Looking for the right kind of home loan can be an exhausting and nerve wracking process. Especially so when lending institutions seem reluctant to approve the desired amount of loan needed to buy that dream home. Even though the amount of loan approved will mainly depend upon the buyer’s income, other simple steps taken beforehand can also enhance the loan eligibility of the prospective borrower.

One of the best ways to heighten loan eligibility is to present the lender with a good track record of loan repayments in the past. This can be done in the form of credit card statements which reveal punctual repayments over a period of time.

While looking for loans, one can also target institutions with whom the prospective borrower has had financial relations in the past. For instance banks will not only be more willing to approve loans for long-time account holders but may even be willing to offer lower rates than other lending institutions.

Finally one should go for a long repayment period since longer the loan tenure, easier is the loan servicing. One may also look for lenders who are willing to club the prospective borrower’s income with that of the spouse of other earning members of the family in order to raise the loan eligibility.

-Kalyani Mookherji.

Today, the internet has is much more than a source of information - it is a virtual marketplace where all kinds of products and services are on sale. In such a scenario, search engine placement constitutes one of the crucial ways of attracting the attention of a potential customer and thus one of the primary tools of internet marketing.

An online business offering specific goods of services needs to channel the quality traffic to its website in order to attract the right kind of customers. Extensive studies have revealed that one of the foremost ways of doing this is to rank high on the search results of the better known search engines. This is because researchers have found out that searchers typically scan the results pages from top to bottom and left to right. Thus higher the ranking of a website on search results, greater are the odds of its being noticed.

Some of the most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo!, Live Search from Microsoft and Ask.com. However being ranked high on search results may not always translate into higher sales. Another drawback of this method of internet marketing is that there are no guarantees of continued referrals by search engines. Thus Search engine placement of websites should be emphasized only after keeping the target audience in mind.

-Kalyani Mookherji

In a unanimous decision, the Los Angeles City Council voted to keep out new fast food joints from opening in its less-privileged Southern areas. With this step, the Council hopes to promote healthier food habits among people who have been found to be clinically obese in a greater proportion as compared to residents of other areas.

The move to impose a moratorium on new fast food restaurants comes in the wake of a report compiled by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. This reports estimates that almost 30 percent of the adults living in South Los Angeles areas suffer from clinical obesity while the corresponding figure of rest of the Metropolitan area is19.1 percent. The well-off Westside area has an even lesser percentage of obese people which at present stands at 14.1.

The City Council decision is being watched with interest by both business and civic communities since it is the first bill of its kind which seeks the direct intervention of the city governing officials in the protection of public health. While the mayor is yet to sign the action which will enforce it as law, local members of the California Restaurant Association have already decided to challenge to the ordinance in a court of law.

-Kalyani Mookherji

Las Vegas, located in the U.S state of Nevada, is often referred to as the Entertainment Capital of the world. To cater to the millions of tourists streaming in each year, Las Vegas has come up with some of the most lavish hotels in the world with one estimate pegging the total number of hotel rooms above 126,394. The city is especially famous for its casinos, convention centers and hotspots of adult entertainment.

Hotels and casinos in Las Vegas are generally built on a grand scale and house thousands of rooms. Most of these hotels lie along the Las Vegas Boulevard South and which is also referred to as Arrowhead Highway, U.S Highway 91and Salt Lake Highway. It has been estimated around eighteen of the world’s 25 biggest hotels are situated on the Las Vegas Strip or the Boulevard. Some of the largest hotels in this area which have more than 4000 rooms are MGM Grand, The Venetian, Excalibur and Luxor.

Many of the popular Las Vegas hotels like Four Queens, Golden Nugget, Binion’s Gambling Hall and Hotel, Fremont Casino, Las Vegas Club can be found in the city’s downtown area. In fact, the original center of the city’s gaming and entertainment industry was located in its downtown area and included some of the famous hotels and casinos on the Fremont Street Experience.

-Kalyani Mookherji

Before you start looking for your dream home, be sure to identify your housing requirements. Not only do priorities vary from one family to another but they may change for the same family over the passage of time. Thus recognizing your housing needs forms the first major step when shopping for a house.

The requirements of all family members go into deciding what house to buy. If there are children in the family, then the availability of schools, playgrounds, recreational spots and the security of the area become important. A young couple however would look for easy commuting facilities and proximity to entertainment centers. Here question of suburbs or city gains relevance. While suburbs offer larger spaces at lesser rates, city locations score on infrastructure and connectivity.

Another major point to be decided centers around the respective merits of independent houses and apartments. While the former offers greater privacy and the freedom to plan the house as one wants, apartment blocks come with a convenient established system of domestic utilities and security.

Finally with the passage of time, housing needs also undergo changes. While young people would like to live in the proximity of shopping malls, multiplexes and nightclubs, senior citizens living away from their children would prefer to look for healthcare facilities and improved security.

-Kalyani Mookherji

Representatives of the food industry in US have decided to appear before a House Committee to point out what they see as errors in the government’s method of tackling salmonella-poisoning. At the same time the industry leaders will also ask the House to review the country’s food safety program.

Since the end of June, the country has been racked by more than 1300 cases of salmonella poisoning which were initially attributed to certain types of raw tomatoes. Around July 17, FDA lifted the warning against consuming tomatoes and later blamed certain types of peppers grown in Mexico, like jalapeno and Serrano, for spreading the offending bacterial strain. The outbreak was the largest case of food-borne illness in the past decade.

However by the time tomatoes were declared safe to be eaten, the tomato industry had lost more than $100 million. Leaders from food industry are expected to claim compensation along with putting forward their grievances before the Committee. At the same time, food safety experts feel that industry leaders should also take the initiative for putting a more efficient system of produce-tracking in place, something which the industry has strongly opposed in the past.

-Kalyani Mookherji

Inflation levels in Europe rose to the highest point in sixteen years even as the European Central Bank struggled with tough decisions directed at charging up the economy. This comes in the wake of separate reports which show a continued slide in employment levels all over the continent.

Statistics from the European Union office at Luxembourg pegged current inflation rates at 4.2 percent which is the highest since April 1992. Unemployment levels also touched north and stood at 7.3 percent in June this year. The European Central Bank which attempts to restrict inflation levels to below 2%, responded by raising interest rates in an effort to control spiraling inflation. However, economists fear that as loans become more expensive, economic growth will take a beating.

Worldwide trends of a sluggish economy were also reflected in Europe’s leading service and manufacturing industries which are suffering from a slowdown and lowest confidence levels since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Rising living costs coupled with soaring fuel prices have led to restricted purchasing power for the average person. One of most troubling outcomes of this situation might be growth of labor unrest all over Europe as workers continue to demand higher wages.

-Kalyani Mookherji

Protesting against a payment cutback of $1.5 billion, a coalition of health care providers in California has lost its case in a state court. The coalition consisted of doctors, medical caregivers and hospitals that were treating poor patients covered under the health program, Medi-Cal. The reductions were put into place from July 1, this year.

Battling a 2009 budget deficit of more than $15 billion, the state legislature of California had approved a 10 percent cutback in payments, earlier this year which was then signed into a law by Governor Schwarzenegger. The cutbacks directly affect those medical care givers who treat patients covered by Medi-Cal. This is a health program jointly floated by state and federal governments and mainly covers the less privileged populace.

The coalition opposing the cutbacks has now decided to go a step further and appeal in a federal appellate court against the state court’s decision. The worst-hit among all this legal wrangling will be the poor patients with some of them even being turned away by pharmacists as the latter stand to lose around $30 for every prescription they fill. A California Pharmacist Association said that some pharmacists may be forced to take recourse to cutting down hours or even downing shutters in order to avoid incurring more losses.

-Kalyani Mookherji