Did you recieve unsolicited credit card offers?

The big banks use their position to target vulnerable individuals, - claims Credit Cards.com, Australia, citing a report that surveyed 1,360 people. 2 out of 3 respondents had received an unsolicited credit card offer in the last 12 months, and half had been offered an increased credit limit. One in three low-income households have received an unsolicited offer of a personal loan in the last year. And while offers of credit are spread across income brackets, it should not be offered in the first place to those who cannot afford to repay.

Bank employees are also paid on a commission, which encourages them to approve loans and credit before looking too closely at your ability to repay. Therefore, before you accept an increased credit limit or pre-approved personal loan, take a look at your finances yourself; no one knows your situation like you do.

Libyan passenger jet plane crash

A Libyan passenger jet plane crashed several minutes before landing at Tripoli airport after a more than 7-hour flight across Africa from Johannesburg. There had been 104 people (93 passengers and 11 crew) aboard. The passengers were mainly Dutch returning from vacations in the South African Republic. The sole survivor is 10 years old Dutch boy, who is currently in the emergency room of one of Tripoly's hospitals. So far 96 bodies have been recovered from the crash site. The Airbus A330-200 flight 8U771 that crashed was operated by the Libyan company Afriqiyah Airways, a low-cost airline providing cheap flights to Europe, Africa, and Asia. The company has no previous records of any accidents. By now the blackboxex are recovered, so everybody's waiting for the results of the investigation concerning the cause of the crash. It's known, however, that the airpot of Tripoly is not equipped with a precision approach system. Some experts say the likeliest cause of the crash must be due to a shallow angle of the plane descent.

The phone numbers 020-7008-8765 in London and 0203-355-2737 in Tripoli are where information about the victims can be asked for by relatives and friends.

Scuba Diving at Jellyfish Lake, Indonesia

As you might guess, this lake is infested with jellyfish. Normally jellyfish live in sea, and this is what make jellyfish inhabiting the Jellyfish Lake unique, as well as the lake itself. These jellyfish is different - they don't knoe to sting. The point is that at the open sea their worst enemies are sea turtles and barracudas who feed on them, and stinging is the only way jellyfish could to at least some extent protect them. Since there are neither turtles nor barracudas in the lake, the jellyfish living there have lost their naturally inherent ability to sting because stinging have become of no use any more. And that's why secondly the jellyfish have become so fantastically numerous. Its's fabulous, nice place to dive at with scuba, isn't it?

Forecast of Russian-Ukrainian relations

Writing about his vision of the future of the relations between Russia and Ukraine after the second round of the presidential election in Ukraine-2010 in his article "Ukraine after the election", the known Russian political analyst Alexander Dugin says that purely theoretically there are 4 possible variants for such relations.

One of the four variants presumes that Ukraine would start orienting mainly at Russia, while strengthening the relations with the European Union in parallel. It would also refrain from functioning as the sanitary corridor, would join the United Economic Area, and would stop exerting pressure on the Russian language along with canceling canonization of the nazis. These expectations, says the analyst further, are theoretically associated with Yanukovich.

In the past Alexander Dugin was known for his anti-soviet opinions. Currently he is a resolute advocate of close alliance between the post-soviet Slavic states. He has been announced persona non grata in Ukraine for the period 2006 through 2011. Though the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs doesn't provide explanations for the sanctions of the sort, it may be concluded that Alexander Dugin was announced persona non grata in Ukraine because, according to Ukrayinska Pravda, "in 2006 he again questioned the sovereignty and integrity of the Ukrainian state".

Forecast Of Relations Between Russia and Ukraine 2010

The member of the Parliament of the Russian Federation Sergey Markov predicts what will happen with Russian-Ukrainian relations if Viktor Yanukovich becomes new Ukrainian President:

"If Victor Yanukovich is elected President, we will face the most complicated negotiations, because he represents the interests of the Ukrainian economy. But those will be the negotiations about collaboration".

Further Mr. Markov specified: "We believe we'll have complicated negotiations about cooperation in the field of aviation and outer space technologies. But we are not going to sease the relations, contrary to what did the mad Yushchenko. We are going to collaborate. Besides that we are going to negotiate the terms of mutual construction of the atomic power electricity generating stations both here and across the whole world. But those will be negotiations about how to work close together instead of how to disrupt the relations between the two nations."

US Government Troubled Asset Relief Program

The Troubled Asset Relief Program otherwise called TARP, is a program by the federal government of the USA that provides for buying assets and equities from financial institutions in order to regain the dynamics of its financial sector. TARP is described as the biggest constituent part of the US government's large scale measures taken starting in 2008 and intended to gain the control over the subprime mortgage crisis and bring back the economy revival. Many people still can't understand what was the purpose of giving money to big financial institutions who already had lots of funds instead of helping financially and issuing loans to those who needed it badly. The purpose must have been to strngthen the corporations considered to form the backbone of the economy so they would act like a locomotives tugging all the rest out of crisis.

What those corporation did instead, anyway? It seems they just used the money to pay off their own obligations and debts and to derive the immediate profit. In part, the TARP was intended to stabilize the housing market, but istead there's a visible rise in foreclosure rates due to people failing to meet their loan obligations. For example, last September it rose by 17% to result 106,007 cases. Early in 2009 the Congressional Oversight Panel issued statement saying: "In particular, the Panel sees no evidence that the U.S. Treasury has used TARP funds to support the housing market by avoiding preventable foreclosures". "Although half the money has not yet been received by the banks, hundreds of billions of dollars have been injected into the marketplace with no demonstrable effects on lending." Now there's a good time to see whether anything changed one year later, since it is already 2010 outdoors.

Department of the Treasury * residential or commercial mortgages * securities * March 14, 2008 * Federal Reserve System * committees of the Congress * banks * debt obligations * foreclosures * loans * secondary market * balance sheets * avoid losses * value * the Treasury * default rate *