Olympia – With a new school year about to begin, the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions Securities Division reminds investors to take stock of their financial education and arm themselves with the knowledge to sidestep this year’s Top 10 Investor Traps.

DFI’s Director of Securities Michael Stevenson says investors under pressure from the struggling economy need to resist the lure of sales pitches to rebuild their savings.

“An educated investor should be alert at all times, but especially when money is tight,” Stevenson explained. “Falling into an investment trap makes it harder to get back on solid financial ground.”

The following traps were determined to be the top 10 for 2009 by the Enforcement Trends Project Group of the North American Securities Administrators Association, of which DFI’s Securities Division is a member. Many of the traps identified promise high returns to cash-strapped investors -- but provide little, if any, disclosure of risks and offer high commissions to aggressive sales forces.

Seattle, WA - You may not think twice when you make or take a call on your cell phone, but a new report offers some reasons for concern. The International EMF Collective (EMF stands for "electromagnetic fields") report, co-authored by Brian Stein, questions long-awaited research about whether cell phone use can cause brain cancer.



Stein, who also heads a British supermarket chain, says he used his cell regularly for 14 years and then started experiencing problems. He's convinced the phone was to blame.



"If this had happened to you, you would have had no doubt whatsoever what caused it. As soon as I put the cell phone to my head, major pain; as soon as I removed it from my head the pain went away. It was as dramatic and instantaneous as that."

Construction employment hours and payroll doubled for Recovery Act related projects from June to July as work began or continued on more than 100 state and local highway projects. Employees collected an average of nearly $38 per hour for 144,308 hours worked in July. One of the largest state Recovery Act projects was awarded on August 20 to add an auxiliary lane to I-405 northbound in Bothell. WSDOT applied for almost $435 million in high speed passenger rail funds on August 24, the deadline for states to apply for the first portion of $8 billion in Recovery Act funds for high speed passenger rail projects.