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BNP Paribas Investment Partners suspended the calculation of net asset value, the issuance of subsciptions and redemptions in the funds.

The market for ABS – securities backed by assets such as mortgages, loans, leases and credit-card debt – has come under pressure recently as a related consequence of problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market. BNP Paribas’ move follows similar action this week by WestLB Mellon Asset Management, the asset management joint venture of German state bank WestLB AG and the Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BK).

BNP Paribas said that “the complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly regardless of their quality or credit rating.”

As a result, the bank said it would suspend three funds – Parvest Dynamic ABS, BNP Paribas ABS Euribor and BNP Paribas ABS Eonia, which are now worth a total of around EUR1.6 billion, down from around EUR2 billion two weeks ago, a spokesman said.

All funds combined at BNP Paribas Investment Partners are worth more than EUR350 billion.

“The situation is such that it is no longer possible to value fairly the underlying U.S. ABS assets in the three above-mentioned funds” and “therefore unable to calculate a reliable net asset value, NAV, for the funds,” the company said.

The bank has been unable to find prices in the relevant parts of the U.S. credit markets since Monday, Alain Papiasse, head of BNP Paribas’ asset management services division told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview.

BNP Paribas Investment Partners, the unit managing the funds, was able to find prices quoted as late as last Friday.

“Since then, liquidity in some parts of the U.S. credit markets has dried up. To be honest, I don’t know why,” Papiasse said. There is no primary issuance and it’s impossible for those seeking to refinance ABS-related funds with any link to the mortgage market to do so, he said.

The valuation of the funds and the issue and redemption process will be resumed as soon as liquidity returns to the market, BNP said.

Concerns Throughout Money Markets

The suspensions sent further shock waves through an already sensitive money market.

“There is a certain degree of herd behavior here,” said Cubillas Ding, analyst at research and consulting firm Celent.

The electric-field therapy was developed by Yoram Palti, a physiologist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, who founded the company NovoCure to commercialize the treatment. Palti’s electric fields cause dividing cancer cells to explode while having no significant impact on normal tissues. The range of electric fields generated by the device harms only dividing cells. And since normal cells divide at a much slower rate than cancer cells, the electric fields target cancer cells. “An Achilles’ heel of cancer cells is that they have to divide,” says Herbert Engelhard, chief of neuro-oncology in the department of neurosurgery at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Even after chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery, about 85 to 90 percent of glioblastoma patients’ cancer still progresses, and their survival rates are low, says Engelhard. He has about 10 glioblastoma patients enrolled in the trial, which is testing the unusual treatment in patients for whom all other approaches have failed. Engelhard says that the results are encouraging but that it’s too early to comment on the treatment’s efficacy.

The electric fields’ different effects on normal and dividing cells mostly have to do with geometry. A dividing cell has what Palti calls “an hourglass shape rather than a round shape.” The electric field generated by the NovoCure device passes around and through round cells in a uniform fashion. But the narrow neck that pinches in at the center of a dividing cell acts like a lens, concentrating the electric field at this point. This non-uniform electric field wreaks havoc on dividing cells. The electric field tears apart important biological molecules, such as DNA and the structural proteins that pull the chromosomes into place during cell division. Dividing cells simply “disintegrate,” says Palti.

Palti, who for years has been studying the effect of electric fields on cancer and normal cells, says that he has verified this mechanism in computer models and experiments in the lab. “The physics are solid,” says David Cohen, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.

…

It is likely workers at the site – shared between the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) and its commercial partner, Merial Animal Health – were to blame for spreading the disease, the report said.

In a further twist, the HSE said that sabotage at the labs could not be ruled out. Ironically, the Government has just asked Merial to produce 300,000 foot and mouth vaccines.

Politicians and farmers’ leaders were last night asking how such a fundamental breach could occur at a high-security laboratory complex where highly contagious diseases were tested.

Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative environment spokesman, said: “This is truly shocking. It will be very bad news for the farming community, who do so much to make sure they abide by the law.

“This report is devastating in its conclusions and it will be deeply troubling news for farmers, who are always being pushed to improve their bio-security. Yet the labs that are meant to be preventing the disease turn out to be the source of the outbreak.”

Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning – for the first time – that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress. Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.

Thousands of soldiers and 500 combat vehicles will take part in “Peace Mission 2007”, organised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. Russian officials have also proposed an alliance between the SCO and a body representing most of the former Soviet republics.

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.