Chinese syndicates and triads are at large in China kidnapping traders for ransom.

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/4/15/nation/8485486&sec=nation

Such incidents happen too often in China. Traders must be extra careful.

Filipinos can help themselves by not agreeing to carry drugs hidden in secret compartments in baggage.

The 3 China executed yesterday were not workers. All 3 went to China on tourist visas and paid their own way. All 3 had previously made successful drug runs into China.

If it means they virtually sold shares of the horse… I am confused why someone would do that? Wouldn’t an owner make more money by keeping all shares of a horse and earning all the profit from him?

The reason that people syndicate a stallion for stud duty is to spread the risk of standing him at stud.

If every horse that was a superior racehorse became the sire of superior racehorses when he goes to stud, then breeding horses would be an easy business. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Just for example, Spectacular Bid, one of the best Thoroughbred racehorses of the last 50 years, was syndicated for stud for a then-record value of $22 million. He went to stud at Claiborne Farm, which is one of the best Thoroughbred farms in the world. He was bred to some of the best race mares and broodmares in the country, his babies went to some of the top trainers in the country, and he failed miserably as a stallion. He never sired a horse that even came close to his own quality.

People who breed Thoroughbred racehorses have no sentiment when it comes to their bank balances. They don’t care how wonderful a horse was as a racehorse, if his babies don’t win at the racetrack, they will not send mares to breed to him. And that’s pretty much what happened to "Bid." When it became apparent that he was not going to be successful as a sire of racehorses, he was sold to a farm in upstate New York, and he ended up being used as a sire of hunters and jumpers, standing for a very low stud fee.

Syndicating the stallion spreads the risk; usually the owner retains a few shares in him, but selling most of the shares gives the owner a pot of money up front.

Syndicating a stallion is also a way of getting him access to the best mares possible. For the last 20 years, standing a stallion at stud has been a numbers game: the leading first-year sires usually have at least 70-80 foals from his first crop. There aren’t many individual owners who have that many mares to breed to a single horse, and at least up until the past few years, breeders were reluctant to support a stallion that they didn’t own at least one share in. So to get him the number of quality mares that it usually takes to get him up high on the general sires list, you almost had to syndicate him and sell at least half the shares in the syndicate. (Most stallions are syndicated into something around 40 to 60 shares, with the original owner usually retaining from 20% to 50% of the shares. It used to be that each share gave the owner of the share the right to breed one mare per year to the horse, but nowadays a share is more likely to give the owner the right to breed two mares per year to the horse.)

Right now, the market is changing. People are a lot less willing to pay huge prices to buy a share in an unproven horse, and there are a lot fewer people who are breeding Thoroughbreds than there were just 5 years ago, and people who are breeding aren’t breeding as many mares. So the market for stallions has gone down dramatically. People who want to send a stallion to stud are finding that they can’t readily syndicate him, and there’s a lot of wheeling and dealing that goes on with unproven stallions now.

Prior to the 1960’s, the business was completely different: most stallions were owned by the people who bred or raced them, and were essentially "private" stallions. For example, Secretariat’s sire, Bold Ruler, stood his entire career at Claiborne Farm as the private property of Wheatley Stable (the Phipps family). You just couldn’t buy a breeding to Bold Ruler unless you were a friend of the Phipps family. That was true for most stallions.

Right now, the Thoroughbred breeding business is in the biggest state of change that I’ve seen it since I started following racing and breeding in the mid-1960’s. Things are really shaking down.

I have been given evidence of the following.
A £20k wager placed at Wirriam Hill in Beijing for Spurs and Milan to be goaless last night.
£45k on Crouch 1st scorer in the away leg a couple of weeks ago at Blet Fled in Shanghai.
Spurs to get beaten at Blackpool, £100k bet wagered at Ladblooks in Canton.

All bets were placed in the name of a Mr Hally Redknlapp.

ok

Will the US do something about it, by diverting their time and resources away from the lost cause in the middle east and onto the drug cartels in Mexico, or are we bound to see constant political strife in Mexico as a result of these crime syndicates?

The PEOPLE of the USA have the power to put them out of business tomorrow. All they have to do is stop buying illegal drugs. Simple. Which is more important to them – getting high, or preventing the deaths of thousands and thousands of innocent people???

ca

I don’t believe there is a tie anymore,the huge political gains and power they needed were established with the help of organized crime long ago,now they are the organized crime. The reputable and legitimite face that the mob always wanted.

Something like a mafia,street gang or racial superiority group.

Yes, Russians in Pattaya and Phuket, Taiwanese and Chinese, Nigerian, along with many Thai gangs who work for any boss who can afford them. This does not include the numerous drugs gangs thourghout the country.

I need a statistic. quick! its for a paper.

Billions.

Richard

my spec are….
Intel P4 2.8
1gb RAM
128 mb FX5200 AGP card
Plzzzz please pleaseeee help ThanKs

Raja…I would love to help you, but this category is all about horse racing….

I find it odd that some episodes are entirely wiped out and not aired. I see this all the time with Home Improvement and Saved by the Bell reruns.

They buy episodes in bundled packages and sometimes dont have the rights to every episode. That happens with really long running shows like the Simpsons, they dont want to purchase the rights to 20 years of episodes, they’ll make do with the past 10 years.