cryptogon.com

Police are asking residents to submit to voluntary searches in exchange for amnesty under the District’s gun ban. They passed out fliers requesting cooperation on Monday.

The program will begin in a couple of weeks in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of southeast Washington and will later expand to other neighborhoods. Officers will go door to door asking residents for permission to search their homes.

Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said the “safe homes initiative” is aimed at residents who want to cooperate with police. She gave the example of parents or grandparents who know or suspect their children have guns in the home.

Community leaders went door to door in Ward 8 Monday to advise residents not to invite police into their homes to search for weapons.

“Bad idea,” said D.C. School Board member William Lockridge. “I think the people should not open your doors under any circumstances, don’t even crack your door, unless someone has a warrant for your arrest.”

Ron Hampton, of the Black Police Officers Association, said he doesn’t expect many in the community to comply.

They’re all riding a roller coaster of commodity market prices, where peaks are unusually high. Like oil futures, agricultural futures have experienced dramatic highs and lows in recent months as Wall Street investors flock to commodities for protection from the falling dollar and slumping stocks.

But the ups and downs in futures prices are giving grain sellers and farmers financial vertigo. Instead of finding predictable prices for wheat, corn and other crops in futures markets, they’re getting daily price jolts and no refuge from uncertainty.

That has prompted government regulators to examine what forces, if any, have thrown the markets off balance.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said last week it will meet with farmers, traders and grain sellers next month to assess the recent price jumps.

The loss of equilibrium has rattled large grain merchants that buy wheat and other crops and sell them to food processors like Kellogg Co. and General Mills Inc.

“There has been a huge influx of capital from index funds and pension funds to the point now where futures markets are not reflecting actual supply and demand,” said Todd Kemp, spokesman for the National Grain and Feed Association.

Even after cutting rates by 3 percentage points since September, expanding the range of securities it accepts as collateral for loans and giving dealers access to its discount window, the Fed has been unable to promote confidence. The difference between what the government and banks pay for three- month loans doubled in the past month to 1.95 percentage points.

While hard figures are hard to come by, evidence from nonprofit credit and mortgage counselors suggests that the number of people using these so-called “pay day loans” is growing as the U.S. housing crisis deepens, a negative sign for economic recovery.

“We’re hearing from around the country that many folks are buried deep in pay day loan debts as well as struggling with their mortgage payments,” said Uriah King, a policy associate at the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL).

A pay day loan is typically for a few hundred dollars, with a term of two weeks, and an interest rate as high as 800 percent. The average borrower ends up paying back $793 for a $325 loan, according to the Center.

The Center also estimates pay day lenders issued more than $28 billion in loans in 2005, the latest available figures.

In the Union Miles district of Cleveland, which has been hit hard by the housing crisis, all the conventional banks have been replaced by pay day lenders with brightly painted signs offering instant cash for a week or two to poor families.

“When distressed home owners come to us it usually takes a while before we find out if they have pay day loans because they don’t mention it at first,” said Lindsey Sacher, community relations coordinator at nonprofit East Side Organizing Project on a recent tour of the district. “But by the time they come to us for help, they have nothing left.”

Rapid urbanization has been a major driver of Chinese growth over the past two decades and will become more so over the next 20 years; cities will account for 95 percent of China’s gross domestic product by 2025, up from 75 percent today, MGI said.

But the institute, the economics research arm of consultants McKinsey & Co, said in a report that China could reap even greater economic benefits by adopting a more concentrated pattern of urban growth.

By enforcing land acquisition rules more strictly and by tweaking incentives for local officials, national policy makers could nurture 15 supercities with average populations of 25 million people, the report said.

Alternatively, planners could develop 11 clusters of cities with combined populations of more than 60 million people.

China currently only has two cities of more than 10 million people, Beijing and Shanghai.

China’s urbanization rate doubled between 1980 and 2005 to 44 percent and will climb to 66 percent by 2025, driven by the influx of an additional 240 million rural migrants, MGI said.

This flight from the land will impose huge strains.

Mortgage insurers, whose backing is required for borrowers who can’t afford the traditional 20 percent down payment on a home, have already flagged nearly a quarter of the nation’s ZIP codes where they refuse to insure some home loans.

That encompasses a wide variety of neighborhoods: McMansions in Scottsdale, Ariz.; luxury Miami condos; 1960 ranch houses in Flint, Mich.; and early 20th century kit homes in Metuchen, N.J.

The entire states of California, Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio and Nevada — which have seen the highest foreclosure rates and the worst price declines — are blackballed on some mortgage insurers’ lists.

Banks that have lost billions because of bad bets during the housing boom are now reverting to strict lending standards not seen in nearly 20 years, according to industry data and interviews with lenders.

For new home buyers and those seeking to refinance, it can mean higher down payments and a higher bar for credit scores, among other requirements. The toughest restrictions are in markets where home prices are falling, though regions where property values are rising are not immune.

“We’re in the midst of an epic, broad, sweeping change in the mortgage industry,” said Chris Sipe, a loan officer with America East Mortgage in Frederick, Md.

The reluctance to extend credit comes despite a flurry of government initiatives, including steady interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, intended to make it easier for would-be borrowers and those facing interest-rate resets on their mortgages.

Lenders’ growing leeriness threatens to dampen sellers’ already soggy prospects for the spring home-buying season — and that means more pain for the already battered housing sector and the broader economy.

Indeed, the power required could be so low that implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and health monitors could be powered indefinitely by a person’s body heat or motion—no battery needed.

…

For example, portable and implantable medical devices, portable communications devices, and networking devices could be based on such chips and thus have greatly increased operating times. There may also be a variety of military applications in the production of tiny, self-contained sensor networks that could be dispersed in a battlefield.

The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from ”a social contact in an adult-themed club.” It offered one potentially identifying detail: the man in question hadn’t taken off his calf-length black socks “during the sex act.”

Stone, known for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County, is a longtime Spitzer nemesis whose political experience ranges from the Nixon White House to Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign. His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted.

”Mr. Stone respectfully declines to meet with you at this time,” the letter states, before going on to offer ”certain information” about Spitzer.

”The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services. It is Mr. Stone’s understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer,” the letter said.

”It is also my client’s understanding from the same source that Governor Spitzer did not remove his mid-calf length black socks during the sex act. Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information,” the letter said, signed by attorney Paul Rolf Jensen of Costa Mesa, Calif.

The letter also notes that while Stone believes the information is true, he ”cannot swear to its accuracy” because it is second-hand.

James Margolin, a spokesman for the FBI’s New York office, would not say whether the bureau had received the letter. A spokeswoman for Spitzer also had no comment.

The letter was written several months after allegations were leveled at Stone that he had left a threatening phone message at the office of Bernard Spitzer, the ex-governor’s father, regarding ”phony” campaign loans involving his son’s unsuccessful 1994 bid for attorney general. Stone denied making the call but resigned as a consultant for state Senate Republicans in Albany.

Spitzer, the crusading attorney general who became governor, resigned March 12 amid allegations he was a client of a high-paid prostitution ring, the Emperors’ Club. Four people have been charged with operating the ring. Spitzer has not been charged. A federal affidavit described a rendezvous between Spitzer and a prostitute known as Kristen, since identified as Ashley Alexandra Dupre, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on Feb. 13.

One of Stone’s lawyers, Fort Lauderdale attorney Robert Buschel, said the letter’s release is an attempt to set the record straight about Stone’s possible part in the Spitzer drama. Stone confirmed the letter and referred The Miami Herald to his lawyer for comments.

”The conspiracy enthusiasts on the Internet are going wild over Roger Stone’s role in the fall of Eliot Spitzer. We felt it was important to lay out for the public exactly what Mr. Stone did tell the government,” said Buschel, a partner in Rothstein, Rosenfeldt, Adler of Fort Lauderdale.

Stone works as a partner in a separate public affairs and consulting company with the same name — Rothstein, Rosenfeldt, Adler — in the same office as the law firm.