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The FT ABS-Plus fund, which includes residential mortgage- backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, halted redemptions on Aug. 3, the Frankfurt-based company said today. The 160 million-euro ($221 million) fund has a “small exposure” to subprime investments, spokesman Holger Ullrich said.

Defaults on U.S. housing loans to borrowers with patchy credit histories have reached a 10-year high, driving down the value of bonds backed by mortgages. Union Investment Asset Management Holding AG, Germany’s third-largest mutual fund manager, said on Aug. 3 it halted redemptions from a fund holding subprime mortgages after clients withdrew about 10 percent of the assets in the past month.

“The situation for the asset-backed securities and CDOs market has gotten much worse in the last few days because of the U.S. real estate crisis,” making it difficult to secure fair prices, the company said in a statement on its Web site.

Fulfilling rising redemption requests would have forced Frankfurt Trust to sell the securities far below their “fair” value, the company said. It is closing the fund to withdrawals and new investments for an unforeseen period “in the interest of investors.” Clients had withdrawn about 40 million euros since the end of last month, Ullrich said.

In comparing identical McDonald’s foods in name-brand and plain wrappers, the unmarked foods always lost.

Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches.

The study had youngsters sample identical McDonald’s foods in name-brand and unmarked wrappers. The unmarked foods always lost the taste test.

“You see a McDonald’s label and kids start salivating,” said Diane Levin, a childhood development specialist who campaigns against advertising to kids. She had no role in the research.

Levin said it was “the first study I know of that has shown so simply and clearly what’s going on with (marketing to) young children.”

Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., of Torrance, Calif., has been granted a contract by the Department of Homeland Security to develop what it calls the “LED Incapacitator,” according to a DHS online newsletter.

The handheld device using light-emitting diodes to emit super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths, causing disorientation, nausea and even vomiting in whomever it’s pointed at.

“There’s one wavelength that gets everybody,” says IOS President Bob Lieberman. “Vlad [IOS top scientist Vladimir Rubtsov] calls it ‘the evil color.'”

Phase 1 of the contract — creating a working prototype — has already been completed, and Phase 2 will begin this fall as researchers at Penn State’s Institute of Nonlethal Defense Technology put the puke-saber through its paces.

“Phase 3 will be our shrink phase,” Lieberman said, admitting that the prototype, 15 inches long with a 4-inch lens, is too large and heavy to be comfortably carried on a belt.

Ministers issued guidance allowing heads to collect pupils’ biometric data to use when taking the register, paying for lunch or using the library.

Schools can also take retina and iris scans and record children’s voices, face shapes, hand measurements, handwriting and typing patterns.

Civil liberties campaigners are concerned that the data could be given to police or the Government without parents’ knowledge – or stolen by identity thieves.

Increasing numbers of these properties are being abandoned by cash-strapped owners, leaving messes and headaches for neighbors and municipal officials.

Chandler real-estate agent Liz Morganroth said she dons a disposable face mask before she inspects new foreclosure listings but can’t always escape the stench.

“Many of them are disgusting: trash and animal feces everywhere, rotting food in a refrigerator crawling with maggots. We even find pets left in the house,” said Morganroth, who sells foreclosed homes in Chandler and Gilbert for Realty Executives.

Her inventory, she said, is skyrocketing.

A good portion of her listings were occupied by tenants who faced eviction because their landlords weren’t paying the mortgage. “Some of these people had been paying the rent every month, but the owner wasn’t paying the mortgage,” she said. “They were forced to move and lost their security deposits, so they totally destroy the homes out of anger.”

Officials from Mesa to Peoria are seeing the trend and say newer subdivisions on the outskirts of town are some of the hardest hit. They tie it to declining home values, adjustable-rate mortgages, discouraged investors and owners struggling to make ends meet.

“It started ramping up during the past six months, and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon,” said Ray Villa, acting neighborhood services director for Mesa. “We’re getting between five and 10 complaints a week that someone has walked away from a property and is letting it deteriorate,” he said.

Villa, who lives in Queen Creek, said one of his own neighbors packed up and left a house. “It’s all over the place,” he said.

Maricopa County treats abandoned pools to prevent mosquito breeding and the spread of West Nile virus, but that doesn’t prevent algae from growing or the other hazards.

When I reach the top of a winding driveway leading to Westwind, Kamen’s estate outside Manchester, N.H., I’m greeted by an employee rolling along on a Segway. Then Kamen, dressed in jeans and short sleeves, a smartphone holstered on his hip, comes whipping around a corner on a small black motorcycle that sounds like the starship Enterprise going to warp factor 8. It’s an electric scooter equipped with a Stirling heat engine that is charging the vehicle’s battery, providing virtually greenhouse-gas-free travel.

The iconoclastic inventor, who made his first fortune developing medical devices, has spent more than $40 million creating Stirling engines that can tap almost any fuel source, from restaurant grease to cow dung. He wants to equip the City with one, extending its range by hundreds of miles.

Kamen met Willums about a year ago and later visited Think in Norway. “He’s a fun, gregarious, good guy,” Kamen says. “Next thing I know, I’m getting sucked into this, and he’s sending me a car, and — son of a bitch — I’ve got this car here and I’m putting a Stirling engine in!”

The navy-blue City is parked next to a 1913 Model T and an 1898 steam-driven car. Kamen opens a panel in the floor of the City’s cargo area to reveal a silver cylindrical object — a larger version of the Stirling engine that powers his scooter.

“You can plug the car into the wall to charge the batteries, or you can plug into this,” Kamen says, noting that when it’s connected to the City, his Stirling engine will meet indoor air-quality standards.

Kamen takes the City for a drive. “This little sucker will move,” he says, talking a mile a minute as he accelerates past his wind turbine and down a hill. Right now this is just a hobby for the inventor, but Kamen thinks the car could be the killer app to move toward his vision of the future: mass-produced Stirling engines powering the world’s off-the-grid villages.

If Kamen makes the Stirling work in an electric vehicle, Willums will get another power plant for his open-source car and a way to overcome drivers’ fears that they’ll run out of electrons in the middle of nowhere.

And that’s just the start. Both men see the City as part of a network of mobile generators that can draw energy from the power grid and send electricity back during periods of peak demand. “If you have enough Thinks out there, you would literally change the architecture of the grid,” Kamen says.

But for that to happen, you need a partner accustomed to managing vast amounts of data over global networks, a company like the one run by Kamen’s pals Brin and Page. A couple of days after my visit to his New Hampshire home, Kamen flies to California to have dinner with the Google guys, carrying the schematics of his Think/Stirling hybrid.

“The resource base for geothermal is enormous,” Professor Jefferson Tester, the study’s lead author, told The Associated Press.

But there are drawbacks — not just earthquakes but cost. A so-called hot rock well three miles deep in the United States would cost $7 million to $8 million, according to the MIT study. The average cost of drilling an oil well in the U.S. in 2004 was $1.44 million, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

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The United States led the way in demonstrating the concept with the Los Alamos geothermal project at Fenton Hill, N.M. The project begun in the 1970s demonstrated that drilling 15,000 feet deep was possible and that energy could then be extracted.

But the project came to a halt in 2000 when it ran out of funds. Meanwhile, the MIT report said, problems encountered in testing have been solved or can be managed — such as controlling how the water flows underground or limiting earthquakes and chemical interactions between water and rock.

Backers in the United States hope government funding will increase as oil and gas prices rise. But Steve Chalk, deputy assistant secretary for renewable energy, said the Department of Energy won’t spend more money beyond the $2 million it has already allocated to hot rock technology.

However, he said the MIT study, which was funded by the Department of Energy, serves as a basis for studying the idea further.

Major energy companies, including Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and American Electric Power, told the AP they are following the research but not investing in it.