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Banks Get New Rules on Property By LINGLING WEI Federal bank regulators issued guidelines allowing banks to keep loans on their books as "performing" even if the value of the underlying properties have fallen below the loan amount. The volume of troubled commercial real-estate loans is skyrocketing. Regulators said that the rules were designed to encourage banks to restructure problem commercial mortgages with borrowers rather than foreclose on them. But the move has prompted criticism that regulators are simply prolonging the financial crisis by not forcing borrowers and lenders to confront, rather than delay, inevitable problems.

Ibrahim Didi, right, the minister of fisheries and agriculture in the Maldives, signs a document calling on all countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions ahead of a major climate change conference in December. (Mohammed Seeneen/Associated Press) Cabinet ministers in the Maldives held an underwater meeting Saturday to draw attention to the threat global warming poses to the lowest-lying nation on earth. President Mohammed Nasheed and members of his cabinet wore scuba gear as they arrived for the meeting in a lagoon off the island of Girifushi. They sat at a table anchored to the sand on the floor of...

Maldives Cabinet Meets Below Waves to Highlight Climate Change Threat By Steve Herman New Delhi 17 October 2009 In an effort to highlight climate change, the Cabinet of the government of the Maldives, an Indian island nation, has held a meeting under water. Meetings of government ministers can sometimes be a dry affair. That certainly was not the case during the latest gathering of the Cabinet of the Maldives. President Mohamed Nasheed and 11 of his government ministers, plus the vice president and Cabinet secretary, donned scuba gear and plunged six meters below the shimmering turquoise surface of an Indian...

August 13, 2009 More than half of Sacramento-area mortages are under water UPDATE: Here are the local numbers: Rather shocking.... In Sacramento-Arden-Arcade-Roseville-Woodland, 257,871, or 51.10 percent of all properties with a mortgage, are in negative equity. Santa Ana-based First American CoreLogic just minutes ago released a grim look at the mortgage crisis, reporting that 32.2 percent of all U.S. mortgages were tied to homes worth less than the amount of their loans. In California, it says, 42 percent of mortgages are in that condition often referred to as "under water." The report says 2.9 million California mortgages are in a...

An estimated 25 million homeowners, or 48% of those with mortgages, will owe more on the loan than the house is worth by the first quarter of 2011, according to an analysis by Deutsche Bank released this week.

The reason that these colorful shrimp are important: is because they are living next to this: NW-Rota in Eruption Video (suggest turning down computer sound/speakers, volume level is set on high for this video) More info: Submarine Ring of Fire 2006 Expedition to NW Rota 2009

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Home values in the United States extended their fall in the first quarter, with more than one in five homeowners now owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, real estate website Zillow.com said on Wednesday. U.S. home values posted a year-over-year decline of 14.2 percent to a Zillow Home Value Index of $182,378, resulting in a total 21.8 percent drop since the market peaked in 2006, according to Zillow's first-quarter Real Estate Market Reports, which encompass 161 metropolitan areas and cover the value changes in all homes, not just homes that have recently...

PARIS (AFP) – A predicted slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents will cause sea levels along the US northeast coast to rise twice as fast as the global average, exposing New York and other big cities to violent and frequent storm surges, according to a new study. Manhattan's Wall Street, barely a metre (three feet) above sea level, for example, will find itself underwater more often as the 21st century unfolds, said the study, published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Sea levels vary across regions by up to 24 centimetres (9.5 inches), influenced in part by powerful currents that coarse around...

Underwater Stock Options Get a Lifeline From Firms By Tomoeh Murakami Tse Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 7, 2009; D01 Nearly 100 companies have undertaken programs that allow employees, many of them executives, to exchange sharply depreciated stock options for new awards with more generous terms. The companies, from Google to Silver Spring-based United Therapeutics, argue that the exchange -- which increases the chances that executives will be able to collect rewards even though the company stock has plummeted -- is necessary to retain and motivate personnel. Critics say the practice undermines the purpose of performance-based bonuses and puts...

[snip] None of the existing proposals to help homeowners with negative equity would eliminate the incentive to default. In an earlier article on this page I proposed a plan to prevent declines of house prices back to the prebubble level from pushing current positive-equity homeowners into the negative-equity group. The essential feature of that plan is to replace 20% of the homeowner's existing mortgage with a separate, full-recourse loan from the government. That "mortgage replacement loan" would have a very attractive, low interest rate. Because it would be separate from the mortgage and would have full recourse, it would establish...

 (edit)The concept car developer Rinspeed calls its "sQuba" the first real submersible car(edit) Rinspeed says its car can provide a stable "flight" at a depth of 30 feet."For three decades I have tried to imagine how it might be possible to build a car that can fly underwater," says Frank Rinderknecht, Rinspeed's 52-year-old CEO and a professed James Bond fan. "Now we have made this dream come true." The car will be unveiled at next month's Geneva Auto Show.Rinderknecht says it is difficult to make a car watertight and pressure-resistant enough to be maneuverable underwater."The real challenge, however, was to...

Underwater city could be revealed Sonar, underwater camera and scanning equipment will be used Britain's own underwater "Atlantis" could be revealed for the first time with hi-tech underwater cameras. Marine archaeologist Stuart Bacon and Professor David Sear, of the University of Southampton, will explore the lost city of Dunwich, off the Suffolk coast. Dunwich gradually disappeared into the sea because of coastal erosion. "It's about the application of new technology to investigate Britain's Atlantis, then to give this information to the public," Professor Sear said. Mr Bacon, director of the Suffolk Underwater Studies, first located the debris of the lost...

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days. The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment. The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature. The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period...

Underwater Archaeologists Find Possible Mastodon Carving On Lake Michigan Rock September 4, 2007 11:51 p.m. EST Nidhi Sharma - AHN News Writer Traverse City, MI (AHN) - Underwater archaeologists in Lake Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay are speculating a boulder they found in a June ship wreck to be engraved with a prehistoric carvings. Mark Holley, a scientist with the Grand Traverse Bay Underwater Preserve Council, believes that the granite rock, which was found hidden at a depth of about 12 metres, has markings that resemble a mastodon. A mastodon is an elephant-like creature that once inhabited parts of North America....

Experts survey seabed off Gujarat for Dwarka evidence New Delhi, Aug 17 : A group of archaeological experts and Indian Navy divers have conducted the first scientific survey off the Gujarat coast to establish whether or not the ruins on the seabed are of the mythological city of Dwarka, the capital of Hindu god Krishna. "The area off the Samudranaraya temple at (present day) Dwarka is known to contain structures which have been widely reported and interpreted by renowned scholars. However, no scientific study of the area had been conducted so far," Alok Tripathi of the Archaeological Survey of India...

A race against time is under way to try to save a Stone Age settlement found buried at the bottom of the sea in the Solent. The village under the sea off the Isle of Wight was found by chance Eight thousand years ago the area would have been dry land, a valley and woodland criss-crossed by rivers. A swamped prehistoric forest was identified off the northern Isle of Wight coast in the 1980s, but Bouldnor Cliff's buried Stone Age village was only found - by chance - a few years ago. Divers taking part in a routine survey spotted...

Thousand of new volcanoes revealed beneath the waves 10:04 09 July 2007 NewScientist.com news service Catherine Brahic The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before. The team estimates that in total there could be about 3 million submarine volcanoes, 39,000 of which rise more than 1000 metres over the sea bed. "The distribution of underwater volcanoes tells us something about what is happening in the centre of the Earth," says John Hillier of the...

Despite challenges such as darkness, limited visibility and cold temperatures, the waters in and around Sweden offer unique opportunities for underwater exploration. Worlds away from the warm, clear waters of the tropics, Swedish diving is in a class of its own.

NEW DELHI: The exact age of Dwarka, the ancient submerged city off Gujarat coast, can now finally be determined. In a major breakthrough, archaeologists have excavated from the ruins of Dwarka a wooden block that promises to solve the mystery about the exact age of the submerged city believed by many to belong to Lord Krishna. "Now that we have found wood, we are confident of dating the excavations. We will know exactly how old is this submerged city," Alok Tripathi, Superindenting Archaeologist of the Underwater Archaeology Wing of the Archaeological Survey of India. Archaeologists will now use the carbon...

SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian scientist emerged unscathed Wednesday after spending 12 days in an underwater capsule where he had to create his own oxygen with algae and generate electricity on an exercise bike. Self-confessed "nutcase" Lloyd Godson lived at the bottom of a flooded quarry in a yellow steel capsule measuring just nine square metres to demonstrate how a closed ecological system can work. Godson admitted suffering mild cabin fever during his time in the underwater tank, which used a revolutionary Israeli-developed "Biocoil" system to generate oxygen from algae soaked with the 27-year-old's urine. "It's nice to feel the...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Office (DARPA) has initiated an underwater express program to "demonstrate stable and controllable high‑speed underwater transport through supercavitation. The intent is to determine the feasibility for supercavitation technology to enable a new class of high‑speed underwater craft for future littoral missions that could involve the transport of high‑value cargo and/or small units of personnel. The program will investigate and resolve critical technological issues associated with the physics of supercavitation and will culminate in a credible demonstration a significant scale to prove that a supercavitating underwater craft is controllable at speeds up to 100 knots." Such...

Work with lender as soon as possible to avoid owing more than your house is worth. Sunday, November 12, 2006 In the next couple of years, a combination of rising mortgage interest rates and falling or slow-growing home value could plunge thousands of homeowners underwater. Being underwater means owing more than the house is worth. It's an especially risky situation for people with interest-only mortgages and pay-option adjustable-rate mortgages because they don't build equity unless they choose to. Some might be able to refinance or get through hard times by living frugally. Others will have to sell their houses. Still...

Mashantuckets, Ballard To Explore Ancient Coastline They are questions that have intrigued scientists, archaeologists and historians for centuries: When did Native Americans first arrive on the North American continent, and where did they settle? Now, Robert Ballard, president of the Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium, and Kevin McBride, research director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and other researchers hope to answer that question. On Wednesday, Ballard, McBride and Dwight Coleman, the IFE's research director, outlined plans for a multiyear expedition to chart the location of ancient coastlines now underwater, identify sites of Native American settlements and find artifacts to...

Underwater landslides tallied near Puerto Rico Sid Perkins An oceanographic survey off the northern coast of Puerto Rico has found remnants of many past underwater landslides, a handful of which were large enough to have caused deadly tsunamis. Although most tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, a small percentage of the destructive waves are triggered by seafloor slumping (SN: 3/6/04, p. 152: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040306/bob8.asp). Sonar revealed the landslide remnants off Puerto Rico, says Uri S. ten Brink, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Mass. He and his colleagues report their findings in the June 16 Geophysical Research Letters....

Divers begin search for underwater 'Atlantis' By Wu Chong (China Daily) Updated: 2006-06-17 05:56 YUXI, YUNNAN: Ten divers began a seven-day search for a possible underwater "Atlantis" on Friday in the Fuxian Lake near Kunming, the second-deepest freshwater pool in the country. Local diver Geng Wei first told of a large ancient city in the lake eight years ago, thought to span 2.4 square kilometres. Geng claimed to have seen lots of square boulders more than 1.4 square metres in size, either piled or scattered deep underwater. In 2001, the local government launched the first large exploration of the lake,...

ROME (Reuters) - An underwater volcano with a base larger than Washington D.C. has been discovered just off the shores of Sicily, a scientist with Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology said on Thursday. The volcanic structure, which incorporates peaks previously thought to be separate volcanoes, was named Empedocles after the Greek philosopher who named the four classic elements of earth, air, fire and water. Legend has it that the philosopher died by throwing himself into Mount Etna, the nearby Sicilian volcano. Giovanni Lanzafame, who works at the institute and led the research, said Empedocles was at least 400...

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (NNS) -- In a first for the U.S. Navy, an underwater glider was launched with the aid of Navy divers from the Dry Deck Shelter aboard USS Buffalo (SSN 715) Nov. 14. The glider is a uniquely mobile network component capable of moving to specific locations and depths and gathering various information, which is transmitted on a predetermined interval when it surfaces to computers via a built-in satellite phone. “Our interest in the submarine force has been to use these to characterize the ocean,” explained Lt. Cmdr. Patrick Cross, Pacific Submarine Force oceanographer. “They’re equipped with sensors...

A couple of models participate in a promotion of underwater wedding package at Ocean park in Hong Kong Friday, Nov, 11, 2005. Ocean Park, one of the hot spots for tourists here, unveils underwater wedding package program which prices HK$109,999 (US$14,182).

Norway's Directorate for Cultural Heritage has begun a unique program of setting up signs to highlight historical landmarks - underwater. About 30 shipwrecks in southern Norway will get the familiar preservation sign from the directorate, to help divers appreciate - and respect - some of the country's less obvious attractions. On Thursday the first sign, bearing the familiar pretzel-shaped landmark logo, will go up near a shipwreck in Vest-Agder County in southern Norway. The signs are built of acid-resistant steel and titanium to resist saltwater and other sea problems. Signs will be placed at depths of 10-30 meters (33-98 feet),...

Janice, an African American woman, age 55, is all fired up against the Democrats in Louisiana. Said "I bet you those buses were running on election day!"

TORONTO -- Live from the Titanic, it's Sunday night. Tomorrow night, Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron plans to take TV viewers on a live tour of the ill-fated ocean liner from its resting place at the bottom of the Atlantic, where it sank nearly a century ago in one of history's most notorious marine disasters. Last week, Cameron was in a Los Angeles editing suite putting together pre-taped sequences from the latest of the 30 expedition dives he's taken to the Titanic site over the last decade. He was then going to fly back to the site to do more...

Underwater microphones pick up dull, deadly roar in Indian Ocean---- Sound from last December's huge tsunami-causing earthquake was picked up by underwater microphones designed to listen for nuclear explosions.Scientists this week released an audio file of the frighteningly long-lasting cracks and splits along the Sumatra-Andaman Fault in the Indian Ocean. The spine-tingling hiss and rumble is an eerie reminder of the devastation and death that is still being tallied in the largest natural disaster in modern times. At least 200,000 people are thought to have died as a result of the magnitude-9.3 earthquake, the tsunami, and the lack of food,...

New National Geographic/Zelitsky Expedition to Cuba "Underwater City" Site Planned-- Page 27 By Hernán Casares Camera Thanks to: Donald Raab The Russian-Canadian oceanographer Paulina Zelitsky reveals that likely, next autumn, between October and November, she will lead a new expedition, from the Port of Progress, to finish the work that could not be concluded last year at the suspected site of a lost underwater city near Cuba; to map the area and to make a hi-resolution film of the location. National Geographic will finance most of the trip. For several months the team has been readying a specially equipped ship...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - As he combed the murky depths of the Scioto River, Ed Schillig wondered how he would find the 21-year-old man's body. "Am I going to bump into him? Is he going to press against my mask?" said the six-year veteran of Franklin County's dive-rescue team, recalling the assignment on June 4. Eventually, Schillig's hand brushed the torso of David Roller, who had fallen out of a boat about three hours earlier. "It's a personal experience, because there's no one else there," Schillig said. Dive teams are expecially busy in the summer, when people flock to waterways throughout...

Archaeologists make major discovery... underwater When most people think about Mayan archaeology they imagine excavations in royal tombs or trenches cut into tree covered mounds. Few of us would expect that a significant find could be made underwater... particularly in a swamp. But Belizean archaeology is a many-faceted field, as the presentations at this year's Archaeology Symposium, now underway in San Ignacio, amply reveal. Among the updates to last year's reports is a startling discovery made by a team from Louisiana State University. It is a find unlike any in all of the Meso-American world, and it was made right...

China begins trial exploration of first offshore coal mine in E. China Energy-thirsty China Saturday started exploration of its first offshore coal mine, in eastern Shandong Province. Experts with the Shandong Longkuang Group said the underwater coal mine, located about five kilometers away from the coast of Longkou city in eastern Shandong, has a proven reserve of 1.29 billion tons of coal. It is the first offshore coal mine in China. According to the company, the first phrase of digging will be done at the field 350 meters below sea level, stretching 150 meters. The deposit there is expected to...

Breathing Underwater Without Oxygen Tanks IsraCast is a Jerusalem-based multimedia network and one of its reporters just wrote an article about a dream come true, "Like a Fish: Revolutionary Underwater Breathing System." An Israeli inventor, Alan-Izhar Bodner, "has developed a breathing apparatus that will allow breathing underwater without the assistance of oxygen tanks." This invention is based on how fish are breathing, picking the air which is dissolved in the water. Right now, a prototype has been built which uses rechargeable batteries and which will allow for one hour of diving time. But don't run to your diving store...

Claim: A Newfoundland rig manager snapped an underwater photograph of an enormous iceberg. Status: False. Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001] "This is an amazing shot. This came from a Rig Manager for Global Marine Drilling in St. Johns, Newfoundland. They actually have to divert the path of these things away from the rig by towing them with ships! Anyway, in this particular case the water was calm & the sun was almost directly overhead so that the diver was able to get into the water and click this pic. They estimated the weight at 300,000,000 tons." Origins: Charming story,...

Scientists Interrupt Search for the “Mayan Atlantis" in the Caribbean. Cuban Newpaper: GRANMA Mexico City, November 6, 2004 Forwarded by David Drewelow This story updates this prior story . - A group of scientists searching for a hypothetical “Mayan Atlantis" found a pyramid of 35 meters under the waters of the Caribbean, but it had to interrupt the mission due to technical problems, as reported by the Mexican newspaper Millenium, today. After 25 days of work in the sea, near the southwestern end of Cuba, the investigations deeper than 500 meters had to be abandoned due to problems with the...

Homo Sapiens:Scientist plunges into work creating deep-sea probes 03/26/2005 By TOSHIHIDE UEDA,The Asahi Shimbun Developing a robot that can independently quarry the secrets of the deep sea is Taro Aoki's dream. For now, the closest he has come is the ``Urashima,'' an autonomous underwater vehicle developed by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. Aoki, 57, is the program director for the Urashima, which takes its name from a traditional Japanese folk-tale character who rode a sea turtle and visited a deep-sea castle. The real Urashima is loaded with state-of-the-art technology. Cable-less and unmanned,...

Five-star luxury on the ocean floor: undersea hotel planned in the Bahamas 2 hours, 23 minutes ago Offbeat - AFP MIAMI (AFP) - Anyone willing to dish out 1,500 dollars a night might soon get a chance to come face to face with sharks from the comfort of an undersea hotel room a Florida entrepreneur plans to build in the Bahamas. AFP/DDP/File Photo "People who are interested in experiencing something they can't find anywhere else in the world will find it a real bargain," says Bruce Jones who heads the 40-million-dollar project. To date, there is only one such underwater...

Underwater arrowheads, tools dazzle Maritime historians Last Updated Thu, 17 Feb 2005 15:28:09 EST CBC News HALIFAX - Archaeologists are showing off a treasure trove they call one of the most significant discoveries of Mi'kmaq artifacts in Nova Scotia. Hundreds of arrowheads and tools, some 8,000 years old, were discovered last summer along the Mersey River, near Kejimkujik National Park in the southwest region of the province. Workers from Nova Scotia Power were doing repairs to generating stations on the river. As water levels dropped in some areas, the riverbed was exposed for the first time since dams were built...

TEHRAN (MNA) -- During the latest season of excavations of the northern gate of Takht-e Suleiman, an ancient Zoroastrian fire temple located in northwestern Iran, the stamps of two seals were discovered which indicate that objects entered Takht-e Suleiman from other regions with special tags attached to them which seem to be advertisements. They signify that an early form of advertising was being practiced during the Sassanid era (224-642 C.E.), Yusef Moradi, the head of the excavation team, said on Friday. “The team began its excavations in early August and found the stamps of two seals at the upper levels...

Secrets of an ancient Persian armada sunk off the coast of Greece 2500 years ago are being dredged up by modern archaeologists. A team from Greece, Canada and the United States has just completed a second expedition to retrieve artefacts from 300 ships of the Persian King Darius that were wrecked in a storm off the Mt Athos Peninsula, northern Greece, in 492BC or 493BC. Aucklanders will be among the first to hear the results today when three of the expedition leaders present their findings in a free public lecture at Auckland University. In two trips so far, last October...

click on purple heart to see my webpage of Kerry's Purple Heart Lie.It's simple, consise, you can send it's URL to email folks, or print it out and post it in public places...

Scientists exploring the deep sea in the Gulf of Mexico have discovered seeps that resemble a paved road. Seeps are places where oil and other hydrocarbons bubble up from under the seabed. But these seeps, discovered by researchers with Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, are covered in asphalt. The seeps were found along salt domes that lie about two miles down in the southern Gulf of Mexico. Deep sea cameras revealed about 20 salt domes that had collapsed or broken apart. Along the edges were large patches of asphalt, or hardened tar. Scientists photographed them and took samples;...

<p>The U.S. Navy plans to begin testing a prototype for an unmanned underwater glider with a flying-wing design in March, according to the Office of Naval Research, which funds the project.</p> <p>If successful, tests of the Flying Wing Underwater Glider could lead to a new generation of gliders that researchers expect to be the largest and fastest to date. They would be capable of traveling thousands of miles under ocean waves, quietly conducting surveillance and gathering data for military and civilian purposes, researchers said. "Gliders have the potential of providing long-endurance mobile platforms for employing sensors," said Thomas Franklin Swean Jr., team leader for Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems Science and Technology at the Office of Naval Research, which has spent $500,000 on the project so far. "The endurance is measured in months rather than hours or days."</p>

Alexandria, January 2004. The 2003 joint Aboukir Bay research mission of the Department of Underwater Archaeology of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM) led by Franck Goddio has brought to light scientific results of great historic interest. On the site of the sunken city of Heracleion, discovered in May 2001, archaeological excavations performed around the temple of Heracles have enabled to define the topography of the surroundings of the sanctuary. In this monument a cult to the supreme pharaohnic deity Amon and to his son Konshu (respectively Zeus and Heracles for the Greeks)...

The Atlantis between Spain and Morocco Revealing discoveries  Expedition: "The Ibero-Marroqui Atlantis '"   By Maria Fdez-Valmayor  A Scientific Expedition has started off at the end of this summer for the area of the Straits of Gibraltar in search of possible ruins of the well-known civilization like Atlantis by Plato. According to the project? Atlantis Ibero-Moroccan, between the coasts of southwest of the Iberian Peninsula and the northwest of Africa evidences of cities or submerged coastal villages of the Age of the Bronze would have to be, that could belong to the Island or Peninsula of Atlantis. The expedition...

Stone Age Settlements Found Underwater in Britain Thu Sep 11, 5:38 AM ET LONDON (Reuters) - Archaeologists have stumbled across the first underwater evidence of Stone Age settlements in Britain. Missed Tech Tuesday? Become a Wireless Whiz -- get connected in every room and secure your wireless network in six steps A team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England say they found flint artifacts including tools and arrowheads off the coast near Tynemouth during a training session to prepare them for dive searches elsewhere. They say the items pinpoint two sites dating as far back as...