Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.
Source: http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/155057/android-modules-nfc-not-in-alloy
fenway park philadelphia flyers student loan forgiveness ufc 145 weigh ins record store day 2012 detroit red wings jose canseco
Biden brought about 1,000 Democrats to their feet repeatedly at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner barely four months ahead of the nation's only competitive governor's race. His appearances at state fundraisers haved evoked speculation that he is laying his footing for a 2016 presidential bid.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we stand for equal rights and women's rights," Biden said. "With virtually zero support from the Republicans, the president and I have moved the country from the worst recession since the Great Depression to 38 months of private-sector growth."
With Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe at his side, Biden took aim at McAuliffe's opponent, state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who won the GOP nomination with strong tea party support and his socially conservative ticket mates.
"There is so much they stand for that is so at odds with the value set of Virginians," Biden said.
The vice president warned that a GOP victory in Virginia would only galvanize the tea party's grip on the GOP in Congress, where he said even longtime moderate Republicans are fearful of a primary challenge if they don't do the tea party's bidding.
"They are so afraid of a challenge by the tea party that they vote against what is the right vote. Imagine what they will do to Barack and me if Terry McAuliffe loses," he said.
A McAuliffe victory, he said, would "send a strong signal to Republicans across America that there's no reason to be afraid of these extreme guys."
Before speaking to activists who paid $175 or more per ticket, Biden joined McAuliffe, a longtime confidante of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in surprising patrons at a Richmond restaurant, shaking hands before wolfing down two plates of fried whiting.
Among other campaign events this season, Biden aided Democratic Rep. Ed Markey in a Massachusetts special election ? Markey won, thus keeping Secretary of State John Kerry's old seat in Democratic hands ? and held a series of closed-door "donor-maintenance" events in Washington.
Sen. Tim Kaine, elected on the same Virginia ballot as President Barack Obama last fall, said it's too early for Democrats to take sides in a potential nomination contest between Biden and Hillary Clinton, but he counseled both to try pragmatism over progressive partisanship.
"I think the Virginia Democratic success model is, we'll let the other guys be the ideology people and we will be the work-together, compromise, make-things-happen party. That's been the model that has allowed Dems to win," said Kaine, like McAuliffe, a former Democratic National Committee chairman.
In speeches warming up the crowd, Kaine and Sen. Mark Warner congratulated gay-rights activists for the ruling that cleared the way for same-sex marriages in 13 states but not in Virginia, where a 7-year-old amendment to the state Constitution prohibits it. And both hailed the immigration reform bill that they supported ? it now faces an uncertain future in a conservative Republican-led House.
The Cuccinelli campaign joined the Virginia GOP in using Biden's visit as an occasion to attack the ticket for Obama's clean-energy initiative, warning that it will devastate Virginia's struggling coal industry and drive up utility bills.
"With no economic plan or message to tout, Vice President Biden and Terry McAuliffe doubled down on an empty strategy of division and false attacks tonight," the campaign said in a statement that referred to the "Obama/Biden/McAuliffe War On Coal" and government-run healthcare as "harmful to job growth and economic opportunity in Virginia."
State GOP Chairman Pat Mullins called it "the most anti-coal slate of candidates ever fielded in the history of Virginia," a distinction intended to lock up the rural, rugged but independent southwestern tip of the state for the GOP in a neck-and-neck governor's race.
Republicans weren't alone in protesting Biden's trip. About three dozen environmental activists opposed to construction of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline stood on a street corner as Biden's motorcade passed, waving placards that read "Say No to Big Oil" and chanting "Hey, Joe, you ought to know, Keystone pipeline's got to go."
? Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/VP-Biden-Virginia-GOP/2013/06/29/id/512614
Paul Kevin Curtis gucci mane Chicago sinkhole Panda Express illuminati illuminati ricin
Justin Lane / EPA
Todd Fernandez (L) and Giovanni Miranda (R), who were just married today, kiss while marching during the 44th annual gay pride march in New York, New York, USA, 30 June 2013.
By Elisha Fieldstadt, NBC News
Gay Pride weekend festivities are rarely understated,? but after the Supreme Court?s decisions last week, marches and rallies all over the country were expected to be especially celebratory this year.
Pride weekend generally occurs at the end of June to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, in which the gay community exploded against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, in New York City on June 28, 1969.
After the Supreme Court?s decision on Wednesday to overturn DOMA, granting legally married same-sex couples the same federal benefits as their heterosexual counterparts, and to let "Prop. 8" die, resuming the legalization of gay marriage in California, the festive atmosphere surrounding Pride events has been ramped up several notches.
While many of the largest and most notable Pride rallies and parties occur in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, smaller but equally colorful celebrations were set to take place in Seattle, St. Louis, Cleveland and other cities throughout the U.S. and around the globe.
Although the first gay pride march was in New York, in forty-plus years, pride events have spread throughout the world. The Paris pride march also had a duel celebration purpose on Saturday, marking the one month anniversary of France?s first gay marriage. Simultaneously, LGBT groups and supporters marched in Spain, Portugal and Mexico. Canada, Sweden, and Finland held parades on Sunday.
Jose Cabezas / AFP - Getty Images
Members of the LBGT community and their allies celebrate around the world.
Appropriately leading the way in New York City, was Edith Windsor ? the woman who championed the fight against DOMA.
Signs along the route read, "Thank you, Edie" ? celebrating Windsor for her successful challenge of a provision of DOMA that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
"If somebody had told me 15 years ago that I would be the marshal of New York City's gay pride parade in 2013, at the age of 84, I wouldn't have believed it," said Windsor.
Singer Harry Belafonte and activist Earl Fowlkes, both equality and civil rights advocates, wijoin her in leading the two-mile march down New York's famed Fifth Avenue from Midtown to the historic Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
?LGBT rights are expanding across the country and these individuals embody the soul of a movement far from over,? organizers NYC Pride said in statement.
The NYPD this year increased plain-clothes patrol to deal with problems that may occur before and after the parade, officials said. The additional surveillance is in response not only to expected record-breaking crowds but also the deadly shooting of a gay man that took place just a month ago in the area that Pride-goers are set to congregate.
Progressive songstress Lady Gaga spoke out against gay violence at New York?s kickoff rally on Friday, declaring "The violence that has taken place towards LGBTs in the past months is unacceptable here and anywhere ? enough is enough," according to NBCNewyork.
While the parade marks the peak of excitement in New York, marchers may have trouble trumping the grandeur of her surprise appearance and performance of her pride-centric ?Star-Spangled Banner? including the line, ?Oh, say does that flag of pride yet wave."
Although New York's Stonewall sparked gay pride marches, San Francisco is equally famous for its gay community, and also boasts a large and colorful pride weekend. According to NBCBayarea, San Francisco?s police chief expects over 1.5 million people to attend the parade.
"Even though the World Series was huge, this could quite possibly be larger in light of the decision that just came down from the Supreme Court ? but it will be just as happy as the World Series," Police Chief Greg Suhr said. Police presence has also been bolstered in San Francisco to keep musical performances, rallies and the parade enjoyable and safe.
Meanwhile, Chicagopride.com announced that their pride weekend will also include performances, over 200 floats and of course, marchers.
According to the Chicago Transit Authority, the parade route was expanded to include more streets last year and maintains that distance this year to accommodate the greater amount of people who wish to display their pride in Chi town.
According to NBCChicago, the gay rights advocates of their city could use a joyous occasion after Illinois could not garner enough support from the house to legalize gay marriage in the state, even after a petition on Change.org and a plea from President Barack Obama to the lawmakers of his home state.
Related: Justice Kennedy denies motion to halt gay marriage in California
justin bieber birthday read across america vikings stadium breitbart dead db cooper fafsa branson missouri
? 0 Like?
Photos claiming to be of the back-plate of Apple?s rumored low-cost iPhone have made their way online. The photos first appeared on Weiphone forums, the back-plate which cannot be verified to be that of an iPhone appears to be made of soft plastic material vs the aluminum unlike the current iPhone. Only time will tell if these do belong a real product that Apple has been developing in their top secret labs or if these are just rumors.
[via]
Source: http://ihackthatifone.com/are-these-apples-lower-costing-iphone-plastic-rear-shells/
old school nick swisher jaco san jose sharks humber perfect game ufc 145 fight card ufc145
By Jeff Mason and Mark Felsenthal
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - President Barack Obama met the family of South Africa's ailing anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela on Saturday and he praised the critically ill, retired statesman as one of history's greatest figures.
The faltering health of Mandela, 94, a figure admired globally as a symbol of struggle against injustice and racism, is dominating Obama's two-day visit to South Africa.
But Obama also faced protests by South Africans against U.S. foreign policy, especially American drone strikes.
Police fired stun grenades on Saturday to disperse several hundred protesters who had gathered outside the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg, where Obama was due to address a town hall meeting with students.
Obama, in South Africa on the second leg of a three-nation Africa tour, met Mandela relatives to deliver a message of support instead of directly visiting the former president at the hospital where he has spent the last three weeks.
The meeting took place at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in Johannesburg.
Obama told reporters afterwards he also spoke by telephone with Mandela's wife Graca Machel, who remained by her husband's side in the hospital in Pretoria.
"I expressed my hope that Madiba draws peace and comfort from the time that he is spending with loved ones, and also expressed my heartfelt support for the entire family as they work through this difficult time," he said, using the clan name Madiba by which Mandela is affectionately known.
Obama earlier had talks with South African President Jacob Zuma and the two held a joint news conference in which Zuma said Mandela remained in a "critical but stable condition".
Obama's visit to South Africa had stirred intense speculation that the first African-American president of the United States would look in on the first black president of South Africa in his hospital room.
But Mandela's deterioration in the last week to a critical condition forced the White House to rule out the possibility of Obama and his wife seeing the frail ex-statesman.
Speaking to reporters at Pretoria's Union Buildings, where Mandela was inaugurated as president in 1994, Obama said the prayers of millions around the world were with the Nobel Peace laureate, who lay just one km (mile) away in hospital.
Adding to his previous praise of Mandela, Obama likened him to first U.S. president George Washington because of the decision of both to step down at the peak of their power.
"What an incredible lesson that is," Obama said, calling Mandela "one of the greatest people in history".
Obama had said on Thursday he did not "need a photo op" with Mandela, whom he met in 2005 in Washington when he was a U.S. senator.
"BOUND BY HISTORY"
After holding talks with Obama, Zuma said Mandela's critical condition was unchanged. "We hope that very soon he will be out of hospital," he added, without giving further details.
In welcoming Obama, Zuma underscored the historical similarities between Mandela and his U.S. guest in overcoming decades of institutionalized racism and discrimination to rise to the highest political office.
"The two of you are also bound by history as the first black presidents of your respective countries," Zuma said. "You both carry the dreams of the millions of people in Africa and the diaspora."
On Sunday, Obama flies to Cape Town from which he will visit Robben Island, the windswept former penal colony in the frigid waters of the south Atlantic where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in apartheid jails.
Zuma said Mandela had told him before his latest hospitalization that "when I go to sleep I will be very happy because I left South Africa going forward".
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Mark Felsenthal, and Dylan Martinez and Jon Herskovitz in Soweto; Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Pascal Fletcher)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-meets-mandela-family-police-disperse-protesters-135122531.html
mario manningham mario manningham williams syndrome hoya casa de mi padre corned beef and cabbage diners drive ins and dives
President Obama visits the Copper Mountain Solar Project in Boulder City, Nev. on March 21, 2012. Obama's recently announced climate action plan puts a lot of emphasis on measures to adapt to climate change.Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters
One should be grateful for a president who is willing to stand up and declare?as President Obama did in his speech Tuesday announcing his long-awaited climate action plan?that global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions is a serious problem requiring serious measures, and that ?We don?t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.? After all, as presidents go, we could have done much worse. President Obama is working under serious constraints in the form of a completely uncooperative Congress, and insofar as there is no real substitute for congressional action, there are limits to what he can be expected to do. One can always hope, but anybody hoping for a miracle in the unveiling of Obama's plan will be severely disappointed.
For the most part, the plan follows the recommendations of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which many of us found wanting. Stanford's Ken Caldeira has described them as a ?bunch of small-bore measures? that ?fail to articulate a vision in which we transform our energy system into one that doesn't treat the atmosphere as a waste dump.? I am inclined to agree with this assessment, and I don't see much in either the president's speech or the climate action plan to change my mind.
Obama's plan puts a lot of emphasis on measures to adapt to climate change; these are worthwhile and necessary, but they won't amount to much more than a pinky in the crumbling dike if carbon dioxide continues building up at anything like the rates we are currently seeing. The most important part of the action plan and Obama's speech deals with measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which the president refers to throughout the plan and speech as ?carbon pollution.? This terminology is reasonable, as it is the carbon in fossil fuels which, when combined with oxygen during burning, makes the carbon dioxide, the principal and most enduring cause of global warming. One must not confuse ?carbon pollution? in this sense with the emission of particulate soot, known loosely as ?black carbon.? Soot is a much shorter-lived and more minor part of the global warming story, which comes up somewhat later in the action plan. Another thing to keep in mind is that, while the president refers to ?carbon pollution,? all the tonnages of emissions referred to in the document are tonnages of carbon dioxide, not tonnage of carbon. Carbon dioxide is 27 percent carbon by weight, so one ton of carbon dioxide is equivalent to about one-quarter ton of carbon, which is also roughly the amount of carbon you need to burn in order to produce it. This is just a matter of accounting convention, but one must keep it straight in order to do the arithmetic right. I prefer to do my accounting in terms of tonnage of carbon, and the numbers I refer to are converted accordingly.
The usual unit of carbon accounting is billion metric tons of carbon (gigatons carbon, or GtC); 1 metric ton is 1,000 kilograms or about 2,200 pounds, just a bit more than a conventional English (or ?short?) ton. U.S. emissions amounted to 1.36 GtC in 2012, representing about 17 percent of the world total, and the contributions of Obama's decarbonization plan should be measured against these figures. The 2012 U.S. emissions were back down to levels not seen since the 1990s. This welcome decline is in part due to switching between coal and natural gas, but in order to sustain the decline into the future, much more will have to be done (as discussed here and here). Worldwide emissions are what count for the climate, but if the United States is to exert the leadership required to help bring the developing world (notably China and India) on board, it must first get its own house in order.
When it comes to carbon pollution, coal is Public Enemy No. 1 by a wide margin. That is because, both in the United States and worldwide, coal represents the biggest, cheapest, and most accessible pool of carbon that is threatened to be dumped into the atmosphere. To make matters worse, coal is a very inefficient fuel, and as usually burned produces more carbon per unit of useful energy than any other fossil fuel. Obama?s commitment to extend EPA carbon pollution regulation from new to existing power plants is perhaps the most important part of the climate action plan. Even if such regulations take years to put into place, as they probably will, the mere fact that such regulations are on the way signals to the energy markets that the future may not be business as usual with regard to carbon pollution, and the rule will help direct capital to more carbon-neutral forms of energy. Until the regulations are formulated, however, it will be hard to pin down how many gigatons of carbon they keep out of the atmosphere. The potential leverage is huge, since current U.S. emissions from coal (primarily in power plants) add up to nearly a half-gigaton of carbon per year.
However, Obama has failed to fully engage in the war on coal. The biggest shortcoming of the plan is that it doesn't do anything to address U.S. coal exports, which have grown as domestic demand has dropped. This has helped keep U.S. coal production steady or growing, and it will cancel the benefits of switching fuels in domestic power plants. The atmosphere doesn't care where the coal is burned so long as it is burned somewhere. I don't think much of our exported coal is going to rock collectors who are keeping it locked up in cabinets. U.S. coal exports have doubled since 2007, with much of the increase going to Asia. This increase is equivalent to at least 27 million tons of carbon annually, which cancels out one-half of the reduction in U.S. emissions achieved during 2012. It wouldn't take too much more growth in coal exports to entirely undo the good the president's plan may achieve.
Insofar as the United States holds some of the world's greatest coal reserves, there is much more that Obama could have done?and still can do?to assure that as much as possible of it is left in the ground. For starters, he could mandate that climate effects be taken into account in evaluating the environmental impact of new coal export terminals. The current permitting process used by the Army Corps of Engineers does not do this, and indeed it is lax in many other regards. Additional measures the president could have taken would be to include climate effects in the permitting process for coal mining on federal lands and impose climate-impact extraction fees on such mining.
Canada's tar sands are Public Enemy No. 2 in the climate fight, if not in terms of current emissions, at least in terms of the size of the extractable carbon pool they represent. In this regard, a welcome surprise is that Obama included a statement concerning the Keystone XL pipeline in his speech, though not in the action plan itself. In the speech, he proclaimed that the pipeline, which taps into the tar sands production, would be approved only if it did not make climate change ?significantly? worse. The key here is how that word ?significantly? will be interpreted; the original State Department document soft-pedaled the issue and more or less said the tar sands would be burned regardless so there's no significant climate impact of the pipeline. The EPA begged to differ. I think it is clear that the pipeline will increase the profitability and hence production from the tar sands, otherwise Canada would not be lobbying so aggressively for it. The important thing with regard to Obama's policy is that he didn't really need to mention Keystone at all in his speech. A mention of Keystone followed by weaseling out through careful parsing of the meaning of ?significant? is not going to get him much street cred with environmentalists, so one can hope that Obama's remark signals an intention to take the obvious, if incremental, climate impacts of the pipeline seriously.
Some of the things mentioned in the action plan are so trivial they look like r?sum? padding to me. For example, what is the point of touting 100 megawatts of renewable energy incorporated in federal housing projects? If it displaces coal, it amounts to a fairly trivial one-quarter of a million tons of carbon per year. Similarly, the appliance and federal building energy standards save only 48 million tons of carbon per year?not exactly trivial?but the action plan inflates the significance by comparing the cumulative savings out to 2030 to a single year of U.S. energy related emissions. The 13 gigawatts of permitted renewables planned for federal lands and military installations in Obama's plan yields a similar savings of 33 million tons per year. That's nothing to sneeze at, but it will take a whole lot of actions of this sort to add up to something significant.
Obama's climate plan did add one set of actions that was not in the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommendations. Namely, the plan gives a fair amount of prominence to control of short-lived climate pollutants, which are emissions other than carbon dioxide that cause warming, but which dissipate within a decade or less after emission (in contrast to carbon dioxide, which sticks around for millennia). The main targets for control are methane (the same stuff as natural gas, emitted from agriculture and leakage from gas extraction), HFCs (a refrigerant that is a substitute for freons that doesn?t destroy the ozone), and particulate black carbon. There is a substantial part of the scientific and policy community which has deluded itself into thinking (wishful thinking, I would say) that early action on such substances could make an important contribution to climate protection. The program is heavily backed by the United Nations Environment Program, and is very popular within the State Department, which no doubt sees it as a way for the United States to appear to be doing something about climate without having to touch the third-rail issue of fossil fuels. In reality, the short-lived nature of these pollutants means that there is little to be gained by spending money and political capital controlling them now. Since their climate effects largely dissipate within a decade, we can wait 100 years if we like, do something about them then, and still get nearly the same benefit in terms of reduced warming. The same cannot be said for carbon dioxide, which sticks around essentially forever. Every extra 100 GtC we emit (as carbon dioxide) while wasting time diddling with short lived climate pollution irreversibly ratchets up the world's temperature by another two-tenths of a degree Celsius. People also get fooled into thinking the contribution of short-lived climate pollution is a big deal by just comparing these substances? climate impact to the still relatively modest carbon-dioxide effect at present, neglecting the fact that at the rate carbon dioxide emissions are growing, the contribution of short-lived climate pollutants is going to look pretty trivial by the year 2100, even allowing for their growth. It makes sense to begin controlling the short-lived stuff once carbon dioxide emissions are on a track to go to zero, but not before. Those of us in the scientific community who have realized that early abatement of short-lived climate pollution yields little climate protection are fighting an uphill battle against the juggernaut. From the council report and conversations I have had with certain council members, it seems clear to me that the council appreciates the limited role to be played by early abatement of the short-lived emissions, but it appears that the State Department has managed to win a place for its viewpoint in the president's plan. I will have a lot more to say about the issue of short lived climate pollution in a future Slate article, but that is for another day.
So, the decarbonization measures in Obama's plan are good and constructive steps. They include a number of other sensible ideas beyond what I have already discussed, such as worldwide efforts to eliminate perverse subsidies for fossil fuels, substantial reduction of financing of foreign coal-fired power plants, and measures to increase the use of renewables and to improve energy efficiency. But all these measures still don't add up to anything like what is really needed, and nobody should succumb to the illusion that they do. The good news, however, is that Obama has brought the dialogue around to the nature of the solutions to the decarbonization problem. The solutions are many and various, mostly boring and prosaic?and not frightening. They are not precisely painless and risk-free, but neither are they the sort of challenges that Americans have shied away from in the past. President Obama has made a start on leading the nation and world down this path. Where he actually leads, and how much following he picks up, will make all the difference.
Boston Strong Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev Boston Bombing Suspect obama fbi Watertown Ma Krystle Campbell
In move to appease marketers, Facebook will no longer show ads with offensive content.?
Advertising makes up 85 precent of revenue at Facebook, the world's largest social network with 1.1 billion users.
AP Photo/Paul Sakuma
EnlargeFacebook said it will no longer allow ads to appear on pages with sexual or violent content, as the online social network moves to appease marketers being associated with objectionable material.
Skip to next paragraph' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
The moves come a month after several businesses pulled their ads from Facebook?amid reports of pages on Facebook?that promoted violence against women.
Facebook?said at the time that it needed to improve its system for flagging and removing content that violated its community standards, which forbid users from posting content about hate-speech, threats and pornography, among other things.
Ads account for roughly 85 percent of revenue at Facebook, the world's largest social network with 1.1 billion users.?Facebook?said the changes would not have a meaningful impact on its business.
On Friday,?Facebook?said it also needed to do more to prevent situations in which ads are displayed alongside material that may not run afoul of its community standards but are deemed controversial nonetheless.
A?Facebook?page for a business that sells adult products, for example, will no longer feature ads. Previously such a page could feature ads along the right-hand side of the page so long as the page did not violate?Facebook's prohibition on depicting nudity.
The move underscores the delicate balance for social media companies, which features a variety of unpredictable and sometimes unsavory content shared by users, but which rely on advertising to underpin their business.
"Our goal is to both preserve the freedoms of sharing on Facebook?but also protect people and brands from certain types of content,"?Facebook?said in a post on its website on Friday.
Facebook?said on Friday that it would expand the scope of pages and groups on its website that should be ad-restricted and promised to remove ads from the flagged areas of the website by the end of the coming week.
Pages and groups that reference violence will also be off limits to ads, the company said. A Facebook?spokeswoman noted that the policy would not apply to the pages of news organizations on?Facebook.
Facebook?said the process of flagging objectionable pages and removing ads would initially be done manually, but that the company will build an automated system to do the job in the coming weeks.
mega millions numbers the fray seahawks new uniforms 2012 tornadoes in dallas kentucky basketball oaksterdam the fray national anthem
The Commerce Commission has rejected Labour's concerns that a failed industry effort to broker a deal over the price Chorus could charge for copper broadband amounted to collusion.
It was reported last month that major telecommunications companies had suggested Chorus should be allowed to charge just under $14 a month each for its 1 million wholesale broadband connections, but that Chorus had rejected the compromise. ?
Labour communications spokeswoman Clare Curran said a letter she had received from Commerce Commission chairman Mark Berry confirmed the nature of the negotiations.
"What really concerns me is [Communications Minister Amy Adams] was fully complicit," she said.
Berry said the commission understood that telecommunications companies had had discussions about the wholesale price of copper broadband and was "currently confirming our understanding of the situation".
But he said the commission did not believe the talks breached the Commerce Act, since pricing was regulated and the discussions were "limited to encouraging the Minister for Communications and Information Technology to legislate for a different regulated [wholesale broadband] price".
"As such, telecommunications companies cannot themselves fix, control or maintain the regulated ... price," he said.
The talks were brokered by the Telecommunications Forum and Adams was kept abreast. She had made it clear that had a final industry agreement been reached, it would then have been put out broadly for consultation.
Curran wrote to the commission asking it to investigate and to take action, saying there was ?"serious concern that collusion may have occurred between telecommunication
companies in order to determine a price that may have been acceptable to Chorus".
"This is a fundamental issue which cuts to the heart of price fixing behaviour for which the
Commerce Commission was established to prevent," she said.
Even though no deal was done, Curran said the issue mattered because the talks were an attempt to bypass the Commerce Commission. She questioned how consumers' interests would have been represented.
Berry promised her a "more fulsome reply once we have confirmed our understanding of the situation".
Since the commission recommended a regulated price of less than $9 in a draft document and ultrafast broadband is not expected to fully replace copper for two decades, the rejection of the attempted industry compromise amounted to a billion-dollar gamble by Chorus.
- ? Fairfax NZ News
Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/8853563/Watchdog-rejects-Labours-concerns
bristol motor speedway prometheus grand canyon skywalk tonga pid corned beef hash the walking dead season 2 finale
Former New England Patriots football tight end Aaron Hernandez stands during a bail hearing in Fall River Superior Court Thursday, June 27, 2013 in Fall River, Mass. Hernandez, charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player, was denied bail. (AP Photo/Boston Herald, Ted Fitzgerald, Pool)
Former New England Patriots football tight end Aaron Hernandez stands during a bail hearing in Fall River Superior Court Thursday, June 27, 2013 in Fall River, Mass. Hernandez, charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player, was denied bail. (AP Photo/Boston Herald, Ted Fitzgerald, Pool)
Former New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez, right, stands with his attorney Michael Fee, during a bail hearing in Fall River Superior Court Thursday, June 27, 2013, in Fall River, Mass. Hernandez, charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player, was denied bail. (AP Photo/Boston Herald, Ted Fitzgerald, Pool)
Former New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez stands during a bail hearing in Fall River Superior Court Thursday, June 27, 2013 in Fall River, Mass. Hernandez, charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player, was denied bail. (AP Photo/Boston Herald, Ted Fitzgerald, Pool)
Former New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez enters a courtroom for a bail hearing in Fall River Superior Court Thursday, June 27, 2013 in Fall River, Mass. Hernandez, charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player, was denied bail. (AP Photo/Boston Herald, Ted Fitzgerald, Pool)
Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter speaks to the media outside the Fall River Justice Center after a bail hearing was held for former New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez in Fall River Superior Court Thursday, June 27, 2013 in Fall River, Mass. Hernandez, charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player, was denied bail. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? The murder case against former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez has led investigators to his hometown of Bristol, Conn., the working-class Hartford suburb where he began a meteoric rise that would carry him to the upper echelons of the NFL.
He is remembered as a fun-loving teenager at Bristol Central High School, where he followed in the footsteps of his older brother, D.J., who would star as a quarterback and tight end at the University of Connecticut.
Some recall him struggling with the death of his father, Dennis, in 2006, but remaining determined to become a pro athlete, spending hours working out before and after school. As Bristol police assist Massachusetts investigators, arresting one local man as a fugitive from justice, the community was left to ponder the fall of the hometown hero with the $40 million pro contract and a new family of his own.
A former high school teammate, Andrew Ragali, 24, said the troubled street hood he has seen portrayed on television is not the Aaron Hernandez he knew.
"You could maybe say he was immature, but he wasn't a gang-banger at all," Ragali said. "I think when he went to college things might have changed, hanging around with the wrong people, but in high school, he wasn't like that at all."
The 23-year-old Hernandez was arrested Wednesday at his mansion in North Attleborough, Mass., and accused of orchestrating the execution-style shooting of his friend, Odin Lloyd, allegedly because Lloyd had talked to the wrong people at a nightclub. He was denied bail at a hearing Thursday in a Massachusetts courtroom, where a prosecutor said a Hummer belonging to Hernandez turned up an ammunition clip matching the caliber of casings found at the scene of Lloyd's killing.
Hernandez's lawyer argued his client is not a risk to flee and the case against him is circumstantial.
On June 16, the night before the slaying, a prosecutor said, Hernandez texted two unidentified friends and asked them to hurry to Massachusetts from Connecticut. A few minutes later, he texted Lloyd to tell him he wanted to get together, the prosecutor said. Authorities said surveillance footage showed the friends arriving, but they did not say who fired the shots.
New Britain State's Attorney Brian Preleski said Thursday that his office and Bristol police have been assisting investigators in Massachusetts and that Carlos Ortiz, 27, of Bristol, had been charged as a fugitive from justice. He waived extradition to Massachusetts and was being held on $1.5 million bail in Hartford.
Ortiz's public defender, Alfonzo Sirica, declined to comment about the case.
Massachusetts state police said Thursday night they were seeking another man, Ernest Wallace, in connection with Lloyd's killing. They issued an alert and wanted poster for Wallace, saying he was considered armed and dangerous, and sought the public's help in tracking down a silver or gray 2012 Chrysler 300 with Rhode Island license plates he was seen driving.
In Connecticut, Bristol is known to many as the home of ESPN, Otis Elevator and the Hernandez family.
Aaron and his brother each earned honors as the state's Gatorade high school player of the year, although they played several years apart at Bristol Central. Aaron would often visit his brother at UConn, and at one point verbally committed to follow D.J. and play for UConn himself. But Aaron became too big a star for the state school and signed instead to play at the University of Florida, a national powerhouse where he was an All-American.
Ragali recalled seeing Hernandez again, years after high school, at a Hartford bar. He described him as quieter, with more tattoos. But said he was very nice, asked about his family and took pictures with his girlfriend.
It was after his father's death that Hernandez began smoking marijuana and hanging out with a rough crowd, Hernandez's mother, Terri, told USA Today in 2009.
"The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger," she said at the time.
Hernandez's mother works in the office at the local South Side elementary school, and other family members still live in Bristol.
"All I can say is that he will be cleared of all these charges in the end," she told the Bristol Press outside her home Wednesday. "Just let it play out until the end."
On Wednesday night, police searched a Bristol home and garage owned by Andres Valderrama, whom WFSB-TV identified as an uncle. A message was left at the home Thursday seeking comment.
The Patriots, who cut Hernandez following his arrest Wednesday, drafted him in 2010 and signed him last summer to five-year contract worth $40 million.
During the draft, one team said it wouldn't take him under any circumstances, and he was passed over by one club after another before New England picked him in the fourth round. Afterward, Hernandez said he had failed a drug test in college ? reportedly for marijuana ? and was up front with teams about it.
A Florida man filed a lawsuit last week claiming Hernandez shot him in the face after they argued at a strip club in February.
Hernandez became a father on Nov. 6 and said he intended to change his ways: "Now, another one is looking up to me. I can't just be young and reckless Aaron no more."
Hernandez could face life in prison if convicted.
___
Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith in Fall River, Mass., contributed to this report.
Associated Presstulsa shooting doug fister the perfect storm mickelson how to tie a tie sweet potato recipes the sound of music
VATICAN CITY (AP) ? A Vatican cleric and two other people were arrested Friday by Italian police for allegedly trying to smuggle 20 million euros ($26 million) in cash into the country from Switzerland by private jet. It's the latest scandal to hit the Holy See and broadens an Italian probe into its secretive bank.
Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, already under investigation in a purported money-laundering plot involving the Vatican bank, is accused of corruption and slander and was being held at a Rome prison, prosecutor Nello Rossi told reporters.
Scarano's arrest came just two days after Pope Francis created a commission of inquiry into the Vatican bank to get to the bottom of the problems that have plagued it for decades and contributed to the impression that it's an unregulated, offshore tax haven.
Francis has made clear he has no tolerance for corruption or for Vatican officials who use their jobs for personal ambition or gain. He has said he wants a "poor" church that is concerned for the world's needy, and he has also noted, perhaps tongue in cheek, that "St. Peter didn't have a bank account."
Prosecutor Rossi said the Swiss operation involved three people, all of whom were arrested Friday: Scarano, a recently suspended accountant in the Vatican's main finance office, Italian financier Giovanni Carenzio, and Giovanni Zito, who at the time of the plot was a member of the military police's agency for security and information.
Rossi detailed a remarkable plot ? uncovered by telephone wiretaps ? in which the three allegedly planned to bring into Italy some 20 million euros in cash that financier Carenzio held in his name in a Swiss bank account without paying customs at the airport, as would be required.
Scarano's attorney, Silverio Sica, said his client was something of a middleman: The 20 million euros belonged to friends who had given the money to Carenzio to invest but wanted it back. The plot would presumably enable them to avoid paying customs fees or having any paper trail of such a large amount of money entering Italy.
Rossi identified the friends as members of the Italian shipping family d'Amico and said that the money was "presumably" being held in Switzerland to avoid paying Italian taxes. An email seeking comment from the family's Rome-based company, the d'Amico Societa di Navigazione SpA, wasn't immediately returned.
According to prosecutors, Zito, the agent, called in sick to his job one day in July 2012, rented a private plane and flew with Carenzio to Locarno, Switzerland. There, Carenzio was supposed to withdraw the cash from his bank account and hand it over to Zito to bring back to Italy. The plan was so detailed there was even to be an armed police escort waiting at the airport to bring the money to Scarano's apartment in Rome, Rossi said.
"This operation was meticulously planned in all its details," Rossi said, noting that Zito was chosen to be the mule specifically because his high-ranking position in the Carabinieri would have enabled him to pass through the airport customs area without being stopped.
The money could have been transported relatively easily because euros are issued in high denominations. If the cash had been withdrawn in the largest denomination ? 500 euro notes ? it would have weighed 44 kilograms (97 pounds) and fit in a suitcase.
But at a certain point in Locarno, the deal fell through and Carenzio made excuses that the bank couldn't come up with the money, Rossi said. He declined to identify the bank.
Zito returned to Rome empty-handed but still demanded from Scarano his fee of 600,000 euros for the operation. Scarano cut him one check for 400,000 euros which he deposited. He gave him a second check for 200,000 euros, but in a bid to prevent the check from being deposited, reported it as missing, the prosecutor said.
That put a block on the check and resulted in Scarano being accused of slander for filing a false report knowing that the check was in Zito's hands, Rossi said.
Scarano, as well as the other two, are also accused of corruption. If they are indicted and convicted, they could face up to five or six years in prison, prosecutors said.
Sica, the lawyer, said Scarano said his client would respond to prosecutors' questions.
The Vatican bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, is cooperating with Italian authorities and its lay board has launched an internal investigation, spokesman Max Hohenberg said.
Rossi, the Italian prosecutor, described the operation as one branch in a "mosaic" of investigations targeting the IOR, which has long been a source of scandal for the Holy See. That said, the Swiss investigation didn't immediately appear to directly involve the IOR.
The checks Scarano wrote to Zito, for example, came from an Italian bank account, prosecutors said. They declined to say if Scarano received any payment for his role in the plot, or if his IOR account was used at all.
Rossi's team of prosecutors in 2010 placed the top two Vatican bank officials under investigation for allegedly violating anti-money laundering norms during a routine transaction involving an IOR account at an Italian bank. They ordered the 23 million euros in the transaction seized. The money was eventually unfrozen but the two men remain under investigation.
Rossi's team is also working with prosecutors in Salerno on a separate money-laundering investigation involving Scarano and his IOR account.
According to Sica, the lawyer, Scarano took 560,000 euros ($729,000) in cash out of his IOR bank account in 2009 and carried it out of the Vatican and into Italy to help pay off a mortgage on his Salerno home.
The money had come into Scarano's IOR account from donors who gave it to the prelate thinking they were funding a home for the terminally ill in Salerno, Sica said.
To deposit the money into an Italian bank account ? and to prevent family members from finding out he had such a large chunk of cash ? he asked 56 close friends to accept 10,000 euros apiece in cash in exchange for a check or money transfer in the same amount. Scarano was then able to deposit the amounts in his Italian account.
The lawyer said Scarano had given the names of the donors to prosecutors and insisted the origin of the money was clean, that the transactions didn't constitute money-laundering, and that he only took the money "temporarily" for his personal use.
The home for terminally ill was never built, though the property has been identified, Sica said.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Scarano was suspended more than a month ago and that the Vatican was taking the appropriate measures to deal with his case. He said the Vatican had confirmed it was prepared to offer its "full cooperation" to Italian investigators.
On Wednesday, Francis named five people to head a commission of inquiry into the Vatican bank's activities and legal status "to allow for a better harmonization with the universal mission of the Apostolic See."
___
Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/vatican-monsignor-arrested-20m-euro-plot-142307395.html
argentina train crash nancy pelosi nancy pelosi gop debate republican debate lewis black kirkwood
NEW YORK (AP) ? CNN said Wednesday that it is bringing the political debate show "Crossfire" back on the air this fall with Newt Gingrich as one of the combatants.
The former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate will be one of the four regular hosts of the program, taking the conservative side along with commentator S.E. Cupp of The Blaze. Stephanie Cutter, a former campaign spokeswoman for President Barack Obama, and Van Jones, a Yale-educated attorney and advocate for green projects, will speak from the left.
"It just feels like the right time for 'Crossfire' to be coming back," said Sam Feist, CNN's senior vice president and Washington bureau chief. The show will air weekdays but no time slot has been set.
The original aired on CNN from 1982 until 2005, and its alumni list reads like a Washington who's who ? Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Geraldine Ferraro, Lynn Cheney, James Carville, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson among them. It was essentially killed by Jon Stewart.
"The Daily Show" host appeared on "Crossfire" in 2004 and got into a bitter fight with Carlson, with Stewart calling the show "partisan hackery" that did little to advance the cause of democracy. When then-CNN U.S. President Jon Klein cancelled it a few months later, he said he was essentially siding with Stewart.
But with Fox News Channel tilting right and MSNBC leaning left, there really isn't a debate program on cable TV now that is a fair fight, Feist said.
"CNN is really the only network that can have a bipartisan debate show with some level of authenticity," he said.
Each show will have a single topic and feature two of the four regular hosts, joined by two guests who are experts on the particular issue being discussed, Feist said. It will be a studio show without the audience that was used in a later incarnation of "Crossfire," he said.
New CNN chief Jeff Zucker began pushing for the show's resurrection almost since taking over this winter, saying he had long been a fan of it, Feist said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cnn-bringing-crossfire-back-air-133912676.html
adam sandler College Football Scoreboard nfl scores nfl scores Devon Walker Tom Cruise ryan reynolds
At its basic definition, call tracking utility tells a business or organization which ad campaign or marketing method is very effective and which is not through tracking the number of the phone calls that are made from a specific ad campaign.
Many businesses and huge companies assume that their marketing campaigns and ads are working and that they generate leads randomly from one to another. So, they kept spending on the same campaigns that they once have had without minding the expenses. What they mistook a lot is that they do not know which ad generates leads.
Many advertisers failed to know if the potential customer is calling because they found a listing on Google, or through receiving a flier in the mail, or clicked through an online banner, or watched on TV or heard over the radio. If you are so keen enough, most of the business websites will add a special poll question at the bottom of their page to inquire about where do you find their article or website.
Call tracking allows businesses to know which form of advertising or campaigns that keep the phone ringing. This helps them stop wasting money on the ads that aren?t so effective and focus on a campaign that is more effective in driving buying customers instead.
Okay, let?s start with the most basic example. Let?s say you own a medium sized business. You occasionally do direct mail ads, radio commercials, banner ads, you listed your business on an online directory and Google PPC campaign. The call tracking software will assign a unique phone number to each of the campaigns and then the database will show you which ad or phone number generates the phone call and which is not.
You no longer need a tracking code after the call is connected or a coupon to bring into the store. You will simply put a unique phone numbers on each of the marketing pieces and wait which is working.
If you pay to advertise elsewhere, especially on more than one platform, you could benefit from using call tracking software. You could waste a lot of revenues allotted for marketing campaigns if you do not use call tracking to identify which platform serves the utmost purpose.
Aside from the above functions, call tracking software also offers several other tools like call recording, call tagging, lead scoring, and goals and alerts.
Call recording allows you to record every call that comes in through a tracking number. You can also use call recording to gather customer feedback, concerns, problems, track employees customer handling performance and held them accountable, improve sales skills, improve customer service and gather important marketing data.
Call tagging allows you to tag or label calls in accordance to their marketing lead quality. The example is when a customer is calling simply to check the price but is not interested in buying the product, you can tag the call as ?far away from sale? or ?cold lead.?
Lead scoring allows you to score the call on certain criteria you choose to measure the lead quality. For instance, you can use the lead scoring to measure whether or not the caller is going to buy the product within 30 days, or whether they don?t have the money to buy now, or whether they are just hunting around.
Goals and alerts allows you to set goals and alerts for campaign ROI. You can use this tool to set a goal to generate specific amount of income from specific advertising campaign or set a goal to close a number of deals from specific ad campaign. It will also alert you when the deadline of your goals is approaching via text message or email.
With these crucial tools, you will never waste another amount of penny paid on advertising that does not work.
Steven Wright ? who has written 1 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Steven Wright is a Marketing Expert at Dial800. His task is to reach out prospective clients through online marketing, and promotes their company's online social presence. He is passionate about virtual phone business, call tracking and the wonders of inbound marketing. You can connect with Steven via Twitter at @Dial800.
Don?t Worry ? People Know 
I used to be FAT until I had A Duodenal Switch 
The Gestalt Protocal 2013 srt viper scott walker recall fisker atlantic social darwinism wisconsin recall election april 4 wisconsin primary
Just days after an LTE-Advanced variant of Samsung's Galaxy S 4 leaked, Korean carrier SK Telecom has officially announced it's launching the world's first publicly available LTE-Advanced wireless network. The Galaxy S4 LTE-A is also official (in red or blue) as the first device able to take advantage of the new technology for even faster data transmission speeds. According to the press release, SK Telecom plans to have as many as seven LTE-A devices available by the end of the year, all capable of up to 150Mbps. While SK Telecom is using Carrier Aggregation and Coordinated Multi Point technology to improve speeds right now, it will add Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination in 2014 to go even faster. After that, it suggest carrier aggregation will improve to support higher speeds and faster uploads in subsequent years.
To take advantage of the higher speeds, SK Telecom's Btv IPTV service will begin offering 1080p video streaming in early July. That will be accompanied by enhanced multiview baseball broadcasts, more free videos, an HD video shopping service with six channels on one screen in August and the addition of FLAC audio files via its music package. Right now, the company has Seoul covered in LTE-A, and plans to eventually offer it in 84 cities, all at the same price as existing LTE service. Check after the break for the press release with all the details, plus video of a speed test.
Update: We've just come across another juicy tidbit that makes the Galaxy S4 LTE-A all the more worthwhile... it'll ship with a Snapdragon 800 SoC that contains a 2.3GHz quad-core CPU. It goes without saying that this phone will be speedy on all angles.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Samsung
Source: Samsung Tomorrow (1), (2)
al gore la dodgers lawrence o donnell magic johnson jetblue pilot solicitor general neighborhood watch
CHICAGO (AP) ? Like your cousin who doesn't pay his bills on time and squanders money he doesn't have, Illinois is paying the price ? in both cash and reputation ? for years of ignored warnings about its pension crisis, the worst in the nation.
Largely because of its unfunded retirement plans, Illinois has replaced longtime bottom-dweller California as having the lowest credit rating of any state. So when Illinois tries to borrow money, it faces the same problem as the spendthrift cousin: far higher interest rates.
The state's financial failings are so well-known, they have inspired a name on Wall Street ? the "Illinois effect," a reference to the fact that cities, universities and other bond-issuing entities here must pay more in interest, even if they are responsible spenders.
"There are investors who won't buy Illinois or bonds with Illinois labels at any price. They just see it as toxic," said Brian Battle, director at Performance Trust Capital Partners, a Chicago-based investment firm. That means the state pays "the biggest penalty by a long, long shot."
Battle compared the Illinois situation to someone who has a good job and plenty of revenue. But "we just spend like crazy, don't pay our credit cards and haven't saved for retirement," he said.
Take the $1.3 billion in bonds Illinois is expected to sell this week to improve highways, rebuild a 40-year-old elevated train line in Chicago and buy land for an airport. Battle estimates the state will pay more than $18 million in extra interest each year than states such as Virginia or Maryland, which have high credit ratings.
That's an additional $450 million over the 25-year life of a bond issue. In personal terms, it's $36 taken directly from the pockets of each of Illinois' nearly 13 million residents. And that's for just one bond sale.
For decades, legislators skipped or shorted payments to state retirement funds, creating a $97 billion pension shortfall and making investors nervous year after year. Yet lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled General Assembly adjourned the spring legislative session last month without a deal. It was the fifth time in 12 months that they left town without solving the crisis.
Within days, two major credit-rating agencies downgraded the state to an all-time low for Illinois. Gov. Pat Quinn called lawmakers back for a special session last week, but they could agree only to form a bipartisan committee to keep working on the problem.
Contributing to the inaction are the state's strong constitutional protections for pension benefits and a powerful union lobby that has opposed across-the-board cuts.
Still, the seeming lack of urgency dumbfounds some onlookers. Among them is Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff and U.S. commerce secretary from the famous Chicago mayoral clan. He has focused on the pension debacle as he explores a challenge to Quinn in next year's Democratic primary.
"You can't have 13 downgrades in four years ... and think people are going to come here and create jobs," Daley said, questioning the need for repeated legislative sessions that yield no progress. "This is Groundhog Day."
State leaders insist they are trying to deal with the crisis. But in a place known for backroom deals, compromise can be hard to find, even after years of trying.
House Speaker Michael Madigan, who has overseen a Democratic majority in the Illinois House for 28 of the last 30 years, acknowledges that fixing the pension mess is "extremely important for the future of the state."
"This is the time to step up and help the state of Illinois," he said. But the speaker has urged the governor to support Madigan's own solution, which would save the most money, rather than a rival proposal in the Senate that could stand a better chance of surviving a legal challenge.
In the past 50 years, just three states ? California, Louisiana and Massachusetts ? have had investment ratings as low as Illinois, but all have taken steps to correct it. Quinn's office has begged lawmakers do the same, even as the governor endures criticism that he hasn't done enough to broker a deal.
Abdon Pallasch, Quinn's assistant budget director, said the additional dollars spent to cover interest and the annual pension payment ? $6 billion this year, or almost 20 percent of the state's general-fund budget ? represent money that could be spent to achieve smaller class sizes, hire more police or ease prison overcrowding.
"No more alibis. No more excuses. No more delay. (Lawmakers have) had plenty of time," the governor said Monday. "Running in place is not a way to go when it comes to the pension crisis."
Illinois' interest rates are the result of simple supply and demand: Because fewer investors want to take the risk of buying the state's bonds, the ones who are willing to do so are able to charge more.
Several factors are behind the reluctance. Some investment funds and trusts have rules that prevent them from buying bonds that are approaching "junk" bond status, as Illinois is, Battle said. Many investors don't want any names in their portfolio that have made headlines for negative reasons, like Illinois.
The state has a constitutional provision that guarantees it will make its debt payments, but investors also see cities like Detroit reneging on debts or considering filing for bankruptcy and get jittery, said Richard Ciccarone, managing director and chief research officer at McDonnell Investment Management in Oak Brook, Ill.
Illinois' reputation also hits taxpayers on the local level, even in communities with sound budgets.
Suburban Chicago's DuPage County, a wealthy, conservative-leaning area, is among the 1 percent of counties nationwide with the highest-possible credit rating from all three major ratings agencies. But officials there estimate taxpayers will pay $4 million more in interest over the life of a recent $67 million bond issue than if Illinois had its financial house in order.
In March, Moody's downgraded credit ratings for four public universities, noting that the schools rely heavily on state money for operating expenses. The Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, which constructs and renovates sports stadiums such as Chicago's Soldier Field and U.S. Cellular Field ? home of the Chicago White Sox ? has been downgraded twice since January. Chicago also has seen its rating on million in bonds lowered.
Last year, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel travelled to the state Capitol to testify in favor of reform, only to see his efforts ? like all the others ? fall flat.
Kathleen Strand, a spokeswoman for Emanuel, said he continues to stress the urgency of the problem, in hopes a solution can be found.
"The truth is," she said, "we have run out of time."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/illinois-bad-credit-costing-taxpayers-millions-071545200.html
Mike Jeffries Farrah Abraham Video Michelle Knight Saul Bass Jeanne Cooper Jody Arias mothers day gifts
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_u-_2JFzSpK4MGfuqaSWmtfemGLAjJTosYE65Rf_-aLOMyOmXPYnlgDnfbOi15eqrKeTLmkfvRiobFhzw3iQCu0fWX6bHg1lghyhKSFPC0=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 26-Jun-2013
Share ] Contact: Gail Pinder
gpinder@faseb.org
301-634-7021
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
Bethesda, MD FASEB MARC (Maximizing Access to Research Careers) Program has announced the travel award recipients for the American Association of Immunologists 2013 Advanced Course in Immunology meeting in Boston, MA from July 28-August 2, 2013. These awards are meant to promote the entry of students, postdoctorates and scientists from underrepresented groups into the mainstream of the basic science community and to encourage the participation of young scientists at the American Association of Immunologists meeting.
Awards are given to poster/platform presenters and faculty mentors paired with the students/trainees they mentor. This year MARC conferred 6 awards totaling $11,100.
The FASEB MARC Program is funded by a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health. A primary goal of the MARC Program is to increase the number and competitiveness of underrepresented minorities engaged in biomedical and behavioral research.
POSTER/ORAL PRESENTERS (FASEB MARC PROGRAM)
Mark Barnes, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine/Case Western Reserve University
Dr. Raimon Duran-Struuck, Columbia University [AAI member]
Dr. Azure Faucette, Wayne State University [AAI member]
Samantha Garcia, Thomas Jefferson University [AAI member]
Jose Suarez-Martinez, Michigan State University [AAI member]
Jaleisa Turner, Washington University in St. Louis [AAI member]
###
FASEB is composed of 26 societies with more than 100,000 members, making it the largest coalition of biomedical research associations in the United States. Our mission is to advance health and welfare by promoting progress and education in biological and biomedical sciences through service to our member societies and collaborative advocacy.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 26-Jun-2013 Share ] Contact: Gail Pinder
gpinder@faseb.org
301-634-7021
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
Bethesda, MD FASEB MARC (Maximizing Access to Research Careers) Program has announced the travel award recipients for the American Association of Immunologists 2013 Advanced Course in Immunology meeting in Boston, MA from July 28-August 2, 2013. These awards are meant to promote the entry of students, postdoctorates and scientists from underrepresented groups into the mainstream of the basic science community and to encourage the participation of young scientists at the American Association of Immunologists meeting.
Awards are given to poster/platform presenters and faculty mentors paired with the students/trainees they mentor. This year MARC conferred 6 awards totaling $11,100.
The FASEB MARC Program is funded by a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health. A primary goal of the MARC Program is to increase the number and competitiveness of underrepresented minorities engaged in biomedical and behavioral research.
POSTER/ORAL PRESENTERS (FASEB MARC PROGRAM)
Mark Barnes, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine/Case Western Reserve University
Dr. Raimon Duran-Struuck, Columbia University [AAI member]
Dr. Azure Faucette, Wayne State University [AAI member]
Samantha Garcia, Thomas Jefferson University [AAI member]
Jose Suarez-Martinez, Michigan State University [AAI member]
Jaleisa Turner, Washington University in St. Louis [AAI member]
###
FASEB is composed of 26 societies with more than 100,000 members, making it the largest coalition of biomedical research associations in the United States. Our mission is to advance health and welfare by promoting progress and education in biological and biomedical sciences through service to our member societies and collaborative advocacy.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/foas-mta_6062613.php
school shooting oscar nominations C7 Corvette tom brady denver post Scandal denver broncos
Sen. John McCain weighed in on the Edward Snowden saga on Tuesday, telling CNN that Russia's actions in the wake of the National Security Agency leaker's reported arrival in Moscow harkens back to the Cold War.
"It's reminiscent of the days of the Cold War, when you hear a Russian spokesman saying that [Snowden?s] not in Russia when every shred of evidence indicates that he is,? McCain said. ?We've got to start dealing with Vladimir Putin in a realistic fashion for what he is. He?s an old KGB colonel apparatchik that dreams of the days of the Russian empire, and he continues to stick his thumb in our eye in a broad variety of ways. Most importantly to me, of course, and should be to the world, is their continued support of [Syrian President] Bashar al Assad and the massacre taking place in Syria."
McCain's comments echoed what fellow U.S. lawmakers said on Sunday.
"Putin always seems almost eager to stick a finger in the eye of the United States?whether it is Syria, Iran and now of course with Snowden," New York Sen. Charles Schumer said on CNN's "State of the Union." "Allies are supposed to treat each other in decent ways."
"The freedom trail is not exactly China-Russia-Cuba-Venezuela," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on "Fox News Sunday." "So I hope we?ll chase [Snowden] to the ends of the Earth, bring him to justice and let the Russians know there?ll be consequences if they harbor this guy.?
At a news conference in Finland on Tuesday, Putin said Snowden was still in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, and that Russia would not hand him over to the American government.
Putin added that he hoped the Snowden case would not affect Russia's relations with the U.S.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/mccain-putin-snowden-syria-153134808.html
Mavericks Surf Stonewall Inaugural Ball julio jones j crew san francisco 49ers san francisco 49ers
