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College enrollment in computer science, engineering on the rise

Relief may be finally on the way for engineering-starved employers.

For the first time since the dot-com bust, there is a jump in the number of undergraduate computer-science majors. New enrollment in North American computer science and engineering programs rose 8% during the 2007-08 school year from the year before, according to a report released Tuesday by the Computing Research Association, a trade group for about 200 university computing departments. It is the first increase since 2002.

"The perception that IT jobs are hard to come by is over, and the field is now considered an interesting place to be," says Peter Harsha, director of government affairs for CRA, which also represents government research labs and research labs for tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and IBM.

The allure of popular technologies such as Web 2.0, iPhone, Facebook and YouTube have drawn more teens into computer science and should boost enrollment figures next year, too, Harsha says.

Adding to the surge: Many undergraduates who once considered business and finance majors are focusing instead on computing, says Jeff Hollingsworth, associate chair at the University of Maryland's computer-science department.

The dramatic shift should ease concern within the tech industry that the U.S. does not graduate enough computer-science students. For years, that has driven tech vendors to outsource low-level programming jobs to India, China and elsewhere.

The spike in majors comes as especially comforting news for IBM and others that often could not fill enterprise-computing jobs because of a paucity of qualified college graduates."(Information technology) skills are now required to be more competitive in all professions not just a technical company," says Mark Hanny, vice president of alliances and academic initiative for IBM Software Group.

President Obama's $787 economic stimulus package underscores the importance of such skills in building a smart energy grid, modernizing health care and expanding broadband networks. Indeed, eight in 10 U.S. college students see a growing need for more IT professionals as technology advances, according to a survey by IBM and the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, also released Tuesday.

The change is easy to spot at Carnegie Mellon University, says Sameer Chopra, a junior majoring in computer science there. It used to be fairly easy to get into most classes. Now, some have waiting lists of up to 40 people, he says.

Reuters - U.S. housing offers hope on economy

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U.S. housing offers hope on economy

Tuesday, Mar 17, 2009 4:40PM UTC

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. housing starts and permits unexpectedly rebounded in February, according to data on Tuesday that provided a rare dose of good news for the recession-hit economy and fractured housing market.

The Commerce Department said housing starts jumped 22.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 583,000 units from 477,000 units in January. That was the biggest percentage rise since January 1990 and also marked the first increase since last April.

"That is an encouraging sign for the U.S. economy. It is good signal of what is to come. With the rally in equities we hopefully have seen a bottom for the economy here," said Matt Esteve, foreign exchange trader at Tempus Consulting in Washington.

U.S. stocks have been on the rise over the last several days and the major indexes opened flat on Tuesday. U.S. government bond prices trimmed gains after the data and the U.S. dollar fell against the euro as risk aversion eased.

The data came as the Federal Reserve's policy-setting committee was due to start a scheduled two-day meeting on Tuesday, It is expected to leave the target for its benchmark overnight funds rates unchanged at zero-0.25 percent.

But the statement at the end of the meeting on Wednesday will be scrutinized for clues on the central bank's readiness to start buying Treasuries to boost its efforts to jump-start an economy in recession since December 2007.

New building permits, which give a sense of future home construction, rose 3.0 percent to 547,000 units, from 531,000 units in January. That also marked the first advance in permits since April last year.

Compared to the same period in 2008, housing starts were down 47.3 percent in February and permits declined 44.2 percent. Completions rose 2.3 percent to a rate of 785,000 from January's 767,000.

HOUSING STABILITY KEY

The housing market is at the center of the financial and economic meltdown and bringing some measure of stability to the sector is crucial to rescuing the economy.

Collapsing house and stock market values are a drag on consumer spending, which accounts for over a third of economic activity.

A separate report from the Labor Department showed U.S. producer prices rose by less than expected in February after the pace of energy price increases slowed, but core producer prices came in a bit above forecast.

The seasonally adjusted producer price index increased by 0.1 percent last month versus a 0.8 percent gain in January.

"These two reports will be a relief for everybody and bring some optimism. But the Fed will remain cautious because one month doesn't make a trend," said Kurt Karl, chief U.S. economist at Swiss Re in New York.

Compared with the same period last year, producer prices were 1.3 percent lower, the largest fall since a 1.8 percent decline in September 2002.

Core producer prices, which exclude energy and food costs, rose 0.2 percent in February compared with a forecast for a 0.1 percent increase. This followed a 0.4 percent rise in January. Core producer prices were 4.0 percent higher measured on a year-over-year basis.

A moderating in price increases for energy goods limited the rise in the headline PPI index in February, the data showed. Energy goods rose by 1.3 percent in February after climbing 3.7 percent the month before.

Capital equipment was up only 0.1 percent after a 0.5 percent increase in January, while consumer foods prices fell 1.6 percent.

(Additional reporting by Alister Bull in Washington and Richard Leong and Nick Olivari in New York, Editing by Andrea Ricci)

CNN - Obama blasts AIG 'outrage,' will try to block bonuses

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Obama blasts AIG 'outrage,' will try to block bonuses

President Barack Obama said Monday he will attempt to block bonuses to executives at ailing insurance giant AIG, payments he described as an "outrage."

"This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed," Obama told politicians and reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where he and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were unveiling a package to aid the nation's small businesses.

The president expressed dismay and anger over the bonuses to executives at AIG, which has received $173 billion in U.S. government bailouts over the past six months.

"Under these circumstances, it's hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. I mean, how do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?"

Obama was referring to the bonuses paid to traders in AIG's financial products division, the tiny group of people who crafted complicated deals that wound up shaking the world's economic foundations.

The president said he has asked Geithner to "pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole."

Obama spared AIG's new CEO, Edward Liddy, from criticism, saying he got the job "after the contracts that led to these bonuses were agreed to last year."

But he said the impropriety of the bonuses goes beyond economics. "It's about our fundamental values," he said.

"All across the country, there are people who are working hard and meeting their responsibilities every single day, without the benefit of government bailouts or multimillion-dollar bonuses. You've got a bunch of small-business people here who are struggling just to keep their credit line open," Obama said.

"And all they ask is that everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington, play by the same rules. That is an ethic that we have to demand."

Obama said he would work with Congress to change the laws so that such a situation cannot recur.

Then, coughing, he added in jest, "I'm choked up with anger here."

Under pressure from the Treasury, AIG scaled back the bonus plans and pledged to reduce 2009 bonuses -- or "retention payments" -- by at least 30 percent. That did little to temper outrage at the initial plan, however.

In a letter Sunday to Geithner, U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold urged the Obama administration to explore "legal options" to prevent the millions in AIG payouts.

"I write to ask why any bonuses would be legally required, given the company's abysmal performance," says Feingold, D-Wisconsin.

Feingold asked whether the bonuses could be canceled or recouped from recipients, and whether the administration will sue AIG executives for breaching their duties to shareholders

"There are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last 18 months, but what's happened at AIG is the most outrageous," Lawrence Summers, head of the National Economic Council, told ABC's "This Week."

"What that company did, the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching, what's proved necessary, it is outrageous."

And on "Fox News Sunday," White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said Geithner was "really upset by the news."

"He stepped in and berated them, got them to reduce the bonuses following every legal means he has to do this," Goolsbee said.

In a letter to Geithner, obtained Saturday by CNN, AIG Chairman and CEO Edward Liddy said his company was taking steps to limit compensation in AIG Financial Products -- the British-based unit responsible for issuing the risky credit default swaps that have brought the company to the brink of collapse. The default swaps amount to insurance against losses from bad loans, which have increased dramatically since the U.S. housing boom peaked.

In the letter to Geithner, Liddy said the unit's 25 highest-paid contract employees will reduce their salaries to $1 this year and all other officers in the unit will reduce their salaries by 10 percent. Other "non-cash compensation" will be reduced or eliminated. But he told Geithner that some bonus payments are binding legal obligations of the company, and "there are serious legal, as well as business consequences for not paying."

Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told Fox that bailout recipients should have to follow stricter compensation rules, and said Congress should look into whether the bonuses are "legally recoverable."

"We can't just violate legal obligations, I understand that," the Massachusetts Democrat said. "But I do want to find out at what point these legal obligations were incurred. Who said, and at what point, 'We're going to give these bonuses no matter what?' And I do think it's inappropriate for those people to stay in power at that company."

Frank said that if banks complain that the Obama administration has made things too tough, "They can give the money back. We made that easy."

Goolsbee said AIG was following "a policy that's really not sensible, is obviously going to ignite the ire of millions of people."

"We've done exactly what we can do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again," Goolsbee said. Summers told ABC that the administration was taking "every legal step possible to limit those bonuses."

AIG lost a record $62 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008. It has more than 74 million insurance policies issued in 130 countries around the world.

Portfolio Mobile - Hulu Sprouts a Social Network

Hulu Sprouts a Social Network







On the one-year anniversary of its launch, video-on-demand site Hulu has added social networking features to let friends share viewing histories while becoming more valuable to advertisers. (The more data the site gathers, the better its ads can target users.)

The Wall Street Journal concludes that Hulu's embrace of social networking somehow means it might not threaten the traditional television-watching model as much as it may have otherwise. "By underscoring that the site is about providing entertainment on the computer, and not replacing television" writes the WSJ, "the new social-networking features also could help ease concerns about Hulu's potential to undermine the business interests of TV networks and cable operators."



This is rather strange logic.

Extra features normally add to the allure of one service over another, rather than detracting from it. If Hulu has social networking features, it's hard to see how that will make viewers prefer their television without those features. It's more likely that television sets will eventually incorporate social networking, than that social networking will prevent internet television from cannibalizing broadcast.

One thing that's not up for debate is that Hulu's premium content -- much of which comes from its parent companies NBC Universal and News Corp. -- continues to draw more viewers. Nielsen's latest data puts Hulu on course to stream 33 percent more videos in February than in the previous month. By comparison, YouTube's mostly short-form video streams declined 11 percent in the same period.



The new "Hulu Friends" feature appeared on the site on Thursday. To use it, sign in, then click your Profile link and go to the Friends tab to add contacts from  Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, Hotmail and/or Yahoo Mail (you can also enter names and email addresses by hand). Once people are connected to your profile, you'll be able to monitor a feed of their viewing activities on the site and browse their profile pages.

by Eliot Van Buskirk




See Also:

ZillionTV: Hollywood and ISPs Unite to Deliver Video over the Net

For Many, MegaVideo Trumps Bit Torrent

Free, Legal and Online: Why Hulu Is the New Way to Watch TV



Hulu Content Vanishes From TV.com, Blocked on Boxee

Hulu Videos Return to Boxee (Sort of)Related Links
Hulu Videos Return to Boxee (Sort of)
TV.com Just Might Be a Contender
Hulu Closes In on YouTube -- Fast





(c) 2007 Portfolio. Powered by mLogic Media, Crisp Wireless, Inc.

Portfolio Mobile - Jim Cramer Did Something Wrong. I'm Shocked! Shocked!

Jim Cramer Did Something Wrong. I'm Shocked! Shocked!







Watching Jim Cramer getting his ass kicked by Jon Stewart last night left me with mixed feelings, but mostly feelings of déjà vu. I mean, is anyone really surprised by any of this?

It is nothing new that Cramer engaged in sleazy tactics when he ran a hedge fund. Hell, that was known years ago, and was admitted in his 2002 book Confessions of a Street Addict and one by a former employer, Nicholas Maier, Trading With the Enemy. It's also a matter of public record that as a fund manager he was the subject of an SEC inquiry, later dropped.

I reviewed both books for Business Week, and the title of my review, in BW question-y style, was "Brilliant Stockpicker -- or Brazen Hustler?" and it was obvious from my review that I leaned heavily toward the latter. I had no choice -- Cramer was very forthright on the subject. I wrote:
He then opened a hedge fund, Cramer Partners, where he developed a special approach to earning money. He describes this method with such candor that some readers may be taken aback. After all, controversy is now swirling around analysts. And they were at the core of Cramer's "formula for making money every single day, day in and day out." As developed in the early '90s, the system consisted of becoming "merchants of the buzz." Cramer writes: "We would work to get upgrades or downgrades because we knew, cynically, that Wall Street was simply a promotion machine."





Cramer would look for stocks likely to move quickly on good news. Then one of his staffers would begin calling the companies, looking "to find anything good we could say about them." When he discovered a stock that seemed ready to take off, or when his staff uncovered something favorable about the company that the analyst community didn't know, Cramer would load up on options and stock and then "give the good news to our favorite analysts who liked the stock so they could go do their promotion." That would get the buzz going, and "we would then be able to liquidate the position into the buzz for a handsome profit."

In other words, Cramer used his pals in the analyst community to engage in a kind of legal pump-and-dump scheme. Part of what makes his account compelling is that Cramer is so matter-of-fact, even proud. He sees absolutely nothing wrong or unfair about the practice. In fact, at one point he says that he sees himself as "the proverbial Boy Scout, never breaking any laws, never even getting a parking ticket," a man who had "nightmares about overdue library books. I was Little Miss Goody Two-shoes." Nope, introspection is not his strong point. [emphasis added]
Maier had accused Cramer of frontrunning short positions. That turned out to be wrong, and his book was withdrawn from circulation, pulped, and a new edition released.



But the publisher's retraction was not quite as sweeping as Cramer might have liked. HarperCollins says the only inaccuracy was the specific reference to Western Digital, which the new version of Maier's book doesn't mention. But the revised book does say that Cramer was the subject of an SEC inquiry, later dropped, concerning trading in options of an unspecified stock. "Our timing on this occasion may have been too perfect," Maier says in the post-pulping version. A call to Cramer was referred to his lawyer, who says both versions are inaccurate, and that there was no SEC inquiry at all.
So I guess I can't quite figure out why people, Stewart and his researchers included, are surprised by Cramer's sleaziness, since he admitted it himself in his book. As a matter of fact, watching Cramer's awful performance last night, I couldn't understand why he didn't admit that he came clean (more or less) in a book he'd written nine years ago.





I have only limited sympathy for people who buy stocks based on what Cramer or any other market guru has said. A financial genius named Burton Malkiel has been arguing against the very concept of stock picking for years, and wrote a book called A Random Walk Down Wall Street which became a best-seller.

Three years ago I made my own modest contribution to the genre in Wall Street Versus America, whose central point was that you had to listen to Malkiel and disregard the Cramers of this world. I pleaded with people to avoid managed mutual funds, hedge funds and individual stocks, to buy stock indexes and disregard stock newsletters and market "wizards" like Cramer. As I argued in the book, there is no way to beat the markets, no way of getting rich unless everyone in the market is getting rich (or way of escaping getting poor if the market goes into a slump).



Cramer has nothing to be ashamed off that he's hustled his way to a fortune, pushing a dream of riches that countless studies have shown to be illusory, since markets are reasonably efficient. But you can't get rich being a Cassandra, and the best way to make money is to lie that you can make money for other people. Cramer knows that as well as anyone, and now he is paying the price.

by Gary WeissRelated Links
AIG: The Cramer Conspiracy Theory
Hedge Fund Datapoint of the Day
The Hedge Fund Money-Go-Round




(c) 2007 Portfolio. Powered by mLogic Media, Crisp Wireless, Inc.

Reuters - Cash-hungry U.S. states turn to Web to auction goods

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Cash-hungry U.S. states turn to Web to auction goods

Saturday, Mar 14, 2009 10:11AM UTC

By Tom Ryan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. municipalities, strapped for cash as the recession decimates revenues, are stepping up sales of everything from old police cars, helicopters and bicycles to confiscated jewelry and slot machines in an effort to reduce swollen deficits.

And municipalities that previously relied on old-fashioned auctions conducted in local parking lots are getting more sophisticated, turning to the online world as they seek to maximize their sales.

As many as 46 states are struggling with deficits, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And governments, which are required by law to close budget gaps, are being creative in seeking ways to meet the shortfall.

"Anything that we can dispose of that generates revenue definitely helps to reduce any deficit that we have in the budget," said Greg Spearman, director of purchasing for Tampa, Florida.

Tampa recently raised more than $300,000 from the sale of a 1978 Piper police airplane. The sale was conducted by auction on www.govdeals.com, a website founded by a former investment banker and two partners to help local governments maximize returns on unwanted assets.

Listings on the site have increased significantly in recent months and governments are looking deep into their closets for things to sell, according to Chief Executive Bill Angrick.

Agencies from Alabama, for example, sold about $3 million worth of goods in the first two months of 2009, compared with $9 million for 2007 and 2008 combined. Items included a batch of 27 confiscated bicycles sold by the city of Montgomery for $270.

Georgia agencies have chalked up $1.8 million in sales in the first two months of 2009, compared with sales of $9.1 million for all of 2008. Among the goods sold was a confiscated Yukon SL Crossbow sold by the town of Rome for $147.

The Austin, Texas, police raised $388,100 in an auction of confiscated slot machines last week.

State and local governments are "getting a lot of visibility and more competition" than they would using the old-fashioned open-outcry auctions, said Angrick.

Scott Bartley, an accountant in the controller's office of Charleston County, South Carolina, said municipalities previously sold used equipment and other assets in annual auctions, typically held in a local parking lot.

That meant paying for storage until enough inventory had accumulated and relying on the largess of the few buyers who typically turned up.

Bartley said the county's revenues have roughly tripled since it stepped up efforts to generate cash, with the website helping it access a larger pool of buyers.

Since the county started using the service in 2005, revenues from sales have climbed to between $800,000 to $1 million a year from an average $170,000 to $200,000 previously.

The county is now selling up to seven used police cars a week online and "we're getting above bluebook value," he said.

About 1.2 million buyers have used the govdeals.com site, ranging from other states and municipalities to companies, entrepreneurs and resellers, all of whom are prescreened to ensure they can pay.

Vehicles are the most popular items sold on the site, although Angrick believes the second most popular item -- highway maintenance equipment -- could increase significantly with President Barack Obama's massive spending on infrastructure as part of his economic stimulus plan.

The largest ticket item auctioned in 2008 was a 1993 McDonnell Douglas MD520N helicopter sold by the Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky Metro Government, to a tour operator in Hawaii for $791,000.

Among the more surprising offers is an Arabian horse currently on offer from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, with a starting bid of $50. The 100-mile endurance horse was used for exercise physiology and nutrition research at the university.

The Nashville Metro Airport Authority in Tennessee is selling a 40-foot tall rotating beacon for an airport with bids starting at $200.

Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, is auctioning off a batch of confiscated jewelry including a 10-carat gold necklace and various rings and watches.

And, in November of last year, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, put its 85-foot fireboat, "Mayor, J. Harold Grady," on the block after 47 years of service.

Allan Johnson, owner of a marine contracting firm in Akron, Ohio, won the bidding at $80,000. Johnson, who was hoping to pay $50,000, still believes he got a good deal. A new one could be well over $1 million.

Of course, online auctions have not always been successful for municipalities.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, campaigning as John McCain's vice presidential running mate last year, famously trumpeted her move to put a "luxury jet" used by the previous governor up for sale on eBay. What she shied away from mentioning was that the jet failed to find a buyer on eBay and she ultimately hired a broker to sell it.

(Additional reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Reuters - Web founder warns against website snooping

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Web founder warns against website snooping

Saturday, Mar 14, 2009 10:13AM UTC

By Jonathan Lynn

GENEVA (Reuters) - Surfers on the Internet are at increasing risk from governments and corporations tracking the sites they visit to build up a picture of their activities, the founder of the World Wide Web said on Friday.

Tim Berners-Lee, whose proposal for an information management system at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN 20 years ago led eventually to the World Wide Web, said tracking website visits in this way could build an incredibly detailed profile of who people are and their habits.

"That form of snooping I think is really important to avoid," he told an anniversary celebration at CERN.

Technology now being developed will make it easier to decide who can see material one posts on the Web, and in what circumstances. For instance people may not want prospective employers to see an album of holiday photos, he said.

Berners-Lee, a British software engineer who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said innovation on the World Wide Web was speeding up.

"The Web is not all done, it's just the tip of the iceberg," Berners-Lee said. "I am convinced that the new changes are going to rock the world even more."

One big change that is coming is "linked data," in which individual bits of data are machine-readable, not just the Web pages they appear on.

That would allow users to link readable data to similar data and manipulate it, for instance putting it in spreadsheets or plotting graphs. The sum of human knowledge would then grow exponentially in what Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web.

Examples would be students accessing data from research institutes, or ordinary people getting hold of government data -- paid for by taxes -- to improve websites.

The system would allow investors to process the data contained in company press releases.

MULTIPLE DATA USE

People who put data on social networking sites such as Facebook, for instance tagging names on pictures, would also be able to use that data in other applications, for instance ordering a T-shirt on another website.

Berners-Lee said the future of the Web was on mobile phones, which already have more browsers than laptops do.

"In developing countries it's going to be exciting because that is the only way that a lot of people will actually get to see the Internet at all," he said.

When Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989, his boss at CERN, the world's biggest particle physics laboratory, scrawled "vague, but exciting" on the memo.

A year later, he tested the idea by justifying it as a test program for a new NeXT computer, whose software is the basis of the current OS X Macintosh operating system for computers made by Apple Inc.

In two months in 1990, Berners-Lee wrote the software that allowed users to share access to information over the Internet, coining the name World Wide Web.

The code was made freely available in 1991 and was rapidly picked up and developed by other enthusiasts. "It took off because people across the planet got involved, that's the most exciting thing about that period," he said.

Among his regrets was starting Web addresses with http:// as the two slashes were redundant, leading to billions of wasted keystrokes.

Another regret was the way web addresses were constructed. In retrospect it would have made more sense to start with the most general elements such as countries or organizations -- for instance using ch/cern/info instead of info.cern.ch as at present, he said.

(Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; editing by Tim Pearce)

Portfolio Mobile - 44, Day 52: Everyone Out of the Pool

44, Day 52: Everyone Out of the Pool





An ongoing log of the daily activities of the 44th president of the United States during his first 100 days:

-President Obama today again warned against anyone thinking they could benefit unfairly from the $787 billion stimulus plan. And Vice President Joe Biden said spending rules would be coming tomorrow. "A little hint," Biden said. "No swimming pools in this money."

-The president today met with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in the Oval Office. Get the White House's readout here.

-We missed something yesterday. President Obama met with 13 of the nation's top travel executives, all of whom are concerned that Washington has become anti-travel as it takes companies to task for holding conventions, retreats, and conferences during these tough times. "He left with an understand that our industry means jobs, and that 17 million people in the United States are working in some form or fashion in the travel and tourism industry," Jonathan M. Tisch, chairman and chief executive of Loews Hotels, told POLITICO. "And he just asked us to stay focused and do all we can to encourage travel. As he says, he was traveling a lot, which allowed him to get this job, and he deeply understands the benefit of travel and tourism in the United States of America."



-Personnel watch: the FBI today raided the offices of the president's choice to be U.S. chief information officer. Authorities took the action on Vivek Kundra's offices (he's now the District of Columbia's chief technology officer as part of a bribery sting that last week led to the arrest of two people.

by J. Jennings Moss

Sources: The White House, Politico, CNET, and the Associated Press.Related Links
Top Tech Policy People to Watch
44, Day 22: On the Road Again
44, Day 28: Where's Click and Clack When You Need Them?




(c) 2007 Portfolio. Powered by mLogic Media, Crisp Wireless, Inc.

CNN - Police: U.S. teens were hit men for Mexican cartel

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Police: U.S. teens were hit men for Mexican cartel

Rosalio Reta sits at a table inside a Laredo Police Department interrogation room. A detective, sitting across the table, asks him how it all started.

Reta, in Spanish street slang, describes his initiation as an assassin, at the age of 13, for the Mexican Gulf Cartel, one of the country's two major drug gangs.

"I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person," Reta says on the videotape obtained by CNN. "They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from kid."

Rosalio Reta and his friend, Gabriel Cardona, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later.

In interviews with CNN, Laredo police detectives and prosecutors told how Cardona and Reta were recruited by the cartel to be assassins after they began hitting the cantinas and clubs just across the border.

CNN has also obtained detailed court records as well as several hours of police interrogation videos. The detective sitting across the table from Reta and Cardona in those sessions is Robert Garcia. He's a veteran of the Laredo Police Department and one of the few officers who has questioned the young men.

"One thing you wonder all the time: What made them this way?" Garcia told CNN. "They were just kids themselves, waiting around playing PlayStation or Xbox, waiting around for the order to be given."

Over a nearly one-year period starting in June 2005, the border town of Laredo, Texas, saw a string of seven murders. At first glance, the violence looked like isolated, gangland-style killings. But investigators started suspecting something more sinister.

Then Noe Flores was gunned down in a clear case of mistaken identity. Investigators found a fingerprint on a cigarette box inside the suspected shooter's get-away car. That clue unraveled the chilling reality and led police to arrest Gabriel Cardona and Rosalio Reta.

Prosecutors say they quickly discovered these two teenagers were homegrown assassins, hired to carry out the dirty work of the notorious Gulf Cartel.

"There are sleeper cells in the U.S.," said Detective Garcia. "They're here, they're here in the United States."

The cases against Cardona and Reta -- both are in prison serving long prison sentences for murder -- shed new light into the workings of the drug cartels.

Prosecutor and investigators say Reta and Cardona were recruited into a group called "Los Zetas," a group made up of former members of the Mexican special military forces. They're considered ruthless in how they carry out attacks. "Los Zetas" liked what they saw in Cardona and Reta.

Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.

The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.

As the teens became more immersed in the cartel lifestyle, their appearance changed. Cardona had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. Reta's face became covered in tattoo markings. (Prosecutors say during his trial Reta used make-up to cover the facial markings.) And both sported tattoos of "Santa Muerte," the Grim Reaper-like pseudo-saint worshipped by drug traffickers.

"These organizations, these cartels, they function like a Fortune 500 company," Webb County, Texas, prosecutor Uriel Druker said. "We have to remember that the United States is the market they are trying to get to."

In Cardona's interrogation tape, there are clues that "Los Zetas" are reaching deeper and deeper into the United States. Cardona is asked, "Where else are the Zetas?" And Cardona responds, "I've heard in Dallas and Houston."

And that's why the cartel recruited these young Americans. Cardona and Reta could move freely and easily back and forth across the border with Mexico.

Just hours before they were arrested, federal authorities taped a phone conversation between them in which Cardona brags about killing 14-year-old Inez Villareal and his cousin, a Cardona rival.

Cardona laughs as he describes torturing the two boys and dumping their bodies in large metal drums filled with diesel fuel. He says he made "guiso," or stew, with their bodies.

As the call ends, Cardona says, "There are three left to kill, there are three left."

Reuters - Marvel delays The Avengers, Thor releases

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Marvel delays The Avengers, Thor releases

Thursday, Mar 12, 2009 12:29PM UTC

March 12 (Reuters) - Media company Marvel Entertainment Inc said it rescheduled the release dates of some of its self-produced feature film properties through 2012.

As per the revised schedule, the release date of the multi-character superhero film 'The Avengers' has been extended by about a year to May 4, 2012, from July 15, 2011.

'Thor', the big-screen adaptation of one of Marvel's popular comic book characters, will now release on June 17, 2011, instead of July 16, 2010, the company said.

"It maximizes the visibility of our single character-focused films, leading to the highly anticipated release of the multi-character The Avengers film in 2012," David Maisel, chairman of Marvel Studios, said in a statement.

The company now plans to release 'The First Avenger: Captain America' on July 22, 2011, instead of May 6, 2011.

However, 'Iron Man 2' will be released as scheduled on May 7, 2010, Marvel said.

Marvel also confirmed that Sony Pictures will release 'Spider-Man 4' on May 6, 2011. Marvel has licensed theatrical rights of Spider-Man, its most popular character, to the unit of Sony.

Shares of Marvel closed at $24.55 Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Bijoy Koyitty in Bangalore; Editing by Himani Sarkar)