NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Rock-bottom home prices have finally begun to lure vulture real estate investors into the fray.

Sharon Restrepo, a broker in South Florida, where home prices have dropped nearly 27% over the past 12 months, recently bought a three-family home in Cape Coral from a very motivated seller for a mere $65,000. It listed for $195,000.

She can rent the three apartments out for about $1,500 and turn a profit, while she holds on to the property until the market recovers.

“The savvy investors here,” she said, “are buying up everything they can.”

Quick flips

Even in the Seattle area, where prices are down just 5% year-over-year, small investors like Liberty Capital, a three-man operation, are snapping up cheap properties.

Liberty’s portfolio manager Davis Hsu has purchased four homes this year, including a “very clean” 2,700 square foot four bedroom in suburban Federal Way, for about $330,000. He estimated that he bought it at 70 cents on the dollar. He quickly flipped it for a modest profit.

He bought another house for only $80,000, a 55% discount from the market, he figured, and made $60,000 profit when it sold. The other two properties he plans to hold onto for a while, renting them out until the market rebounds.

For the full story click here.

(CNN) — Wouldn’t it be great if you could become invisible whenever you wanted? Harry Potter can do it, and so could certain groups of futuristic creatures on “Star Trek.”

Such technology remains far off, but it may not be entirely impossible.

Teams of scientists around the globe say they’re making progress on theories and experiments involving cloaking — that is, making things invisible.

In theory, all that’s needed to make a small object invisible is something called a superlens, says Graeme Milton, a mathematician at the University of Utah.

He and Australia-based collaborators Nicolae Nicorovici, Lindsay Botten and Ross McPhedran have made mathematical models showing that at a critical distance from a superlens, an object would seem to disappear.

A superlens has a negative refractive index, meaning light that hits it reverses and goes in the opposite direction. Physicist John Pendry at Imperial College London was among the first to propose superlenses in 2000.

At a certain distance from a superlens, an object becomes invisible because light that bounces off it cancels out with light reflecting off the superlens, Milton said. It’s a little like noise cancellation devices such as earphones, he said.

“We’ve seen it numerically — not in practice, but we’ve got a theoretical proof that collections of particles become invisible,” he said.t this stage, Milton said he wouldn’t go as far as to promise that this kind of invisibility cloak would work for a large object such as a truck, but small things such as clusters of dust particles would be good candidates.

Princeton University physics professor David Huse said he is “sure this is legitimate science, although as always one needs to be skeptical of the extrapolations beyond what has already been proven.”

Huse, who attended graduate school at Cornell University with Milton, said he could believe the lens could hide the object, such as an opaque screen, but he asks if the lens would be visible, too.

In mathematical models, Milton said, a superlens can correspond to space folded back on itself, meaning it too appears to be invisible. In real life, very thin gold or silver might approximate the effect, he said.

Experimentalists also are progressing in cloaking research, notably using artificially structured materials called metamaterials.

For the full story please click here.

This is beyond sick. How does something like this happen. After serving eight years for attempted murder he gets out and does this!

NEW YORK (AP) — An ex-convict was found guilty Tuesday in the rape and torture of a Columbia University graduate student who survived 19 hours of nightmarish sadism in which he scalded her with boiling water and attempted to blind her before trying to burn her to death.

Robert Williams was convicted of attempted murder, rape, kidnapping, arson and other charges in the attack, which was so prolonged and agonizing that the victim begged her tormentor to kill her and later tried to kill herself.

The verdict followed a gruesome trial that included dramatic testimony from the victim, who said Williams, 31, made her swallow fistfuls of painkillers, ordered her to gouge out her eyes with scissors, sealed her lips with super glue and gagged her with duct tape before torching her apartment.

Williams, who was found guilty of all but two of 46 counts, was not in court to hear the verdict read. The judge said that when Williams was told a verdict had been reached, he simply turned over in his courthouse cell and went back to sleep.

“He didn’t have any more reaction to that than he has had to anything else,” said Williams’ attorney, Arnold Levine.

The victim and her relatives, in the front row of the courtroom, showed no reaction while the verdicts were read. Her father, on behalf of the family, later declined to comment.

Williams, who previously served eight years in prison for attempted murder, could get a life sentence at a hearing set for July 24.

When the trial began June 5, prosecutor Ann Prunty told jurors that Williams had violated the victim “in every way imaginable — and in some ways unimaginable,” then tried to finish her off by burning her alive.

The evidence against Williams included DNA from the victim found on a shirt he was wearing when he was arrested and DNA from him on one of the woman’s T-shirts. The victim also identified him in court.

The woman told teary jurors that Williams repeatedly raped and sodomized her, scalded her with boiling water, threw bleach at her eyes in an attempt to blind her and slit her eyelids during the excruciating torture in her upper Manhattan apartment.

A couple of snips and bam!

Quebec’s Jewish chaplain for prisons got a speeding ticket quashed after convincing a judge he’d been rushing to a medical emergency: a baby boy who was bleeding from a ritual circumcision.

“It wasn’t like I was going 120 kilometres an hour - I was going a reasonable speed,” Jacob Lévy told Judge Alain St-Pierre in Outremont municipal court Monday, where he went to contest the ticket.

After listening to the rabbi’s story, the judge said Lévy had proven the “necessity” of why he’d been speeding, and threw out the ticket.

Lévy, who used to be grand rabbi of Geneva and also lived in France, leads the Sephardic congregation at Beth Rambam synagogue in Côte St. Luc. Trained in Jerusalem as a mohel, the Hebrew word for circumciser, Lévy has been practising the ritual procedure for 30 years. His first case was his own son, he told St-Pierre at the Van Horne Ave. courtroom, where he’d brought along his surgical kit as proof of his trade.

Lévy testified he’d received an emergency call from a distraught mother in Côte St. Luc whose 8-day-old boy had been recently circumcised. The bandage had come off and the boy was bleeding into his diaper. The date of the incident was not mentioned in court, nor the speed at which Lévy was travelling.

“The mother was upset and wanted me to get there as soon as possible,” said Lévy, who is also a rabbinical judge in Montreal’s francophone Jewish community. “The boy was bleeding, and that’s always serious.”

Why didn’t the mother simply call 911 and have the boy taken to hospital? St-Pierre asked.

“Doctors don’t like to treat circumcision cases because the practice is so rare nowadays here - they prefer to leave it to specialists like me,” replied Lévy, who said he carries a number of products in his medical kit to staunch blood if there are complications.

CNNMoney has an article that makes your barbarian laugh. It discusses gas prices and how some people are choosing to move closer to work to cut down on their spending.

Clearly they have never had to rely upon a horse for transportation. I would never trade my steed for anything as he is worth his weight in gold, but then again he eats enough for three horses.

Come to think of it he is the reason I have had to resort to increasing the amount of times I go out for plunder and pillage each month.

As if expensive gas wasn’t bad enough on its own, now people worry about….

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — As much as Americans fret over the rising price of gas, one thing worries them more: the possibility of having to wait in long lines to buy rationed gas.

A CNN/Opinion Research poll released Tuesday shows that 55% of those surveyed are more worried about long lines at gas stations and rationing than about the high prices that drivers have paid in recent months. The poll shows 40% of the respondents are more concerned about the high prices.

While gas rationing is not expected at this time, it was a hallmark of the 1970s- era energy crisis, when drivers lined up outside gas stations and sales of gas were limited to certain days of the week.

However, at that time, gas was in short supply, which is not the case today.

The poll shows that 83% of respondents think $4-a-gallon gas is a major problem or a crisis.

Read the whole story here.

Consumerist lists

The World’s 5 Worst Ways To Get Drunk

Here is a partial list:
5. Tharra
This spirit native to India boasts a 90% alcohol content and is made by fermenting the mash of sugar cane pulp in ceramic containers. One unfortunate characteristic of the stuff is if you let it sit long enough it turns toxic. Tharra kills hundreds of people per year.
1. Changaa
Changaa is an illegal drink which is popular in Kenya. It is a libation made from distilled grains such as maize and sorghum. Changaa is usually controlled by the criminal gangs who often spike batches with jet fuel, battery acid or formalin. Obviously, this stuff kills many people every year.

Good question. I don’t see her becoming V.P or for that matter governor or a supreme court justice.

(CNN) — Now that she has ended her historic run to become the first Madame President, many are speculating about what Sen. Hillary Clinton will do next.

On Saturday, she held her last rally, telling thousands of supporters she was endorsing her former rival, Sen. Barack Obama, who became the presumptive Democratic nominee Tuesday.

“The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand, is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States,” she told the packed crowd at the National Building Museum in Washington.

Clinton is expected to return to the campaign trail to stump for Obama.

Some of her top backers are hoping she will play a larger role in the Obama campaign by becoming his running mate.

Clinton told New York lawmakers this week that she’d be open to becoming the Democrat’s vice presidential nominee, some of them said, but Obama has said only that Clinton “would be on anyone’s short-list.”

Democratic analyst Jamal Simmons says Clinton has reason to look beyond a joint ticket.

“Hillary Clinton may actually think she spent the last year, year-and-a-half getting out from the shadow of Bill Clinton. She may not want to get underneath the wing of Barack Obama,” said Simmons, an Obama supporter.

Apart from the vice presidency, analysts say, there are several roles Clinton could potentially fill.

Some New York Democrats would love to see a Gov. Hillary Clinton in 2010.

But the primary fight would put her up against David Paterson, New York’s first African-American governor. Paterson took over after Eliot Spitzer stepped down in the wake of his call-girl scandal.

Others say Clinton could aim for Harry Reid’s powerful position as Senate majority leader, but there are a some major obstacles on that career path.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the assistant majority leader, is next in line. He’s followed by Sen. Charles Schumer, vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus. And of course, Reid would have to resign.

Clinton could potentially add Supreme Court justice to her résumé, but she would be in her early 60s if the offer came

Jim McKay- One of my Favorites

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