| Bucking the Tide on Private Loans
As the scandals and debates over private lending have grown in recent months, conventional wisdom has held that private loans are a necessary evil. Sure, students and their families are taking on debt that is typically more expensive and more risky than federally backed loans. But as long as families feel that college costs are otherwise beyond their reach, private loans will continue to become more popular. .
WasteServ’s message in a bottle – ‘squash plastic drink bottles ...
Since plastic is one of the most popular kinds of waste being separated at source and disposed of, extra bins for plastic are being placed at the 200 bring-in sites around the Maltese Islands.
In 2007, 500,470 kilogrammes of plastic alone has been collected from bring-in sites by WasteServ, nearly double that collected in 2005. Each bottle is currently sorted by hand at the temporary facility at Marsa until the Sant Antnin waste treatment plant resumes operations later this month. The plastic is then sent for recycling.
There has been an overwhelming response from the public to WasteServs bring-in sites around Malta and Gozo, said chief executive officer Vince Magri. If plastic bottles are squashed at source, it will mean more free space at the bring-in sites used by residents and the community.
Plan's on borrowed time Home loan piece of stimulus may be shortlived
A provision in the new economic stimulus package that would make it cheaper and easier to buy or refinance a home a boon in the pricey Bay Area might be terminated almost as soon as it begins. President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi trumpeted a plan this week to raise loan limits for mortgages that FannieMae and FreddieMac can purchase, a move that would allow lenders to offer many more home loans of a greater amount and with the lowest mortgage rates available. The only problem is the loan limits would expire at year's end if the stimulus package follows the proposal as outlined in the current stimulus package. Some key U.S. senators want to extend the time period for the higher loan limits, perhaps indefinitely. The idea behind the higher limits is to stoke demand for homes in high-priced housing markets such as the East Bay and other parts of the Bay Area.
Cleveland taking banks to court over crisis
A tire sits in front of a boarded up home in Cleveland, Ohio, on Friday. The city's Mount Pleasant neighborhood is filled with homes for sale or on the auction block. The city is the epicenter of the nation's home foreclosure crisis.
PHOTO: AFP
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