Meet Cody Horn In Steven Soderbergh's 'Magic Mike"

 The genre of a Channing Tatum on-screen love interest can be subdivided into three categories.

 One: wounded, doe-eyed woman based on a Nicholas Sparks character (see: Seyfried, Amanda, in Dear John). 

Two: wounded, doe-eyed woman whose magnetic delicacy and plot-advancing toughness will inspire a future Nicholas Sparks character (see: McAdams, Rachel, in The Vow). 

And Three: a heretofore unseen species, the drop-dead—though not particularly doe-eyed—girl who is breezy, even-tempered, and in a relationship with a stripper who dances at a club called Xquisite. Tatum, whose abdominal muscles ripple and curve like graphs of calculus functions, plays the titular entertainer in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike. Cody Horn co-stars as Paige, the sister of one of Tatum’s ...peers. The daughter of Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan F. Horn, she previously played underqualified new hire Jordan on the 2010–11 season of The Office. Jordan’s office-mates unhappily suspected she was hired for her femininity. Predictably, such H.R. concerns do not trouble anyone at Xquisite.

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Five Common Retirement Mistakes

Retirement conjures up images of spending more time with family and paring down a bucket list, but the reality can be quite different without adequate financial planning. 

Here's a guide to what experts say are the five most common mistakes people make when they retire.

Mistake No.1: Not having a plan

Some pre-retirees fail to sufficiently consider what they would like to accomplish after leaving the workforce. According to Christine Fahlund, a senior financial planner at T. Rowe Price, it's essential for people who are considering retirement to identify what activities are going to be interesting and challenging for them in retirement.

"In addition, it is very important for married couples to communicate with one another about what each one wants to do in retirement," she says. "The discussion will provide a good idea of how much it will cost to make their respective visions a reality."

Mistake No. 2: Not enough funds

If pre-retirees expect they will live on much less money in retirement, Fahlund suggests trying to cut down and make lifestyle changes before retirement to see if its viable.

Kevin Worthley, a certified financial planner, says it's essential for pre-retirees to analyze how their retirement income needs will match up with retirement resources.

Mistake No. 3: Not calculating rising costs of living

Worthley says many people fail to calculate inflation, or rising costs of living, when evaluating how much they will need in retirement.

"Over the course of a 20-year retirement, the amount of dollars needed to sustain your lifestyle could double," he says.

Thomas Corley, author of Rich Habits - The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals, says that if retirees are not adequately invested in equities, their retirement assets will not be able to keep pace with inflation. He adds that shifting assets away from equities and into fixed-income investments "robs each retirement dollar of real value."

Mistake No. 4: Not accounting for long-term care expenses

Worthley says it is imperative for retirees to account for long-term care expenses, which can give any savings a significant blow.

"People are living longer, medical advances are increasing ... and medical costs are growing faster than nearly every other CPI (Consumer Price Index) component," Worthley says, adding that the rules for Medicaid qualification are "getting tougher."

"Seriously consider long-term care insurance as part of a good retirement income plan," he advises.

Mistake No. 5 Relying too much on Social Security

Worthley also says many retirees rely too heavily on Social Security income for their living expenses.

"The system is under heavy financial strain already, and the so-called baby boomers are just starting to retire," he says. "Who knows what Social Security will look like in five, 10 or 20 years?"

Fahlund recommends that retirees create an emergency fund with approximately three to six months' worth of expenses stowed in a money market account or short-term bond fund.

"In addition, they should think about a long-term emergency fund for unexpected expenses, such as a roof that suddenly needs replacing or a grown child moving back home after a job loss or divorce," she adds.

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Japan Floods: Relief Teams Work As Residents Return

'Japanese Relief Team'

Residents of Japan's flood-hit areas are being allowed to return home after record rainfall that left thousands cut off and at least 26 people dead.

Clean-up efforts have also started after evacuation orders were lifted in the southern island of Kyushu.

A year's worth of rain fell in some areas over the weekend, causing landslides.

Troops are airlifting supplies to those trapped in mountainous areas and seeking at least six missing people.

Residents have started to clean up the mud and debris from their homes, with felled trees and debris also being removed from the roads.

"We are stepping up efforts to remove rubble as roads remain covered with mud at many points," Masatatsu Minoda, an official from Kumamoto prefecture, was quoted by AFP news agency as saying.


"Workers are engaged in clean-up efforts while taking care against possible further landslides. We may have to stop working if it rains heavily again."

More rain and thunderstorms were being forecast for some areas, reports said.The weather agency says the worst is over but it warns that even a small amount of rainfall could trigger further landslides, says the BBC's Mariko Oi in Tokyo.

On Sunday officials said 26 people were known to have died in Kumamoto, Oita and Fukuoka prefectures. Reports said most of the victims were elderly people in their 70s and 80s.

Evacuation orders were issued on Saturday for a quarter of a million people. The orders were lifted in most areas on Sunday as the rain stopped and many people were allowed to return to their homes.

Heavy rain has also caused flooding in parts of Japan's historic capital, Kyoto, on the main island of Honshu.

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Syrian Rebels-"We Don't Need help From A Woman From Canada"

When Thwaiba Kanafani first introduced herself to rebel commanders as someone who could help bring together the fractious Syrian opposition, she was met with skepticism and condescension.

What could a woman, and a woman from faraway Canada at that, really do for the uprising, they asked.

Ms. Kanafani shrugged aside the rejection. After weeks of meetings with opposition figures based in Turkey, she said she was spirited briefly across the border into Syria to record a call-to-arms video that has become a centrepiece of opposition propaganda. In it, she announces proudly that she has “come from Canada to answer the call of my homeland.”

Her adventure, when it unravelled, unravelled quickly. On Monday, she won a post as a communications co-ordinator on a Free Syrian Army (FSA) committee at a Syrian refugee camp. That lasted barely three days. By midday Thursday, Ms. Kanafani was expelled from the council because of suspicion over her motives. “I left them,” she said. “I am not working with them any more because they say I am an Israeli spy.”

Many Syrian expatriates, watching the increasingly bloody struggle in their homeland, want desperately to play a part. Some laboriously assemble and disseminate data on civilian casualties inside Syria; others work with the opposition’s political front. Ms. Kanafani, a 40-year-old Toronto businesswoman and mother of two, took the more unusual step of travelling to the restive Turkish-Syrian border and offering her help to the disparate bands of rebel fighters.

It was a spectacularly swift comedown for Ms. Kanafani, who had aggressively fought her way inside the Free Syrian Army over the past weeks and donned camouflage fatigues to make the video urging “free” Syrian women to take up arms.

She said she ruffled the male members of the committee by insisting that it would only be effective if its leadership was kept to a small number of people. “It can’t work like this, with so many people and so many positions,” she said she told them. It was then that officers – she would not name them – asked how she got her ideas, then claimed she was being led by “someone else” and said she would be investigated for being an Israeli spy. “I am still confused about what happened,” said Ms. Kanafani, after recounting the incident.

The aim of the new committee was to unify the FSA in order to receive international support, said Fayez Amr, an officer who had defected from the Syrian army and lives in the camp. He confirmed that Ms. Kanafani had been invited to participate in a “communications” role.

According to Ms. Kanafani, other committee members had already accepted her ideas. But at the meeting Thursday, several people she had never met before arrived at the officer’s camp. She said they were members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, the long-banned group that has emerged as important backers of the opposition but are accused by some activists of trying to control the revolution.

While she had previously defended the rebel officers in the camp, who are often accused of doing little for the people actually fighting inside of Syria, she said she had now reversed her opinion of them: “I don’t care for the people here. … The people inside are really fighting for something. The people here are fighting for positions.”

Originally from the Mediterranean island of Arwad, just over three kilometres from the Syrian coast, Ms. Kanafani left Syria in 1996 to work in the United Arab Emirates, and she immigrated to Canada four years later. There, she said, she opened a construction-consulting business in Toronto, married an Egyptian man with whom she had two children, and last year became a citizen.

When the Syrian uprising began in early 2011, she recalled, she was “very un-optimistic.”

She said she told people: “This regime is a very bad regime. … They have strong ties with so many countries. So it is not going to be easy to defeat them.”

She paid close attention as the violence in Syria increased, and began sending videos and writing letters to the leaders of different countries – including the United States, Canada, and Iran – asking them to intervene on behalf of the Syrian people. She was convinced there would be no end to the Assad regime without the help of the international community.

But she got no response and became increasingly frustrated. “So many people told us we did our best. We don’t know what is not working,” she said.

Earlier this year, with her family safely out of Syria, she decided to get more directly involved.

In May, Ms. Kanafani said, she flew to Egypt with her husband and children and managed to meet Syrian activists there. Then she resolved to go on her own to Turkey to make direct contact with the FSA.

At first, the FSA first refused to work with her. Ms. Kanafani said the suspicions came from her sudden appearance and aggressive desire to help. “It’s because I know what should be done,” she said. “I was trying to propose my ideas to a lot of people.”

Eventually, she said, she convinced them to trust her and was taken into Syria by a few rebels in late June to make the video that has attracted wide attention on the Internet. In it, she is seen backed by machine-gun-toting fighters and wearing a bandolier of bullets draped around her shoulders. “I am a daughter of Syria, and I came from Canada to answer the call of the country,” she says in the video.

Despite her newfound access, many of the military men were skeptical that she has anything substantive to contribute. “I don’t think we need help from a woman from Canada,” Ammar al-Sheikh, a member of the FSA who had heard of, but not met, Ms. Kanafani, said earlier this week.

Being a woman, she acknowledged, was a “barrier somehow.” But she prodded the rebels to break out of their traditional vision of how a Syrian woman should act.

When told to cover her hair by the fighters in Syria, she said she pushed back. “You guys need to be more open minded,” she said she told them. “I am a Muslim. I pray five times a day. It doesn’t mean I have to cover.”

It was not clear exactly what prompted rebel officers turn her out of the co-ordinating committee. Neither Mr. Amr nor any other FSA officer was available to comment on what happened at the meeting.

In Canada, Ms. Kanafani was involved in a group advocating a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, according to news accounts. Her views were not widely reported, but some version might have been brought to the attention of some officers, many of whom spent most of their lives on a war footing with Israel, and made them question her motives.

Ms. Kanafani said her views on Israel did not come up during the meeting. But, she said, “I am telling everyone clearly that I am willing to work with everyone in the whole world. For me, I am willing to work with Israel and work with America as long as this will make peace. This does not make me a spy for anyone. We eventually want to live without war.”

Ms. Kanafani’s efforts are likely to be seen as naive. And many in the West, including the Canadian government, remain wary about supporting the FSA because of its infighting and suspicion of infiltration by al-Qaeda.

Ms. Kanafani said that the experience had left her deeply concerned with the direction the Syrian revolution is headed, and whether it can unify. She said she will stay in Turkey for at least the next two weeks to see if she can help the FSA inside Syria.

If she can’t or runs out of money, Ms. Kanafani plans to return to Canada and leave the revolution behind. “I will forgot everything about what happened if I do not succeed. I do not want to remember this,” she vowed. “I will just move on and focus on my own life.”

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India's Frugal Revolution

India’s sliding economy has inspired gloom and doom far and wide, but increasingly bearish sentiment is misplaced. India still offers hope, but, to understand why, you have to leave macroeconomic indicators aside and go micro. To take one example: Google the phrase “frugal innovation,” and the first 20 search results all relate to India.

Indian companies have long recognized the opportunities in meeting previously overlooked demand at the “bottom of the pyramid.” Shampoo sachets originated in India more than two decades ago, creating a market for a product that the poor had never before been able to afford. Indians without the space or money to buy a whole bottle of shampoo for 100 rupees could spend five for a sachet that they’d use once or twice.

But India’s leadership in “frugal innovation” goes beyond downsizing: it involves starting with the needs of poor consumers – itself a novel term (who knew the poor could be consumers?) – and working backward. Instead of complicating or refining their products, Indian innovators strip them down to their bare essentials, making them affordable, accessible, durable and effective.

Indians are natural leaders in frugal innovation, imbued as they are with the jugaad system of developing makeshift but workable solutions from limited resources. Jugaad essentially conveys a way of life, a worldview that embodies the quality of making do with what you have to meet your needs.

But jugaad is not about pirating products or making cheap imitations of global brands. It is about innovation – finding inexpensive solutions, often improvised on the fly, within the constraints of a resource-starved developing country full of poor people. An Indian villager constructs a makeshift vehicle to transport his livestock and goods by rigging a wooden cart with an irrigation hand pump that serves as an engine. That’s jugaad.

Common machines and household objects are reincarnated in ways that their original manufacturers never intended. Everything is reusable or reimaginable. If you cannot afford your cellphone bills, you invent the concept of the “missed call” – a brief ring that is not answered but that signals your need to speak to the recipient.

Indian ingenuity has produced a startling number of world-beating innovations, none more impressive than the Tata Nano, which, at $2,000, costs roughly the same as a high-end DVD player in a Western luxury car. Of course, there’s no DVD player in the Nano (and no radio, either, in the basic model) but its innovations (which have garnered 34 patents) are not merely the result of doing away with frills (including power brakes, air conditioning, and side-view mirrors). Reducing the use of steel by inventing an aluminum engine, increasing space by moving the wheels to the edge of the chassis and relying on a modular design that enables the car to be assembled from kits proved conclusively that you could do more with less.

Then there’s the GE MAC 400, a hand-held electrocardiogram (ECG) device that costs $800 (the cheapest alternative costs more than $2,000), and the Tata Swachh, a $24 water purifier (10 times cheaper than its nearest competitor). The GE MAC 400 uses just four buttons, rather than the usual dozen, and a tiny portable printer, making it small enough to fit into a satchel and even run on batteries; it has reduced the cost of an ECG to just $1 per patient. The Swachh uses rice husks (one of India’s most common waste products) to purify water. Given that some five million Indians die of cardiovascular diseases every year, more than a quarter of them under 65, and that about two million die from drinking contaminated water, these innovations’ value is apparent.

Many other examples of frugal innovation are already in the market, including a low-cost fuel-efficient mini-truck, an inexpensive mini-tractor being sold profitably in the U.S., a battery-powered refrigerator, a $100 electricity inverter and a $12 solar lamp.

Moreover, medical innovations are widespread. An Indian company has invented a cheaper Hepatitis B vaccine, bringing down the price from $15 per injection to about 10 cents. Insulin’s price has fallen by 40 per cent, thanks to India’s leading biotech firm. A Bangalore company’s diagnostic tool to test for tuberculosis and infectious diseases costs $200, compared to $10,000 for comparable equipment in the West.

Even the financial sector has seen innovation. Just three years ago, there were only 15 million bank accounts in a country of 1.2 billion people. Indians concluded that if people won’t come to the banks, the banks should go to the people. The result has been the creation of brigades of travelling tellers with hand-held devices, who have converted the living rooms of village homes into makeshift branches, taking deposits as low as a dollar. More than 50 million new bank accounts have been established, bringing India’s rural poor into the modern financial system.

Frugal innovation pervades the Indian economy. It is one of the reasons why there is more dynamism in the Indian economy than those who look only at the macroeconomic data believe. Sometimes it is important to stop looking at the forest and focus on the trees.

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Egyptian Protesters Pelt Clinton Motorcade(Video)

Protesters threw tomatoes and shoes at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's motorcade on Sunday during her first visit to Egypt since the election of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi. A tomato struck an Egyptian official in the face, and shoes and a water bottle landed near the armored car carrying Clinton's delegation in the port city of Alexandria after she gave a speech on democratic rights

A senior U.S. official said neither Clinton nor her vehicle, which was around the corner from the incident, were hit by the projectiles, which were thrown as U.S. officials and reporters walked to the motorcade after her speech.

Protesters chanted "Monica, Monica," a reference to the extra-marital affair conducted by Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, while in the White House. Others earlier chanted "leave, Clinton" an Egyptian security official said.

It was not clear who the protesters were or what were their political affiliations. Demonstrations have become common in Egypt since former President Hosni Mubarak, long-time U.S. ally, was brought down by mass street protests last year.

Egypt is gripped by political uncertainty as two major forces, the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, engage in a power struggle over the future of a country that remains without a permanent constitution, parliament or government.

On Saturday night, protesters outside Clinton's luxury hotel in Cairo chanted anti-Islamist slogans, accusing the United States of backing the Muslim Brotherhood's rise to power.

In her speech at the newly re-opened U.S. consulate in Alexandria, Clinton rejected suggestions that the United States, which had long supported former Mubarak, was backing one faction or another in Egypt following his ouster last year.

"I want to be clear that the United States is not in the business, in Egypt, of choosing winners and losers, even if we could, which of course we cannot," Clinton said.

"We are prepared to work with you as you chart your course, as you establish your democracy," she added. "We want to stand for principles, for values, not for people or for parties."

TANTAWI STRESSES ECONOMYEarlier on Sunday, Clinton met Egypt's top general, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, to discuss Egypt's turbulent democratic transition as the military wrestles for influence with the new president.

The meeting came a day after she met Mursi, whose powers were clipped by the military days before he took office.

Mursi fired back by reinstating the Islamist-dominated parliament that the army leadership had disbanded after a court declared it void, deepening the stand-off before the new leader even had time to form a government.

In their hour-long meeting, Clinton and Tantawi discussed Egypt's political transition, the military's "ongoing dialogue with President Mursi," and the country's economic troubles, a U.S. official travelling with Clinton said in an email brief.

"Tantawi stressed that this is what Egyptians need most now - help getting the economy back on track," the official said.

The talks also touched on the increasingly lawless Sinai region and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Speaking after the meeting, Tantawi said the army respected the presidency but would not be deterred from its role of "protecting" Egypt.

"The armed forces and the army council respects legislative and executive authorities," he said in a speech to troops in the city of Ismailia. "The armed forces would not allow anyone to discourage it from its role in protecting Egypt and its people."

TIES STRAINEDTies with the United States, which provides Egypt with an annual $1.3 billion in military aid, were strained this year when Egyptian judicial police raided the offices of several U.S.-backed non-governmental organizations on suspicion of illegal foreign funding and put several Americans on trial.

The spat ended when Egyptian authorities allowed the U.S. citizens and other foreign workers to leave the country.

Clinton said Washington wanted to support "real democracy," in which "no group or faction or leader can impose their will, their ideology, their religion, their desires on anyone else."

She delivered a similar message in earlier meetings with women and Christians, both groups that fear their rights may be curtailed under a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government.

"I will be honest and say some have legitimate fears about their future," she said. "I said to them ... no Egyptian, no person anywhere, should be persecuted for their faith, or their lack of faith, for their choices about working and not working.

"Democracy is not just about reflecting the will of the majority. It is also about protecting the rights of the minority," she said.

The United States had learned that "the hard way," Clinton said, noting the U.S. constitution originally did not protect the rights of women or slaves.

The Video Below Says It all

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Timothy Geithner's LIBOR Recommendations

WASHINGTON -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has so far escaped responsibility for the spreading Libor fixing scandal by releasing documents showing that when he became aware of the problem in 2008, as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he made recommendations to address it.

"The New York Fed analysis culminated in a set of recommendations to reform LIBOR, which was finalized in late May. On June 1, 2008, Mr. Geithner emailed Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, a report, entitled 'Recommendations for Enhancing the Credibility of LIBOR,'" a Fed statement released Friday reads. "As is clear from the work culminating in the report to Mr. King of the Bank of England, the New York Fed helped to identify problems related to LIBOR and press the relevant authorities in the UK to reform this London-based rate."

With that, Geithner earned a rash of headlines focused on his foresight, as well as criticism for the cozy relationships between regulators and bankers that had led to the controversy.

But the Fed, along with its statement, also released the staff work that led to the recommendations. Those documents reveal that the recommendations Geithner sent to London did not come from staff, but rather were proposed by major banks and more or less forwarded on verbatim.

The policy recommendations Geithner forwarded in an attachment on June 1 first appear in a staff memo dated May 20 that reads: "A variety of changes aimed at enhancing LIBOR's credibility has been proposed by market participants, and seem to be under consideration by the BBA. These proposed changes include, but are not limited to..."

A comparison between Geithner's recommendations and those put forward by"market participants"-- shorthand for banks -- makes it clear that Fed staff asked banks how to fix the problem, then presented those answers as their own. (Most of the banks consulted were likely U.S.-based institutions, as several of the recommendations are aimed at giving more power, not surprisingly, to U.S. banks.)

Below are excerpts from the recommendations, side by side:

Geithner: Strengthen governance and establish a credible reporting procedure. To improve the integrity and transparency of the rate-setting process, we recommend the BBA work with LIBOR panel banks to establish and publish best practices for calculating and reporting rates, including procedures designed to prevent accidental or deliberate misreporting. The BBA could require that a reporting bank's internal and external auditors confirm adherence to these best practices and attest to the accuracy of banks' LIBOR rates.

Banks: lmplementing an audit process designed to ensure that reporting procedures and quotes adhere to an agreed and published set of best practices.

Geithner: Increase the size and broaden the composition of the USD panel. The BBA should increase both the size and tile proportion of US banks on the USD panel. Currently, the only US banks on the panel are Bank of America, Citibank, and JPMorgan, but there are several other US banks active in tills market and potentially eligible for inclusion in the panel, including Wachovia, State Street, Northern Trust, and BoNY.

Banks: lncreasing the size of the panel and including more US institutions, so that the resulting rate is more representative of the global demand for unsecured interbank dollar funding, and less susceptible to issues concentrated within any particular region's banking sector.

Geithner: Add a second USD LIBOR fixing for the U.S. market. The BBA should consider adding a second USD fixing to capture rates for transactions that occur when the US market is active.

Banks: Changing the time of the fixing, or adding a second fixing that occurs when US-based sources of dollar funding are active.

Geithner: Specify transaction size. … [T]o reflect the fact that actual transaction sizes can fluctuate markedly with changes in market conditions, the BBA should consider allowing the transaction size it specifies to adjust flexibly over time, with these adjustments occurring either at regular frequency in response to significant changes in market conditions.

Banks: Specifying transaction size, which could adjust flexibly to market conditions.

Geithner: Only report the LIBOR maturities for which there is a net benefit.
We recommend that, in consultation with panel banks, the BBA adopt guidance on consistent methods for determining quotes across the range of maturities of LIBOR. In addition, we recommend that the 13BA consider reducing the number of maturities for which it solicits quotes and publishes rates. For tenors such as the 3-month tenor, LIBOR quotes provide valuable information to the public because of the volume of activity occurring at that tenor, whilequotes for tenors at which little or no trading occurs, such as the 11-month, are less indicative and therefore less valuable. The current practice of soliciting rate quotes across 15 tenors, when only a subset of those tenors reflect meaningful market activity, likely leads to more subjective andformulaic responses across all tenors. By asking banks to quote fewer rates, the BBA may solicit higher quality responses for those more informative tenors, with relatively little value lost by excluding less informative tenors.

Banks: Reducing the number of maturities quoted. The high number of maturities may lead to formulaic responses, and it is not clear that the market highly values, for example, a 7-month LIBOR quote. A key issue here may be the existence of derivatives contracts that reference all existing maturities.

Geithner: Eliminate incentive to misreport. If the combination of best practices and audit recommendations in (1) above seems unlikely to be sufficiently effective in ensuring accurate reporting, a complementary approach might be to adopt the following process for collecting, calculating, and publishing LIBOR rates. The BBA could collect quotes from all members of the expanded panel, and then randomly select a subset of 16 banks from which the trimmed mean would be calculated. The names and quotes for the 8 banks whose rates are averaged to calculate the LIBOR fixing would be published. The banks whose reports fall above or below the midrange would not be publicly identified,nor would the level of their outlying rates. This random sampling from an expanded panel would lessen the likelihood that the market would draw a negative inference regarding a particular bank's continued absence from the list of published quotes.

Banks: Making some or all of the individual quotes anonymous, so that even if the quotes refer to own-borrowing rates, banks at the high-end of the rate spectrum won't fear reporting accurately.

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