news blog from Rashida

The Bengals had refused to give into Palmer’s demand until Tuesday when they were unable to turn down a first round pick in the 2012 NFL draft and a second round pick in 2013.In place of Palmer, rookie quarterback Andy Dalton has gone 118 of 189 for 1,311 yards and seven touchdowns in his first five NFL games.”Several factors made us believe that trading Carson to Oakland was the best move for the Bengals at this time,” Bengals president Mike Brown said in a statement.”The principal development has been Andy Dalton, who has shown himself to be one of the best and most exciting young quarterbacks in the NFL. We have a good, young football team, and Andy can be the cornerstone of that team for a long time.”The teams confirmed the deal shortly after the NFL’s 4 p.m. (2000 GMT) Tuesday trade deadline.Despite no playing time this season, Palmer is expected to step right into the starting job in Oakland after number one quarterback Jason Campbell suffered a broken collarbone during Sunday’s win over the Cleveland Browns.Taken by the Bengals with the first overall selection in the 2003 draft, Palmer spent his entire career in Cincinnati posting a record of 46-51 as starter while passing for 22,694 yards and 154 touchdowns, including a career best 32 in 2005.The Raiders (4-2), winners of two straight, are in second place in the AFC West division while the Bengals (4-2), winners of three straight, are second in the AFC North.

* Transition arrangements could last ten yearsBy Myles NeliganLONDON, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Insurers are seldom fazed by technical complexity or heavy expenditure, yet even they have flinched when confronted with the intricacy and high implementation costs of Solvency II, a set of new capital rules for the European insurance industry.That makes Solvency II an unlikely money-making opportunity for mainstream investors.But some experts believe those with the right risk appetite should be able to turn a decent profit from the new rules.The key opportunity lies in buying insurers’ subordinated debt, which can only count towards their Solvency II capital in limited quantities, and is therefore likely to be bought back at par as the new regime takes effect from 2013, said Urs Ramseier, managing partner at Zurich-based asset manager Twelve Capital.With the bonds currently trading on average at a 35 percent discount, weighed by insurers’ exposure to the euro zone sovereign debt crisis, such buybacks could deliver stellar returns to investors.”August and September were very weak months for this market. That’s why we believe now is a very good entry point,” said Ramseier, whose firm manages 100 million euros ($138 million) of subordinate insurance debt on behalf of European pension funds and family offices.Some sector watchers reckon the depressed price of insurance debt makes it a good bet even without the prospect of issuer redemptions.Credit analysts at Morgan Stanley are expecting a “bear market rally” in European insurers’ bonds as measures to shore up the finances of critically-indebted euro zone nations boosts investor sentiment, they wrote in a note on Oct. 7.The high coupon yield on depressed subordinate bonds has also made them a relatively expensive source of capital, giving insurers an added incentive to buy them back, either through formal redemptions or opportunistic purchases in the market.Insurers including Munich Re , Standard Life and Aviva have repurchased bonds in the past year.”There can be different motivations for buying back this debt, and it could involve both economic reasons and at the same time a desire to replace it with Solvency II-compliant debt,” said Dominic Simpson, a vice-president at credit rating agency Moody’s.However, hoovering up subordinated insurance debt is not without risk. The market slumped by up to a fifth as the euro zone sovereign crisis accelerated in August and September, and will likely remain volatile in the absence of a lasting solution.There is uncertainty also over the timing of any bond redemptions as insurers look set to benefit from a transition period of up to 10 years to adjust their capital structures.The European Union authorities could agree on the precise transition - or “grandfathering” - arrangements in early 2012.”If the grandfathering is 10 years, then clearly that is going to give insurers a lot more time,” said Simpson of Moody’s.”That could dampen the incentive to call early.”There are currently about 85 billion euros of subordinated insurance bonds in circulation, according to Twelve Capital.Solvency II is intended to protect policyholders and investors by making insurers align their capital reserves more closely with the risks they underwrite.The rules are currently scheduled to come into force on Jan. 1, 2013, although the industry expects their introduction to be delayed by one year.

In August, Google said it will acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The deal will give Google access to one of the largest patent libraries in the wireless industry as well as hardware manufacturing operations that will allow it to develop its own line of smartphones.The company is plowing money into its fast-growing mobile business which competes with iPhone-maker Apple. Google’s Android mobile software now powers 190 million devices, up from 135 million in mid-July.”While Google is large and well-followed, we still see the company as an underappreciated mobile play,” BofA Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post said in a research note.”We see Google as a 15 percent grower, warranting a premium valuation to the large cap technology sector.”However, Post — an analyst with a five-star rating, according to Starmine data for the accuracy of his earnings estimates on the company — cut his price target to $720 from $740 citing the complex Motorola buy as a near-term overhang.Some investors worry that a move to build its own phones could jeopardize support for Google’s free Android mobile software from other phone manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics and HTC CorpMany other brokerages raised their price targets on the company, some by as much as 10 percent.Collins Stewart raised its price target on the stock to $795 from $725 — 42 percent higher than its current levels.The increasing usage of tablets in a manner more similar to PCs than phones is driving more queries and paid clicks to Google, JP Morgan said in a note.”We expect this trend to continue, and for Google to be the primary beneficiary as it likely has 90 percent plus share of mobile search — even higher than on the desktop,” it said.According to Thomson Reuters StarMine data, 13 analysts rate Google a “strong buy,” 20 rate the stock a “buy” and four others rate it a “hold,” with a mean price target of $716.17.Google’s Frankfurt-listed shares were trading up 7 percent, while its Nasdaq-listed stock rose to $599.60 in morning trade.

“Grayson has not just selected objects, he has made his own civilization. It’s unlike anything the British Museum has done in the past — nobody has ever made a rival museum before,” Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, told reporters.Many of the artifacts selected by the Turner Prize winner are little known, and form a cross-culture mix of the contemporary and the ancient.An Asante ceremonial deerskin hat from Ghana and Japanese shrines from the Edo period sit alongside Hello Kitty hand towels and Perry’s hair in a ceramic coffin.”I didn’t choose just to celebrate craftsmen for their precision, but for their dialogue with the materials,” Perry said.”I have made my choices of objects from the British Museum collection because of their connections with each other and with my own work. Sometimes the connection is in their function, sometimes in their subject and often in their form,” he said.”One thing that connects all my choices is my delight in them.”Perry’s new work, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, an iron coffin-ship sailing into the afterlife, is strung with casts of objects from the museum’s collections.The ship serves as a memorial to these anonymous craftsmen and a site of pilgrimage for visitors to contemplate the care that went into the creation of the artifacts, according to Perry.”The British Museum is the greatest site of pilgrimage in Britain. When I initially proposed the idea of the exhibition, I wanted to be part of the grandeur and huge significance of the museum,” he said.At the center of the ship is an example of a 250,000-year-old flint hand axe — “the tool that begat all tools.”“The whole of civilization revolves around the moment when we started to have control over the world and adapt it to us, rather than having to adapt to it, and that to me is an incredibly moving thing,” Perry said.The ceramicist said he hoped the exhibition would encourage visitors to form their own opinions about art.”The nicest compliment people can pay is to be inspired by the exhibition, and want to make something, or look at the world afresh,” he said.Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003, famously accepting the 25,000 pound ($38,455)award wearing a Shirley Temple dress.The exhibition “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman” runs from Oct 6, 2011 to Feb 19, 2012. ($1 = 0.650 British Pounds)

“Grayson has not just selected objects, he has made his own civilization. It’s unlike anything the British Museum has done in the past — nobody has ever made a rival museum before,” Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, told reporters.Many of the artifacts selected by the Turner Prize winner are little known, and form a cross-culture mix of the contemporary and the ancient.An Asante ceremonial deerskin hat from Ghana and Japanese shrines from the Edo period sit alongside Hello Kitty hand towels and Perry’s hair in a ceramic coffin.”I didn’t choose just to celebrate craftsmen for their precision, but for their dialogue with the materials,” Perry said.”I have made my choices of objects from the British Museum collection because of their connections with each other and with my own work. Sometimes the connection is in their function, sometimes in their subject and often in their form,” he said.”One thing that connects all my choices is my delight in them.”Perry’s new work, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, an iron coffin-ship sailing into the afterlife, is strung with casts of objects from the museum’s collections.The ship serves as a memorial to these anonymous craftsmen and a site of pilgrimage for visitors to contemplate the care that went into the creation of the artifacts, according to Perry.”The British Museum is the greatest site of pilgrimage in Britain. When I initially proposed the idea of the exhibition, I wanted to be part of the grandeur and huge significance of the museum,” he said.At the center of the ship is an example of a 250,000-year-old flint hand axe — “the tool that begat all tools.”“The whole of civilization revolves around the moment when we started to have control over the world and adapt it to us, rather than having to adapt to it, and that to me is an incredibly moving thing,” Perry said.The ceramicist said he hoped the exhibition would encourage visitors to form their own opinions about art.”The nicest compliment people can pay is to be inspired by the exhibition, and want to make something, or look at the world afresh,” he said.Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003, famously accepting the 25,000 pound ($38,455)award wearing a Shirley Temple dress.The exhibition “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman” runs from Oct 6, 2011 to Feb 19, 2012. ($1 = 0.650 British Pounds)

After the latest news from Mexico where armed men torched a casino in Monterrey, killing at least 52 people, it’s a good time to re-read Robin Emmott’s special report “If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls.” As the story says: In just four years, Monterrey, a manufacturing city of 4 million people 140 miles from the Texan border, has gone from being a model for developing economies to a symbol of Mexico’s drug war chaos, sucked down into a dark spiral of gangland killings, violent crime and growing lawlessness. Since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led war on the cartels in late 2006, grenade attacks, beheadings, firefights and drive-by killings have surged. That has shattered this city’s international image as a boomtown where captains of industry built steel, cement and beer giants in the desert in less than a century — Mexico’s version of Dallas or Houston. By engulfing Monterrey, home to some of Latin America’s biggest companies and where annual income per capita is double the Mexican average at $17,000, the violence shows just how serious the security crisis has become in Mexico, the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter and a major U.S. trade partner.