Issue #1 for S.
Mahmood Pelarak
1/3/2009 at 3:19:00 AM - 1/5/2009 at 11:13:40 AM
A Victim's Tale
(Portfolio.com: Top 5)
Submitted at 1/4/2009 9:00:00 PM
The victims of Bernard L. Madoff's
fraud includes no small number of
boldface names and institutional
investors.
There are Hollywood moguls
Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey
Katzenberg, financiers Fred Wilpon
and Henry Kaufman, and actors
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick.
Then there were banks like HSBC
and Banco Santander, and nonprofit
groups including Yeshiva University
and the Robert I. Lappin Charitable
Foundation.
But a number of average-Joe
investors have discovered that they,
too, had money invested with
Madoff. Their retirement funds,
family trusts, and other savings
usually found its way to Madoff
through "feeder" funds, some of
which were run by friends,
acquaintances, or financial advisers.
Since they were not direct investors
with Madoff, their status in
recovering any money is uncertain.
But there is no doubt that they, too,
are victims of what appears to be the
greatest Ponzi scheme in history.
Here, in his own words, is one
investor's story:
I n 1992, when I was 67 years old, I
unexpectedly found myself with some
extra cash on hand. During the
preceding half century, I had served
in three wars, earned a master's
degree, married, bought and paid off
a house, and put three daughters
through college.
I had started my fulltime working
life in 1950 as a copyboy and later
John Travolta 'heartbroken' at death of son Jett
(World news | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/5/2009 2:01:47 AM
John Travolta, whose teenage son
died suddenly over the weekend, has
said he and his wife, the fellow actor
Kelly Preston, are "heartbroken" at
their loss.
Jett Travolta, who was 16 and had a
history of seizures, was found
unconscious in a bathroom at his
family's home at the Old Bahama Bay
resort on Grand Bahama island on
Friday morning. He was taken by
ambulance to Rand Memorial
hospital, in Freeport, where he was
pronounced dead.
A postmortem examination to
determine the cause of death is due to
be carried out today.
When marketing goes nuclear
(Seth's Blog)
Submitted at 1/3/2009 10:10:31 AM
Scarcity plus Christmas plus social
reporter on the San Francisco
Chronicle and then, for over 30 years,
was simultaneously a science writer
at UCLA and a freelance journalist.
My wife, Rachel, had worked full or
part-time during much of that period.
We had bought a hillside house in
suburban Los Angeles in 1968 and
were close to paying off our
mortgage.
Our two older daughters had
married, were working and raising
their own families, and our youngest
child was independent, and likely to
marry in the near future.
As a family, we were always quite
disciplined about the household
budget. As a matter of principle, we
never got into debt and we paid off
our credit card balances in full every
month.
I wasn't exactly a tightwad, we
traveled frequently overseas, but, as
my daughters like to remind me,
when they were kids and scrawled
drawings, I made them use BOTH
sides of a blank sheet.
So in 1992, Rachel and I found
ourselves with an extra $25,000 in the
bank and decided to invest it, but
knew enough to know that we knew
nothing about the market.
So we turned to a trusted friend,
whom we shall call Phil, who was our
sometime lawyer and a fellow
volunteer in local political
campaigns. Phil had many years of
successful investment experience, and
although $25,000 was pretty small
potatoes in his league, we insisted
that we wanted into the game.
Thus I became one of some 99
limited partners in Caroline
Investment Co. Phil told me that the
"Jett was the most wonderful son
that two parents could ever ask for
and lit up the lives of everyone he
encountered," Travolta said in a
statement posted on his website.
"We are heartbroken that our time
with him was so brief. We will
cherish the time that we had with him
for the rest of our lives."
Although the brief statement made
no mention of Jett's medical history
or any possible cause of death, it
appears that he may have had
epilepsy, and experienced grand-mal
convulsions and losses of
consciousness.
Travolta's lawyers, Michael Ossi
and Michael McDermott, told the
celebrity website TMZ that Jett had
been on anti-seizure medication for
pressure plus greed plus kids =
critical mass.
The most poignant moment comes
just after 3:00 when a young boy
partnership had consistently returned
15 percent to 16 percent a year,
sometimes as much as 20 percent,
and added that he had millions of his
own money in the fund.
But he warned me that even he,
with decades of experience, had no
idea how the partnership managed to
generate such high and steady returns.
Phil sent me a 73-page document,
which I never read closely until after
I learned about my link to Bernard
Madoff. In the papers, I have learned
that Caroline was a limited partner in
the Lambeth Fund, operated entirely
by Beverly Hills investor and
arbitrage maven Stanley Chais, whom
Phil had known for many years.
Chais, in turn, passed on the funds
in Lambeth, Caroline and other
partnerships to an unnamed brokerage
and investment firm in New York.
That firm, we learned since, was
Madoff Investments; Chais had
known Bernie Madoff for decades,
but the name never appeared in any
papers and was unknown to Phil.
For years, this opacity didn't matter.
Like most small-time amateur
investors, with a full work and family
life, I had happily watched as my
stake steadily grew. Even with 25
percent of the profits going to Chais
and 5 percent to Phil for their
administrative work, I averaged an
annual net return of 10 percent to 14
percent.
This compounded rapidly, since I
didn't need the income to make ends
meet. Since my investment was in the
form of an I.R.A. account, I didn't
have to withdraw money until I was
70½ years old and started receiving
mandatory minimum distributions.
several years.
They said the prescription was
suspended after the drug lost its
effectiveness amid concerns about
side-effects, adding that Jett had been
suffering about one extremely serious
seizure a week.
Ossi told People magazine that
Travolta, 54, tried to revive his son
and was so distraught he had to be
pulled away from Jett's body.
"He didn't want anything to happen
to that boy, and he kept on trying to
revive him," Ossi said. "He did mouth
-to-mouth until they had to physically
remove John to take Jett to the
hospital."
"He never dreamed of this. Their
relationship was so close. He always
said, 'I'm happy as long as my kids
totally loses it.
This is the most disturbing video
I've seen today.
feedjournal.com
I had about $150,000 accumulated
in Caroline on Dec. 11, when I
received an e-mail from Phil, which
started, "I have some terrible news for
us."
The shocking news, of course, was
that Madoff had been arrested for
fraud and that the many millions Phil
and his daughter, a successful Los
Angeles restaurateur, had been wiped
out, as had Chais' Lambeth Co.—and
my $150,000.
Sure the loss hurts, and with the
simultaneous devaluation of our
house, we have dropped plans to
move into an upscale retirement
community.
On the upside, our mortgage is paid
off, I still earn money as a journalist,
and I get Social Security. Although
my retirement-savings plan with the
University of California is sinking
like a stone, I'm pretty confident that
my wife and I will not go hungry.
I take some irrational satisfaction
from the thought that, for the first
time in my life, I'm in the company of
so many millionaires and billionaires,
and we are all going down together
on the same financial Titanic.
The real losers, I'm afraid, will be
the families of my three daughters,
and my eight grandchildren, to whom
I will now leave a rather meager
monetary inheritance.Related Links
Smart Money, R.I.P.
Sex, Drugs, and Options
Backdating
Cost of Backdating: Six Months, $1
Million
are happy.' He is heartbroken ... To
bury your son is the worst thing you
can ever do."
Travolta and his wife have said
previously that Jett became very sick
when he was diagnosed as a toddler
with Kawasaki disease, which leads
to inflammation of the blood vessels
in young children.
Travolta's publicists declined to
comment on funeral plans.
• United States
• Bahamas
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Israeli troops enter Gaza
(World news | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/4/2009 10:09:39 AM
Israeli ground troops cross the
border into the Palestinian territory
2
Israel targets international deal on
Gaza truce
(World news | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/5/2009 2:03:12 AM
Israel hopes its military offensive in
Gaza will end with an agreement
imposed by the international
community rather than a ceasefire
renewed directly with the Hamas
movement, according to reports in
Israel today.
Israel aims to convince the
international community to accept a
deal under which Egypt would
prevent smuggling into Gaza across
its border, and border crossings into
Gaza would operate under
international supervision and in the
presence of the Palestinian Authority
(PA), which is run by the West Bank-
based Fatah movement, Hamas's
bitter rival, the reports said.
Senior Israeli cabinet ministers will
hold meetings today with a delegation
from the European Union and later
with the French president, Nicolas
Sarkozy. The Ha'aretz newspaper
reported that the Israeli prime
minister, Ehud Olmert, the foreign
minister, Tzipi Livni, and the defence
minister, Ehud Barak, yesterday
decided against any ceasefire
agreement with Hamas for fear it
would give legitimacy to the Islamist
movement.
Hamas said it would send a
delegation to Cairo today at Egypt's
invitation to talk about how to end the
Do ads work?
(Seth's Blog)
Submitted at 1/3/2009 3:19:00 AM
If the local bank were offering a sale
on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how
many would you buy?
Most rational people would say,
"I'll take them all please." Especially
if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an
ad budget?
If your ads work, if you can
measure them and they return more
profit than they cost, why not keep
buying them until they stop working?
And if they don't work, why are you
running them?
The time-tested response is that
you're not sure, that ads are risky, that
you can't tell. And for some sorts of
products and some sorts of ads, you'll
get no argument from me.
Digital ads are different (or they
should be). You should know cost per
John Kraemer and Larry
Gostin: A case for
intervention in
Zimbabwe
(World news | guardian.co.uk)
Submitted at 1/5/2009 2:00:02 AM
John Kraemer and Larry Gostin: By
any reasonable measure, Mugabe has
committed crimes against humanity
justifying an international response
conflict in Gaza. Egypt mediated the
ceasefire agreement between Hamas
and Israel that began in June last year
and broke down six months later.
"The international community will
initiate the agreements and will
impose it on Hamas," Ha'aretz quoted
a senior political source in Jerusalem
as saying. "The agreements will be
with both the PA and Egypt and then
if Hamas will not agree it will pay the
price, mostly by even greater
isolation."
It said Israel had three aims: it
wanted Egypt to help stop smuggling
into southern Gaza, and suggested the
US might be involved in this, perhaps
by sending combat engineers to
reinforce the border; it wanted EU
and Palestinian Authority officials
deployed at the Rafah crossing into
Egypt, as in the past; and it wanted
the US, France and moderate Arab
countries to support a UN security
council agreement to grant Israel the
right to respond to any Hamas
violations of the deal.
A similar report in the Yedioth
Ahronoth newspaper described the
possible deal as "a unilateral
international arrangement" which, it
said, might be forced on Hamas if it
did not agree. It said Israel wanted the
border crossings opened only under
international supervision, and it
suggested Israel wanted mention of
calls to release Gilad Shalit, an Israeli
click and revenue per click and be
able to make a smart guess about
lifetime value of a click. And if that's
positive, buy, buy, buy.
And if you don't know those things,
why are you buying digital ads?
When Amazon was at its key
growth peak, the mantra there was
$33. They would buy unlimited ads,
of any kind, as long as they generated
new customers for $33 or less each.
There was a risk that $33 was too
high a number for the business to
sustain, but the ads were no risk at all.
As long as they came in under that
number, there was unlimited money
to buy them.
How often do you hear the
marketing person say, "that's a neat
idea, but we don't have the budget
this year"?
Shouldn't she say, "We have an
unlimited budget for ads that work"...
Is everything
okay?
(Seth's Blog)
Submitted at 1/4/2009 4:19:00 AM
soldier captured two and a half years Unless you work in a nuclear power
ago who is still being held in Gaza. plant, the answer is certainly no (and
The Ma'ariv newspaper said the if you work there, I hope the answer
deal would be a "deterred
is yes.)
arrangement. Or, in other words, a No, everything is not okay. Not in a
broad international arrangement with
growing organization. Not if your
everyone except Hamas." company is making change happen,
Livni was quoted in the Makor
or dealing with customers. How could
Rishon-Hatzofe newspaper as saying: it be?
"This is not a matter for an isolated
And yet, that's what so many
operation – and every arrangement managers focus on. How to make
should advance the interests of the
everything okay.
State of Israel vis-a-vis Hamas. There We spend so much time smoothing
is no intention here of creating a
things out, we lose the opportunity
diplomatic product with Hamas. We for change, or for texture or
need diplomatic products against
creativity.
Hamas, and any product that weakens Instead of working so hard to make
it is positive in our eyes."
everything okay, perhaps it is more
In recent days, Hamas has said its helpful to work hard at living with a
conditions for a ceasefire are an end
world that rarely is.
to the Israeli attacks, an end to the
Israeli economic blockade of the
Gaza Strip and the reopening of the
crossings out of Gaza. Before the
ceasefire last June, Hamas agreed that
PA representatives could operate the
Rafah crossing between Gaza and
Egypt, and said it would accept EU
monitors, but insisted Israel should
not have the right to close the
crossing as in the past.
• Israel and the Palestinian territories
• Gaza
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Intel, Adobe plan a chicken in
every pot, Flash on every
HDTV
(Engadget) watching TV on Hulu this could be
Submitted at 1/5/2009 1:19:00 AM
the push that takes online video to the
TV mainstream. Still, Intel must
Intel's been talking up the CE 3100 know that only Flash support so
(née Canmore) processor for quite 2008, we'll be expecting more
some time now, and with Adobe as its widgets to come.
newest partner -- late again Yahoo? -- Filed under: CES, HDTV, Home
pushing HD Flash streams to Internet Entertainment
connected TV's and set-top boxes. Intel, Adobe plan a chicken in every
Frankly, we've already gotten quite pot, Flash on every HDTV originally
used to YouTube and other online appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05
video access in the living room, but Jan 2009 04:19:00 EST. Please see
with the first Flash Lite-enabled our terms for use of feeds. Read|
system-on-a-chip due by mid-2009 Permalink| Email this| Comments
and everyone and their mom
 3

Serv O'Beer pours when PowerBook G4 Titanium

iPhone accelerometer tells it inelegantly modded into
to desktop
(Engadget) (Engadget) the system; a so-called "perfect pour"
Submitted at 1/5/2009 2:31:00 AM
Now that the holiday season is
officially over ( CES
notwithstanding), there's officially no
better time to get inebriated and wash
away the sorrows of not having
another government-recognized
holiday for like, ever. After you've
drug that dead tree out to the roadside
and filled a few buckets with tears,
why not try constructing your very
Serv O'Beer in order to bring just a
sliver of that joy back into your
heart? Put simply, the project pictured
above utilized Construx as the
mechanical platform, a servo driving
the action and ioBridge controlling
was executed by linking an iPhone
accelerometer to the system and
turning it up. Have a look at the
demonstration vid just past the break
-- dollars to donuts it'll make you
smile.
[Thanks, Hans]
Continue reading Serv O'Beer pours
when iPhone accelerometer tells it to
Filed under: Cellphones, Household
Serv O'Beer pours when iPhone
accelerometer tells it to originally
appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05
Jan 2009 05:31:00 EST. Please see
our terms for use of feeds. Read|
Permalink| Email this| Comments
Submitted at 1/5/2009 1:04:00 AM
We're all for taking lemons and
making lemonade, but at least clean
up the mess before you showcase it to
the world. All kidding aside (sort
of...), Sir Bibin and Nick Lee found
something better to do with their
jacked up PowerBook G4 Titanium
than fetch a few pennies on eBay.
When the hinges finally cracked, they
decided to just fold 'er on over, epoxy
a pair of totally lackluster speakers on
the side and add a wired Apple
keyboard in to create a makeshift
PowerMac (er, iMac, we suppose).
Truthfully, we'd be way more into
this if not for that very apparent
spitball and the circa 1991 telephone
cluttering up the masterpiece, but you
know what they say about an artist
and his / her studio.
[Thanks, Michael and Nick]
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
PowerBook G4 Titanium
inelegantly modded into desktop
originally appeared on Engadget on
Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:04:00 EST.
Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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LG previews two new UK-bound LCDs

(Engadget)
Submitted at 1/5/2009 1:47:00 AM
Stuff.tv has the heads up on two
more members of LG's 2009 lineup,
the LH5000 and LF7700. The
LF7700 LCD should fit the bill for
anyone needing an alternative to
Panasonic's TX-37LZD81, with
integrated FreeSat support, while a
plasma version will follow later in the
year. If 100Hz isn't enough and
480Hz is too much, the LH5000
drops 200Hz TruMotion tech on
European heads later this year. No
price or size info for either, but
hopefully all this new kit will slightly
make up for a Netflix-less existence
suffered by our people across the
Atlantic.
Filed under: HDTV, Home
Entertainment
LG previews two new UK-bound
LCDs originally appeared on
Engadget on Mon, 05 Jan 2009
04:47:00 EST. Please see our terms
for use of feeds. Read| Permalink|
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