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To: bentway who wrote (527959)	11/11/2009 1:19:01 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1576164

Just wondering if this would be deemed a "Hate Crime?" Black Columbia Prof. punches white female university employee Prof busted in Columbia gal 'punch' By PERRY CHIARAMONTE, BETH STEBNER and JEREMY OLSHAN Last Updated: 4:54 AM, November 10, 2009 Posted: 2:57 AM, November 10, 2009 A prominent Columbia architecture professor punched a female university employee in the face at a Harlem bar during a heated argument about race relations, cops said yesterday. Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges. McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school's theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said. The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said. McIntyre, who is known as "Mac" at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said. "The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise," bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. "I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me." The other patron involved in the dispute said McIntyre then took a swing at him after he yelled, "You don't hit a woman!" "He knocked the glasses right off my face," said the man, who would only give his first name as "Shannon." "The punch came out of nowhere. Mac was talking to us about white privilege and what I was doing about it -- apparently I wasn't doing enough." McIntyre had squabbled with Davis several weeks earlier over issues involving race, witnesses said. As soon as the professor threw the punch Friday, server Rob Dalton and another employee tossed him out. "It was a real sucker punch," Dalton said. "Camille's a great lady, always nice to everybody, and doesn't deserve anything like this." Davis was spotted wearing sunglasses yesterday to conceal the black eye. Reached at her Columbia office, she declined to comment on the alleged attack. McIntyre was released without bail at his arraignment last night. "It was a very unfortunate event," he said afterwards. "I didn't mean for it to explode the way it did." Additional reporting by Sarah Makuta

To: bentway who wrote (527959)	11/11/2009 3:28:56 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576164

For Whom the Bell Tolls By Jim Cramer RealMoney Columnist 11/11/2009 3:05 PM EST Housing bears, including those who are endlessly focused on the now almost imperceptible decline in the price of housing nationwide, please do not read the Toll Brothers (TOL - commentary - Trade Now) release this morning. That's because the key metrics -- net signed contracts versus the depressed 2008 numbers and the inflated 2007 numbers -- were amazing. To wit, Toll exceeded 2007's fiscal Q4 net signed contracts by 17% in unit terms and 18% in dollars. You read that right -- exceeded! Not only that, but it was done with fewer selling communities, meaning that prices HELD, or, if anything, INCREASED. How can that jive with the downbeat housing reporters who keep harping and carping on about housing prices going down. This stuff is all high end, so the notion that the next crisis is the luxury housing component because of defaults simply can't be true, or Toll could not do these numbers. Further, the cancellation rate, the walking away from contracts, typically because of an inability to get a loan, was 6.9%, You have to go back to the housing boom in 2005 to get that low a number. How does that tally with the notion that you can't get a loan from a bank to buy a house? I don't understand it. Look, it is easy to say that housing is still weak. Toll wouldn't deny that. And it is also easy to dismiss Toll on the basis of its "smallness," as we are not speaking about thousands of homes sold -- it's just 765 units. But it is so hard to say that it hasn't stabilized, which has always been my issue, because stability ultimately ends the crisis. We know there's been a lot of discussion about shadow inventory, but not a lot of good data. Some have said that it is as much as 20% of listed inventory, but I wonder if there is much shadow inventory at all. Toll's high end -- it indicates things are terrific. How about the low end? The National Association of Realtors confirms that in areas where there are tight supplies and multiple bids in the $100,000 range, the banks have simply refused to release more homes or don't have any. We can never get to a no-supply moment, we can only continue to reduce inventory. Right now, the existing inventory shows 3,630,000 homes on the market, down 7.5% from August and 15% from a year earlier -- a 7.8 month supply. We know the banks aren't releasing new homes. We know that we are building about 440,000 new homes. If you simply extrapolate the building of new homes, layered over the sales of existing homes, you can see where we will ultimately get to, where we could have an inventory shortage. Again, we will never get to where there is no inventory, but we know that there are 865,000 new household formations a year. So, taking those new formations, minus the new homes, we get new demand for 425,000 homes. If existing homes inventories continued to decline 7.5% every month, we would come into 2010 with about 3.1 million homes for sale, only a six-month supply. I think with that with few homes and mortgage rates at this level, it is only a matter of time before housing stops stabilizing and then starts to go higher. Then you can only imagine what it would do to the bottom lines of Wells Fargo (WFC - commentary - Trade Now) and Bank of America (BAC - commentary - Trade Now). I know this: the changes are simply not in the numbers. Not at all. Not one bit