Greek debt talks to stretch into weekend

IMF chief debt inspector Poul Thomsen arrives at a government office building before meeting Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in central Athens on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. Unions and employers' associations rejected demands for private-sector wage cuts, despite pressure for the country to introduce strict austerity measures if it is to receive a crucial bailout package. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

IMF chief debt inspector Poul Thomsen arrives at a government office building before meeting Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in central Athens on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. Unions and employers' associations rejected demands for private-sector wage cuts, despite pressure for the country to introduce strict austerity measures if it is to receive a crucial bailout package. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

European Commission official Matthias Mors, second left, and Klaus Masuch of the European Central Bank, left, arrive a government office building before meeting Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in central Athens on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. Unions and employers' associations rejected demands for private-sector wage cuts, despite pressure for the country to introduce strict austerity measures if it is to receive a crucial bailout package. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

IMF chief debt inspector Poul Thomsen, left, arrives at a government office building before meeting Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in central Athens on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. Unions and employers' associations rejected demands for private-sector wage cuts, despite pressure for the country to introduce strict austerity measures if it is to receive a crucial bailout package. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Greek civil engineers protest as a sign on a shopfront behind reads ''closing sale,' outside the Labor Ministry building in central Athens on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. Several hundred people took part in the peaceful protest, as unions and employers' associations rejected demands for private-sector wage cuts, despite pressure for the country to introduce strict austerity measures if it is to receive a crucial bailout package (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos enters a government office building before meeting with debt inspectors from the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission, known collectively as the "troika, in central Athens on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012. Several hundred people took part in the peaceful protest, as unions and employers' associations rejected demands for private-sector wage cuts, despite pressure for the country to introduce strict austerity measures if it is to receive a crucial bailout package (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

ATHENS, Greece (AP) ? "Crucial" issues remain to be resolved in Greece's critical negotiations over a second multibillion euro international bailout, and talks would continue into the weekend, the country's Finance Minister said early Saturday.

A long anticipated bond swap deal was now the easier part of the process in securing continued funding for the country, Evangelos Venizelos said after marathon talks with debt inspectors from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, known as the troika.

Venizelos said he would speak on Saturday afternoon by teleconference with the other eurozone finance ministers, and that the ministers would meet on Wednesday ? a gathering that had originally been expected to be held Monday.

"After 12 hours of continuous and tough negotiations with the troika on the new program, we have solved quite a few issues. But there remain crucial issues which concern the future of the country and the Greek people," Venizelos said.

Greece desperately needs to secure the second bailout and the bond swap deal that seeks to halve its debt load in order to avoid a catastrophic default within weeks.

A major sticking point in the negotiations over Greece's second euro130 billion bailout are disagreements over the troika's demands for private sector wage cuts.

Apart from the new bailout talks, Greece is conducting urgent negotiations with its private creditors, who are being asked to lose half the face value of their Greek government bonds. New talks on the writedown ? which would slash Greece's national debt by euro100 billion ($131.6 billion) ? will be held in Athens over the weekend.

Venizelos said the negotiations on the bond swap "is now the easier part of the whole procedure."

In a letter to the government Friday, Greek unions and employers said they rejected proposals to slash the minimum wage and further cut annual salaries. Private sector workers have already suffered a 14 percent loss in income due to emergency taxes imposed since the beginning of 2010, the letter said.

The creditors argue that cutting labor costs is essential to making the Greek economy more competitive. The unions and employers' associations counter that the move will only further depress consumer spending and therefore tax revenue.

The government must conclude negotiations on its second rescue package "that will ensure debt sustainability of the country in the long run, and that will bring remedies to a number of serious problems that the Greek economy has had even before this crisis," said Amadeu Altafaj Tardio, spokesman for EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn.

"And one of the main problems of the Greek economy as we have said time and again here is the chronic loss of competitiveness over the past decade. ... Therefore all the elements, including elements linked to the labor market, wage formation, are part of these discussions."

Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees De Jager said he and his colleagues from the other three AAA-rated eurozone countries ? Germany, Luxembourg and Finland ? "are not satisfied with Greece's progress."

"We want a serious commitment from the Greek government and the opposition. They need to show concrete action as soon as possible," De Jager wrote on his blog after a meeting of finance ministers from the four triple-A countries in Berlin.

"The IMF rightly is demanding a reduction in the minimum wage and a major reduction in the number of civil servants," he said. "We will not agree to the second loan package until Greece has shown it is seriously working at this."

Without the new bailout deal, and the related bond swap to cut its privately-held debt, Greece would go bankrupt in late March, when it faces a euro14.5 billion bond redemption it cannot afford.

The Institute of International Finance, a Washington-based bank association conducting negotiations for the private creditors, said Friday that its senior official Charles Dallara would resume talks in Athens over the weekend.

IIF spokesman Frank Vogl said Jean Lemierre, senior adviser to the chairman of French bank BNP Paribas, will be accompanying Dallara.

Athens has said the writedown deal would see private investors take real losses of more than 70 percent through a 50 per cent cut in the face value of the bonds, along with lower interest rates and a longer repayment period than originally planned. It has also called for the ECB and national central banks to take part in the debt relief agreement, and indicated it was seeking a lower interest rate for the first bailout.

Greece has been surviving since May 2010 on rescue loans from a euro110 billion bailout package from other eurozone countries and the IMF. In return, it has pushed through tough austerity measures, including public sector salary and pension cuts and repeated rounds of tax hikes. Despite the measures, however, the country has failed to meet the targets set out in its bailout agreement, and now needs a combination of the bond deal and a second bailout to prevent a default that could roil the euro currency.

A meeting between Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and the heads of the three parties in his interim coalition government was expected to be held Saturday, according to government officials. The leaders must commit to the new agreements and whatever further austerity measures they entail for the deals to go ahead.

Speaking from Brussels, Tardio said that while negotiations were "extremely complex," he believed an agreement was within reach "in the days to come."

Venizelos stressed the decisions to be taken in the coming days were critical.

"We must save the country, we must now all together, united ... fight this battle. Tomorrow is the day of truth for all the political parties, for the country's political leadership."

___

Nicholas Paphitis in Athens and Mike Corder in The Hague contributed.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-02-03-EU-Greece-Financial-Crisis/id-a0be1302828a434bb4ad08e64f5ff44d

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Customer Centric Business Strategies Blog ? Social CRM: The Next ...

by Barton Goldenberg, President, ISM Inc.

I continue to be amazed at the confusion regarding the value and importance of Social CRM. I entered the CRM industry in 1985, as founder and president of ISM Inc, when it was still called Sales Force Automation (SFA). SFA functionality soon was complemented with valuable ?customer service and support? functionality (late 1980s), then with market campaign management functionality (early 1990s), then eBusiness functionality (late 1990s) and more recently business intelligence functionality (early 2000s).

Around 2005, social media took the market by storm as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and several others public communities took hold. Companies like Mzinga, Lithium, Jive and others joined the fray by offering private social communities that has similar capabilities to the public communities (i.e., forums, blogs, polls, contests, rankings, etc.). Most recently, CRM vendors like salesforce.com and RightNow Technology have also moved the ?community? capability into their own CRM software and have begun to offer internal as well as external private communities. Simply said, ?Social? and ?CRM? have now merged and in 2012, Social CRM is here to stay.

In my latest book, Social CRM, to be published later this year, I define Social CRM as the process of leveraging ?social insights? and integrating them into your overall customer relationship efforts. More specifically Social CRM gathers social insights from both public and private social communities, filters this ?free-form? information to ensure you have captured meaningful social insights (by no means an easy task), and then integrates this filtered insight into your CRM customer profiles so that you have a deeper understanding of how your customers and prospects. In other words, with Social CRM, you now have both transactional as well as non-transactional information currently residing within your CRM system, such as:

? sales forecasts,
? customer service incident management,
? market campaigns, as well as,
? sentiment-based insight such as how your customers feel about doing business with you.

Many companies, including several of our global, best-in-class customers, are well on their way to mastering Social CRM to deliver increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, customer advocacy and a meaningful ROI. I?ll talk about some of these companies in my presentation at the upcoming the Sales Management 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia on March 5 at 9:15 a.m. (check out the full agenda)

Social CRM is not going away as the payback is overwhelmingly positive, which is why I strongly believe that Social CRM is the way of the future; it takes CRM to an entirely new level in terms of understanding your customers and deepening your relationship with them.

Posted by - jennifermq @ 10:42 am

Source: http://ismguide.com/blog/?p=546

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Health and Fitness Facts and Myths Exposed | advokatska.com

Imagine your frustration if you discovered you?d been performing your exercises wrong for years. Think about the person who gets injured because of incorrect form and information. These are very real considerations and they happen to people all the time. You need to be sure you?re getting your information from experts and credible sources for this reason. Your health depends it and bad information is rampant. Here is some solid information regarding health and fitness.

Here is an interesting partial myth, if we can say so. When you engage in aerobic exercise, your metabolism will get a terrific boost that will last for hours, maybe, beyond the actual workout. The part of this myth that is misleading is the fact that the calories do not continue to burn like you?d expect. This is because the increase in metabolic rate is not as high as some might claim. The fact is that these increases in metabolic rate are not significant enough to affect calorie burn.

No pain, no gain. That?s the only way to do it and get great results. Dangerously incorrect is what that statement really is. In addition, there is very real potential for inflicting serious bodily damage by living that particular motto. The pain of a good workout should not inhibit your other activities. If it hurts don?t do it, it the best rule to follow in relation to workout pain and soreness that does not subside in a reasonable amount of time. If you are injured, then continuing to exercise will only increase the severity of your injury.

Fitness exercises are perfect for mental acuity as well. In other words, working out helps to make your brain more powerful and operate at a higher level of performance.

Circulation is another benefit of regular exercise. Of course that means in your brain as well. Also, exercise increases the serotonin level in your brain. More serotonin in the brain is shown to improve mental clarity. There are many benefits to improved mental acuity. By the way eating healthy can also help you avoid health insurance. It?s more important than ever to sort out the truths of health and fitness, especially if you?re totally new to working out. Because you are still forming your fitness habits, this is extremely important. You will have to go through a painful re-education later if you form the wrong habits now. Whether you continue your fitness program and your future success depend on forming good habits.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized by kohale. Bookmark the permalink.

Source: http://www.advokatska.com/2012/02/03/health-and-fitness-facts-and-myths-exposed/

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2 Texas missionaries found slain in north Mexico

MEXICO CITY (AP) ? A missionary couple from Texas were slain in their home outside the violence-plagued northern industrial city of Monterrey, the U.S. Embassy and their family said Wednesday

The embassy identified the couple as John and Wanda Casias.

Valerie Alirez, the eldest child of John Casias, told The Associated Press from her home in Greeley, Colorado, that one of her brothers found her father and stepmother Tuesday dead in their home in Santiago, Nuevo Leon.

The family was originally from Amarillo, Texas, but relatives said John and Wanda Casias moved to Mexico in the late 1970s or early 1980s and made it their home.

John Casias was a Baptist preacher and the couple ran the First Fundamentalist Independent Baptist Church in Santiago, Alirez said.

Her brother, Shawn Casias, who lives in Monterrey, said he went to his parents' home around 4 p.m. Tuesday to pick up a trailer. After he had hooked up the trailer outside he went into the home to say goodbye. He said he found Wanda Casias lying on the floor with an electrical cord around her neck and a gash from a blunt object on her head.

Missing from the house were a couple of computers, a plasma television and a safe that had been chiseled out of the wall.

The couple's Chevrolet Suburban was also missing, and Casias said he initially thought his father had been kidnapped.

But about four or five hours later, he said, a forensic investigator informed him that his father's body had been found in a storage room of a small building on the property. His father also had an electrical cord around his neck.

Fighting between the Zetas and Gulf drug cartels has inflicted a surge of violence and other crimes on Monterrey and the surrounding area since 2010. In poorer suburbs, entire blocks have been held up by gunmen and young people snatched off the streets.

Casias said a sister-in-law in Dallas had spoken to their mother around 11 a.m. Tuesday and everything was fine. So he believes there was about a five-hour window when the killings could have occurred before he showed up.

He said the killers did not take everything they could have, leaving two of the three TV sets. He said perhaps they were warned that he was coming, because anyone watching the winding road approaching the home could have alerted them.

"They're scum. They're not sophisticated," he said.

Speaking from his parents' home, Casias said the house was burglarized two years ago when the couple were on one of their periodic visits to the United States to talk at churches about their work in Mexico.

"We're convinced that it's somebody he knew," Casias said of the killers. He said authorities had some leads based on people seen around the home.

John Casias was 76. He had recently priced a knee replacement because he couldn't walk more than 100 yards (100 meters) without having to sit down, Shawn Casias said. Wanda Casias was 67.

Casias said his parents held services and prayer meetings at a church about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from their home.

The couple maintained a website, www.casias.org, with details of their lives and their missionary work

"The only hope for the Mexican people today is Jesus in them, the HOPE of glory," they wrote in one dispatch from last summer. "I confess that it's getting easier to witness to the wealthy, at least they are listening. The wealthy are fleeing to Canada and the USA for protection. The only problem is that when they return to re-new their visas the cartel is waiting, and either kill them of (sic) kidnap them for thousands of dollars, in some cases millions. The cartel has NO mercy or value for life. They are ruthless murderers!"

It was the second slaying involving American missionaries in a year in the Mexican region bordering Texas.

In January 2011, a Texas couple who had been doing missionary work in Mexico for three decades were attacked at an illegal roadblock in one of the country's most violent areas.

Nancy Davis, 59, was fatally shot in the head while her husband, Sam, sped away from suspected drug cartel gunmen who may have wanted to steal their pickup truck, authorities said.

The Davises were driving along the two-lane road that connects the city of San Fernando with the border city of Reynosa in the state of Tamaulipas, which borders Nuevo Leon.

___

Associated Press writer Katherine Corcoran reported this story in Mexico City and Christopher Sherman reported from McAllen, Texas.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-02-01-LT-Mexico-Americans-Killed/id-e47c6cc2bdfd44bd9f0bda5e90ef9f70

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Minutemen: History Lesson Part II [Video]

At decision points in my life, I often ask: What would Mike Watt do? Watt was the bass player for the minutemen and firehose, and more recently the Stooges. He's also a prodigious songwriter. This is scientist rock. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/a8nCZdL6zA8/minutemen-history-lesson-part-ii

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PocketCloud Remote RDP/VNC (for Android)

PocketCloud is a free Android app that allows users to connect their Android devices to Mac and Windows desktops remotely. This app serves one main purpose, and it achieves that purpose well, even when the remote computer is part of a corporate network.

Download and Install

Wyse Technology's PocketCloud is a free, 4.41MB download from the Android Market. As with many remote access solutions that connect mobile devices to remote desktops, the install process is two-fold: once on the mobile device, and once on the remote desktop.

The remote install on the desktop is called PocketCloud Companion, and it's available as a free download from Wyse's site with versions for both Mac and PC.?To create a connection, you enter your Google username and password into the software on both the Android device and the PocketCloud Companion, which creates a connection between the two machines via the Google App Engine. This means no additional configuration is necessary.

Those leery of automatic connections done through Google App Engine can opt to manually create connections via RDP or using VNC, which requires some advanced knowledge. For instance, for an RDP or VNC connection, you have to know the IP address of the host machine, as well as make sure RDP and VNC traffic are allowed on the host's network.

Establishing a connection using Google is the simplest way for most users to use PocketCloud.

The install on my Droid was simple enough. Install and log in. That's it. The Pocket Companion install on my Windows 7 laptop that I wanted to remotely connect to was also simple, but a bit more involved. PocketCloud Companion has to do a number of tasks to prep the machine to make a remote connection. These include automatically configuring Remote Desktop, firewall settings, NLA (Network Level Authentication), user privilege, Windows password , and Auto-Discovery.

The Windows password that's configured is a local password used to remotely access the Windows desktop. There are other remote access solutions that will prompt you to just enter the already created local Windows password. However, PocketCloud's solution is clever. Why? Because many corporate desktop users often do not know the local Windows account. They can only log into their machines using a network or domain account. PocketCloud's setup process gets around this restriction.

Of course, your IT department may restrict you from installing PocketCloud Companion, or may restrict PocketCloud traffic?if so, you would need to speak to your network administrator to use this solution for accessing your business machines.

Once a Google username and password is entered into PocketCloud Companion on the remote machine, the app on the phone (which otherwise simply awaits a remote sign-on from the host machine) finds the now-installed software on the client machine through Google App Engine and gives the message, "Setup is complete." All in all, it's a very smooth and surprisingly speedy setup process, and simple way to create a remote access session.

Features

PocketCloud's app allows you to remotely connect to a machine?and that's pretty much it. You can't transfer files between the Android device and remote machine. However, it allows for some smooth navigating of a remote client, at least as far as I could tell when connected remotely to my computer running Windows 7.

The app displays a mouse wheel image, providing a visual guide of where your fingers should go to execute clicks: left-click, right-click, zoom, etc. Using the mouse functions takes some getting used to, especially on a relatively small smartphone screen, but the functionality is consistent. Working with the mouse as well as getting around on the remote client's screen is smooth?a user can quickly become adept. I found using PocketCloud to access a remote Windows machine overall easier than other free solutions like Jump Desktop (290188).

While connected to a remote client, you can pull up a keyboard to type in an application on the remote desktop. It was easy to type a Word doc from my Android into Microsoft Word on my computer (not that I would want to write up most reviews that way). There's also a handy function key shortcut for executing various shortcut commands on the remote machine.

You can tweak your remote session a bit with the various settings options PocketCloud provides. For instance, you can control sound detection, windows dragging, and menu animation on the remote machine. Users can opt to have the PocketCloud app's keyboard automatically appear when connected to remote machines that have the PocketCloud companion installed, and there are some more fine tuning options.

Good, Quick and Free Remote Access

Sure, PocketCloud isn't as robust a remote access solution as some paid solutions like TeamViewer 5, an Editors' Choice remote access product that allows you to do tasks like collaborate and transfer files.

However, for a free lightweight app that gives you quick and easy remote access, it's a very good four-star option.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/RGcgyKQkmYw/0,2817,2399669,00.asp

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Focus on Nevada (TIME)

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