It began with a startling, inexplicable explosion of anger over a seat on a D train. And then the passenger who had resisted giving up his seat was bleeding from stab wounds, staggering through the car, collapsing, dying.

The other passengers on the train at 2 a.m. Saturday — among them four photography students on their way home from burgers and beer in a Midtown restaurant — had just become witnesses to a murder. One of the students, Paola Nuñez Solorio, 30, chronicled the aftermath of the stabbing, ending her day as she had begun it, watching the world through her camera.

In the morning she had zoomed in on apartment-building courtyards for a school project. Now she was photographing frightened passengers, a wounded man tottering through the train, a killer standing at the end of the car.

She took 120 photographs in the mayhem that followed the stabbing, some out of focus, some a blur of passengers scrambling to get out of harm’s way, some showing the victim’s blood on the floor, some showing the victim’s body sprawled across the two seats he collapsed on.

New York City and its subways are far safer than they once were, but violence can still erupt, seemingly out of nowhere, and Ms. Nuñez’s photographs captured the harrowing moments in all their unfiltered, unvarnished reality.

Ms. Nuñez and her friends had been standing in the first car of the uptown D train after they boarded at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas. There were scattered empty seats, not enough for them to sit together, so they stood, talking about nothing in particular.

The train stopped at Rockefeller Center, and moments after it pulled out of the station, they realized something was wrong at the other end of their car.

“Everyone started running toward us,” Ms. Nuñez said. “We thought there was a fight. Then we saw this guy with blood coming out of his mouth, and the killer right behind him, putting this thing away. I didn’t know what it was.”

It was a knife, other passengers said.

Instinctively, Ms. Nuñez reached for her camera, a digital single-lens reflex model that did not need a flash to function in the fluorescent light of the car.

She and her friends had not noticed the suspect, identified by the police as Geraldo Sanchez, 37, an exterminator from the Bronx, when he boarded at Rockefeller Center. Nor had they realized that he had gone on a rampage at the other end of the car, spilling food and demanding that a passenger, Dwight Johnson, 36, vacate a seat beside one of the doors.

Mr. Johnson said there were other seats.

Mr. Sanchez said he wanted that seat. Soon he pulled out a knife and slashed Mr. Johnson’s hands and neck, witnesses said. Ms. Nuñez said Mr. Johnson staggered through the car, bleeding, with Mr. Sanchez right behind him.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said, and she and her friends realized they might be in danger: “We were stuck with the killer.”

The fear behind that thought deepened when someone pulled the emergency brake cord, freezing the train between Rockefeller Center and the Seventh Avenue station. The passengers were trapped in the car with the suspect and the dying victim longer than if the train had gone on to the station and had been met by the police.

As the train sat in the tunnel, the terrified passengers huddled together. Mr. Sanchez walked by and began trying to open the locked door leading to the next car. “We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said. “A guy standing with us said, ‘Don’t move.’ ”

Another passenger, a woman, fainted. The man with her tried to revive her, Ms. Nuñez said.

After several long minutes, the train started moving again. It pulled into the next station, at Seventh Avenue, but the doors remained closed.

One of Ms. Nuñez’s friends said it appeared that the two officers on the platform were waiting for backups to arrive. That left the passengers in the car feeling vulnerable anew. “People were looking at us like we were in the zoo,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified because she had not told her father that she had been at the scene.

Once the doors opened and the police stepped in, “We told them, ‘That’s the guy who killed him,’ ” the woman recalled. “They said, ‘Step aside.’ ”

She said Mr. Sanchez tried to blend in with the other passengers as police officers swarmed into the car. “The killer tried to be a part of us,” she said. She remembered hearing him say, “I didn’t do anything.”

Mr. Johnson was pronounced dead at the scene, the police said. Mr. Sanchez was charged with second-degree murder and weapons possession.

You can’t spell “sensual” without “SMS.”

National Geographic’s International Photography Contest attracts thousands of entries from photographers of all skill levels around the world every year. While this year’s entry deadline has passed, there is still time to view and vote for your favorites in the Viewer’s Choice competition. National Geographic was kind enough to let me choose a few of their entries from 2009 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 25 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers. (25 photos total)

Apparently, there’s a global oil scam making Bernie Madoff look like a petty thief.

If serial entrepreneur and Seeking Alpha columnist Philip Davis is to be believed, the world is being scammed out of $2.5 trillion, 50 times greater than the sum Madoff took from the duped investors.

According to Davis, the scam starts in 2000 with the formation of the ICE – the Intercontinental Exchange. The ICE – founded by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, Total, Shell, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale – is an online commodities and futures marketplace that exists outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.

After a Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003, the ICE was found to be facilitating “round-trip” trades. This is where one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm sells the same amount of energy back to the first company, at the same time and at the exact same price, as told by Davis.

No commodity ever changes hands

Quite shockingly no commodity ever changes hands, but the transactions still send a signal to the market, artificially boosting company revenue. Angry yet? There’s more.

Because the trading is unregulated by Washington, its difficult to gauge the scale on which “round-trip” trading takes place.

But when DMS Energy were investigated by Congress, the company admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were round-trip trades. This means 80 percent of all trades in that year were false trades. Not a drop of oil changed hands, but the balance sheets showed increased revenue.

The idea is to hike up commodity prices. For example, according to Davis, after the ICE turned commodity trading into a “speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn’t need the things that were not produced”, Goldman Sachs were able to triple the price of commodities in just five years.

ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand

The beauty (or rather the horror) of the scam outlined by Davis is that because they control the oil markets, the ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge consumers an extra dollar per gallon of gas. And whereas this may not seem like much, this $1 soon becomes $50 billion A MONTH as global drivers consume 1.7 billion gallons of gas every single day.

Whereas, at this stage, it would not be accurate or indeed wise to suggest what Philip Davis claims is either true or false, one cannot ignore the issue. There have been concerns for may years that global markets are controlled by a monopoly of mega-organizations, but there could be a strong case for suggesting the ICE is close to becoming just that – a super-organization with the power to push oil prices up or down.

Good luck Washington, you might just be getting a deluge of mail demanding answers.

The slide show below comes from SlideShare.net and gives a breakdown of the global oil scam.

Comparison of both economic and financial indicators between the two countries.

Recent news articles have brought to light the fact that almost 47% of households in the US currently have zero or negative federal tax liability. We take a closer look at this lack of liability across each income level, highlighting the percentage in each range that will not pay any taxes. Also shown is a full breakdown of who is paying the bulk of all taxes collected by the Federal Government each year.

Personal Finance
Software – Mint.com

What would you do if your net worth were $22 billion? If you were Indian businessman Mukesh Ambani, you might build yourself the world’s most expensive home. As designed by Chicago architecture firm Perkins + Will, the in-progress glass-tower is estimated at $1 billion and is known to feature, at the least, a health club, multiple “safe” rooms, 3 helipads, 168 parking spaces and require 600 servants to maintain, and physically, the structure stands at 27 stories, or 570 feet tall.

According to the Mumbai Mirror, the tower will also contain:

Floor for car maintenance Sources said the Ambanis would prefer to have all their cars serviced and maintained at an in-house service centre. This centre will be set up on the seventh floor.

Entertainment floor
The eighth floor will have an entertainment centre comprising a mini-theatre with a seating capacity of 50.

Balconies with gardens
The rooftop of the mini-theatre will serve as a garden, and immediately above that, three more balconies with terrace gardens will be independent floors.

The ‘health’ floors
While the ninth floor will a ‘refuge’ floor — meant to be used for rescue in emergencies — two floors above that will be set aside for ‘health.’ One of these will have facilities for athletics and a swimming pool, while the other will have a health club complete with the latest gym equipment.

Family
The four floors at the top, that will provide a view of the Arabian Sea and a superb view of the city’s skyline, will be for Mukesh, his wife Neeta, their three children and Mukesh’s mother Kokilaben.

Air space floor
According to the plan, two floors above the family’s residence will be set aside as maintenance areas, and on top of that will be an “air space floor,” which will act as a control room for helicopters landing on the helipad above.

With congress set to raise the limit on the national debt, let’s take a look at just how much money that is.
With a total statutory debt limit of $12.1 trillion ($12,100,000,000,000) and the U.S. population at 304 million (304,000,000), the debt per American is $39,800.

The U.S. debt is the total amount of money the government has borrowed (from its people and foreigners) in order to pay for past government spending. Some of the money has been invested in infrastructure like roads and education, while the rest has gone into political pork barrel projects, subsidies or social causes.

One way to think about the $39,000 is that it is the amount that the U.S. government has been charged on its credit card. If it is able to make more than the minimum payments with increased tax revenue and thus reduce its overall debt, then borrowing can be a good thing. But if it is unable, then the payments become a heavy burden on the government and the next generation.

Are you ready to pay your portion off?

Reporting from Las Vegas - What would appear to be a natural — a Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr. super fight — might not be. Egos, greed and grudges could get in the way.

“It’s a simple negotiation,” Ross Greenburg, HBO Sports president, said minutes after Pacquiao knocked down welterweight world champion Miguel Cotto twice en route to a 12th-round technical knockout Saturday.

“There’s so much money to be made. If it doesn’t happen, there’ll be a revolt. Nothing else is acceptable, and I’m speaking on behalf of the American public and the sport itself.”

But obstacles exist. Will the rich rivals fight over who gets more than a 50% cut of the purse? Of course. Can Mayweather and Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s promoter, set aside their deep personal dislike? Perhaps.

Richard Schaefer, the Golden Boy Promotions chief executive who has promoted Mayweather’s last three fights, expressed confidence that he’d be able to work with Arum to make a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.

Schaefer told The Times he planned to speak today with Mayweather and Arum. Pacquiao said, “It’s my job to fight. It’s my promoter’s job to pick the fight.”

Said Schaefer: “Bob and me — how often have we failed to make a big fight?”

Yet, that deal is expected to require a diplomatic effort on a scale usually reserved for the State Department.

Mayweather (40-0, 25 knockouts) formerly fought for Arum’s promotional company Top Rank after being an Olympian but left, saying he felt obscured by the popularity of former stablemate Oscar De La Hoya. The mega paydays that followed, against De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Juan Manuel Marquez, have emboldened the unbeaten star’s public statements that Arum shorts his fighters, including Pacquiao (50-3-2, 38 KOs).

Arum bluntly said this week that a deal will not hinge on whether he likes Mayweather — “and I don’t,” he said.

Pacquiao, usually polite, this month directed some verbal blows at Mayweather, saying he doesn’t think the fight will happen because of Mayweather’s attitude.

“I’m sure he doesn’t want to fight me,” Pacquiao said. “With Floyd, boxing is like a business. He doesn’t care about the people around him watching. He doesn’t care if the fight is boring. As long as the fight is over and he gets the money, it’s good. I want the people to be happy. If I was in the audience, I’m going to watch the boxing because it’s a good fight.”

Mayweather hasn’t launched back, but he does strongly believe he’s the world’s best fighter and has made it pretty clear he deserves the larger purse. He was considered the world’s top pound-for-pound fighter before retiring for more than a year and watching Pacquiao seize the title with the battering of De La Hoya, Hatton and Cotto.

Cotto went to the hospital after suffering facial cuts in the loss but said he planned to fight again, with possible foes being Shane Mosley or Antonio Margarito.

As for Pacquiao-Mayweather. . . .

“All we can do is try to encourage both sides to sit at a table and hammer out a deal,” said Greenburg, who likened the situation to the 1971 deal between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, when Ali returned from boxing exile to face the champion Frazier. They settled on a 50-50 purse split of $5 million, Greenburg said.

Why not 50-50 again, with so much cash available?

Mayweather and Pacquiao have displayed tremendous greed. Pacquiao kept asking for more money to fight Hatton in May until the Hatton camp nearly walked.

Now, Pacquiao probably will be able to say his fight with Cotto easily surpassed Mayweather’s million-seller against Juan Manuel Marquez in September. But Schaefer already has a reply.

“How did Pacquiao-Marquez do versus Mayweather-Marquez? How did Pacquiao-Oscar do versus Floyd-Oscar?” Schaefer said, well aware of the disparity.

Greenburg made it clear: “Floyd’s calling the shots for this fight to happen.”

And Arum’s matchmaker at Top Rank, Bruce Trampler, said it’s naive to believe intangibles like “the good of boxing” will influence the deal.

“This has nothing to do with that,” Trampler said. “These are two businessmen who are going to do what’s best for themselves.”

Said Schaefer: “Getting them together is a mega-fight that has to be made. We’d all have to be morons to not let this happen.”

[via: LA Times]

It seems as if not even Hollywood is exempt from the fact that life has a tendency to come full circle. Nicolas Cage saw his finances crumble this year, leaving the actor currently facing a tax bill of over $5 million as previously reported here. While Cage is in the process of suing his former financial advisor for mismanaging his funds, it looks like his dire financial straits may be temporarily fixed, and by none other than fellow A-lister Johnny Depp.

In a true “that’s what friends are for” move, the Public Enemies star has reportedly called his old friend to let him know that he will front “whatever he needs” to get him out of this crisis. Depp is generous in his financial and emotional support, possibly seeing the move as a way to pay Cage back for launching Depp’s stellar career: It was Nic who arranged for Depp, then an unknown musician, to meet with his agent, which led him to A Nightmare on Elm Street.

[Via: StyleCaster.com]