40 devastatingly simple ways the web can save you big money

You can save a surprising amount of money with the web

Capitalism is collapsing, we're eating shoes for dinner and our houses are worth about 10p - so it's more important than ever to ensure that we're getting the biggest bang for our bucks.

If money really talked, it'd be saying "go online and save some cash!"

So we did.

Here, we reveal 40 ways to use the web to beat the bills, cut your costs and get more from your money.

1. Go paper-free for cheaper bills
Many firms, such as Norwich Union Direct give you one discount for applying online and a further discount if you choose online-only paperless policies.

2. Make free phone calls
Whether it's Skype or your favourite chat software, why pick up the phone when voice and video chat is free?

3. Cut your credit card rates
If you don't clear the balance every month, high interest rates could be costing you a fortune. Use MoneyExtra to find a better deal.

4. Get cheaper gas and electric
Energy firms make a lot of money from inertia - that is, customers sticking with the package they're on instead of switching to better deals. Use Uswitch to compare different providers.

5. Collect Airmiles
Airmiles aren't just for flights - you can use them for hotel stays, too. The Airmiles website shows you where to collect the most miles.

6. Be patient and save on delivery charges
Many online shops such as Amazon charge a fortune for fast delivery. Go for free delivery instead - no book, game or DVD is that urgent.

7. Get cheaper broadband
Been with the same ISP for a while? You're probably paying too much. Broadband Genie shows who's got the best prices for the speed you need.

8. Get loyalty discounts
Providers such as O2 give massive discounts for customers who take more than one service so, for example, O2 broadband is £5 cheaper for existing O2 customers.

9. Get cheaper insurance
Insurers typically attract new customers with generous deals and then stuff them when it's time to renew. Use Confused.com to get a better deal.

10. New quotes are often cheaper than renewals
Like your insurer but hate the renewal price? Get a new quote from their website and demand they match it. We saved £90 this week doing just that.

11. Buy groceries online
Supermarkets are brilliant at encouraging impulse buys, so avoid temptation by ordering over the internet. If possible, arrange midweek delivery: weekends cost more.

12. Dump designers
Sites such as ASOS.com can help you get designer styles without paying designer money.

13. Book flights early
The earlier you book a flight on airlines such as EasyJet, the less it costs.

14. Use free software
Is OpenOffice.org as good as Microsoft Office? Who cares? It's free! See also: Picasa, Google Docs, Paint.net...

15. Get cheaper gig tickets in advance
Sign up to mailing lists to get advance notice of ticket sales for your favourite acts.

16. Get cheaper last-minute tickets
Need tickets for a sold-out gig? Sod the scalpers: try ethical trading site Scarlet Mist.

17. Get cheap Christmas presents now
It's not long till Xmas, and there are sales a-plenty from big names such as Debenhams and Marks & Sparks.

18. Find freebies
The lovely people at Moneysavingexpert.com have found freebies ranging from baby food samples to study aids and sun cream.

19. Compare prices to save big
Never buy things from the first site you try - a quick trip to Kelkoo will often find it cheaper.

20. Use a car broker and save cash on your new car
Car dealers are suffering, so brokers such as Broadspeed can get even bigger discounts on new cars than before.

21. Monitor the market for cheap mortgages
The best deals appear and disappear in a matter of days, so use a site such as Moneysupermarket.com to make sure you don't miss any.

22. Prioritise your debts to cut repayments
Shifting debt to a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers could slash your repayments; find one on Moneysupermarket or MoneyExtra.

23. Get a currency card
Travelling abroad? Pre-paid currency cards can save you a stack when you pay with plastic.

24. Find the cheapest petrol
Petrolprices.com finds the cheapest petrol stations in your area.

25. Earn more interest on your savings
Make sure you're earning maximum interest at Moneysavingexpert.com.

26. Get 2 for 1 cinema tickets
With Orange? Text 241 to get two-for-one tickets on Wednesdays.

27. See films for free
Disney's Film Factory often gives away free tickets for new movies.

28. Sell your story to the press
Did your partner leave you for a chicken? Beonpaper is where real-life mags often get their case studies - and many of them pay.

29. Get free stuff from Freecycle
Join your nearest Freecycle group and discover how you can get people's unwanted items for nowt.

30. Get cashback when you shop
Sites such as Topcashback can get you cash back when you buy from major retailers - although you should always check that the same things aren't cheaper elsewhere.

31. Stream music for free
Why buy CDs when Last.fm's streaming is so good?

32. Build a blog, not a website
Free blogging platforms such as WordPress are often better than paid-for web space.

33. Cancel the newspaper
They're all online, so subscribe to their RSS feeds with NewNewsWire or FeedDemon.

34. Find cheap restaurant deals
5pm.co.uk offers cheap same-day deals for all kinds of swanky restaurants.

35. Do a holiday house swap
Don't pay for a hotel: swap houses with someone instead.

36. Save petrol
Plan your route before you travel - it saves petrol and it's cheaper than a sat-nav.

37. Get cheaper train tickets
Book in advance and use services such as Raileasy to find the lowest fares.

38. Get bargain hotel rooms
Laterooms can save you a packet on hotel accommodation - especially if you're booking at the last minute.

39. Find free Wi-Fi
Free-hotspot.com and Wififreespot make it easy to find free Wi-Fi - although inevitably, availability is awful outside big cities.

40. Use up food before you buy more
Cooking By Numbers is brilliant: tell it what odds and sods are in your fridge and it'll come up with recipes. We got Bacon Surprise: "The surprise is that it is nothing but bacon."

Now read 12 Vista Sidebar gadgets that will save you money and 7 Firefox add-ons that will save you a fortune

By Gary Marshall

Original here

Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation

Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, with John Snow, former Secretary of the Treasury, at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — For years, a Congressional hearing with Alan Greenspan was a marquee event. Lawmakers doted on him as an economic sage. Markets jumped up or down depending on what he said. Politicians in both parties wanted the maestro on their side.

But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Now 82, Mr. Greenspan came in for one of the harshest grillings of his life, as Democratic lawmakers asked him time and again whether he had been wrong, why he had been wrong and whether he was sorry.

Critics, including many economists, now blame the former Fed chairman for the financial crisis that is tipping the economy into a potentially deep recession. Mr. Greenspan’s critics say that he encouraged the bubble in housing prices by keeping interest rates too low for too long and that he failed to rein in the explosive growth of risky and often fraudulent mortgage lending.

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.

He noted that the immense and largely unregulated business of spreading financial risk widely, through the use of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, had gotten out of control and had added to the havoc of today’s crisis. As far back as 1994, Mr. Greenspan staunchly and successfully opposed tougher regulation on derivatives.

But on Thursday, he agreed that the multitrillion-dollar market for credit default swaps, instruments originally created to insure bond investors against the risk of default, needed to be restrained.

“This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades,” he said. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Mr. Waxman noted that the Fed chairman had been one of the nation’s leading voices for deregulation, displaying past statements in which Mr. Greenspan had argued that government regulators were no better than markets at imposing discipline.

“Were you wrong?” Mr. Waxman asked.

“Partially,” the former Fed chairman reluctantly answered, before trying to parse his concession as thinly as possible.

Mr. Greenspan, celebrated as the “Maestro” in a book about him by Bob Woodward, presided over the Fed for 18 years before he stepped down in January 2006. He steered the economy through one of the longest booms in history, while also presiding over a period of declining inflation.

But as the Fed slashed interest rates to nearly record lows from 2001 until mid-2004, housing prices climbed far faster than inflation or household income year after year. By 2004, a growing number of economists were warning that a speculative bubble in home prices and home construction was under way, which posed the risk of a housing bust.

Mr. Greenspan brushed aside worries about a potential bubble, arguing that housing prices had never endured a nationwide decline and that a bust was highly unlikely.

Mr. Greenspan, along with most other banking regulators in Washington, also resisted calls for tighter regulation of subprime mortgages and other high-risk exotic mortgages that allowed people to borrow far more than they could afford.

The Federal Reserve had broad authority to prohibit deceptive lending practices under a 1994 law called the Home Owner Equity Protection Act . But it took little action during the long housing boom, and fewer than 1 percent of all mortgages were subjected to restrictions under that law.

This year, the Fed greatly tightened its restrictions. But by that time, the subprime market as well as the market for other kinds of exotic mortgages had already been wiped out.

Mr. Greenspan said that he had publicly warned about the “underpricing of risk” in 2005 but that he had never expected the crisis that began to sweep the entire financial system in 2007.

“This crisis,” he told lawmakers, “has turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined. It has morphed from one gripped by liquidity restraints to one in which fears of insolvency are now paramount.”

Many Republican lawmakers on the oversight committee tried to blame the mortgage meltdown on the unchecked growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies that were placed in a government conservatorship last month. Republicans have argued that Democratic lawmakers blocked measures to reform the companies.

But Mr. Greenspan, who was first appointed by President Ronald Reagan, placed far more blame on the Wall Street companies that bundled subprime mortgages into pools and sold them as mortgage-backed securities. Global demand for the securities was so high, he said, that Wall Street companies pressured lenders to lower their standards and produce more “paper.”

“The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations (undeniably the original source of the crisis) would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far lower,” he said.

Despite his chagrin over the mortgage mess, the former Fed chairman proposed only one specific regulation: that companies selling mortgage-backed securities be required to hold a significant number themselves.

“Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets,” he said. “Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.”

Original here

What Google Gains From The Crisis

Andy Greenberg

Last year's question of whether Google might be invulnerable to a recession has officially been answered. Since the beginning of the year, investors have sliced the company's stock price nearly in half over fears that spending on online ads will slow or fall as the credit crunch freezes wallets.

But there's an upside for Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ): Even as the search giant suffers, the company's competitors seem to be suffering more. And by the time the economy has recovered, analysts watching the search market say the downturn may have only helped Google tighten its already dominant lead in search marketing, the largest--and still growing--category of the Web ads.

On Tuesday, Yahoo!'s (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) unhappy earnings announcements drew a sharp contrast with Google's relatively positive results the week before. Even though Google's revenue fell a bit short of analysts' expectations, the search engine giant reported an earnings gain of 26%, to $1.4 billion for the quarter. (See "Google Hits On The Bottom Line, Not On Top.")

By contrast, Yahoo! said Tuesday that third-quarter earnings fell 64%, to $54 million, on revenues of $1.79 billion, and that the wounded company would lay off 1,500 employees. (See "Yahoo! Earnings Plunge, Cuts 1,500 Jobs.")

In fact, Google's good news in bad times may be based in a bigger trend. Overall, online advertising spending numbers are looking sickly. According to numbers released earlier this month from the Internet Advertising Bureau, spending fell in both the first and second quarters of the year. That marks the first time that either first or second quarter spending has dropped with respect to the previous quarter since 2003.

But search advertising--the small text ads placed beside search results--show signs of relative health. Those pay-per-click ads accounted for 44% of online ad spending in the first half of 2008, up 3% from the first half of last year, while spending on banner ads stayed flat at around 21% of the total.

Advertisers' migration toward search advertising is partly a result of belt-tightening companies looking for a more measurable and accountable form of marketing, says Greg Sterling, a search market analyst with Sterling Market Research. While companies are typically charged a certain sum every time a display appears, a search ad only costs an advertiser when it's clicked.

That difference, Sterling says, has created "the perception that search ads are a safer bet than display advertising," he says. As the downturn squeezes ad spending further, Sterling says that stingy companies will continue to give an added boost to search marketing, a category where Google receives around 71% of all spending, according to ad-tracking firm eMarketer.

Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), all of which are more invested in other forms of online advertising, will suffer from the perception of search ads as the thriftiest form of marketing, says Sterling. "If Google were as built up in display advertising as in search, it would see similar weakness," he says. "But that's the irony: [Google's] business is less diversified, so it will benefit from the relative strength of the one sector it dominates."

To be sure, the move toward search ads isn't strictly new, argues eMarketer analyst David Hallerman--the trickle of advertising funds from banner ads to pay-per-click search ads has been a slow process, he says. But this year's numbers show an acceleration: The fraction of spending on search advertising jumped three percentage points in the first half of 2008, compared to just one percentage point in 2007, according to the IAB's numbers.

"A recession that lasts a few years may incrementally boost a trend that's been ongoing regardless," Hallerman says.

While the downturn chokes spending for Google's major competitors, it may also cut off funding for potential foes in their embryo stages. One potential upstart competitor, Wikia Search, may already be feeling the crunch: Its parent company, Wikia, announced this week that it will lay off 10% of staff. More generally, the credit crisis has made IPOs all but impossible for small start-ups and has chilled venture capitalists' enthusiasm for young potential Google-killers.

In this market, the most likely outcome for any successful search start-up is being bought, likely by Google itself, says Gartner Research analyst Andrew Frank. "Some innovative start-up could have an impact on the market if they achieve a real breakthrough," he says. "But the most likely exit strategy is acquisition. The downturn has reduced speculative market caps and created real bargains for companies like Google with cash on hand."

The increasing invincibility of Google's search advertising dominance hasn't gone unnoticed by anti-trust authorities. In July, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to discuss the anti-competitive implications of Google's proposed partnership with Yahoo!, which would allow the struggling Web portal to host some fraction of Google's ads. Following that hearing, the two search competitors have put their partnership on hold, likely sensing the government's wariness of the deal's perceived impact on advertising prices.

As the economic downturn exacerbates the troubles of Google's competitors and solidifies its grasp of the search advertising market, Google's biggest barrier may become government intervention. "The dilemma for Google now is how it will continue to grow," says Greg Sterling. "It may benefit from the weakness of its competitors, but it will have to avoid incurring the wrath of the Justice Department."

Original here

Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights: What it means for you

by Karen Datko

This post comes from partner blog The Dough Roller.

While the $700 billion bailout and presidential election have dominated the news, the U.S. House passed a major piece of credit card reform legislation. The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act of 2008 passed the House on Sept. 23 by a vote of 312-112 (with nine members not voting).

The bill, which still needs to pass the Senate before heading to the White House, would have a major impact on everything from how credit card issuers apply cardholder payments to outstanding debt to limits on interest rate increases.

Here are some of the more significant provisions of the act:

Retroactive interest rate increases and universal default limits. One of the biggest complaints leveled against the credit card industry is the practice of raising interest rates significantly due to a late payment or other default, or sometimes for no reason at all. The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights would limit a card issuer's ability to raise interest rates. Specifically, a credit card company could not (with some exceptions) raise interest rates on existing balances. Furthermore, if the interest rate on future balances was raised, the credit card issuer would be limited in how quickly it could insist that the old balance subject to the lower interest rate is paid off.

Here are some other interest rate-hike protections the act would provide:

• If a cardholder loses the benefit of an introductory rate, the new rate could not exceed what the interest rate would have been at the expiration of the introductory period.

• A consumer must be given a 45-day written notice before higher interest rates take effect.

Pro rata payment allocation. The act's provisions related to pro rata payment allocation are absolutely critical to balance-transfer credit cards. Here's the problem. Suppose you have a $5,000 credit card balance at 0% from a balance-transfer offer. Let's also assume that you've charged $500 worth of purchases that are subject to a interest rate of 10%. If you pay $500 at the end of the month, which balance does it go toward?

Under most credit card agreements today, the payment would go to the 0% balance first. Only when that was paid off would you begin to make a dent in the $500 balance subject to 10% interest. That's why I never use my balance-transfer cards for purchases. Under the statute, however, credit card companies would be required to allocate your payments across both the interest-free balance and the balance subject to a higher interest rate.

Double-cycle billing. The statute would also attack a practice that has long been criticized by consumer-advocacy groups, double-cycle billing. Under this practice some credit card issuers go back two billing cycles, not just one, to calculate a cardholder's average daily balance. The result can mean that you will pay interest on balances you paid off the previous month. This chart from a GAO report does a nice job of describing this practice:

Statements must be sent 25 days before payment is due. The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights would require credit card companies to send out your bill at least 25 days before it is due. The intent is to give consumers ample notice and an opportunity to pay the bill before interest charges accrue.

Over-the-limit transactions. This is where common sense and sunshine break through the dark clouds of consumer credit. Today credit card companies charge a fee if you go over your credit limit. The problem is that they let you go over the limit. Rather than rejecting a transaction that would cause you to exceed your available credit, the credit card companies approve the transaction, and then whack you with a fee.

One could argue that consumers should know their current balance and their credit limit, and not make purchases that send them over the limit. True enough. But there is something a bit twisted with the current scheme. The act would allow consumers to elect to have their credit card company reject any transactions that would send them over their limit.

Subprime or fee-harvester cards. This covers the truly dark side of the credit card industry. There are a variety of "bad credit" credit cards aimed at those with poor credit. The terms of the cards make payday loans look like a good deal. For example, check out the terms of the Tribute Gold MasterCard:

• Credit limit: $300

• Annual fee: $150

• Account-maintenance fee: $119.40 (billed monthly at $9.95)

• APR for purchases: 24.50%

Here's how that adds up, according to the credit card issuer: If you are approved for the $300 card, your credit line will be $300 and your annual fee of $150 will appear on your first statement. Your initial minimum payment of $30 must be received, cleared and posted on your credit card account before you can activate your card and use your credit card account. Your initial available credit will be $180. You will be billed an account-maintenance fee of $9.95 per month (total of $119.40 per year), beginning after you make your first purchase or cash advance.

The bill does not put a stop to these types of predatory lending practices, but it tries. What the bill provides is that if annual fees the first year exceed 25% of the available credit, the fees cannot be charged to the card. So in the case of the Tribute card, the consumer would have to shell out the $150 fee and annual account-maintenance fees rather than having them "conveniently" added to the card.

Impact on credit card offers. As you might imagine, the credit card industry is not in favor of the statute. Like any consumer-protection law, there would be some unintended consequences. For example, some credit card issuers have already started to raise interest rates on some cardholders in anticipation of this type of credit card reform becoming law. In addition, there is the potential for this act to have a negative impact on balance- transfer offers, cash-back rewards, travel rewards, and other lucrative credit card offers.

If you'd like to read the statute in its entirety, you can check it out at GovTrack, a great site to track federal legislation.

Original here

AIG Agrees to Freeze Executive Payouts

By CHAD BRAY

NEW YORK -- American International Group Inc. agreed Wednesday to freeze some $19 million in payments to its former chief executive, Martin Sullivan, while New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo reviews executive compensation and other expenditures paid out as the company neared collapse earlier this year.

The insurance giant also has agreed not to distribute any funds from its $600 million deferred-compensation and bonus pools of its AIG Financial Products subsidiary, which Mr. Cuomo has said was largely responsible for the company's near collapse.

The company recently received credit lines of up to $122.8 billion from the federal government, helping it avoid collapse. Last week, AIG had tapped $82.9 billion of those credit lines. Some regulators, including Mr. Cuomo, are troubled by outsized compensation packages being paid to departing executives in the financial industry, particularly if those firms have sought help from the federal government.

"To be clear, it is my position that until the taxpayers are repaid with interest the more than $120 billion that has been used in the rescue financing of AIG, no funds should be paid out of these pools to any executives," Mr. Cuomo said in a letter Wednesday to Edward M. Liddy, AIG's chief executive. "As AIG recovers using taxpayer money, these pools should not be used to reward executives ahead of taxpayers."

The attorney general and AIG agreed last week to work together to recover any expenditures deemed to be improper as the company neared collapse earlier this year, including payments to former executives. His investigation into AIG is continuing.

On Wednesday, Peter Tulupman, an AIG spokesman, confirmed the company had received the letter. "It is consistent with our discussions with the attorney general and with the actions we have taken," Mr. Tulupman said.

The company also agreed to establish a special governance committee to institute new expense-management controls and to immediately cancel all junkets or perks that aren't strictly justified by legitimate business needs. As a result, AIG will be canceling more than 160 conferences and events for a total savings of more than $8 million.

Members of Congress expressed outrage earlier this month at a different AIG expenditure: more than $440,000 for a California spa outing for top business producers just days after AIG's government-funded rescue.

"Once a company accepts tax dollars, there are different rules," Mr. Cuomo said.

During a conference call with reporters, Mr. Cuomo said Mr. Sullivan was still owed about $19 million plus other benefits under his employment contract. Mr. Sullivan was forced out by the company's board in June. Calls to Mr. Sullivan and his lawyer weren't returned.

Mr. Cuomo said that Joseph Cassano, the former head of AIG Financial Products, has a share of about $69 million in the deferred-compensation and bonus pool and five other top executives in that unit have a combined share of funds totaling about $93 million. Those payments have been frozen, the attorney general said.

Mr. Cuomo has said he believes some company expenditures as it neared collapse as well as payments to departing executives may violate New York state law and are fraudulent conveyances.

Original here

Hu Jia wins European rights prize

Hu Jia is serving a jail sentence for subverting state power

One of China's most prominent human rights activists, Hu Jia, has won the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Mr Hu, a democracy, environment and Aids activist, is serving a jail term for inciting subversion of state power.

The parliament's president said Mr Hu was "one of the real defenders of human rights" in China, and that the award would support Chinese activists.

Beijing has criticised the award as an interference in its internal affairs.

European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering said that by awarding the prize to Mr Hu, the parliament "firmly and resolutely acknowledges the daily struggle for freedom of all Chinese human rights defenders".

"The European Parliament is sending out a signal of clear support to all those who support human rights in China," he said.

Mr Hu is credited with chronicling instances of abuse and alerting both fellow Chinese human rights activists and foreign news organisations.

He was convicted last April of inciting subversion, and is now serving a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence. His wife, Zeng Jinyan, is under effective house arrest.

Ms Zeng said she thought her husband would be happy with the award and the validation of his work.

"I have always felt that support for Hu Jia will be helpful to him in the long term," she told AFP.

'Criminal'

Green party leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Monica Frassoni said the awarding of the prize to Hu Jia was "a reflection of this very spirit of this prize, which supports free thought and honours human rights defenders fighting repression".

Ms Zeng said the prize would help her husband in the long term

Mr Cohn-Bendit and Ms Frassoni also criticised Beijing for failing to respect commitments it made to improve their human rights record prior to the Olympic Games in August.

China, which views Mr Hu as a criminal, reacted angrily to news of the prize, saying it was "a gross interference in China's domestic affairs".

"We express strong dissatisfaction at the decision by the European Parliament to issue such an award to a jailed criminal in China, in disregard of our repeated representations," said foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao.

In a letter sent to the president of EU assembly earlier this week, China's ambassador to the EU, Song Zhe, said giving the award to Mr Hu would "inevitably hurt the Chinese people once again and bring serious damage to China-EU relations".

"Not recognising China's progress on human rights and insisting on confrontation will only deepen the misunderstanding between the two sides and is not conducive to the promotion of the cause of world human rights," he said.

Mr Hu was also tipped as a possible winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year, prompting Beijing to issue a veiled warning that the prize should go to the "right person".

The prize was eventually given to Finnish ex-President Martti Ahtisaari.

The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought has been awarded annually since 1988 to "individuals or organisations who have made an important contribution to the fight for human rights or democracy".

The prize, which comes with 50,000 euros ($64,000; £39,500), will be awarded in Strasbourg on 17 December.

Original here

Massive Secret Uranium Shipment Revealed

(AP) More than 340 pounds of weapons-grade uranium was transported secretly over thousands of miles by truck, rail and ship on a monthlong trip from a research reactor in Budapest, Hungary, to a facility in Russia so it could be more closely protected against possible theft, U.S. officials revealed Wednesday.

The shipment, conducted under tight secrecy and security, included a three-week trip by cargo ship through the Mediterranean Sea, up the English Channel and the North Sea to Russia's Arctic seaport of Murmansk, the only port cleared by Russia for handling nuclear materiel.

The 13 radiation-proof casks, each weighing 17,000 pounds, arrived by rail at the secure nuclear material facility at Mayak in Siberia on Wednesday, said Kenneth Baker, an official at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration who oversaw the complex project.

It is the largest recovery to date of highly enriched uranium provided either by the former Soviet Union or the United States under a program, begun in the 1950s, aimed at spreading the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The two countries have been working to return the spent fuel from reactors around the world because at many of the facilities, including the one in Budapest, security is lax, which raised the possibility of the materiel being stolen by terrorists.

"It was a big shipment, the biggest one we've ever done," said Baker in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press, hours after he received word that the shipment had arrived at its final destination in Russia. "It was basically enough to make six nuclear weapons."

Under the U.S.-Russian program, the NNSA, part of the Energy Department, has completed 15 recoveries of U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium, or HEU, from research reactors in more than a dozen countries since 2005. The agency also was involved in three earlier shipments of Russian-origin HEU that were removed from the Czech Republic, Latvia and Bulgaria and returned to Russia.

But the project targeting the 341 pounds of highly radioactive fuel from the Budapest research reactor was particularly complex and challenging, said Baker, the NNSA's assistant deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation.

It began at 3 a.m. in Budapest in late September and ended early Wednesday, Washington time, at the nuclear facility at Mayak, in Russian Siberia. In between, the shipment moved without notice aboard truck and rail to the port of Koper in Slovenia and then by special cargo ship through the ocean shipping lanes that encircle Europe, always staying in international waters at least 12 miles from shore, according to Baker.

It was the most complicated trip we've ever taken by far.

Kenneth Baker, National Nuclear Security Administration

The unusually roundabout route was needed because "we couldn't ship it through Ukraine," which would have allowed a more direct route to Russia, said Baker.

Early one morning in late September the 13 casks were secretly loaded onto trucks at the Budapest research reactor and taken to the city's train station, where they were transported - one cask per train car - onto a special train for the eight-hour trip to the port of Koper in Slovenia on the Adriatic Sea.

The shipment then moved through the Mediterranean, through the strait of Gibraltar, up the Atlantic and into the English Channel and the North and Norwegian seas into the icy waters of the Arctic with a final destination of Murmansk, where it arrived last Saturday. From there the shipment was loaded on a train for the long trip to Siberia.

"It was the most complicated trip we've ever taken by far," said Baker, who oversaw the loading and early part of the operation, but did not accompany the shipment after it went to sea, instead returning to Washington.

Early Wednesday, he received notice that the shipment had arrived at Mayak, where security is far tighter than it was in Budapest.

In Budapest "they had a fence and a guard," said Baker, although some security improvements have been made with U.S. help over the past year. Still, said Baker, "You don't want to leave it there."

The Hungarian reactor now is being converted to use low-enriched uranium that cannot be used in a weapon and will not be a potential terrorist target.

So far, including the shipment from Budapest, 1,685 pounds of Russian-origin uranium has been retrieved from 11 countries. A significant number of reactors remain that have either U.S. or Russian highly enriched uranium, including some with security far less than what is desirable, according to nuclear nonproliferation activists.

© MMVIII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Original here

Why are Docs From the Bailout Being Redacted?

by Ben Protess

The U.S. Treasury Department has decided against publicly releasing key details of the contract it awarded Bank of New York Mellon to keep the books for the government’s purchase of toxic securities. In a publicly released copy of the contract, the Treasury blacked out how much it will pay the bank for its role in the government's $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout.

The Washington Post first briefly noticed the redactions. Meanwhile, Bailoutsleuth, a site created by Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, has been tracking the redactions and flagging more examples.

The government’s justification for blacking out the monthly fees set in the publicly bid contract aren’t clear.

“It looks like a reflexive, ‘we don’t want to tell you,’” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “I just don’t see the rationale.”

Aftergood explained that the Freedom of Information Act allows the government to redact information for reasons including privacy and proprietary concerns, neither of which apparently applies in this case, he said.

A privacy exemption would allow the government to black out the names and salaries of specific Bank of New York Mellon employees, but not the bank’s fee. And a proprietary exemption applies while the contract is being competitively bid, a process that ended last week with the selection of the bank, the world's largest custodian of assets.

“If it were challenged, I believe they would eventually be compelled to reveal the information,” Aftergood said.

A Treasury spokesperson did not return our phone calls. But Treasury officials have previously told the Post that they will reveal the terms once other contracts related to the bailout have been negotiated.

The government released the redacted contract one day after a Treasury Department official touted the bailout plan’s transparency.

“Consistent with Congress' intent, we are committed to transparency and oversight in all aspects of the program,” said Neel Kashkari, the Treasury’s Interim Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability.

That same day, the Treasury compelled Bank of New York Mellon to take a $2 billion infusion of cash in exchange for preferred stock.

Government officials have called Bank of New York Mellon the “prime contractor” of the Treasury’s purchase program. Specifically, the bank will run the auctions used by the government to purchase distressed assets, then hold, track and value those securities. It also will keep track of executive compensation limits.

The bank beat out other big banks JPMorgan Chase and Northern Trust for the contract. In total, 70 firms vied for the deal.

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Defense contractors profits rise

By Bill Rigby

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Defense contractors Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and General Dynamics Corp's (GD.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) quarterly earnings beat Wall Street forecasts, showing few signs that U.S. defense spending will slow, despite the uncertainty of a new administration and a tight federal budget.

The defense unit of Boeing Co (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) also posted higher quarterly profit on Wednesday, partly offsetting the effects of a six-week strike at its commercial plane plants, which dragged down its overall quarterly profit.

Northrop and General Dynamics shares rose, while Boeing fell 7.6 percent.

"If Boeing's commercial aircraft production goes through a cyclical downturn as we project, then the defense side of the business is set to be an increasingly important part of earnings," said Macquarie Securities analyst Robert Stallard.

Northrop and General Dynamics, the U.S. No. 3 and 4 defense contractors, respectively, after Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Boeing, both posted higher earnings on strong sales of military equipment.

Northrop, which makes bombers, warships and a range of military electronics, reported a better-than-expected 5 percent increase in third-quarter profit, helped by better results from its electronics unit.

The Los Angeles-based company reported earnings of $1.50 per share, excluding one-time items, while Wall Street was expecting $1.41, according to Reuters Estimates.

Northrop raised its full-year earnings-per-share outlook to a range of $5.10 to $5.20. It previously had forecast $4.90 to $5.15. Wall Street is expecting $5.12, on average.

General Dynamics reported a 16 percent rise in third-quarter profit, helped by sales of submarines, ships and its Gulfstream business jets.

Earnings increased to $634 million, or $1.59 per share, beating the analysts' average forecast of $1.51.

Northrop shares were up 4.6 percent at $46.91 in morning trading. General Dynamics, which is expected to update its outlook later in the day, saw its shares gain 1.9 percent to$56.55.

Boeing's defense unit, which is the Pentagon's No. 2 supplier, reported operating profit of $854 million, up 4 percent from $822 million a year earlier. The increase, which was better than most analysts expected, stemmed largely from higher sales of network and space systems.

The company said it expected U.S. defense spending growth, the key driver of its military business, to "moderate", but it would focus on keeping its own programs on track.

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

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American Airlines sues Yahoo over search terms

AP) -- American Airlines is suing Yahoo Inc. for trademark infringement, a case similar to one that the nation's largest airline settled this summer against Google Inc.

The airline complains that when computer users enter American's trademark terms such as AAdvantage, the name of its frequent-flier program, in a search they can be directed to competitors who pay Yahoo for the traffic.
American filed its lawsuit last week in U.S. District court in Fort Worth for unspecified damages, legal costs and money to run a "corrective" advertising campaign.

Kelley Benander of Yahoo said, "We have confidence in our trademark policies and are prepared to defend them in court."

AMR's American unit reached a confidential settlement of a similar lawsuit against Google this summer, also in federal court in Fort Worth.

Each side agreed to pay its own legal fees, and American got nothing from Google. But Google searches for "American Airlines" or "AAdvantage" no longer produce paid ads along the right side of the portal screen.

Google had prevailed in previous lawsuits filed by other companies over their paid search advertising practices using trademark terms.

Tim Smith, a spokesman for American, said Tuesday that the airline is suing Yahoo to protect its intellectual property and prevent confusion among consumers.

Smith said the dispute centers on Yahoo's practice of selling American's trademark terms to other companies for use in Internet searches. He said the airline saw value in Internet searches and hoped to continue a "professional and amicable relationship" with Yahoo.

©2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Wal-Mart to Toughen Standards

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Adam Dean/Bloomberg News

Wal-Mart plans to announce in Beijing that after January the retailer will impose stricter labor standards and audits for its suppliers. Above, shoppers at a Wal-Mart store in Beijing

Wal-Mart plans to announce Wednesday in Beijing that it will require manufacturers supplying goods for its stores to adhere to stricter ethical and environmental standards, the latest effort by the big retailer to answer criticism of its business practices.

At a gathering of more than 1,000 suppliers, Chinese officials and advocacy groups, Wal-Mart executives plan to reveal a new supplier agreement that will require manufacturers to allow outside audits and to adhere to specific social and environmental criteria. The agreement will be phased in beginning in January.

The changes signal a move on the part of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, away from intermittent transactions with many suppliers toward longer-term arrangements with a smaller group of manufacturers. Wal-Mart is betting that using its buying power this way can help keep prices low even as it keeps a closer eye on its suppliers.

Wal-Mart, long criticized for its treatment of workers in the United States and its ostensible willingness to overlook violations abroad, has in recent years offered a series of environmental and labor initiatives. A Beijing meeting now under way is the company’s first “sustainability summit.”

By next year, Wal-Mart will start keeping close track of the factories from which its products originate, even if they pass through many hands. By 2012, Wal-Mart will require suppliers to source 95 percent of their production from factories that receive the highest ratings in audits of environmental and social practices.

The agreement includes a ban on child and forced labor and pay below the local minimum wage.

“Meeting social and environmental standards is not optional,” Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s chief executive, plans to say at the Beijing summit, according to his prepared remarks. “I firmly believe that a company that cheats on overtime and on the age of its labor, that dumps its scraps and its chemicals in our rivers, that does not pay its taxes or honor its contracts, will ultimately cheat on the quality of its products. And cheating on the quality of products is the same as cheating on customers.”

To ensure suppliers are making changes, Wal-Mart said it would require three levels of audits: from the vendors themselves, from an outside party and from Wal-Mart, which will initiate more of its own random, unannounced audits.

Wal-Mart said the audits would assess factory working conditions as well as compliance by manufacturers with standards regarding air pollution, wastewater discharge, management of toxic substances and disposal of hazardous waste.

Environmental and labor groups that follow Wal-Mart said the retailer had a mixed history when it came to the environment and labor practices — and that sometimes the company’s goals were lofty, while the measurable outcomes were less so. Through the years, Wal-Mart has been accused of various abuses.

In the 1990s it came to light that workers at factories producing Kathie Lee Gifford clothing for Wal-Mart were subjected to inhumane conditions. Last year two nongovernmental organizations said abuse and labor violations (including child labor) occurred at 15 factories that produce or supply goods for Wal-Mart and other retailers. In June the United States government and the state of Oklahoma filed a complaint in federal court claiming that Wal-Mart and other companies dumped hazardous waste in Oklahoma City. In Bangladesh, it was charged that factory workers were made to work 19-hour shifts, with some bringing home just $20 a month.

Michael Green, executive director of the Center for Environmental Health, a watchdog group in Oakland, Calif., said he believed Wal-Mart’s effort to improve suppliers’ practices began as a program to counter public-relations damage. “I think what happened along the way is some people there actually got convinced,” he said. “It became more than a sophisticated P.R. stunt, but something they believed in.”

However, without knowing the specifics of Wal-Mart’s new plan, Mr. Green said it would not be easy sledding. Suppliers under pressure to offer the company the lowest prices are likely to have an incentive to cheat, he noted, and outside auditors may not want to report violations for fear of losing a lucrative Wal-Mart contract. Additionally, tracing the origins of all the working parts that go into a single toy, for instance, is difficult because it involves multiple factories.

Still, groups that have criticized Wal-Mart are attending the Beijing summit to hear the company’s plans.

In a telephone interview from Beijing Tuesday night, Mr. Scott said Wal-Mart may offer longer-term agreements to suppliers willing to make the big investments needed to live up to its environmental demands.

The company said that within China, a nation with major environmental problems, Wal-Mart would aim by 2010 to cut water use in half in all stores, design and open a prototype store that used 40 percent less energy, and reduce energy use in existing stores by 30 percent. “People will judge us,” Mr. Scott said, “based on the results.”

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