Sunday, March 3, 2013

Blackstone's Schwarzman's earnings flat in 2012; Apollo's Black gains

(Reuters) - The earnings of Blackstone Group LP head Stephen Schwarzman were flat in 2012 at more than $200 million, while Leon Black, the CEO at private equity rival Apollo Global Management LLC , closed in on him with a 73 percent rise in his earnings.

Black's 2012 earnings rose to $180.2 million, while Schwarzman's earnings were $213.3 million, according to separate regulatory filings by the two firms on Friday.

The two buyout kings saw a big rise in dividends from their stakes in the firms they founded. Schwarzman, however, received just $800,000 in 2012 from funds predating Blackstone's initial public offering in 2007, compared with the $74 million he received from these funds in 2011.

Private equity firms took advantage of buoyant equity and debt markets in 2012 to sell many of their investments, leading to bumper profits for their fund managers who receive performance fees in the form of so-called carried interest.

Schwarzman and Black, who are both billionaires, receive other income through their own investments in their funds, which is not disclosed. Schwarzman had a net worth of $5.2 billion as of September 2012, while Black had a net worth of $3.5 billion, according to Forbes.

KKR & Co LP's co-founders and chief executives, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, received about $137 million and $141 million, respectively, in executive compensation and cash dividends in 2012, up by more than 45 percent over what they received in 2011.

Most of Schwarzman's and Black's profits came from their ownership stakes in their firms. Schwarzman, who has a 21 percent stake in Blackstone, received $204.1 million, up from $134.5 million in 2011. Black, who holds a 24 percent in Apollo, received $179.9 million, up from $103.9 million.

Schwarzman, 66, received $8.4 million in compensation, which includes a $350,000 salary. Black, 61, received just $287,368, of which just $100,000 is salary. The rest includes carried interest the two men are entitled to as chief fund managers.

Blackstone had $210.2 billion of assets under management as of the end of last year, making it the world's largest alternative asset manager, while Apollo had $113.4 billion. KKR & Co LP had $75.5 billion, and Carlyle Group LP had $170 billion.

CO-FOUNDERS

Schwarzman co-founded Blackstone in 1985 with Peter Peterson and in 2002 brought in veteran investment banker Tony James as his right-hand man. Black founded Apollo in 1990 together with Joshua Harris and Marc Rowan.

James, 62, is Blackstone's president and chief operating officer. He got about $66 million from salary, bonus and holdings in the private equity firm in 2012. That compares with $52.6 million in 2011 and follows his $64.2 million sale of a small portion of his shares last month.

Black's partners Harris, 48, and Rowan, 50, who each own 15 percent of Apollo, took $114.5 million apiece for 2012 in dividends. They got $66.1 million each for 2011.

Apollo also said senior employees had committed about $1 billion of their own money into the private equity firm's funds from its inception through the end of last year.

The amount of distributions, including profits and return of capital, in 2011 from these investments was $88.5 million for Black, $26.2 million for Rowan and $33 million for Harris. However, Apollo does not disclose how much the actual profits from these investments were.

Black, Rowan and Harris, respectively, invested $15.6 million, $18.2 million and $4.2 million in Apollo's funds in 2011. But in 2012 they invested, respectively, only $46,868, $1.7 million and $97,631, Apollo said.

Blackstone does not disclose Schwarzman's and James's income from investments in Blackstone's funds.

Carlyle's founders, William Conway, Daniel D'Aniello and David Rubenstein, in 20122 received $134 million each in cash distributions and $3.8 million in executive compensation. Their 2012 earnings will be disclosed in a regulatory filing later this month.

(Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blackstones-schwarzmans-earnings-flat-2012-apollos-black-gains-043610356--sector.html

PGA Championship 2012 John Witherspoon george michael usain bolt Closing Ceremony London 2012 Tom Daley Leryn Franco

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Sequester Real Talk: The 3 Dumbest Things About This Truly Dumb Law (Atlantic Politics Channel)

Share With Friends: Share on FacebookTweet ThisPost to Google-BuzzSend on GmailPost to Linked-InSubscribe to This Feed | Rss To Twitter | Politics - Top Stories News, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/288392918?client_source=feed&format=rss

acapulco mexico hines ward robert deniro mexico news the talented mr ripley weather new orleans orcl

New home for sporting youngsters in Stockcross - Newbury Today


Reporter: Ellis Barker Newbury News Reporter

Email: ellis.barker@newburynews.co.uk
Contact: 01635 886639

sportPLANS for a new pavilion at Stockcross recreational ground have been submitted to West Berkshire Council.

If planning permission is granted, the current pavilion will be demolished and replaced with a new facility to include changing rooms and showers as well as a kitchen and club room which will be available for hire.

The recreation ground is home to AFC Newbury boys and girls football teams, and chairwoman of Speen Parish Council, Meg John, said the new facility will be welcomed.

She said: ?The past year has been an exciting time for the recreation ground in Stockcross.

?The children?s play area was improved, while the ground itself was granted Queen Elizabeth II Fields in Trust status as part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

?In addition, through partnership working with AFC Newbury for whom Stockcross is their home ground, funding for a new sports pavilion has so far been secured from Sport England, The Greenham Common Trust and Fields in Trust.

?The recreation ground is an idyllic setting for many types of sporting activity including football, tennis and cricket and it is hoped that a pavilion will provide the basic accommodation needed to support such activities.?

The new pavilion will also improve facilities for Stockcross Tennis Club whose current centre has no electricity.

A new access road to the site from the existing car park, accessible from Ermin Street, will also be installed as well as an overspill car park for an additional ten vehicles, two of which will be disabled spaces.

More detailed plans will be drawn up once the extent to fundraising is confirmed.

A decision is expected from West Berkshire Council by April 5.

?

Don't forget to read the Newbury Weekly News ? Berkshire's largest?selling local newspaper ? out each Thursday morning.

This entry was posted in News. Bookmark the permalink.

Source: http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/2013/new-home-for-sporting-youngsters-in-stockcross

george michael usain bolt Closing Ceremony London 2012 Tom Daley Leryn Franco The Campaign Kinesio tape

Give Your Real Estate Marketing Efforts a Boost

With the real estate market being as competitive as it is, savvy realtors know that they need to expand their efforts in every direction in order to capture leads. Enter the online world, an environment that has drastically changed the way real estate marketing is done.

Point2 has been at the forefront of online real estate marketing for more than 10 years now. Its flagship product Point2 Agent was launched in 2002 and was built to provide advanced marketing tools for real estate professionals. These tools include:

Real estate websites for agents

Agents can create websites for their business and even for each individual property, which are professionally designed and very easy to maintain. Additionally, these real estate websites are optimized in order to attract search engine traffic and traffic from mobile devices. The latter has increased steadily over the years, and it's projected to get to one third of the total paid traffic in the USA by the end of 2013. With the CPCs generally lower than on other devices, mobile traffic is still a great opportunity.

Listing Syndication

Listing syndication gives agents the opportunity to distribute and advertise their listings on over 60 of the most visited real estate marketplaces on the Internet. Agents have complete control over where the listings are sent. Additionally, listing syndication partners are being added on a regular basis.

Lead Management

Effective lead management can make all the difference in the real estate business. The Point2 Agent suite provides agents with tools that are effective at attracting leads and managing relationships through the sales cycle. Agents can customize what listings to show to prospective clients based on past behavior, setup email campaigns, generate leads with custom web forms and more.

Point2 Homes

Point2 Homes is a real estate listings portal that provides homes for sale and rent and a comprehensive data package. You can browse through millions of listings by using the powerful map search engine. Additionally, you can customize your search and filter by price range, number of bedrooms or bathrooms, property type, square footage and more. The data package offers comprehensive property reports that offer property overview, sales history, ownership information and much more.

Last but not least, Point2 offers IDX solutions that help agents capture more leads by displaying more listings. So go ahead and try the complete marketing toolkit offered by Point2. You will find it very valuable in your real estate marketing efforts.


Published: March 1, 2013

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.




Source: http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/20130301_remarketingefforts.htm

gregg williams theraflu masters leaderboard frozen four joe avezzano kanye west theraflu joey votto

Friday, March 1, 2013

Important control mechanism behind autoimmune diseases discovered

May 4, 2010 ? Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have discovered a new control mechanism in our immune system. The discovery is of potential significance to the treatment of serious diseases such as MS (multiple sclerosis), rheumatoid arthritis, and SLE (Systemic lupus erythematosus).

"Now that we've started to understand the regulatory mechanisms involved in these autoimmune diseases, we are hopeful that new treatments can be found," says Mikael Karlsson, associate professor at the Department of Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Solna, and one of the team behind the study now published in the highly reputed periodical, The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

An important component of our immune defence is a type of cell called a B cell. Normally, the job of these cells is to produce antibodies, which in turn bind to and neutralise invasive microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses. In people with an autoimmune disease, explains Dr Karlsson, these B cells actually have an injurious effect and instead of serving the body, are activated against its own tissues, which they start to break down.

Patients with SLE and other autoimmune diseases have lower levels of so-called NKT cells. Previously, it was not known what part these cells play in the origin and development of the disease; now, however, the research group at KI has shown that this deficiency is a contributory pathogenic factor.

"We've demonstrated that NKT cells can regulate how B cells become activated against healthy tissue, and that a lack of NKT cells results in greater misguided B cell activation," says Dr Karlsson. "So now we can mechanically link the NKT cell defect in patients to the disease."

The study also shows that the NKT cells directly impede faulty B cell activation, and that they do so early in the misdirected process. The team managed to inhibit the activity of pathogenic B cells by adding NKT cells -- a result that may one day lead to new types of treatment.

"This means that new treatments specifically targeting the protective NKT cells can help this patient group," concludes Dr Karlsson.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Karolinska Institutet.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. F. Wermeling, S. M. Lind, E. D. Jordo, S. L. Cardell, M. C. I. Karlsson. Invariant NKT cells limit activation of autoreactive CD1d-positive B cells. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 2010; 207 (5): 943 DOI: 10.1084/jem.20091314

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://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/UR3WaKi9EQc/130301085633.htm

fenway park philadelphia flyers 4/20 student loan forgiveness ufc 145 weigh ins record store day 2012 detroit red wings

Kinetica comes into its own with illusory adventures

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

IMG_2263.jpg

One, two, three by Trope Scope

It?s that time of year again. This year?s Kinetica Artfair has opened in London to the delight of many science-minded art explorers.

The theme of illusion and reality runs strongly through many of the exhibits and performances this year, and this thread helps transform what has in the past seemed like a playground for grown-ups into something more enriching.

Angel In My Peripheral Vision by Chris Levine (see video above) plays on a quirk of our vision to produce an image just on the edge of perception. Turn your head, and you catch a glimpse of a figure, but look straight at the artwork and all you see is a human-height column of flickering green LEDs.

Playing with the phenomenon of persistence of vision is a theme in other works such as Tim Lewis?s Transformer, which uses a strobe light to animate a small man running inside a hamster wheel, and Mechanical Flipbook?s Horse in Motion, which recalls Eadweard Muybridge?s pioneering work in the field.

Taking things a step further, Trope Scope present One, two, three, a sculpture-cum-experiment that comes out of the multidisciplinary Diasynchronoscope Project at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Designed by artists Carol MacGillivray and Bruno Mathez as part of the project, the piece is used to investigate how our brains construct a continuous visual stream from discrete objects. ?Most perception experiments use screens,? says Mathez, ?but a screen is not reality. We can represent reality in a much better way by positioning the viewer within a room and playing with space and depth. We can control the experiments very precisely.?

They will be investigating apparent movement - the way that we perceive frames of a film to be a continual flow of information. Everyone consumes movies all the time, MacGillivray says, but most of us don?t really know why we see them move, or what the thresholds are to seeing movement.

One, two, three is a stunning piece of art in its own right. It combines audio-visual elements that nod to MacGillivray?s experience in animation with a sculptural element that brings the projections into the realm of the real.

Other works play with our instinctive reactions to visual stimuli. Madi Boyd has worked with psychologists and neuroscientists who look at how we first respond to visual stimuli and then try to interpret what we?re looking at.

In Fragment Cinema, she draws us in with a completely abstract light projection emerging from a prism-shaped box, but also presents us with an almost-interpretable film element projected onto the outside of the box to engage us at the second, interpretation, stage.

The video hints at a narrative that the viewer can almost, but not quite, unravel. We linger as the images flicker by looking for the next clue, the next pattern that might explain the whole.

In its fifth year, Kinetica Artfair is coming into its own. With a series of performances over the weekend and a host of other fun and interactive exhibits, it?s certainly worth a visit.

If you?re in London and in the mood for more art this weekend, Art13, an art fair for international up-and-coming artists, has some science-related treats too, including taxidermy artist Polly Morgan?s Foundations/Rename - a tower made of casts of a crow?s femur - and Catharina Van Eetvelde?s Subject of the Sun, prints that call to mind Galileo?s struggle with the Catholic church.

Kinetica Artfair runs until Sunday at Ambika P3 (opposite the London Planetarium), University of Westminster, London

Art13 runs until Sunday at Kensington Olympia, London


Follow @CultureLabNS on Twitter

Like us on Facebook

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/291b9017/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A130C0A30Ckinetica0Eartfair0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

quinton coples a.j. jenkins riley reiff david decastro aj jenkins shea mcclellin nfl draft 2012

With 'SNL' gig, Kevin Hart continues to rise

This Feb. 26, 2013 photo released by NBC shows cast member Jason Sudeikis, left, and guest host Kevin Hart during rehearsals for "saturday Night Live," in New York. Hart will host the show on Saturday, March 2, with musical guest Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. (AP Photo/NBC, Dana Edelson)

This Feb. 26, 2013 photo released by NBC shows cast member Jason Sudeikis, left, and guest host Kevin Hart during rehearsals for "saturday Night Live," in New York. Hart will host the show on Saturday, March 2, with musical guest Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. (AP Photo/NBC, Dana Edelson)

(AP) ? Like most people who get the chance to host "Saturday Night Live," Kevin Hart is excited to have the gig.

Unlike most hosts, Hart is proving to be complicated.

For starters, the 32-year-old comedian-actor doesn't like making eye contact. When he writes his jokes, he has to do it in a "think tank" ? alone, in his home.

He also has to stand on top of an apple box when performing. Sometimes, he has to stand on two of them.

That's why collaborating with the "SNL" cast and crew feels like a new process for Hart, who is hosting the NBC show this weekend.

"I am what you would a call a genius," said Hart, as the "SNL" cast and crew burst into laughter.

"So this process here is a little different. ... A lot of people came in the room and were looking into my eyes and it threw me off a little bit," he says jokingly, but in a serious tone. "So I just closed my eyes and let them talk and kind of took it all in. And then I recited everything they said."

Hart was in good spirits and self-deprecating ? as usual ? as he shot "SNL" promos with Jason Sudeikis and Bobby Moynihan on Tuesday.

His hosting gig on "SNL" is another notch on his growing resume: He hosted last year's MTV Video Music Awards, has appeared on ABC's "Modern Family" and starred in the romantic comedy "Think Like a Man."

He's also the star of the BET parody series "Real Husbands of Hollywood" (Tuesday, 10 p.m. EST) with Robin Thicke and Nick Cannon. The Philadelphia-born Hart said he's "anxious," but not worried, about hosting "SNL."

"You can't get nervous about what you love to do. This is what I love to do, so the opportunity to do it on this stage is ridiculous," he said.

Duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, known for their hit "Thrift Shop," will perform Saturday night. Hart says he's a fan of group ? sort of.

"I am a fan now 'cause I found out who they were when I realized they were going to be on the show with me. So because of the Internet and the Google search, I Googled them," he said, as others laughed. "I educated myself ? almost another genius move of mine ? to think to Google somebody that I didn't know."

So is Hart enjoying the group's massive, multiplatinum anthem about buying used clothes?

"I didn't hear that. Didn't hear that one. Don't know what that one is," he said. "But I heard some other stuff. Don't really know the titles. But I know (Macklemore's) white ? from Google."

___

Online:

http://www.khartonline.com/index.html

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-02-28-US-People-Kevin-Hart/id-cf48304e2fd94d7fac94d5cf298a1114

michigan primary daytona 500 winner cleveland plain dealer john scott barry sanders barry sanders jimmie johnson