Archive for August, 2008

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5 ways to avoid a sad vacation finale

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Oh, the terrible things we come home to from vacation. While everyone else seems obsessed with how we will — or won’t — spend our summer, does anyone care what happens when it’s over?

Well, I do. I’ve experienced almost every non-Hollywood ending to a vacation you can imagine. They feature death, destruction and a couple of pink slips from my clients. I’ll get to those in a second.

But first, let’s hear about your unhappy endings.

Cliff Woodrick returned from a four-week vacation in Quebec to a gruesome sight and an even more unpleasant smell: the corpses of more than two dozen fish bobbing up and down in his algae-coated aquarium.

“We had a storm that knocked out the power while I was gone,” he remembers. “The three pump filters went offline, and some of the electrical connections in the house were fried.”

Yuck.

Reader Stacey Udell came back from a weeklong California getaway to find a thousand unwelcome visitors. “Black flies everywhere,” she says. “Water had accumulated on the floor in the basement near a window, and the flies must have come in and multiplied. It was so totally gross and shocking. We couldn’t even let the kids in the house.”

How about getting fired after coming home from a vacation? I’ve been there so often — why do they always wait until you’re away to decide you’re history? — that I’m reluctant to go on vacation. That, and maybe the fact that the last time I took a real break my house was hit by a hurricane.

It could be worse. A British couple recently came home from a trip to find that their pet tortoise had burned down their residence. I’m not making this up. A few weeks ago, the Grahn family of Hugo, Minnesota, returned from a weekend getaway to discover their house had been flattened by a tornado.

Here are five ways to prevent a bad homecoming.

Don’t try to control what you can’t

There’s a certain randomness to travel. In a sense, you never really know what you’re going to come home to. Alice Argento returned from a vacation in Belize to see her Cranbury, New Jersey, apartment in flames. “We jumped out of the car and ran toward the apartment to find our roommate, who had been watching the house and my dog, on fire,” she remembers. It turns out her roommate was making French fries, and had left the hot oil unattended for a minute. They were able to extinguish the fire, but her roommate had to go to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns. “What a night!” she says. And really, there was nothing she could have done to prevent it — except maybe to tell her roommate to stay away from deep-fried foods.

Be prepared for a power failure

That would have saved Woodrick’s fish and possibly the contents of Naoma Foreman’s refrigerator. The power went out in her Phoenix home while she was out on vacation recently. “All food was spoiled, and everything had to be hauled away — including the refrigerator,” she recalls. Don’t stock up on groceries — particularly perishable groceries — before heading off for the weekend. Power failures can happen, and if they last for more than a few hours, you’ll have a mess on your hands.

Don’t cut corners on pet care

The folks whose turtle burned their house down already know that. And so do I. A few weeks ago, while I was away on assignment, one of my beloved cats was run over by a car. Instead of putting my kitties in a kennel, as I should have, I asked a friend to come by twice a day to feed them. I’m still grieving the loss of my companion. I can’t read the comments on my own blog without losing it. Lesson learned? Make sure your pets are safe before you go on vacation.

Take extra precautions when you see trouble coming

Remember the 2004 hurricane season? Florida resident Evelyn Fine does. She was having her Orlando home remodeled during the middle of the summer and thought it might be a good time to go on vacation. If you’ll recall that summer, there were storms lined up one after the other at several points, taking aim at the Sunshine State. Wouldn’t you know it, one of them took out her air conditioner and Fine’s irreplaceable wine collection was, in her words, “cooked.” “Much was corked and the balance was barely drinkable,” she says. It might have been a good time to move them to a nearby wine storage facility, where the bottles could be stored safely.

Stay home

Back in 1995, when I lived on Long Key, Florida — a remote island between Islamorada and Marathon in the Florida Keys, I watched Hurricane Opal approaching. I was scheduled to fly to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a family reunion. But with the storm on a direct path for the Keys, I decided to call off my trip and take my family to the mainland instead. What made me change my mind? Maybe it was the Monroe County sheriff who stopped by our house and asked for our names and whether or not we were staying in the house. He needed to know how many bodies to look for if the hurricane hit. Fortunately, it didn’t. Sometimes the best way to prevent a vacation tragedy is to not go in the first place.

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Dell making cheap computers for India, China

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Dell Inc. unveiled four low-cost computer models for China, India and other emerging economies Wednesday in a new bid to tap the potential of high-growth markets outside the United States.

The two notebook and two desktop PCs are the first Dell models designed especially for emerging markets, said Steve Felice, the U.S. computer maker’s president for the Asia-Pacific.

They are meant for small-business users and are to be sold in 20 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Strong sales in Asia helped Dell turn in better-than-expected results in the last quarter despite a slowing U.S. economy. It is due to report its latest quarterly results after the U.S. markets close Thursday, and analysts are watching whether it can maintain its growth pace.

“Our success is going to be largely dependent on our ability to expand globally,” Felice said in an interview.

Dell and rivals Hewlett-Packard Co., Taiwan-based Acer Inc. and China’s Lenovo Group are expanding aggressively in emerging economies as sales growth in the United States and other developed markets slows.

Dell’s first-quarter sales in China, India, Russia and Brazil — markets known collectively as BRIC — grew by 58 percent, about 10 times the U.S. rate, Felice said. He said Dell expects 20-30 percent annual growth in those markets in coming years.

Prices for the new Vestro notebooks will start at 3,299 yuan ($475) and for the desktop PCs at 2,999 yuan ($440).

Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, broke with its usual development and marketing strategy for its latest products, Felice said.

“We used to design products for global requirements and distribute the same product globally,” he said. “In this situation, we started with talking to emerging country customers, designing a product for emerging countries, and our initial launch of the product is only in emerging countries. That’s a big departure in our strategy.”

The new Dell models were created by a Shanghai design center set up to focus on emerging markets, Felice said.

The move reflects a growing focus by global computer, automobile, consumer goods and other companies on creating products for increasingly prosperous customers in China, India and other emerging economies.

Beijing-based Lenovo, which acquired IBM Corp.’s PC unit in 2005, is targeting China’s vast but poor rural market with a basic PC released last year and priced as low as 1,499 yuan ($220).

According to Felice, industry forecasts say China’s computer sales should grow from 50 million units last year to 500 million by 2015, or double that year’s projected U.S. sales.

Dell built its U.S. business with Internet- and phone-based direct sales but has added retail distribution in China and elsewhere to reach more buyers.

In China, its computers are sold in 2,700 outlets of the Gome and Suning electronics store chains, which Felice said account for about half of Dell’s Chinese sales. He said Dell has a total of about 13,000 retail outlets worldwide.

“These economies are growing so fast that we don’t want to miss out on the opportunity,” Felice said. “But if we just use the direct model, it might take too long to get there.”

Dell is trying to expand its presence in China outside Beijing, Shanghai and other big eastern cities and sees 50 percent of potential sales in small, inland cities, Felice said.

“We’re getting out there as fast as we can,” he said

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Bush declares emergency in Louisiana, Texas

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

US President George W. Bush on Friday declared a state of emergency in Louisiana and Texas in the face of killer Hurricane Gustav, freeing up aid from Washington three years after Hurricane Katrina.

The move empowers federal authorities to lead all disaster relief efforts “to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe” in the states, the White House said.

Bush’s decision came three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf coast, killing 1,800 people.

The botched Washington response swamped the president’s approval ratings amid widespread criticism that he paid too little attention to the storm.

Gustav is forecast to slam the Gulf coast early Tuesday as a powerful Category Three hurricane with wind speeds of up to 130 miles (209 kilometers) per hour — the same force as Katrina when it slammed New Orleans in 2005.

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Antipsychotic drugs double stroke risk: study

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

eople taking antipsychotic drugs are nearly twice as likely to have a stroke compared to those not on the treatment, British researchers reported on Friday.

The risk is even higher — about 3.5 times — for men and women with dementia, which means doctors should only prescribe such medicine to these patients as a last resort, the researchers said.

Previously, stroke risk associated with older antipsychotic drugs was unclear but the study published in the British Medical Journal showed both old and new treatments carry increased risk.

“The risks associated with antipsychotic use in patients with dementia generally outweigh the potential benefits, and in this patient group, use of antipsychotic drugs should be avoided whenever possible,” Ian Douglas and colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine wrote.”

The researchers looked at the medical records of nearly 7,000 men and women and recorded the incidence of stroke among those who at some point had taken antipsychotic drugs.

They found that they were 1.7 times more likely to have a stroke and that the risk was much higher if people had dementia.

The most common older treatments included a drug class called phenothiazine and the generic medicines haloperidol and benperidol. The most widely used newer drug in the study was Johnson & Johnson’s Risperdal, known generically as risperidone, the researchers said.

Other newer drugs in the study included Eli Lilly and Co’s Zyprexa, or olanzapine, Sanofi-Aventis‘ Solian, or amisulpride and AstraZeneca Plc’s Seroquel, known generically as quetiapine.

The researchers did not look at why people with dementia are at greater risk but one possibility may be that vascular causes of certain types of dementia may be involved, said Douglas, an epidemiologist.

“We don’t know why this extra risk associated with antipsychotics is even greater in people with dementia,” he said in a telephone interview.

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Jewelers look abroad to boost sales as US slows

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Rising sales in Asia and Europe boosted Tiffany & Co.’s second-quarter profit on Thursday, signaling that strong international demand for jewelry is helping offset U.S. economic weakness.

Fellow jeweler Zale Corp. posted a loss for its fiscal fourth quarter but forecast 2009 profit above Wall Street expectations and noted significant growth opportunities in Canada.

The softening domestic economy, which has crimped discretionary spending for many Americans, has jewelers focusing on international efforts to offset sluggish sales in the U.S.

At Tiffany, known for its signature blue box, second-quarter sales soared by double-digit percentages in Asia and Europe and helped lift the company’s earnings above Wall Street expectations. Sales in Europe jumped 35 percent to $71 million, while sales in the Asia-Pacific region rose 17 percent to $214.2 million.

That helped counteract weakness in the U.S., where same-store sales declined 4 percent. Same-store sales are an important indicator of how a retailer is performing because it measures sales at existing stores rather than newly opened ones.

Tiffany’s also raised its outlook for this year and now expects profit between $2.82 and $2.92 per share. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $2.83 for the period.

The drop in U.S. same-store sales would have been worse without an influx of tourists. The company said travelers, especially Europeans, boosted U.S. sales growth, mainly at its flagship store in Manhattan.

That location accounted for about 10 percent of the company’s total sales in the year ended Jan. 31. Sales there rose 5 percent in the second quarter, on top of a 31 percent increase last year, due to higher spending by international tourists.

“The 2 percent increase in total U.S. store sales was also more than entirely due to higher spending by customers from other countries,” Mark Aaron, vice president of Tiffany’s investor relations, said in a conference call. “Sales to New Yorkers were below last year, which should not be too surprising to anyone.”

Stephanie Hoff, a senior retail analyst with Edward Jones, said Tiffany did better than people anticipated overall. “Even though the U.S. was weaker than expected, I think a lot of investors thought that could happen,” she added.

At Zale, the jeweler recorded a loss of $4.9 million for the quarter ended July 31, compared with a profit of $1.5 million in the same period last year. Sales rose 6.1 percent to $456.2 million, as same-store sales also grew 6.1 percent.

President and Chief Executive Neal Goldberg said on a conference call that the company has expanded in Canada and market share opportunities are abundant.

“We have grown our Canadian store base where we are achieving much higher returns on capital and the economy is much healthier than we currently find in the U.S.,” he said.

Looking ahead, some analysts are already wondering what the crucial holiday season holds.

Hoff expects a slowing global economy to crimp momentum, especially if the dollar strengthens and deters tourists from shopping in New York during the holiday season. Many Americans buy items like jewelry and engagement rings during the last month of the year.

Hoff also noted that even wealthier consumers are cutting back in the tight U.S. economy, as Tiffany’s reported softness in sales of items priced above $50,000.

Meanwhile, costs are rising for jewelry retailers.

Tiffany’s said precious metal costs are higher now than a year ago, with prices for platinum and silver up about 15 percent. The company also reported “low double digit” percentage increases in polished diamond costs, but said it has raised some retail prices to help offset that.

Shares of Tiffany rose $4.24, or 11 percent, to $43.85, while shares of Zale jumped $4.77, or 21 percent, to $27.92, and earlier set a 52-week high of $28.30.

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Antipsychotic drugs double stroke risk: study

Friday, August 29th, 2008

People taking antipsychotic drugs are nearly twice as likely to have a stroke compared to those not on the treatment, British researchers reported on Friday.

The risk is even higher — about 3.5 times — for men and women with dementia, which means doctors should only prescribe such medicine to these patients as a last resort, the researchers said.

Previously, stroke risk associated with older antipsychotic drugs was unclear but the study published in the British Medical Journal showed both old and new treatments carry increased risk.

“The risks associated with antipsychotic use in patients with dementia generally outweigh the potential benefits, and in this patient group, use of antipsychotic drugs should be avoided whenever possible,” Ian Douglas and colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine wrote.”

The researchers looked at the medical records of nearly 7,000 men and women and recorded the incidence of stroke among those who at some point had taken antipsychotic drugs.

They found that they were 1.7 times more likely to have a stroke and that the risk was much higher if people had dementia.

The most common older treatments included a drug class called phenothiazine and the generic medicines haloperidol and benperidol. The most widely used newer drug in the study was Johnson & Johnson’s Risperdal, known generically as risperidone, the researchers said.

Other newer drugs in the study included Eli Lilly and Co’s Zyprexa, or olanzapine, Sanofi-Aventis‘ Solian, or amisulpride and AstraZeneca Plc’s Seroquel, known generically as quetiapine.

The researchers did not look at why people with dementia are at greater risk but one possibility may be that vascular causes of certain types of dementia may be involved, said Douglas, an epidemiologist.

“We don’t know why this extra risk associated with antipsychotics is even greater in people with dementia,” he said in a telephone interview.

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Heavy fighting threatens East Congo peace deal

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Government forces fought Tutsi rebels on Thursday in the fiercest clashes for months in eastern Congo, threatening a struggling peace process, the defence minister said on Thursday.

Mortar fire erupted between rebels loyal to renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda and government soldiers in North Kivu province on Thursday morning, Congo’s United Nations peacekeeping mission said.

The clashes were among the worst outbreaks of direct fighting between the rebels and the army since Congo signed a peace deal with more than a dozen armed groups in North and South Kivu provinces in January.

North and South Kivu account for at least 80 percent of Congo’s production of cassiterite, a tin ore.

“Everybody’s known for weeks that Nkunda was preparing to attack, Defence Minister Chikez Diemu said

He feared the fighting could endanger the already fragile peace agreement.

“(Nkunda) is playing a dangerous game. He’s playing with fire, and he’s going to get burned,” he said

Colonel Marc Kalongi, a commander for Nkunda’s rebel forces, blamed the army for starting Thursday’s clashes in the Rutshuru area north of North Kivu’s provincial capital Goma.

“Government forces attacked all of our positions in Rutshuru. For months the government has been carrying out maneuvers to prepare this attack,” he said.

Kalongi said rebel positions were still being bombarded by government artillery in the afternoon. No reports of casualties were immediately available.

The U.N. mission appealed for both sides to return to their original positions.

The January peace accord, a U.S. and EU-backed attempt to end a year of sporadic violence and draw a line under a conflict that has continued despite the end of Congo’s broader 1998-2003 war, has struggled since the very beginning.

The U.N. estimates some 857,000 North Kivu residents have been forced to flee their homes since fighting broke out between Nkunda and government soldiers in December 2006.

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Militants say kidnapped Israeli located in Nigeria

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Nigeria’s most prominent armed group said Thursday it had located an Israeli national who was kidnapped earlier in the week in the country’s oil-rich but dangerous south.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) also said it was withdrawing an earlier offer to try and help secure his release until an Israeli newspaper apologised for referring to it as a terrorist organisation.

Naming the man as Ehud Avni, MEND said all it would do until the Arutz Sheva issued an apology is “plead with his captors to be humane.”

The Israeli expatriate was captured on Tuesday from his house in Port Harcourt, the capital of Nigeria’s southern Rivers state.

MEND, which claims to be fighting for greater control of the region’s oil wealth by local people, has denied any involvement in Avni’s kidnapping.

But the group has carried out a series of violent attacks on the oil industry and kidnapped hundreds of local and expatriate workers in the restive region since coming to prominence in 2006.

Oil-rich Nigeria has seen a spate of kidnappings of local and foreign workers and relatives of prominent politicians in the past two years, often by criminal gangs seeking a ransom, but sometimes also for political ends.

The unrest has reduced Nigeria’s oil output by a quarter, causing it to lose its position as Africa’s biggest oil producer to Angola, according to April figures from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

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Sudan seizes copies of English-language paper

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Sudan’s security apparatus has seized copies of a local English-language newspaper, the latest episode in months of threats and seizures, its chief editor said on Thursday.

William Ezekiel said copies of the Sudan Tribune were confiscated on Wednesday for the 17th time this month and that he had been summoned by national security forces.

“They want to punish us financially in order for the newspaper to die out, which is the worst punishment,” said Ezekiel.

He said the National Press Council on Tuesday sent a “final” written warning to the newspaper specifying that failure to comply with conditions would see the newspaper closed on September 1.

Ezekiel said the Press Council wants him, as chief editor, to be based in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, not Juba, in the semi-autonomous south.

Ezekiel’s newspaper opened an office in Juba earlier this year.

He also said the council wants the newspaper to replace its editorial board and submit a new list of names for approval, and that all those writing for the paper must have a graduate degree.

“Even the Arabic dailies and other English dailies, they have the same problems,” Ezekiel said referring to censorship. “Why are they picking us out?”

Ezekiel has been summoned various times by the Press Council after the Sudanese authorities have taken umbrage over various articles.

The interim constitution in Sudan, ushered in for the six-year implementation of a landmark peace agreement that ended two decades of civil war between north and south, upholds freedom of the press and expression.

But censorship is practised daily. The powerful security apparatus inspects newspaper editions nightly, and editors who refuse to remove articles deemed offensive risk a ban on their publications.

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Darfur rebels claim downing of Sudan drone

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Darfur rebels claimed to have shot down a Sudanese military spy plane in a wild mountainous area of the war-torn region on Thursday.

A spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army told AFP from London that its forces shot down the unmanned drone — which appeared to be Chinese — in eastern Jebel Marra, in West Darfur State.

“The movement warns the Sudanese government against targeting the movement through both militias or espionage,” Mahgoub Hussein said.

A Sudanese army spokesman said that a military plane without a pilot made an emergency landing at east of Jebel Marra and was unable to say whether the aircraft was shot down.

“So far, we haven’t reached the place where the plane landed to know whether it was shot or not,” the spokesman told AFP in Khartoum.

The incident came two days after hijackers, who officials said claimed to be from Darfur, diverted a Sudanese passenger jet to Libya and demanded to fly to Paris.

The attackers, who were quoted as saying they belonged to the Sudan Liberation Army, whose exiled leader Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur lives in Paris, surrendered to Libyan authorities at a remote desert airport on Wednesday.

The movement has fractured into multiple groups headed by different field commanders over the more than five years of war in Darfur.

The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died and more than 2.2 million have fled their homes the conflict erupted in February 2003 when ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Khartoum regime and state-backed Arab militias. Sudan says 10,000 have been killed.

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