Chipotle Mexican Gril
20 mins total 0 mins prep
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/chipotle-mexican-grills-_n_1217499.html
tampa bay bucs cowboys cowboys slim dunkin slim dunkin will rogers ohio university
By Martin Wolk
The housing market ended the year on a positive note with strong sales in December, but a glut of unsold homes will likely push prices lower through much of this year, forecasters said Friday.
Sales of existing homes hit an 11-month high last month and the number of properties on the market fell to the lowest level in nearly seven years, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Unseasonably warm weather may have helped boost sales, but analysts said a strengthening job market and record low mortgage rates should buoy housing in coming months. Still, they were troubled by the high level of "distressed homes" for sale, including short sales of underwater properties or sales of foreclosed properties. Nearly one-third of existing-home sales were distressed last month, according to the Realtors.
In addition, one-third of Realtors said home sales fell through last month because of declined mortgage applications or appraisals that fell short of the required values.
"These strong negative undercurrents in the housing market and absence of support from strong labor market conditions will continue to trim home sales in the near term," said Asha Bangalore, economist at Northern Trust Co.
The median sale price for an existing home in December was $162,500, down 2.5 percent from December 2010. For the full year, the median price for existing homes fell nearly 4 percent.
"Home sales will gradually improve in 2012. ... However, prices will continue to decline in the near term, despite the better sales," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist of PNC. He pointed out that many home foreclosures are stuck in the pipeline due to paperwork issues and will pressure home prices in the year to come.
"The market for single-family homes picked up in the second half of 2011, after being stuck near the bottom for nearly three years," said economist Patrick Newport of IHS Global Insight. "This pickup is real, but the road to recovery will be a slow one."
While the home sales pace was a touch below economists' expectations, December marked the third straight month of gains, adding to hopes that a tentative recovery was taking shape.
But a glut of unsold properties that is weighing down on prices and stringent lending practices by banks is likely to make progress painfully slow.
There were 2.38 million unsold homes on the market last month, the fewest since March 2005. That represented a 6.2 months' supply at December's sales pace, the lowest since April 2006 and down from a 7.2 months' supply in November.
The Realtors group noted, however, that the inventory of unsold homes tends to decline in winter.
Data earlier this week showed single-family home starts rose for a third straight month in December and optimism among builders this month was the highest in four-and-a-half years.
"It is very encouraging that the current phase of the recovery is being driven by economic fundamentals as opposed to being fostered by temporary stimulus," said Millan Mulraine, a senior macro strategist at TD Securities in New York.
Reuters contributed to this report.
What are home prices doing in your area?
Existing home sales increased 5 percent last month, the highest pace in nearly a year. So, which investments may be the best bets as housing shows signs of life? CNBC's Diana Olick has the details.
99% associated press breast cancer awareness breast cancer awareness guinea worm the others the others
NEW YORK ? A 24-year-old man who pleaded guilty to murder and other crimes in a violent stabbing rampage in New York City last winter was sentenced Wednesday to 200 years in prison during a hearing in which he hurled epithets at one of his victims and was told by the judge that he was a "sociopath."
Maksim Gelman, born in Ukraine, pleaded guilty in November in Brooklyn to murder and other charges in the spree in February 2011, which included stabbing his stepfather and two others to death, fatally running down a pedestrian, stealing a car and attacking a subway passenger.
On Wednesday, he was sentenced to the maximum sentence for each of 13 counts; some of the sentences will run consecutively, resulting in the 200-year term.
"You are a violent predator and sociopath," Judge Vincent Del Giudice said.
Gelman's deadly spree on Feb. 11 started with a family argument over whether he could use his mother's car.
He stabbed his stepfather to death in their Brooklyn home, then took off in the car and drove to the home of an acquaintance, Yelena Bulchenko. Bulchenko's friends have said he was obsessed with the 20-year-old woman and imagined a romantic relationship with her.
She wasn't home, but Gelman stabbed her 56-year-old mother to death, then waited nearly nine hours with the body for the daughter to return. When she walked in, he stabbed her 11 times, killing her, authorities said.
On Wednesday, Gelman interrupted Bulchenko's boyfriend, Gerard Honig, telling him he had fallen in love "with a heroin addict," to which Honig responded, "You can burn in hell."
Gelman was then removed from the courtroom for a short time.
After stabbing Bulchenko, Gelman left the home, rear-ended a car and wildly stabbed at the driver, authorities said. The driver survived.
Stealing the wounded man's car, Gelman drove off and plowed into 62-year-old Stephen Tanenbaum, who died from his injuries. After abandoning the car, he later hailed a livery cab and attacked its driver, then approached another car, attacked a man inside and seized the car, police said. Both men survived.
All those attacks happened in Brooklyn. As authorities hunted him, Gelman was next spotted hours later on a subway train in Manhattan, where passengers recognized him from newspaper photographs and notified police.
He dashed across the tracks, switched trains and attacked a final passenger before he was grabbed by police who were in the subway car looking for him on the tracks.
The livery driver, Fitz Fullerton, spoke at the Wednesday hearing in a whisper because his voice box was damaged by Gelman.
"I just got caught up in this, this is my like third time ever seeing him and I hope he gets what he deserves," Fullerton said.
Gelman also made a brief statement, saying "I'm not the bad guy here," and that it wasn't his fault. He also said he was being followed by federal agents in an undercover investigation.
Gelman had previously said he wasn't guilty, was under medical supervision and his attorney, Edward Friedman, described his client's mental state as fragile.
But given the evidence and a psychiatrist's recent opinion that Gelman couldn't argue he was not guilty by reason of insanity, he decided he wanted to get out of his holding cell and start serving his time in a permanent facility, his lawyer said. No plea deal was offered.
On Tuesday, Gelman admitted trying to kill passenger Joseph Lozito on a train on Feb. 12 at the end of his two-day spree.
Police later recovered a bloody knife, three straight razor blades, a paring knife and $932.
When asked by police why the four victims had to die, Gelman said, "Because I said so," according to the documents.
small business saturday small business saturday hank baskett beyonce dance for you beyonce dance for you nba lockout over gone with the wind
ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2012) ? The psychological experience of power makes people feel taller than they are, according to research by ILR School associate professor of organizational behavior Jack Goncalo and a Washington University colleague.
"Although a great deal of research has shown that physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that the powerful may actually feel taller than they are," Goncalo and Michelle Duguid write in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.
So a 5-foot-4-inch woman might actually sprout an inch or two in her own mind when she's having an empowered moment. In other words, there is actually a physical experience that goes along with feeling powerful.
Three experiments with 266 American men and women confirmed for Goncalo and Duguid that there is a relationship between feelings of power and one's self-perception of height.
"Using different manipulations of power and measures of perceived height, we found that people literally perceived themselves as taller when they occupied a more powerful position," they write.
Is that perhaps why, Goncalo and Duguid wonder, BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg referred to Gulf of Mexico oil spill victims as "small people?"
Research -- included assigning one's height to a video game avatar --established a starting point for exploring reciprocity between the psychological and physical experiences of power, Goncalo said.
He added that the research begs a number of questions: Do short people attempt to capture power by physically elevating themselves above others? Would it be possible to psychologically empower people by giving them an office on the top floor? Can feeling powerful make leaders less able to feel empathy and relate to the "little people" because they literally feel bigger? Is it possible that BP's CEO gave us an insider's view on the experience of power?
Maybe the powerful really do feel bigger than the rest of us.
Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:
Other bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cornell University. The original article was written by Mary Catt.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120116154024.htm
justin beiber dia de los muertos dia de los muertos david arquette lionfish lionfish conjoined twins
SHEBOYGAN, Wis (Reuters) ? The first-term mayor of a Wisconsin town, a self-described alcoholic who has come under pressure to step down, survived the first round of a recall election on Tuesday by getting more votes than any other candidate.
Sheboygan Mayor Bob Ryan, 48, took about 33 percent of the vote in the eight-way contest, the city's first mayoral recall election, and former state representative Terry Van Akkeren finished second with 26 percent, the city clerk's office said.
"I feel great. We took first place," Ryan said in an interview from his post-election party.
The Sheboygan election came on the same day as opponents of another Wisconsin politician -- Republican Governor Scott Walker -- filed petitions containing more than a million signatures to try to force the governor into a special election only a year after he took office.
Since no candidate received a majority of the votes cast in the Sheboygan election, where the contenders also included a high school student, the top two vote-getters move on to a run-off on February 21.
That vote will be essentially a rematch of the last election, in which Ryan defeated Van Akkeren to win the office in 2009.
More than 4,000 Sheboygan voters had signed petitions to force the recall after Ryan was caught on tape making sordid jokes about a sister-in-law and was photographed passed out in a tavern during a drinking binge last summer.
Ryan, a married father of three, admits he was a binge drinker and considers himself an alcoholic but said he has not had a drink for months.
"But I know the only way to put the character issue to rest is over time. I hope that by the election it will be behind me."
LOOKING FORWARD TO REMATCH
Ryan said he was looking forward to the rematch with Van Akkeren and hoped the result of Tuesday's vote would let the campaign focus on issues such as drawing business to Sheboygan, which rests on the western shore of Lake Michigan about midway between Milwaukee and Green Bay.
He said in a pre-election interview that the scandal had forced him to come to grips with his drinking. "Everyone knew me as a fun guy. But lately it had changed. I was not a happy drunk. I became cynical."
Interest in the election was so strong that the Sheboygan city clerk's computer servers were overwhelmed. More than 9,800 votes were cast for a turnout of about 34.5 percent.
Ryan was a city councilman before winning election to his first term as mayor in 2009. He defeated Wisconsin's first Latino mayor, Juan Perez, in a primary, and Van Akkeren in the general election.
Van Akkeren, 57, who served as a Sheboygan alderman from 1986 to 2003 and as a state representative from 2003 to 2010, saw the results differently.
"The mayor got 33 percent of the vote," Van Akkeren said in a telephone interview. "That means 67 percent of the people aren't happy with him."
As for the high school student? Asher Heimermann, 18, a senior at South High School, finished last with a handful of votes, but ahead of write-ins.
The recall election was a first for Sheboygan, but not the first time residents have attempted to recall a city leader. Opponents tried to recall Perez six years ago, but failed to gather enough support among voters to force an election.
(Reporting By Geoff Davidian; Editing by David Bailey, Paul Thomasch and Cynthia Johnston)
art basel 2011 art basel 2011 straight no chaser straight no chaser bcs standings bcs standings douglas fir
