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NanoLauncher’s suborbital services will be rendered under the brand name NanoLauncher Blue (so named for “blue skies”) and orbital insertions will fall under NanoLauncher Black, named for the “black” of space.

For the latter service, NanoLauncher has advertised sending a maximum of 44 pounds (20 kg) into a high, circular 155-mile (250-km) orbit, although pricing is still being worked out.

Per its existing technology philosophy, NanoLauncher will make use of the standard deployment system developed at Cal Poly and Stanford University known as the poly picosatellite orbital deployer, or P-POD. This spring-loaded instrument can deposit three standard-size CubeSats into space, but is modifiable for various size and shape payloads.

The inflow has been sudden, and dramatic.

“Up to the end of last year, the amount of Chinese investment in Brazil was tiny, less than 400 million dollars. Over the first half of 2010, it’s gone over 20 billion dollars — and it should hit 30 billion dollars this year,” Charles Tang, head of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Sao Paulo, told AFP.

Two-thirds of the total coming into Brazil this year will be invested in the oil sector, to which China has privileged access after extending a 10-billion-dollar credit line to Brazil’s state-owned Petrobras, and after China’s Sinopec bought the Brazilian subsidiary of Spain’s Repsol for seven billion dollars.

“China is investing everywhere in the world to ensure it gets the strategic resources it needs. And Brazil, obviously, is important,” Tang said.

In return, Brazil gets “capital for its growth and job-creation,” he explained.

“China needs the mineral resources, oil and land that Brazil has in abundance,” Tang added before predicting that the relationship between the two BRIC economies “has only just begun.”

In 2009, China became Brazil’s top trading partner, overtaking the United States. Bilateral exchanges topped 36 billion dollars last year.

Bernanke next week is likely to preside over a decision to launch another round of large-scale asset purchases after deploying $1.7 trillion to pull the economy out of the financial crisis, comments from policy makers over the past week indicate. This time, with interest rates already near zero, the Fed will be aiming to increase the rate of inflation and reduce the cost of borrowing in real terms. The goal is to unlock consumer spending and jump-start an economy that’s growing too slowly to push unemployment lower.

Estimates for the ultimate size of the asset-purchase program range from $1 trillion at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Global Research to $2 trillion at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., with economists at both firms agreeing the Fed will likely start by announcing $500 billion after the Nov. 2-3 meeting. The danger is that once the Fed kindles price increases, inflation will be difficult to control.

“By reducing real interest rates and trying to break the psychology of ‘Why spend today when I can buy goods cheaper tomorrow,’ they are hoping to drive growth that would be more commensurate with a pickup in employment,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “The risk is a late 1970s type of scenario where the inflation genie gets out of the bottle.”

The top and bottom three countries on the list remain unchanged from 2009: Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore are seen as having the world’s cleanest governments, while Somalia, Afghanistan and Myanmar, are seen to have the most corrupt. Finland, Sweden, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland and Norway rounded out the top 10. Japan ranked 17, Britain ranked 20.

The United States, which ranked 19th in 2009, fell to 22. Also falling in the rankings were the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Madagascar, Niger and Russia, which took the 154th slot. China ranked 78, up from 79 last year, according to the 2010 corruption perceptions index. The index, which seeks to gauge domestic, public sector corruption, is figured with data compiled from surveys of country experts and business leaders, and relies on perceptions rather than legal findings, which can differ sharply across borders depending on enforcement.

Instead, poor healthcare may be to blame, the team at Columbia University in New York reported.

More than 20 months later, after saying at least five times that a response was imminent, Treasury officials responded with 560 pages of printed-out e-mails — none of which Pittman requested. They were so heavily redacted that most of what’s left are everyday messages such as “Did you just try to call me?” and “Monday will be a busy day!”

None of the documents answers Pittman’s request for “records sufficient to show the names of the relevant securities” or the dates and terms of the guarantees. Even so, the U.S. government considers the collection of e-mails a partial response to an official request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. The Justice Department in July cited an increase in such responses as evidence that “more information is being released” under the law.

President Barack Obama vowed to usher in a new era of open government. On Jan. 21, 2009, the day after his inauguration and a week before Pittman submitted his FOIA request, Obama directed agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA.”

Limits of Transparency

The Wall Street Journal reported that the mortgage-interest deduction, child tax credits and payment for health insurance with pretax dollars all could be put in jeopardy by the deficit commission, which is to issue recommendations on balancing the budget by 2015.

The report, citing people familiar with the matter, indicated that these tax breaks could be preserved at a lower level. Defense spending and a freeze on domestic discretionary spending also are being weighed, the report said.

Colgate, the world’s largest producer of toothpaste, patented a toothcleaning powder in the hope that it would take the multibillion-dollar Indian oral hygiene market by storm.