because the bonds are denominated in rupees, though the settlement takes place in dollars. The buyer of the bonds assumes the exchange rate risk. In return, he enjoys the high returns, much above similar instruments available overseas.
The term was first used by IFC, which named its rupee-denominated bonds as ‘Masala Bonds’ in 2014. Earlier, only multilateral institutions were issuing these bonds.
In September 2015, the RBI allowed Indian corporates to issue rupee-denominated bonds overseas as well. Since then many Indian companies such as NTPC, Axis Bank and HDFC have successfully raised funds through these bonds.
There are three changes that have been made in the masala bonds issuance rules in the current policy. One, it has been stated that for issuances of up to $50 million or ₹325 crore, minimum maturity period should be three years. In case of issues that are over $50 million in size, minimum maturity period should be five years.
In the initial set of guidelines issued in September 2015, the minimum maturity for all issues was set at five years. It was brought down to three years in April 2016.
The recent change will ensure that larger issuances have longer lock-in periods and will thus attract long-term investors and not short-term traders. This will help protect India’s external balance against volatility caused by fund flows.
The second change in the masala bond guidelines is setting the cost ceiling for these issuances 300 basis points above the yield of Government of India securities of corresponding maturity. The HDFC masala bond issue in 2017 was made at 7.35 per cent. It is, therefore, obvious that corporates with sound fundamentals are able to raise funds at competitive rates.
In the original guidelines issued in 2015, no limit for cost had been set with the rules stating that ‘the cost should be commensurate with prevailing market conditions’.