After I listened in to a company report , my Internet went down the whole working day. The repairman from Time Warner is coming later this morning and I will play catch up after I am back on-line.

Apologies to all. Technology strikes again.

I am off to a party at the Harmonie Club, the "Our Crowd" center from the mid-19th century German-Jewish exodus, well before my parents came to America in the 1930s. When I worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, its chairman, Clifford P. Case, R-NJ, regaled me with the tale of how his colleague, Sen. Jack Javits, R-NY, had been blackballed by the Harmonie because he was of Polish Jewish origin.

The party I am going to is for my neighborhood improvement committee which paid to use the club so its officers don't care about our ethnicity.

The company I was listening to was GlaxoSmithKline whose sales fell short of even the revised estimates, but whose profits beat handily, despite falls in sales in the USA and Europe, and a drop in Avandia demand as it rebuilds its franchise in breathing aids.

GSK scored a few points by announcing that its Ebola vaccine would be available before the end of 2014. This is heartening. But as shareholders in Bavarian Nordic we also have a Danish horse in the race for a vaccine. The jab being developed by Jensen, a sub of Johnson & Johnson, to be delivered early in 2015, uses the virus blocker developed by BVNKF (which barely trades in the US0. Its bid-ask spread however show that there is a lot of buying in Europe.) Check on BAVA before putting in any US market orders to avoid unpleasantly high buy prices. Or mistaken low sell ones.

The other thing to be delivered I hope soon are details of what a Luxembourg company under protection from its creditors is allowed or not allowed to do with its assets. The company in question is Rio Forte which owns a chain of posh hotels (under the Tivoli brand) around Portugal and in Brazil; plus a hospital and clinic chain; a travel agency; farms and cattle in Brazil and Bolivia; a listed Brazilian firm with stakes in other listed firms, and other goodies.

While I admit that I am no lawyer, and while we all know the Espirito Santo family proved to be banksters, you cannot simply steal a cattle ranch or a eucalyptus forest or a hotel or hospital which is checking people in all the time. Madoff could shuffle the paper; Espirito Santo cannot move the real estate off the Rio Forte books.

That means there are assets in Rio Forte which owes our Portugal Telecom over $1 bn (despite the fall in the Euro since the default.) Protection from creditors, which is what Rio Forte was granted, means they can sell the assets at fair prices. It doesn't mean they can pocket them.

Luxembourg is a tax haven but not as disreputable as Switzerland, among other things because it is tiny and has to accomodate its neighbors. A former steel center, it converted into Euro-bond dealing in the 1970s and then branched out into mutual fund domicilation for the European Union's UCITS. The rinky little country has to play fair with small investors even if there are banksters up to no good.

Luxembourg's official language is French but the people in fact speak a variation of German close to Yiddish (although they are Roman Catholic.) It has no Hebrew or Slavic borrowings; it is just that the intonation is similar to Yiddish. It a Duchy run by a Grand Duke who outranks William Tell. The capital, also called Luxembourg, has a profile like Ithaca, New York, with steep ravines, but no Lake Cayuga.