MOSCOW (AP) ? The American rock group Bloodhound Gang was kicked out of a Russian music festival and pelted with eggs after videos emerged of its bass player shoving a Russian flag down his pants at a recent concert in Ukraine. Russian prosecutors are even considering whether to open a criminal case in the matter, which comes amid a rise in U.S.-Russian tensions.
Videos posted online of Wednesday's concert in the Ukrainian city of Odessa show bass player Jared Hasselhoff pushing the Russian white, blue and red flag down the front of his pants and pulling it out the back. He then shouted to the audience: "Don't tell Putin," a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The incident outraged the Russian government. Maria Minina, a spokeswoman for the weeklong Kubana festival in southern Russia, said Saturday that the band's headlining performance the previous evening had been canceled because of its treatment of the flag.
The American band is known for its sexually explicit songs, including "The Bad Touch," with its unforgettable lyrics: "You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."
Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky tweeted Friday night that he had spoken with officials in the southern Krasnodar region, known as Kuban. "Bloodhound Gang is packing its bags," he said in the Twitter post. "These idiots will not perform in Kuban."
Hasselhoff was questioned Saturday by police, according to the Russian Interior Ministry, which said prosecutors have been asked to decide if the musician could be charged with defaming the Russian flag.
The bass player apologized late Friday at a news conference held at the music festival in the city of Anapa, the local Yuga.ru news portal reported. He was quoted saying that he had meant no offense and explaining that it was a band tradition for everything thrown from the stage first to be passed through his pants. Hasselhoff said he decided to throw the flag because some fans had seemed disturbed to see it hanging on the stage.
The scandal caused by the American band in Russia comes at a time of heightened tensions between the two countries over National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, who was given temporary asylum in Russia last week to help him evade prosecution in the U.S.
As the Bloodhound Gang members were driving to the Anapa airport on Saturday, activists from a pro-Kremlin youth group threw eggs and tomatoes at their vehicle, Yuga.ru reported.
The band members were taken off their afternoon flight to Moscow after they had already boarded the plane, Russian news agencies reported, citing airline officials. After being questioned by transport police, they took a later flight, the reports said.
The 69-year-old con man charged with slipping a fatal dose of cyanide into the iced coffee of James ?Whitey? Bulger extortion victim Stephen ?Stippo? Rakes tried to talk his way out of suspicion but was caught in a lie by his own GPS unit, court documents show.
William J. Camuti of Sudbury ? famous in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a TV hawker for his collapsed Loan Depot home-equity loan company ? told cops he ?never saw Rakes again? after a 15-minute chat July 16 at a McDonald?s parking lot in Waltham, where he tried to pitch the former liquor store owner a phony real estate deal, according to prosecutors and a Lincoln police report.
Investigators searched Camuti?s car, home, computer, cellphone and GPS unit ? which placed him at the wooded spot in Lincoln where Rakes? body was found the next day.
Camuti was held without bail yesterday in Concord District Court, where he was charged with attempted murder, misleading police and unlawful disposition of human remains. The suspect is set for a dangerousness hearing on Tuesday. The attempted murder charge was filed because final lab reports on Rakes? cause of death are not yet complete, a spokeswoman for the Middlesex District Attorney?s Office said.
?We allege this defendant intentionally put poison in the victim?s iced coffee and then disposed of his body,? Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said, specifying that Camuti used two teaspoons of potassium cyanide. She said Camuti and Rakes knew each other for years, and that Camuti owed Rakes ?a significant amount of money.?
Camuti, whose birthday was yesterday, was sentenced to nearly 10 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $2.5 million in restitution in 1994 after he was convicted of mail fraud in connection with a mortgage-selling scheme, according to court records. He was also convicted of bank fraud and money laundering by a federal jury in Kansas.
Rakes, 59, a grandfather and retired MBTA worker, was found without his wallet in Lincoln on July 17. A day later, his Dodge Caravan was found seven miles away in Waltham.
Rakes was a key figure in the feds? extortion case against Bulger, 83, who is alleged to have seized Rakes? newly opened Stippo?s Liquor Mart in South Boston in 1984 so the Winter Hill Gang could use it as a front for their headquarters.
Rakes was hoping to take the stand in Bulger?s trial, but prosecutors ultimately chose not to have him testify.
I am excited to let you know that the new Microsoft Developer Network has just launched. While we recognize that many MVPs currently use the MSDN site as a source of deep technical content and support for development issues, we wanted to enhance the experience to add better support for the growing number of developers that are embracing Microsofts platform and technologies for the first time.
There were a few goals we targeted with the Microsoft Developer Network experience:
Simple: The new Microsoft Developer Network site is designed to help developers easily find information and get started with Microsoft more effortlessly. We heard from the community that finding the right information, often spread between different locations, could be challenging. The Microsoft Developer Network addresses that feedback by providing a single point of entry for all developers.
Relevant: We want to meet developers where they are and talk with them on their terms. With the Microsoft Developer Network, an iOS developer, for example, can quickly understand the opportunity available from our platform and then easily navigate to the educational or technical content he needs to get started.
Community Driven: Microsoft has an incredible developer ecosystem, and we wanted to provide even more opportunity for the community to engage with us and with each other. We designed the Microsoft Developer Network with that in mind, creating a Perspectives section with community blogs, an integrated social feed, and a Connect area that allows developers to tell their stories, get advice and connect with us directly.
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"we wanted to provide even more opportunity for the community to engage with us"
And yet the subscriptions still begin at $699 and aren't equal to what TechNet, being killed off to allow MS to gouge us further, offers for less. Thanks a bunch for the opportunity, Microsoft, to give you even more of my money without getting anything of added value in return! (sarcasm, for those that are sarcasm impaired). I used to be a big fan. Now all I see is a grab for more money and various levels of disdain for end users.
Please help us again MS, and at a lower, more reasonable price to the little guy.
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A?September 4 Samsung Galaxy Note III announcement date is not at all impossible, given the fact that previous iterations were all introduced at the August/September IFA, in Berlin. We are expecting the South Koreans to unveil the next Note phablet at the same trade show, this year.
According to this latest report from Korea, we will not only see the new Samsung Galaxy Note III on September 4 ? two days before the official start of IFA 2013 ? but the manufacturer is also planning on unveiling a smartwatch on the same day.
There were lots of leaks, reports, and rumors, surrounding the Note III. It is expected to have a?a 5.99- or 5.7-inch screen, depending on the report, a?Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor with LTE-A capabilities (or the new Exynos 5 octa, again, depending on who you believe), 3GB of RAM, and a 13-megapixel camera.
Montana State University researchers highlight bears' use of Banff highway crossingsPublic release date: 2-Aug-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Evelyn Boswell evelynb@montana.edu 406-994-5135 Montana State University
BOZEMAN, Mont. Within sight of the Trans-Canada Highway, a team of ecologists with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University set out on foot for a nearby site where they'd strung wire snags to catch the fur of passing bears.
In the short distance they walked, with Canada's busiest transportation artery paralleling a prime patch of buffalo berries in the Bow River bottomland, the team spotted five grizzly bears, including a sow with two cubs.
Since counting and genetically identifying bears was critical for Mike Sawaya, Tony Clevenger and Steven Kalinowski's three-year field study on the effects of the highway's wildlife crossing structures on Banff National Park bear populations, it was all in a day's work, Sawaya said.
"We spent a ton of time in the backcountry and had a lot of really great days out there," said Sawaya, a 2012 graduate of MSU. "Fortunately we never had any really scary experiences. But seeing those particular bears, thankfully from a safe distance, did illustrate that the Trans-Canada Highway wildlife crossings allow safe access to that low-elevation Bow River habitat."
Sawaya said roads are the most common form of man-made disruption to wildlife habitat and, in the case of the Trans-Canada Highway, pose a direct threat to a threatened Alberta grizzly bear population. The study of how bears use wildlife crossings was part of Sawaya's doctoral work, for which he teamed up with Alberta-based wildlife biologist Clevenger, a senior research scientist at WTI, and Kalinowski, an associate professor of ecology at MSU who was Sawaya's adviser.
The 25 wildlife crossings in Banff were installed during the 1990s, to keep motorists and wildlife safe. Two of the crossings are overpasses built with enough width and vegetation to resemble the surrounding forest. The rest of the structures are culverts or bridges. The crossings work in conjunction with high fencing installed along the roadway to keep wildlife out of a stream of traffic that brings millions of vehicles to Banff and through the Canadian Rockies. In addition to bears, the crossings have seen documented use by deer, elk and moose, as well as wolves, wolverines, lynx, cougars and a host of other animals.
Last week, coinciding with the Society of Conservation Biology's biennial international conference, Sawaya, Clevenger and Kalinowski published a paper in the journal Conservation Biology detailing what genetic testing on 10,000 hair samples showed about the demographic effect the Banff crossings have on area bear populations.
Their results offered an encouraging assessment that a highway punctuated with 25 different crossings did not fragment the habitat in a way that prevented bears from seeking food, shelter and dispersal areas on either side of the Trans-Canada Highway.
"This is a landmark study because it's the first time anyone has done extensive genetic sampling to address unanswered questions about the use of highway crossings by bears," Clevenger said. "We knew that bears used the crossings, we just didn't know how many, what percentage of each species' population uses them, whether there is a preference by males or females to use crossings, and if there was a gender or species preference for overpasses or underpasses."
Another paper from the study due this fall will break down what ecologists call "gene flow" between bear populations in the Banff ecosystem. That data should help gauge how well the crossing structures perform in allowing different bears to find mates in an ecosystem bisected by a major highway.
"By collecting the genetic data on each bear using the crossings, we have a much more powerful tool for gauging the effectiveness of the crossing structures to provide connectivity within the ecosystem," Clevenger added.
In 2006, Sawaya, Clevenger and Kalinowski began setting out noninvasive hair snags strands of barbed wire strung across the wildlife crossings, hair traps with wire snags that collect samples from bears lured to a scent and rub trees with wire attached. Over the next three years, the MSU scientists and assistants collected hair samples from 20 crossings, 420 hair traps and 497 dispersed rub trees.
Once the genetic testing was finished, Sawaya said they could identify 15 individual grizzly bears and 17 individual black bears that used the highway crossings over the three years, which Sawaya said paints a good picture of the demographic connectivity provided by the crossing structures. During the study, close to 20 percent of the grizzly and black bears in Banff used the crossings. Grizzlies were more likely to use the overpasses, while black bears were more likely to use underpasses.
Sawaya said research shows that movement of more than 10 percent of a population through the highway barrier signals there is sufficient connectivity to maintain a healthy ecosystem for bears and other large mammals.
Clevenger, who has been tracking the numbers of bear crossings on the Trans-Canada Highway crossing structures for over a decade as part of the Banff Wildlife Crossings Project, said the study's findings are a breakthrough.
"This is confirmation of what our previous investigations have suggested but couldn't confirm," Clevenger said. "We were pretty certain that the numbers of bears using the crossings had steadily increased. Now we know."
The use of wildlife crossings to protect motorists and wildlife on the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff has been a model for similar projects elsewhere. WTI has been consulting on proposed projects with similar goals in countries around the world, from Mongolia, to China, to Brazil.
In Montana, where U.S. Highway 93 runs through the southern Flathead Valley, it runs near prime grizzly bear habitat in the Mission Mountains and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex. At the request of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Montana Department of Transportation installed more than 40 wildlife crossings on the Flathead Reservation.
WTI is researching wildlife habits at those crossings also to assess their success in improving habitat. The multiyear study is set to run through 2015, according to Rob Ament, manager of WTI's Road Ecology Program.
Ament said the research WTI scientists are doing in Banff and on the Flathead Reservation is a fundamental part of its mission to provide solutions to transportation problems in the rural West, where wildlife and wildlife-vehicle collision are a common occurrence.
"Between Banff and the U.S. 93 project, we're talking about the two largest wildlife mitigation projects for highways in North America, if not the world," Ament said. "The lessons we learn will be shared with transportation practitioners not only here in the United States but also with those around the globe."
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Montana State University researchers highlight bears' use of Banff highway crossingsPublic release date: 2-Aug-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Evelyn Boswell evelynb@montana.edu 406-994-5135 Montana State University
BOZEMAN, Mont. Within sight of the Trans-Canada Highway, a team of ecologists with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University set out on foot for a nearby site where they'd strung wire snags to catch the fur of passing bears.
In the short distance they walked, with Canada's busiest transportation artery paralleling a prime patch of buffalo berries in the Bow River bottomland, the team spotted five grizzly bears, including a sow with two cubs.
Since counting and genetically identifying bears was critical for Mike Sawaya, Tony Clevenger and Steven Kalinowski's three-year field study on the effects of the highway's wildlife crossing structures on Banff National Park bear populations, it was all in a day's work, Sawaya said.
"We spent a ton of time in the backcountry and had a lot of really great days out there," said Sawaya, a 2012 graduate of MSU. "Fortunately we never had any really scary experiences. But seeing those particular bears, thankfully from a safe distance, did illustrate that the Trans-Canada Highway wildlife crossings allow safe access to that low-elevation Bow River habitat."
Sawaya said roads are the most common form of man-made disruption to wildlife habitat and, in the case of the Trans-Canada Highway, pose a direct threat to a threatened Alberta grizzly bear population. The study of how bears use wildlife crossings was part of Sawaya's doctoral work, for which he teamed up with Alberta-based wildlife biologist Clevenger, a senior research scientist at WTI, and Kalinowski, an associate professor of ecology at MSU who was Sawaya's adviser.
The 25 wildlife crossings in Banff were installed during the 1990s, to keep motorists and wildlife safe. Two of the crossings are overpasses built with enough width and vegetation to resemble the surrounding forest. The rest of the structures are culverts or bridges. The crossings work in conjunction with high fencing installed along the roadway to keep wildlife out of a stream of traffic that brings millions of vehicles to Banff and through the Canadian Rockies. In addition to bears, the crossings have seen documented use by deer, elk and moose, as well as wolves, wolverines, lynx, cougars and a host of other animals.
Last week, coinciding with the Society of Conservation Biology's biennial international conference, Sawaya, Clevenger and Kalinowski published a paper in the journal Conservation Biology detailing what genetic testing on 10,000 hair samples showed about the demographic effect the Banff crossings have on area bear populations.
Their results offered an encouraging assessment that a highway punctuated with 25 different crossings did not fragment the habitat in a way that prevented bears from seeking food, shelter and dispersal areas on either side of the Trans-Canada Highway.
"This is a landmark study because it's the first time anyone has done extensive genetic sampling to address unanswered questions about the use of highway crossings by bears," Clevenger said. "We knew that bears used the crossings, we just didn't know how many, what percentage of each species' population uses them, whether there is a preference by males or females to use crossings, and if there was a gender or species preference for overpasses or underpasses."
Another paper from the study due this fall will break down what ecologists call "gene flow" between bear populations in the Banff ecosystem. That data should help gauge how well the crossing structures perform in allowing different bears to find mates in an ecosystem bisected by a major highway.
"By collecting the genetic data on each bear using the crossings, we have a much more powerful tool for gauging the effectiveness of the crossing structures to provide connectivity within the ecosystem," Clevenger added.
In 2006, Sawaya, Clevenger and Kalinowski began setting out noninvasive hair snags strands of barbed wire strung across the wildlife crossings, hair traps with wire snags that collect samples from bears lured to a scent and rub trees with wire attached. Over the next three years, the MSU scientists and assistants collected hair samples from 20 crossings, 420 hair traps and 497 dispersed rub trees.
Once the genetic testing was finished, Sawaya said they could identify 15 individual grizzly bears and 17 individual black bears that used the highway crossings over the three years, which Sawaya said paints a good picture of the demographic connectivity provided by the crossing structures. During the study, close to 20 percent of the grizzly and black bears in Banff used the crossings. Grizzlies were more likely to use the overpasses, while black bears were more likely to use underpasses.
Sawaya said research shows that movement of more than 10 percent of a population through the highway barrier signals there is sufficient connectivity to maintain a healthy ecosystem for bears and other large mammals.
Clevenger, who has been tracking the numbers of bear crossings on the Trans-Canada Highway crossing structures for over a decade as part of the Banff Wildlife Crossings Project, said the study's findings are a breakthrough.
"This is confirmation of what our previous investigations have suggested but couldn't confirm," Clevenger said. "We were pretty certain that the numbers of bears using the crossings had steadily increased. Now we know."
The use of wildlife crossings to protect motorists and wildlife on the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff has been a model for similar projects elsewhere. WTI has been consulting on proposed projects with similar goals in countries around the world, from Mongolia, to China, to Brazil.
In Montana, where U.S. Highway 93 runs through the southern Flathead Valley, it runs near prime grizzly bear habitat in the Mission Mountains and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex. At the request of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Montana Department of Transportation installed more than 40 wildlife crossings on the Flathead Reservation.
WTI is researching wildlife habits at those crossings also to assess their success in improving habitat. The multiyear study is set to run through 2015, according to Rob Ament, manager of WTI's Road Ecology Program.
Ament said the research WTI scientists are doing in Banff and on the Flathead Reservation is a fundamental part of its mission to provide solutions to transportation problems in the rural West, where wildlife and wildlife-vehicle collision are a common occurrence.
"Between Banff and the U.S. 93 project, we're talking about the two largest wildlife mitigation projects for highways in North America, if not the world," Ament said. "The lessons we learn will be shared with transportation practitioners not only here in the United States but also with those around the globe."
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Doris Ducre of Richmond, Calif., is like millions of other homeowners in this country. She works a 9-to-5 job. She pays her bills. She's current on her mortgage. But Ducre (pictured above) feels like a renter in her own home because she's not gaining equity. "My home is underwater," she tells AOL Real Estate.
The four-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style home that this laboratory technician's family purchased for $300,000 in 1998 is now worth about half its value, she estimates. The same goes for many of her neighbors in this 33-square-mile town just outside of San Francisco. About 49 percent of Richmond homeowners with a mortgage have a dwelling that's worth less than the mortgage owed on it. City data reveals that more than 78 percent of the housing units have mortgages.
Officials in Richmond say that situation is untenable and want to seize about 620 underwater mortgages under eminent domain and give them back to the homeowners at a reasonable value. The program's intent is to help homeowners like Ducre -- and like Rodney Conway, who bought his home in 2004 for $340,000 and says that it's now worth about $140,000. Richmond is the first city to adopt such a plan using eminent domain, a law that typically allows government to seize land for public use -- such as when it wants to expand a road or allow for a commuter rail line to pass through town. Other local governments have considered it, though, most notably San Bernardino County in Southern California, where a proposal for it was ultimately rejected early this year.
The lending industry, including the Mortgage Bankers Association, strongly opposes the idea. "Using eminent domain to seize mortgages will result in tighter, more expensive credit for potential homebuyers and those looking to refinance, driving down home values and threatening local economic recovery," said David Stevens, the MBA's president and CEO.
In announcing Richmond's action, Mayor Gayle McLaughlin said at a Tuesday news conference: "After years of waiting on the banks to offer up a more comprehensive fix or the federal government, we're stepping into the void to make it happen ourselves." To accomplish this, the city is joining with Mortgage Resolution Partners, or MRP, an investment firm that tried and failed to push this solution in a half dozen other communities across the U.S. Richmond is its first win.
"In Richmond, I see political and community leaders courageous enough to wage this battle," said Steven Gluckstern, the chairman of MRP, who promises that this untested idea will save residents' homes and help improve the local economy.
In essence, the private investor would step in and offer to buy the mortgage from the lender at the current market value. The lender would more than likely take a loss from the amount of mortgage that is due (not too unlike when it takes a hit in a short sale, except that now the lender does not have the option to resell the home on the open market to help recoup its loss). However, the lender would not have to go through the financial strains of foreclosing, which could include court costs with the owner, an auction sale, and a commission to the real estate agent. Once the private investor, in this case, Mortgage Resolution Partners, and the city obtain the mortgage, the city would hold the mortgage note until the homeowner can refinance.
"The homeowner who refinances never loses ownership of the house, so never has to purchase their home back. The city buys the loan, not the home, then the homeowner refinances," John Vlahoplus, founder and chief strategy officer of MRP said in an interview with AOL Real Estate. "This is just like a regular refinance except that he or she only has to refinance for a reduced principal balance. The city accepts a reduced payoff of the old loan."
Although the city is accepting a reduced payoff of the old loan, the new loan would still be for more than what it paid the lender, and that's how the investors make a profit. Still, the homeowner would have to qualify for a new loan the traditional way.
For someone like Ducre, that may not be an issue. Some other homeowners in this town, with a nearly 12 percent unemployment rate, according to the most recent available data, may not find it as easy to qualify for a conventional loan. For those homeowners with more challenging credit rating or income, Vlahoplus has an answer.
"Those homeowners would qualify for a regular refinance loan, likely one guaranteed by the FHA under a program that encourages principal reduction on old loans," said Vlahoplus.
On Monday, Richmond officials sent letters to 32 banks and other mortgage holders offering to buy 624 underwater mortgages at discounts to the homes' current value. If the offers are not accepted, the letter said, Richmond may use the power of eminent domain to condemn the mortgages and seize them anyway, paying court-determined fair market value, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. If successful, the number of homes that the city would rescue is just a fraction of the nearly 4,600 underwater homes in Richmond.
"Why not give the little person some relief?" Ducre told San Francisco's KGO-TV. Ducre says that she does not know if her home is on the list, but in describing the situation in Richmond, she told AOL Real Estate: "There are some people who are behind on their mortgage. There are some people who are not behind. There are some people who are going through the foreclosure process as we speak.
"Regardless of what category they fall in the banks should give that person an opportunity to stay in that home and not be gouged," she said. "Wall Street has gotten some help, so why not help us."
Ducre has become an unofficial spokesperson for the community, in part because of the media coverage and her knowledge of the situation. She says that what she learned came from being "just a member" of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which touts that it works with city and state officials to implement strategies that encourage lenders to modify more loans. It also supports the efforts of the MRP.
Richmond City Manager Bill Lindsay invited Gluckstern to sell the city on the idea after he heard the MRP chairman speak at a Contra Costa County meeting of top public administration officials, reported the Contra Costa Times. Gluckstern told the paper that his goal is to make money, but to do so in a way that saves struggling homeowners and improves the local economy.
MRP's Vlahoplus said using eminent domain to help families remain in their homes is appropriate and may be the only way to stop the underwater mortgage crisis from continuing to devastate local communities.
"Our opponents believe that it is appropriate to use eminent domain to acquire a house to widen a road, moving a couple out of the home in which they raised a family and a neighborhood of lifelong friends, but it is appalling and abhorrent to purchase loans to save that very home and neighborhood from destruction," Vlahoplus said. "It is appalling and abhorrent that our opponents plan to needlessly foreclose on millions of American families and evict them from their homes."
The MBA's Stevens told AOL Real Estate in an email interview that: "The program is a short-term solution for a few underwater borrowers that will have severe negative long-term costs for every homeowner in the city."
Separately, in a release announcing the MBA's support of a bill by U.S. Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) to limit the ability of local municipalities to use eminent domain to seize residential mortgages, Stevens said: "Cramming losses down on existing mortgage backed securities holders will drive down the value of millions of Americans' investments, including pension plans, mutual funds and 401(k) retirement accounts."
Ducre says that she believes that the banks are just afraid that Richmond will succeed, because if so "other cities will get the strength and say 'if they can do it we can do it.' "
Her advice to other homeowners in her situation: "Have the faith to get organized. Band together and get the politicians on your side, as far as your mayor and your city go. Let the banks know that you are there and that you are serious about getting the homes down to the market rate."
See more on underwater mortgages: Underwater Borrowers Becoming Accidental Landlords 2 Million Underwater Homeowners Rose From Negative Equity in 2012, Report Says Strategic Default Has a Hidden Cost You Might Not Be Willing to Pay
More on AOL Real Estate: Find out how to calculate mortgage payments. Find homes for sale in your area. Find foreclosures in your area. Find homes for rent in your area.
Follow us on Twitter at @AOLRealEstate or connect with AOL Real Estate on Facebook.
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Public release date: 2-Aug-2013
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