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Dans les années 80 grâce au Régime Épargne Actions imaginé par Jacques Parizeau, les Conseillers en Gestion Informatique (maintenant mieux connu sous l’acronyme CGI) ont pu lever les capitaux nécessaires à l’acquisition stratégique de BST. Parti d’un chiffre d’affaire annuelle de 138 000$, le Groupe CGI génère maintenant des ventes annuelles de 4,3 milliards $ et emploie 25 000 personnes! Le RÉA a été un levier formidable pour le QUÉBEC Inc. 250 nouvelles sociétés québécoises ont ainsi vu le jour. Sico, Laperrière et Verreault, Héroux-Devtek, Van Houtte, Provigo, Jean Coutu, Transcontinental, Couche-Tard, Transat…

En 2012, à part les fonds syndicaux FTQ et CSN, les opportunités de financement pour les entrepreneurs québécois sont plutôt rares. Bien peu savent que le RÉA II est en fonction. Il faut dire qu’il est tellement édenté qu’on peine à le trouver séduisant! Il offre toujours une déduction à 100% de l’impôt provincial, mais impossible de réclamer simultanément la déduction REER.

Quelques sociétés d’exceptions dont D-BOX, Paladin Cheap windows 7 key, MTY Foods, Mines Richmont, Transforce, Intact et Médiagrif ont réussi à s’y qualifier. Christian Cyr est gestionnaire de petites capitalisations chez Fiera (Natcan). Il connaît bien le RÉA puisqu’il administre le plus gros fonds du genre. Selon lui Office 2007 Key, la demande du public est toujours là, mais les conditions actuelles du régime ferment carrément le robinet!

«On travaille avec un bassin très limité de 100 à 120 compagnies. L’intérêt est soutenu, mais on peine à investir les sommes qu’on nous confie ». Son acolyte de Fiera, Alexandre Dobbie en rajoute; «Il y a des barrières administratives pour les firmes de valeurs mobilières, un plafond très bas de 200 millions en actif total pour l’admissibilité des sociétés et l’obligation d’avoir le siège social au Québec.»

Concrètement Windows 7 Activation Key, il y a des minières extrêmement bien positionnées pour croître avec le plan NORD. Tous leurs travailleurs sont au QUÉBEC. Un ou deux administrateurs sont en Ontario ou en Alberta et paf!… Les voilà exclues du RÉA II. Une autre règle inexplicable qui n’embête pas les fonds FTQ et CSN. Talisman, BP, CITIGROUP, Power Corp…et des dizaines d’autres sociétés étrangères sont bien au chaud dans le fonds FTQ et bénéficient des généreux crédits d’impôt du Québec! 2 poids, 2 mesures. Hello! Quelqu’un va se réveiller?

Christian Cyr prétend qu’ «il faut se donner les moyens de ses ambitions… Rehausser l’actif à 300 ou 400 millions et assouplir l’admissibilité, ça amènerait d’autres sociétés et gestionnaires institutionnels à proposer le RÉA II. L’effet d’entraînement va finir par augmenter la popularité»

Martin Coiteux, économiste et professeur aux HEC soulève un point très pertinent. Offrir une réduction supplémentaire du gain en capital sur les petites sociétés québécoises voir, une déduction en cas de perte inciterait peut-être davantage les petits investisseurs à s’y intéresser. Coincés entre le Plan Nord qui favorise les géants industriels et les Fonds de Syndicats, dites-moi où nos jeunes entrepreneurs peuvent-ils trouver des appuis et capitaux au service de leur créativité? Est-ce que l’ancien PDG du fonds de la FTQ (1997-2001) et actuel ministre des Finances du Québec, Raymond Bachand a la volonté d’offrir un VRAI RÉA aux épargnants?

Sholom Rubashkin

Photograph by Christopher Gannon/AP Images.

Sholom Rubashkin, it’s easy to argue, is bad for the Jews. He’s the man who was in charge of Agriprocessors, which was the largest kosher meat producer in the country when its plant in Postville, Iowa, became the site of a huge 2008 immigration raid that led to the detention of 389 workers. A succession of mostly rural Guatemalans pled guilty to breaking immigration laws in a four-day mass processing that took place in makeshift courtrooms on a cattle fairground. The immigrants spent months in jail and were deported.

Rubashkin, meanwhile cheap replica watches, was charged with 69 counts of harboring illegal immigrants for profit, 83 violations of child labor law, and 91 counts of bank fraud. He was tried on the bank fraud counts and found guilty of an accounting scheme that included depositing his company’s funds into the accounts of a kosher grocery store and a Jewish private school. Rubashkin was later acquitted on the child labor charges, and the government dropped the immigration charges in light of the bank fraud conviction. But those developments are almost an aside given the voluminous evidence of corrupt and illegal business practices. Agriprocessors already had a bad reputation, with sanctions for worker safety and environmental violations going back to 2004. The Jewish Daily Forward investigated, as did a group of Conservative Jewish leaders. And so the protests by some Jewish groups that Rubashkin’s prosecution was a product of anti-Semitism seem knee-jerk and unfounded. (Even if it is weird that U.S. authorities fought bail for Rubashkin by arguing that he was a flight risk because of Israel’s right of return for Jews.)

Still, it was kind of crazy for prosecutors to ask for a life sentence for bank fraud. A group of former attorneys general and U.S. attorneys called this sentencing request extreme, and the prosecutors backed down a bit, to 25 years. And then Judge Linda Reade sent Rubashkin to prison for 27 years—which essentially was a life sentence for the 50-year-old defendant. The heavy punishment is one reason why an assortment of lawyers and law professors, of various ideological stripes, want the Supreme Court to hear Rubashkin’s appeal. The other aspect of Rubashkin’s case that’s attracting attention is stranger. It involves the role that Judge Reade played in helping the U.S. attorney’s office plan the raid of the Postville plant.

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The government started planning the May 2008 raid in October 2007. Anticipating hundreds of arrests, prosecutors contacted Judge Reade about how to handle them. Reade has characterized the weekly meetings that followed as nothing more than “logistical cooperation” that was no different than her involvement in “other multiple-defendant cases.” But a Freedom of Information Act request from the defense (which the government initially resisted) turned up emails, memos, and presentations describing the judge’s involvement as going beyond logistics and including “charging strategies.” Reade said she was “willing to support the operation in any way possible.” The government also described the judge as a “stakeholder” in the operation. And after the raid, Reade did in fact act like she had a stake in how it was perceived, telling the New York Times that prosecutors “have tried to be fair in their charging” and saying that immigration lawyers who were critical of the mass processing, “do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges.”

Should Reade have recused herself—decided not to preside over Rubashkin’s trial and sentencing—given her involvement in planning the raid? A federal appeals court rejected that argument last year, mostly on procedural grounds. Rubashkin’s lawyers let a deadline pass for asking for a recusal and only raised the issue after the trial, which poses a problem for him on appeal. Still, in asking the Supreme Court to take the case, Rubashkin’s lawyers—who now include former Solicitor General Paul Clement—are asking the justices to take a stand on Reade’s participation in the immigration raid planning. The argument is that Reade and the prosecutors had an obligation to tell Rubashkin’s lawyers about all that pre-raid planning. Except in very limited circumstances, judges aren’t allowed to meet with one side in a case without the other, and so those weekly meetings broke the rules. Several friend-of-the-court briefs have been written in support of Rubashkin’s position, or are on the way, and the signers include former judges and U.S. attorneys. One of the briefs was co-authored by my sister Lara, who is a clinical teaching fellow at the University of California Hastings law school, and lawyer Allison Ehlert.

In response, Reade and the government have said there’s nothing to see here. The judge attended all those meetings simply to save her court a headache. Her support for the raid was about logistics, nothing more, and there’s no reason that wearing her administrative hat would have biased her against Rubashkin once she put her judge hat back on. Maybe so. But judges aren’t just supposed to be impartial, they’re supposed to make sure they don’t create the appearance of bias. Wouldn’t it be better, as a general rule, if judges who meet regularly with prosecutors in advance of a cascade of high-profile indictments didn’t hear the cases that follow? Rubashkin’s prosecution was the culmination of the raid replica watches, in a sense. Getting him was the best way to justify the spectacle of the processing of the sad sack Guatemalans on the cattle fairground, which we know from her comments to the New York Times Reade felt she had to defend (and which another federal judge in Iowa later called a “travesty”).

The larger problem here is that, practically speaking, federal judges have enormous leeway in deciding whether to take themselves off a case because of potential bias or perceived bias. When they make a bad call, there are rarely any consequences. In all likelihood, the Supreme Court will turn Rubashkin down and refuse to intervene this time, too. The jury who convicted Rubashkin sat for 18 days and reviewed more than 9 replica watches,000 exhibits, and the justices probably have as little appetite for a do-over as they do for smacking down Judge Reade. But even if you can’t bring yourself to care much about the fate of Sholom Rubashkin, the oddities of this case don’t sit well. Judges shouldn’t be able to make up their own rules for policing themselves.

The morning after President Obama announced that he was for marriage equality, I pulled the cord that opened the curtains in my bedroom and I sensed that something was different. Was it just that the sun was shining after days of rain, I wondered, or was it the cherry blossoms that had fallen during the night and made the grass look like there’d been a snow storm? I felt as if I were looking out at a totally different world and then I remembered what it was. President Obama had spoken at last and the world was new.

Why was that day different than any other day? Nothing had really changed to give my partner of over fifty years and me any new legal rights. We still couldn’t leave our estates to each other without excessive taxes, nor could we give each other money as married people can, and we would still have difficulty getting hospital rights for each other in most of the states in the country. So why was it a day that I knew would go down in history? I have just, inadvertently, revealed the reason. I wrote “partner,” not spouse or husband. Even after fifty some years of being together and eight of being legally married in Massachusetts, I still am cautious Tattoo Machines For Sale, still living a Double Life (as the book Norman Sunshine and I wrote together is called) subconsciously but now I wouldn’t have to do it any longer. I could say out loud anywhere to anyone “this is my spouse” (I’m not crazy about the word husband since it still connotes one person being more in charge than the other, although that will change in time). I can shout it if I want to Buy Tattoo Gun, because the leader of the most important country in the world, our president Homemade Tattoo Guns, has said that it is right. For the first time in over half a century of living with what almost caused me to kill myself as a young adult, forced me to leave home too young because I was afraid my parents would discover my shame, sent me to an analyst to try to cure my disease and caused me to live a secret life until I found someone to love who helped me face the world — for the first time it was all right. It’s as if I had been diagnosed with a fatal cancer and had just been told that the x-rays were wrong and I was perfectly well.

Norman and I have not suffered, as many gay people have, because we were luckier and could assimilate more easily in show business and the art world. We were not brutalized, except when we were young, and we had somewhat successful lives. But I think how different it would have been if we had grown up, as I pray young gays, lesbians and trans-genders will, in a world of acceptance. I know we would have contributed more to others and to our community instead of staying off by ourselves so much of the time where we could hide our love without fear. I also know that it isn’t going to change overnight. I always thought that same sex marriage would one day be the law of the land but it would come too late for us because we were getting older. It doesn’t matter anymore. Obama has taken us to the top of the mountain and shown us the way the world will be. That is enough for us to know that the ones who come after us will have a better life.

This undated photo provided by Virgin Atlantic shows its newly redesigned Upper Class Cabin as part of the airline’s £100 million Upper Class product investment. Highlights of the new cabin include the new bar, whhich Virgin says the longest in the sky Tattoo Tubes, bespoke Swarovski crystal curtains adorned with over 1,000 crystals and new cabin mood lighting to create eight separate atmospheres during the flight. The lighting is designed to help passengers relax, fall asleep and adjust to time zones.  (AP Photo/Virgin Atlantic)

South Norwalk Setting Tattoo Machine, CT – Virgin Atlantic has rolled out a new business class seat that the airline says turns into the longest bed in its class.

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The 7-foot, 3-inch bed is part of a $162 million overhaul of the airline’s Upper Class cabin. The revamp took four and a half years to design.

Highlights of the new cabin include a brand new bar — the longest in the sky — which stretches 8 feet and has can accommodate eight passengers, Swarovski curtains with more than 1,000 crystals and new cabin mood lighting with 8 different color schemes. The lighting is designed to help passengers relax, fall asleep and adjust to time zones.

Each seat has a 12.1-inch touchscreen monitor with a touchscreen handset. Passengers can connect their smartphone, USB stick or tablet to the system and watch, read or listen to their own content, plus charge the device.

The first plane with the new design went into service on April 21. Virgin will roll it out on other planes throughout 2012. Virgin’s in-house design team partnered with Pengelly Design for the seats and VW+BS for the bar and interior.

This undated photo provided by Virgin Atlantic shows the bar in its newly redesigned Upper Class Cabin as part of the airline’s £100 million Upper Class product investment. The new bar, which Virgin says is the longest in the sky, stretches eight feet and has space to accommodate eight passengers Piercing Machine, bespoke Swarovski crystal curtains adorned with over 1,000 crystals and new cabin mood lighting to create eight separate atmospheres during the flight. The lighting is designed to help passengers relax, fall asleep and adjust to time zones.  (AP Photo/Virgin Atlantic)

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO air strikes killed 72 civilians in Libya last year, Human Rights Watch said on Monday, accusing the western alliance of failing to acknowledge the scope of collateral damage it caused during the campaign that helped oust Muammar Gaddafi.

In a report based on investigations at bombing sites during and after the conflict, the New York-based HRW said NATO strikes killed 20 women and 24 children. It called on the alliance to compensate civilian victims and investigate attacks that may have been unlawful.

“Attacks are allowed only on military targets, and serious questions remain in some incidents about what exactly NATO forces were striking Missoni Dresses sale,” Fred Abrahams, special adviser at HRW, said in a statement.

The report claims to be the most extensive investigation to date of civilian casualties from NATO’s air campaign and presents a higher death toll estimate than a March paper by Amnesty International which documented 55 civilian deaths, including 16 children and 14 women.

NATO considers its Libya operation highly successful, illustrating the allies’ ability to work well together in a limited campaign. NATO carried out some 26,000 sorties including some 9,600 strike missions and destroyed about 5,900 targets before operations ended on October 31.

The alliance said the campaign had been conducted with “unprecedented care and precision and to a standard exceeding that required by international humanitarian law”.

“NATO did everything possible to minimize risks to civilians, but in a complex military campaign, that risk can never be zero,” said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu in a statement.

“We deeply regret any instance of civilian casualties for which NATO may have been responsible.”

HRW acknowledged that NATO had taken care to minimize civilian casualties and added that countries such as Russia that had made claims of large-scale civilian deaths did so “to score political points”.

But Abrahams, principal author of the report, said the care NATO took during the campaign was “undermined by its refusal to examine the dozens of civilian deaths.”

Concerns about civilian deaths in Libya could hamper NATO’s ability to carry out future operations outside the territory of its members, in North America and Europe.

Although Russia co-sponsored the U.N. resolution authorizing intervention in Libya, it later said NATO had “grossly violated” its mandate. This was a factor earlier this year when Russia opposed a U.N. resolution calling for action to stop the violence in Syria.

HRW highlighted an attack on the village of Majer, 160 km (100 miles) east of Tripoli on August 8, when NATO air strikes on two family compounds killed 34 civilians and wounded more than 30.

HRW said NATO had told it that the Majer compounds were a “staging base and military accommodation” for Gaddafi forces, but had not provided specific information to support that claim.

“During four visits to Majer Buy Karen Millen Dresses, including one the day after the attack, the only possible evidence of a military presence found by Human Rights Watch was a single military-style shirt – common clothing for many Libyans – in the rubble of one of the three destroyed houses,” it said.

NATO said it had now looked into each credible allegation of harm to civilians and confirmed that the targets struck “were legitimate military targets, selected in a manner consistent with the U.N. mandate”.

(Reporting by Sebastian Moffett; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

World Libya

The crossover segment is quickly overpopulating many automaker’s lineups (think Mazda and Ford), and Toyota is the latest to join the fray. The folks from Aichi Japan are only a couple months away from launching a production version of the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show’s FSC concept in their home market. The concept blended SUV utility and station wagon styling queues with a platform that’s based on the Camry to give Toyota another entry in what may be the hottest segment in the industry. The for-sale vehicle will be named Mark X Zio in Japan Tattoo Supplies, and it will cart around six or seven passengers via the power of a 2.4- or 3.5-liter engine.

No word yet on whether the Mark X Zio will ever be made available in the US market, but if does ever grace our shores Tattoo Supplies, we doubt the awkward name will make the trek.

[Source: Winding Road]

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Has that yellow Lamborghini Gallardo been sitting on the lawn for a while because it’s simply not getting you the attention you want? Or have all those other LP560-4 owners made it too hard for you to use the Phone Number Collecting Set? If so, STRUT could have just the right bit of jazz to put the rage back in your bull.

An 11-piece accessory kit in carbon fiber and steel includes grilles for the front, side DKNY Dresses sale, and rear intakes, and the engine cover and bumper vents Buy Christian Audigier Clothing, as well as a STRUT shield for the front of the car. According to STRUT, the accessories give the Lambo “a disctinct Karen Millen Dresses sale, personalized appearance,” because pulling up to the party in a Gallardo just wasn’t distinctive enough. The price of personalization: $25,000 for the basic set, $35 Replica Herve Leger gown,000 if you gotta be a baller and choose the titanium edition. And no Buy Karen Millen Dresses, that doesn’t include the STRUT wheels — those are $9,000 extra.

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[Source: STRUT]

Chrysler Pentastar V6 engine begins production – Click above for high-res image gallery

The artist engine formerly known as Prince Phoenix has officially hit the assembly lines at the Chrysler Group’s plant in Trenton Discount Chanel Dresses, Michigan. The first version of the mill, which now bears the Pentastar moniker, displaces 3.6 liters and will see its first production application in the engine bay of the brand new 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Expect this all aluminum Buy Bandage dresses, 60-degree Replica Christian Audigier Clothes, dual-overhead cam (with variable valve timing) powerplant to see lots of use in the near-term future – Chrysler boasts that the Pentastar V6 will replace seven current V6 engines. In the new Grand Cherokee, the Pentastar will put out 280 horsepower (a 22-percent increase) at 6 Buy Christian Audigier Clothes,400 rpm and 260 pound-feet of torque (an 11-percent improvement) at 4 Herve leger strapless sale,800 rpm.

Just as importantly, Chrysler tells us that the new engine will be 11 percent more fuel efficient than the unit it replaces, and it will run on either regular 87-octane gasoline or E85. This family of engines represent a $730 million investment, and the 822 Replica Chanel Dresses,000-square-foot Trenton facility will be able to produce more than 400,000 engines per year. See the complete press release after the break.

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Investment tycoon Steven Rattner puts the stethoscope to the ailing newspaper industry in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today (Feb. 15) titled “Red All Over.” Rather than telling his patient to take some very strong medicine or change its rotten business habits, he concludes that the case is hopeless and that “perhaps it’s time to think about new models for the news business.” 

Rattner’s “new models” of newspaper operation are nonprofit (like the St. Petersburg Times), tax subsidized (like the BBC), philanthropic (like burger heiress Joan Kroc’s $200 million give to NPR), and, although he doesn’t actually come out and say it with any precision, he suggests that newspaper are like the subways—too vital to the public interest to fail—and should therefore continue as government-run enterprises.

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For a major capitalist addressing the nation’s top capitalist audience on the subject of capitalist media, Rattner is embarrassingly short on business specifics. He essentially believes that the newspaper industry, which sits atop a $45 billion ad market, should be treated like the ballet or other charitable causes.

Rattner’s 1,300-word diagnosis and prescription doesn’t ever consider that the falling circulation and rotten earnings reports can be simply explained: Many of the newspaper industry’s customers—subscribers and advertisers—prefer other products. That horse-and-buggy customers might prefer automobiles or VCR owners might switch to DVDs is only rational. So, if newspaper customers want to spend their money elsewhere, why should we put newspaper companies on the dole? If the cable news channels were having trouble hitting their numbers, would he send Fox News Buy Missoni Dresses, CNN, and MSNBC to ballet school, too?

The modern newspaper “crisis” that Rattner writes about was readily apparent to the industry in the mid-1970s Cheap Hale Bob Dresses, as I wrote in a November column. Declining circulation, failing newspapers, and depressed advertising revenue were acknowledged by industry panel after industry panel. Changes in living and working patterns, demographic shifts, and increased transience got the blame for the business’s woes.

But Rattner’s piece neglects to mention that for better than 50 years newspaper companies have feasted on their advertisers, charging steep ad rates everywhere and confiscatory rates wherever they owned the only daily. Now that the Web is underselling them on the ad front and other media are stealing eyeballs, should we weep for them? Or should they stop the blubbering, quit wishing for the return of 1975, and start competing? I obviously think so.

In a gutsy June/July 2005 American Journalism Reviewfeature, Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi places the newspaper “decline” in perspective, noting that cable news Emilio Pucci Dresses sale, local TV, the broadcast networks, and radio are struggling Buy DKNY Clothing, too. Despite drops in circulation, newspapers still enjoy an array of competitive advantages, Farhi writes. Most notably, newspapers have the very best customers Cheap Chanel Dresses, measured in both quantity and quality (demographics), have the best-established brands in their markets, and are better placed than anyone to attract local customers.

The crisis observed through Farhi’s end of the telescope reveals the poor Herve Leger v neck sale, poor, pitiful newspapers holding a set of winning cards. Shouldn’t Rattner, who is the managing principal of Quadrangle Group LLC and “focused on the firm’s $2.9 billion media and communications private equity business,” be advising newspaper companies on how to make money and not how to surrender elegantly?

So, please, let’s call off pledge weeks for newspapers. I want the next burger heiress to give her fortune to the Pacifica Radio Foundation, not a newspaper. And let’s amend the Constitution to ban tax subsidies for newspapers. If dailies can’t make it on their own, they deserve death.

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BMW i8 Spy Shots – Click above for high-res image gallery
Replica Bell & Ross Watches
BMW doesn’t seem to be too engaged in trying to hide what the company’s new i8 supercar will look like when it arrives – in fact Replica Dior Watches, it’s been so kind as to leave the label on one of its prototypes. Our keen-eyed spy photographers managed to snap a few quick photos of the vehicle dashing through the snow in northern Sweden during a little cold-weather testing. The machine you see above will be the reigning monarch of the Bavarian automaker’s new sub-brand, i, once it debuts.

Based on the Vision EfficientDynamics concept that starred at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show Buy Cheap Replica Versace Watches, the vehicle is said to pack 2+2 seating Fake Blancpain Watches, a 0-62 mph time in the 4.8 second range and fuel economy of over 62 mpg U.S. Where buy best Replica Tag Heuer Watches, along with a supercar price tag. Look to fork over around $200,000 when this beastie touches down.

There’s been some indication that BMW will forgo the thrifty diesel engine of the concept in favor of a turbocharged four-cylinder gasoline mill to work in coordination with a hybrid system. While that’s bad news bears for diesel fans Replica Hermes Watches for Cheap, the fact that BMW is gearing the platform toward gasoline means that this vehicle will more than likely show up on American shores.

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[Source: CarPix]