| How a Pro Thinks About Investing in New Markets
A good example is Mitsubishi UFJ, Japan's largest bank, which has a price-to-earnings ratio in the high single digits. Management is reasonably good and improving; it's just that investors have become despondent with the domestic economy and the prospect for rising interest rates. But we see that as a cyclical setback, not a permanent one, so we're buying in now at a low valuation. You're also buying in at a time when Japan's currency is hitting new highs against the dollar. Does that play into your strategy, too? Every one of the target prices for the stocks we follow closely is dependent on currency changes. So big currency swings can change our holdings. Take Yamaha Motors, which we think is a great company; they make motorcycles, ATVs, and outboard motors. As the yen recently strengthened, we saw investors selling the stock on the expectation that it would impact overseas sales, which gave us an opportunity to add to our position.
NYT: Veterans Are Murderers on 'Downward Spiral'
This 9 page (on the web) report gives us case after case and lots of generalities, such as... "Everything is multicausational, of course," Dr. Lifton continued. “But combat, especially in a counterinsurgency war, is such a powerful experience that to discount it would be artificial." An obvious statement, but not a conclusive one by any means. This piece is filled with these sorts of comments alongside the specific stories of returning vets who did have breakdowns that led to murder. But the Times wants to make it seem as if our vets are universally a troubled lot. But these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence.
the undercover economist
Gordon, a little more scientifically, used detailed listings from catalogs to measure both price and quality of clothes. Many economists still think that inflation is overestimated and we have therefore been getting richer faster than the official statistics show. But Gordon must have a point: If we have been getting rich that quickly, then our ancestors were impossibly poor. Gordon calculated that if the recent estimates of price bias are projected backward, Bruegel's peasant household would have had an income of less than $6 a year and been able to afford less than an ounce of potatoes a day back in 1569. That would have made for a different picture. The Undercover Economist appears on Saturdays in the Financial Times Magazine. Correction, June 6, 2006: The piece originally stated that Montgomery Ward's mail-order catalog was first published in 1893.
Obama faces fire from Clinton, McCain
In what could be a preview of the general election, the two exchanged jabs over Iraq and the economy, sure to be key issues in November. McCain criticized the Democrats for speaking in "platitudes" about Iraq. "The Democrats wanted to leave and set a date for withdrawal and said we could never succeed militarily. Look at the record ... not the rhetoric, not the platitudes, but the principles and the philosophy," he said. McCain later took aim directly at Obama for lacking specifics. "I respect him and the campaign he has run," McCain said. "But there is going to be time when we have to get into specifics, and I have heard not every speech he has given obviously, but they are singularly lacking in specifics, and that's when as the campaign moves forward, we will be portraying very stark differences." Those comments are among McCain's most pointed attack at Obama to date, a clear sign the Republican nominee apparent is increasingly viewing the Illinois senator as the Democratic front-runner.
Capable of Rage
In humans, related anger reveals itself with road rage, an impulsive form of anger that involves little or no thought. "In road rage, the person never thinks about what he is doing but just acts in the way he does because he feels that he has been threatened by someone else and the impulsive behavior represents a way by which he can protect himself from such a threat," co-author Allan Siegel told Discovery News. "In reality, his actions are usually much more dangerous to him than to the person whom he perceived cut him off on the road," added Siegel, a professor in the Department of Neurology & Neurosciences at New Jersey Medical School in Newark. Prior studies have suggested that anger is centered in the medial hypothalamus region of the brain, more colloquially known as the midbrain's gray matter.
Courtesy Antoune Albert
Today, as the profession shifts from negative and slide film to digital, we look at some of the leading visual artists of our time, from hard-bitten news photographers to up-and-coming artists. El-Ustaz At the old Akhbar El-Yom building, several walls swathed entirely in vivid pictures detailing Egypt's history welcome visitors to the photography department. Guarding the entrance is a small panel, a kind of shrine, the centerpiece of which is a portrait of chief photographer Mohamed Youssef, surrounded by smaller pictures of every single photographer who has followed him at the national newspaper empire. “He was the dean of photographers," says Farouk Ibrahim, manager of the photography department at Akhbar El-Yom, pointing out that Youssef was the first to break through colonial barriers, the first Egyptian to be trusted with managing a photography department's coverage of the nation at a daily national press outlet.
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