Top quality watches, replica watches, discount fake watches

By Jesse Riseborough

Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) — Core Mining Ltd. said interest from investors in its Avima deposit in the Democratic Republic of Congo increased after reports BHP Billiton Ltd. is seeking control of a nearby project in Gabon.

“That’s triggered some strong interest,” said Socrates Vasiliades, chief executive officer, in an interview. “We’re listening to proposals at the moment. If it helps fund us through to production, then why not. Let’s talk. It’s a race.”

The closely held company, which is studying a $4.5 billion iron-ore mine, port and rail project, counts OAO Severstal and Glencore International Plc as investors and is seeking to start output by 2015. BHP, the largest mining company, is in talks with Gabon on control of the nation’s biggest iron ore deposit, Belinga, two people familiar with the talks said last month.

Avima is about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the proposed Belinga site and may produce as much as 35 million metric tons of the steel-making raw material a year, making it one of the largest producing iron ore mines on the continent.

“Bringing in some expertise with an established player would be very good for the company and its shareholders,” Vasiliades said. Core said in November the deposit was estimated to hold about 1 billion tons of iron ore. Severstal acquired a 16.5 percent stake in Core Replica Watches, the company said in May 2010.

–Editor: Tony Barrett, Will Kennedy

To contact the reporter on this story: Jesse Riseborough in London at jriseborough@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Viljoen at jviljoen@bloomberg.net

Business Exchange E-mail Print READER DISCUSSION

By Peter Waldman

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) — A Pittsburgh doctor whose office was raided by government agents prescribed such “massive” dosages of narcotics that some drug stores refused to fill his orders, according to the owners of local pharmacies.

People who came in with prescriptions written by Oliver H. Herndon seemed too healthy to need large amounts of potent painkillers, said Adam Rice, who owns five Spartan Pharmacy stores. Rice said he and more than a dozen pharmacists conferred and agreed about six months ago not to fill his prescriptions. Timothy Davis, the owner of Beaver Health Mart Pharmacy in a Pittsburgh suburb, said he stopped honoring them after trying to verify a prescription with the doctor’s office.

One Sept. 8, 2009, slip signed by Herndon for a 45-day supply of Oxycontin — 360 80-milligram tablets — for a hospice patient named Gary Groomes included a note saying “special dosing” in parenthesis.

“That’s typical of the prescriptions we saw out of his office,” Rice said. “You don’t have to be a pharmacist to know that’s an outrageous amount of narcotic medication.”

Agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pennsylvania attorney general’s office searched Herndon’s office Feb. 14 and served him with a suspension order barring him from prescribing controlled substances, such as Oxycontin and Percocet. While not arrested or charged, he is the subject of an “ongoing” investigation, according to Gary Davis, the assistant special agent in charge of the DEA’s Pittsburgh office.

Tougher Regulations

Herndon didn’t respond to a message left with his answering service. An internist who is board certified in hospice and palliative medicine, according to his website Replica Watches, Herndon, 40, is the corporate medical director of Horizons Hospice of Pittsburgh, and the medical director of four nursing homes.

He was featured in a Bloomberg News story about his care of Groomes, who became addicted to narcotics while spending nearly three years in hospice care, according to his family and medical records. Groomes died at 52 last August, 10 months after he was discharged from hospice and dropped by Herndon as a patient, according to Groomes’ wife, Donna.

Herndon increased his narcotics to 2,880 milligrams a day, or 14 times what he took before he was on hospice, according to the records. The drugs included oxycodone, Oxyfast and Roxanol.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has proposed new rules for opioid narcotics, synthetic painkillers that act on the same brain receptors as opium. They are widely misused, according to the FDA’s website, which says a 2007 survey found more than half of abusers got them from a friend or relative.

The FDA proposal is to require manufacturers to distribute educational materials with opioid narcotics; doctors and nurses would have to undergo special training. The agency considered registries to track doctors who prescribe the drugs and patients who use them until the hospice and pain-management industries opposed the idea.

–Editors: Anne Reifenberg, Michael Hytha

To contact the reporter responsible for this story: Peter Waldman in San Francisco at pwaldman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Gary Putka at gputka@bloomberg.net

Business Exchange E-mail Print READER DISCUSSION

Chris Brown made plenty of enemies in Hollywood when he performed twice at the Grammy’s, and now he’s making enemies among regular people too by using ridiculous pickup lines. Brown was at the Lasio Professional Hair Care suite Grammy gift lounge on February 10 when he approached a woman and tried to ask her out in the weirdest way possible – he said, “Can I get your number? I promise I won’t beat you!” Brown’s friends immediately started laughing when they heard what he said and claimed, “That’s his new line!” The woman said she “wanted to throw up.” When asked about the line he used, Chris’s rep didn’t exactly deny that he said it. The rep simply said, “I’d be surprised if Chris said something that stupid.” Chris may not need to flirt with random women for much longer though. Sources insist he and Rihanna are still trying to work things out. They apparently hook up from time to time and were even spotted hanging out earlier this month.

Chris Brown already has a bad reputation for assaulting Rihanna in 2009 and he’s not making himself look any better in the public eye by freaking out on Twitter and using stupid pickup lines. He’s not the only star who’s tried it before though. Here are a few other celebrities that have used pickup lines too.

Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis doesn’t use them anymore, but admits that he loved coming up with pickup lines when he was younger. His technique involved working the lines into casual conversation – he once asked “Hey…what are you doing for sex later?” in the middle of a conversation.

Adam Sandler

Before actress Leslie Mann married Judd Apatow Herve leger, Adam Sandler hit on her in a club. Sandler wrote “nice back” on a napkin in ketchup and made his friend give it to Mann. So it wasn’t the most clever thing in the world, but it got her attention.

EUROZONE chiefs moved today towards closing a deal for a massive new bailout of Greece as leaders negotiated with banks on the key write-down of Athens' massive debt.

After months of acrimonious debate, markets rose as all sides expressed confidence that an agreement would be found to greenlight a €230 billion euro ($283 billion) financial lifeline, in exchange for strict surveillance of the Athens Government over coming years.

That despite grinding negotiations with private creditors on the sidelines of talks among finance ministers in Brussels, principally over a €5.5 billion gap needing to be filled if Germany and the Netherlands especially are to get the agreement past their national parliaments.

Greece’s Prime Minister Lucas Papademos and Finance Minister Evengelos Venizelos took turns scuttling in and out of talks with the representatives of the banks, officials said.

A mini-breakthrough was reached just after midnight (10am AEDT) when national eurozone central banks agreed to engage in their own write-down of Greek bonds.

"There’s a long way to go yet, but we wouldn’t still be in there if we didn’t think we would get there tonight," said one eurozone governmental source.

Greece, Germany, the IMF and the head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker Replica Watches, each maintained that a deal could be reached during the closed-door talks.

By Boris Groendahl

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) — Gianni Papa, the head of UniCredit SpA’s eastern Europe business Replica Watches, said liquidity requirements proposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision may not be suitable for the former communist countries.

“Basel 3 is bringing a problem from the liquidity point of view,” Papa said at a Euromoney conference in Vienna. “The definitions of liquid assets are too strict for the pecularities of central and eastern Europe,” he said, saying that they may disqualify assets from repurchasing operations.

Basel’s capital requirements are not a problem in eastern Europe, where many regulators have already required capital in excess of 10 percent of risk-weighted assets, he added.

To contact the reporter on this story: Boris Groendahl in Vienna at bgroendahl@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net

Business Exchange E-mail Print READER DISCUSSION

By Renee Bonorchis

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — Heyneke Meyer Replica Watches, rugby coach for South Africa’s Blue Bulls, is finalizing a contract to coach the country’s national team, the Springboks, City Press reported without saying where it got the information.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Renee Bonorchis at rbonorchis@bloomberg.net

Business Exchange E-mail Print READER DISCUSSION

By Wes Goodman

Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) — Treasuries snapped a rally that pushed five-year yields to a record low before a government report economists said will show U.S. gross domestic product growth quickened in the fourth quarter of last year.

Five-year inflation swaps, which allow investors to exchange fixed interest rates for returns equivalent to the consumer price index, rose to 2.26 percent yesterday, the most since August. The increase followed the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it’s considering taking additional measures to spur the U.S. economy.

“We’re going to get better numbers” in today’s report, said Kazuaki Oh’e, a debt salesman in Tokyo at CIBC World Markets Japan Inc., a unit of Canada’s fifth-largest lender. “With the Fed easing, it’s good for the economy. Investors may favor corporate bonds and other credit products over the safety of government bonds.”

Benchmark 10-year rates increased one basis point to 1.95 percent as of 10:07 a.m. in Tokyo, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices. The 2 percent security maturing in November 2021 fell 1/8, or $1.25 per $1,000 face amount, to 100 15/32.

Five-year notes yielded 0.78 percent, versus the record low of 0.75 percent set yesterday.

GDP grew at a 3 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, after advancing 1.8 percent in the previous three months, according to the median forecast of 79 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Auction Demand

Treasuries rallied for a second day yesterday as the Fed’s pledge to keep borrowing rates low through at least late 2014 and consider additional asset purchases pushed yields to the least on record at a government auction of seven-year notes.

The securities drew a yield of 1.359 percent, compared with the previous record low auction rate of 1.415 percent in November. Yields slid after Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke unexpectedly said the day before that bond buying is “an option that’s certainly on the table.”

“Bernanke gave people a free pass to buy the belly of the curve Replica watches,” Dan Mulholland, a Treasury trader in New York at RBC Capital Markets LLC Replica Watches, one of 21 primary dealers required to bid at government-debt auctions, said referring Treasuries maturing in the medium term. The “Fed announcement caught the market off guard.”

–With assistance from Susanne Walker in New York. Editors: Naoto Hosoda, Jonathan Annells

To contact the reporters on this story: Wes Goodman in Singapore at wgoodman@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rocky Swift at rswift5@bloomberg.net

Business Exchange E-mail Print READER DISCUSSION

By Sarah Jones Replica Watches

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) — U.K. stocks declined, sending the FTSE 100 Index down 0.3 percent to 5 Replica Watches,726.66 at 9:01 a.m. in London. The gauge rose as much as 0.2 percent.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Sarah Jones at sjones35@bloomberg.net

Business Exchange E-mail Print READER DISCUSSION

By Neil Callanan

(Adds NAMA’s loan purchases in last paragraph.)

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) — Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency is changing its management structure so that its lending and corporate finance teams report to Deputy Head of Portfolio Management Michael Moriarty rather than to the head of lending.

NAMA won’t appoint a new head of lending after Graham Emmett leaves, spokesman Ray Gordon said by phone today. Emmett, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker Floral oil paintings, is leaving by “mutual agreement” to return to the U.K., Gordon said Jan. 13.

The changes to the structure follow a review by former HSBC Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Mike Geoghegan that recommended restructuring NAMA’s portfolio management Dining Scenes oil paintings, credit and risk, lending and legal departments. NAMA must be transformed into an “entrepreneurial” business from a startup, otherwise it might “cost the Irish taxpayer a number of billion euros,” he wrote in the review sent to Finance Minister Michael Noonan Dec. 6.

NAMA was established to purge Ireland’s banks of 74.2 billion euros ($95 billion) of troubled commercial real-estate loans, for which it paid 31.7 billion euros. The agency plans to sell loan portfolios this year and it’s seeking to set up mortgage REITs to help sell 25 percent of its loan book by 2013, Chief Executive Officer Brendan McDonagh said in an October interview.

Ireland appointed Geoghegan last month to head a group set up to advise Noonan on NAMA’s strategy. The asset management agency has bought 11,500 real-estate loans related to 16,000 properties since it was set up, Chairman Frank Daly told a parliamentary committee on Sept. 9.

–Editors: Jeff St.Onge, Andrew Blackman.

To contact the reporter on this story: Neil Callanan in London at ncallanan@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Blackman in Berlin at ablackman@bloomberg.net.

Business Exchange E-mail Print READER DISCUSSION

Casual