PARIS: Amid another flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence, there are plenty of raised, partisan voices on either side. A new ad campaign suggests a different way to address the divide: speak, or even sing, to both sides at once.

The campaign is for a radio station, 93.6 RAM FM, that broadcasts from Jerusalem and Ramallah, reaching Israelis and Palestinians alike - in English rather than Hebrew or Arabic. The station was set up last year by Issie Kirsh, a Jewish South African. The idea came from a similar station, Radio 702, that he set up in the apartheid era of South Africa, allowing blacks and whites to speak on the same call-in and talk shows.

The station, 93.6 RAM FM, underlines its neutrality by avoiding Israeli or Arab songs and featuring the music of American, British and other English-speaking artists.

Some of them, including Bob Marley and the Beatles, feature in the ad campaign, which recently started to appear on billboards, in newspapers and magazines and on buses. The portraits are rendered through a kind of pointillist technique that uses the stamps applied to passports at border crossings, to reinforce the idea that music can surmount such barriers.

Unusually for an ad campaign in the region, the same images were used in Israeli and in Palestinian areas.

“The station views music as being a universal language that can cross all borders and reach all people, all nations and all religions,” said Guy Bar, creative director of Gitam BBDO, the ad agency in Tel Aviv that created the campaign.

The station was spending about $400,000 on the campaign, a spokeswoman said. So far, she said, 93.6 RAM FM has attracted only small audiences, but it hopes those will grow, so that it can start selling ads, too. Getting ahead of themselves

Despite the tremors in world financial markets, advertising executives have been surprisingly upbeat about the outlook for ad spending this year. Forecasts of outlays on television advertising, in particular, have been robust, as analysts cite the stimulative effects of the U.S. presidential election, the Beijing Olympics and the European soccer championships.

Is some of the enthusiasm overblown? Thats what a report from Informa Telecoms Media, a research firm, suggests. While ad agencies have typically predicted that spending on television advertising will rise by over 7 percent this year, Informa says the increase will be 5.8 percent. The discrepancy is partly caused by different ways of tallying ad spending.

Informa says it stripped out advertising production costs and media buyers commissions, which sometimes are included in ad industry spending forecasts. It also took account of discounts that broadcasters and other media owners typically provide in an effort to lure advertisers, rather than quoting so-called rate card figures.

The difference is sizable. Informa says television advertising worldwide will total $123 billion this year - tens of billions less than typical ad industry estimates.

These factors may affect estimates of spending increases, too. Discounts are particularly widespread among pay-TV channels, which have a harder time filling their ad breaks than major networks do, and in emerging markets, said Simon Murray, an analyst at Informa. Among pay-TV channels in emerging markets, discounts can run as high as 70 percent off the published rates, he added.

There has been a lot of enthusiasm in the ad industry about emerging markets, much of it justified. But Informas report suggests that the industry may be overestimating the amount of money that actually changes hands in places like Eastern Europe and Asia, where ad agencies and media owners hope strong growth will compensate for sluggishness elsewhere.

Nonetheless, 5.8 percent is still a pretty respectable rate of increase.

“I thought it would actually be lower,” Murray said. “I thought we would get a much more gloomy picture. Its not exactly ecstatic, but its not all gloom and doom.”

NEW YORK: What are the consequences of a world in which regulators rescue even the financial institutions whose recklessness and greed helped create the titanic credit mess we are in? Will the consequences in the United States be an even weaker currency, rampant inflation, a continuation of the slow bleed that we have witnessed at banks and brokerage firms for the past year?

Or all of the above?

Stick around, because well soon find out. And its not going to be pretty.

Agreeing to guarantee a 28-day credit line to Bear Stearns, by way of JPMorgan Chase, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York conceded Friday that no sizable firm with a book of mortgage securities or loans out to mortgage issuers could be allowed to fail right now. It was the most explicit sign yet of the Feds “Rescues R Us” doctrine that has already helped to force the marriage of Bank of America and Countrywide.

But why save Bear Stearns? The beneficiary of this bailout, remember, has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach. Until regulators came along in 1996, Bear Stearns was happy to provide its balance sheet and imprimatur to bucket-shop brokerages like Stratton Oakmont and A.R. Baron, clearing dubious stock trades.

And as one of the biggest players in the mortgage securities business on Wall Street, Bear provided munificent lines of credit to public-spirited subprime lenders like New Century (now bankrupt). It is also the owner of EMC Mortgage Servicing, one of the most aggressive subprime mortgage servicers out there.

Bears default rates on so-called Alt-A mortgages that it underwrote also indicates that its lending practices were especially lax during the real estate boom. As of February, according to Bloomberg data, 15 percent of these loans in its underwritten securities were delinquent by more than 60 days or in foreclosure.

That compares with an industry average of 8.4 percent.

Lets not forget that Bear Stearns lost billions for its clients last summer, when two hedge funds investing heavily in mortgage securities collapsed. And the firm tried to dump toxic mortgage securities it held in its own vaults onto the public last summer in an initial public offering of a financial company called Everquest Financial. Thankfully, that deal never got done.

Recall, too, that back in 1998, when the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund required a Fed-arranged bailout, Bear Stearns refused to join the rescue effort. Jimmy Cayne, then chief executive at the firm, told the Fed to take a hike.

And so, Bear Stearns, a firm that some say is this decades version of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the anything-goes, 1980s junk-bond shop dominated by Michael Milken, is rescued. Almost two decades ago, Drexel was left to die.

Bear Stearns and Drexel have a lot in common. And yet their differing outcomes offer proof that we are in a very different and scarier place than in the late 1980s.

“Why not set an example of Bear Stearns, the guys who have this record of dog-eat-dog, were brass knuckles, were tough?” asked William Fleckenstein, president of Fleckenstein Capital in Issaquah, Washington, and co-author with Fred Sheehan of “Greenspans Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve.” “This is the perfect time to set an example, but they are not interested in setting an example. We are Bailout Nation.”

And so we are. After years of never allowing any of our financial institutions to fail, they have become so enormous that nobody will be allowed to sink beneath the waves. Otherwise, a tsunami would swamp the hedge funds, banks and other brokerage firms that remain afloat.

If Bear Stearns failed, for example, it would result in a wholesale dumping of mortgage securities and other assets onto a market that is frozen and where buyers are in hiding. This fire sale would force surviving institutions carrying the same types of securities on their books to mark down their positions, generating more margin calls and creating more failures.

As of Nov. 30, Bear Stearns had on its books about $46 billion of mortgages, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities. Jettisoning such a portfolio onto a mortgage market that is not operative would, it is plain to see, be a disaster.

But, who knows what those mortgages are really worth? According to Bear Stearnss annual report, $29 billion of them were valued using computer models “derived from” or “supported by” some kind of observable market data. The value of the remaining $17 billion is an estimate based on “internally developed models or methodologies utilizing significant inputs that are generally less readily observable.”

THE director and an employee of a Christian boot camp in the US have been arrested for allegedly dragging a 15-year-old girl behind a van after she fell back during a morning run.

Charles Flowers and Stephanie Bassitt, of Love Demonstrated Ministries - a 32-day boot camp for at-risk teenagers in Texas - are accused of tying the girl to the van with a rope on 12 June this year and dragging her, according to an arrest statement.

The affadavit says Flowers, the director of the San Antonio-based camp, ordered Bassitt to run alongside the girl after she fell behind.

When the girl stopped running, Bassitt is alleged to have shouted at her and pinned her to the ground while Flowers tied her.

The girl was later treated for scrapes and bruises on her stomach, legs and arms.

The girl’s mother gave investigators photographs of her daughter’s injuries and a sworn statement from a witness who claimed to have seen the girl dragged along on her stomach at least three times.

The camp officials were remanded in custody on 50,000 bail in relation to aggravated assault charges.