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NEWS
NSAN 2008
7A
THE UNIVERSITY DARY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15; 2008
CRIME
Reward offered in local cat mutilation investigation
BY ANDY GREENHAW agreenhaw@kansan.com
The Humane Society of the United States and the Lawrence Humane Society are offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for a recent string of cat mutilations in Lawrence.
The announcement came days after local resident Mark McCanon found his 13-year-old white Manx
cat, Sugar, gutted in his backyard with its hind legs and tail lying nearby. Other neighbors on the 3200 block of West Ninth Street found their cats mutilated on different occasions, and police reports indicate that several other incidents of animal cruelty occurred in September.
Midge Grinstead, executive director of the Lawrence Humane Society, said a cat's severed head was also found in Centennial Park.
lated cat body was discovered six weeks ago, and the most recent victim was discovered Friday.
Grinstead said the first muti
She said she wouldn't discuss any leads for fear that it might compromise the investigation. But she said she thought that, based on similar animal cruelty cases from the past, the suspects probably lived in the neighborhood on the 3200 block, where many of the cat killings took place.
Mary Prewitt, director of the Kansas State Humane Society of
the United States, said it was obvious that these mutilations were human acts committed intentionally.
She said they included decapitations and evisceration with clean cuts rather than the kind of ragged edges that resulted when inflicted by the teeth of another animal.
A person convicted of this type of crime, Prewitt said, could face a felony penalty, including a year in jail, a mandatory psychological evaluation and restrictions on
owning animals in the future. People who intentionally torture animals often go on to commit violent crimes against humans, she said.
"The most notorious example of that in Kansas is Dennis Rader, the so-called BTK murderer," Prewitt wrote in an e-mail. "He admitted to 'practicing on animals' before going on to commit some of the most gruesome crimes the state has ever seen."
Crimestoppers is also offering
a separate reward of up to $1,000 for information leading to felony arrests. According to a press release by the Humane Society of the United States, Crimestoppers pays rewards for the suspect's arrest, while the Humane Society of the United States pays rewards if the suspect is convicted.
ECONOMY
Anyone with information about the case is asked to call 785-832-7509.
Edited by Scott R. Toland
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks at a press conference with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, background, at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The government recently announced its intention to inject up to $250 billion into the banking sector in order to free up credit and relieve pressure on the financial system.
Federal cash infusion aims to alleviate banking woes
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Big banks started falling in line Tuesday behind a rejiggered bailout plan that will have the government forking over as much as $250 billion in exchange for partial ownership — putting the world's bastion of capitalism and free markets squarely in the banking business.
Some early signs were hopeful for the latest in a flurry of radical efforts to save the nation's financial system: Credit was a bit easier to come by. And stocks were down but not alarmingly so after Monday's stratospheric leap.
The new plan, President Bush declared, is "not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it."
It's all about cash and confidence and convincing banks to lend money more freely again. Those are all critical ingredients to getting financial markets to function more normally and reviving the economy.
The big question: Will it work?
There was a mix of hope and skepticism on that front. Unprecedented steps recently taken — including hefty interest rate reductions by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks in a coordinated assault just last week — have failed to break through the credit clog and the panicky mind-set gripping investors on Wall Street and around the globe.
Initially the U.S. government will pour $125 billion into nine
The Dow Jones industrials declined 77 points on Tuesday after piling up their biggest point gain ever on Monday on news of Europe's rescue plan and in anticipation of the United States' new measures.
major banks with the hope that they will use the money to rebuild their reserves and to increase lending to consumers and businesses. Another $125 billion will be made available this year to other banks for cash infusions.
"The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it," Paulson said.
Treasury switched gears deciding to first use a chunk of the $700 billion from the recently enacted financial bailout package to pay for taking partial ownership
"Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans — me included," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in announcing the initiative. "Yet the alternative of leaving businesses and consumers without access to financing is totally unacceptable."
"This plan will work if we wind up with everybody pretty well capitalized," Kashyap said. "But if it doesn't reach that point, we'll be back in soup down the road."
Whether the $250 billion will be sufficient to encourage banks to lend again is hard to tell, said Anil Kashyap, professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. The Treasury Department arrived at the $250 billion figure after consulting with banking regulators.
In return, the government will get ownership stakes in the financial institutions. Banks, meanwhile, will have to accept limitations on executives' compensation.
The government is counting on banks not to just clutch onto the cash, which aggravated the credit crisis to begin with.
stakes in banks, rather than using the money to buy rotten debts from financial institutions. The government said it still intends to buy the bad mortgages and other toxic assets, another move aimed at getting credit flowing again.
Economists as well as both Democratic and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill had argued that the capital injection plan was a more effective way to battle the financial crisis.
The government's cash infusions are attractive to banks because they are having trouble getting money from elsewhere. Skittish investors have cut them off, moving their money into safer Treasury securities. Financial institutions are hoarding whatever cash they have rather than lending it to each other or customers.
The economy's problems also are taking their toll on the government's coffers. The 2008 budget deficit hit an all-time high of $454.8 billion. The red ink probably will be a lot worse next year as the costs of the government's rescue of the financial system and the economic hard times clobber the federal balance sheet, economists predict.
Bush said Tuesday that an additional $100 billion would be needed in connection with covering bad assets. That would leave $350 billion of the $700 billion program, presumably to be spent by the next president.
The first bank to take advantage of the program was Bank of New York Mellon which announced it would sell $3 billion in preferred shares to the Treasury. Other banks initially participating include Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and State Street Corp.
843-SUBS (7827)
WALL STREET
NEW YORK — Wall Street ended a relatively calm session with a moderate loss Tuesday. Happy with the government's plans to spend up to $250 billion to buy stock in private banks, some decided to cash in profits from the previous day's massive advance as they refocused their attention on the economy.
Market finally starts to stabilize Closing bell doesn't ring in triple-digit losses or gains
ASSOCIATED PRESS
It was the first time in nine sessions that the Dow Jones industrial average didn't close with triple-digit losses or gains although it did swing in a 700-point range. The Dow closed down 76 points a day after its record 936-point jump.
Big advances by many bank stocks offset some of the declines in the Dow and the Standard & Poor's 500 index, giving them a better showing for the day than the Nasdaq composite index, which fell more than 3 percent. The technology-dominated Nasdaq also lagged ahead of a profit report from Intel Corp., as investors were reminded of the troubled economy and its impact on corporate earnings.
Profit-taking set in after the Dow surged more than 400 points at the opening. Wall Street is expected to see jittery trading in the weeks and perhaps months ahead because of worries about the economy; stocks also tend to ratchet up and down when they're recovering from a plunge like the one Wall Street has suffered in the past two weeks.
"We don't know if the bottom is in," said Lincoln Anderson, chief investment officer and chief economist at LPL Financial, referring to the market's advance Monday after huge losses last week. "We certainly expect heightened volatility for a fair amount of time while we sort out just exactly what's going on."
President Bush said the government would use a portion of the $700 billion financial bailout passed at the start of the month to inject capital into the nation's major banks, which have been slammed by souring mortgage investments. The move follows a similar one announced Monday by European governments to invest about $2 trillion in their own troubled banks.
The revised bailout plan differs
"These steps are not going to turn the real economy on a dime," he said of the government intervention. "The two keys to the fundamental economy right now are the job market and the housing market and both of those remain distressed."
Robert Dye, senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group, said the government's actions likely will help revive the credit markets, but now that the plan is place, investors are shifting back to concerns about the economy.
"This begins to penetrate the core of the problem," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at New York-based brokerage house Avalon Partners Inc.
from the original in that it aims to capitalize banks, not just buy the troubled assets off their books that could leave the banks with losses.
"There isn't one bottom here. We're talking about multiple events. There will be a bottom in financial market and another in the labor market and one in the housing market. And they're not going to all line up," Dye said.
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