At Not Just The News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Not Just The News and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Not Just The News makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Not Just The News does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Not Just The News.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Not Just The News and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Not Just The News send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
Not Just The News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Not Just The News"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
At Hey WTF? News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Hey WTF? News and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Hey WTF? News makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Hey WTF? News does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Hey WTF? News.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Hey WTF? News and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Hey WTF? News send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
Hey WTF? News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Hey WTF? News"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
With open enrollment for Obamacare ending March 31, the administration has announced that it’s much closer to its goal of 6 million enrollees. A healthy chunk of the 4.2 million applicants are aged 18-35.
About 940,000 people selected Obamacare insurance plans in February, bringing to 4.2 million the total number of people opting for health coverage in the law’s insurance exchanges since the enrollment opened in October.
About a quarter of the sign-ups over the first five months of enrollment were adults between ages 18 and 35 – a key demographic sought by insurers to help offset the cost of covering older, typically sicker enrollees. More than four in five people signing up qualified for subsidies through tax credits.
Women continued to enroll at a disproportionately higher rate than men – a 55-45 percent split. Nearly two-thirds of all sign-ups selected mid-level “silver” level plans that cover about 70 percent of their enrollees’ costs.
An additional 4.4 million people have been found eligible for Medicaid and CHIP through state and federal marketplaces. So that’s 8.6 million people the Republicans want to take health care away from.
At Those Damn Liars, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Those Damn Liars and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Those Damn Liars makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Those Damn Liars does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Those Damn Liars.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Those Damn Liars and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Those Damn Liars send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
Those Damn Liars has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Those Damn Liars"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
At Not Just The News, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Not Just The News and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Not Just The News makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Not Just The News does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.
DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Not Just The News.
Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Not Just The News and other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Not Just The News send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
Not Just The News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Not Just The News"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.
The stories my family wouldn’t tell: Living through war in Lebanon
Every other year, Jalil and his friend would drive to Germany to trade in their cars. The trip would take a few months, through Bulgaria and Serbia; he’d stop at roadside stands and buy fine hand-cut crystal glasses, sold by poor Soviet-satellite artisans for next to nothing, and bring them home to sell and give as gifts. One year, sometime before the civil war started, his daughters begged him, “Don’t get a yellow Mercedes!” The color was, for some reason, very popular that year, but Hanadi and Rula thought it made the otherwise classy car look like a taxi. He promised he wouldn’t, but when he drove back into town, of course it was in the big yellow car. They hated it, but after two years he traded it in again, though he doesn’t make the trip anymore. The road from Lebanon to Germany is not what it used to be.
During those times when Jalil was away, Henriette would have to start feeding the dog scraps from the table, since she didn’t have a car, and couldn’t drive to the meat-packing factory for Fox’s usual fare. The Sulaki would look at her, then at the food, then back at her, without touching it, and whine.
“If you don’t want to eat that,” Henriette would scold, as if he should understand her words, “you better pray the one who brings the good stuff comes back.”
In July of 1976, about a year after the start of the civil war, news came that Christian forces would begin a counterattack against the Muslim militia. All the schools closed, and the last thing on the dissolving government’s agenda was making sure teachers were still getting paid. This put Jalil, a physical education teacher, out of work, and the family in danger. My mother told me they left to live with a family in Tartous, Syria.
They had to leave Fox behind at the house, with my mother’s aunt and grandfather. The two of them stayed in the town with seven or eight other elderly people who couldn’t travel, along with my father’s family and a few other stubborn Lebanese — though my father told me the decision to stay near nearly cost him his life. But part of me can’t blame them. In a place and time like that, leaving meant abandoning everything; you might come back to find your house still standing, but what would be left of your life when you returned?
When the fighting finally reached Ras Masqa — at that time the last town before Tripoli, and what became the stalemated front line between Muslim and Christian forces — militiamen on both sides swept through the streets, shooting cats, dogs, birds — every animal they found — so that their barks and screeches wouldn’t give away the soldiers’ positions to their enemies.
Fox was the last dog they ever had. My grandfather was too heartbroken to replace him, even though he had owned hunting dogs all his life. And my mother, though it is clear she loves dogs, and never hesitates to baby-sit my sister’s or the neighbors’ dogs, has always refused to get one of her own. Growing up she gave other reasons: She didn’t want to clean up after it, or didn’t want it scratching up the furniture. But now I know this isn’t the truth — not the complete truth, anyway.
I also know that what she said about going to live with a family in Tartous wasn’t the complete truth either. They did go to Tartous, but they lived by themselves in a single room, with no electricity, no bathroom and no water. All seven of them — jiddou Jalil, taita Henriette, my mother Hanadi, age 14, aunt Rula, 12, uncle Michael, 8, uncle Chadi, 2 and a half, and my aunt Nidal, just 8 months — slept on two mattresses pushed together on the floor, with a single kerosene lamp for light, and a kerosene stove for cooking and heat. They left Ras Masqa in a hurry, with the clothes on their backs and no money, not knowing how long they would be gone. Jalil taxied people from Tartous to Damascus so the family could eat. They lived that way for four months, though it would be almost a year before they could return home.
This is what my mother wouldn’t talk about. Those days spent crowded in that room — the oldest of five children in exile, her mother still nursing the youngest, and her father gone for most hours of the day. Those days of her life she wouldn’t share with me. Not yet, at least.
No, that story was told to me by my grandfather Jalil. ButJalil, he wouldn’t talk about the dog.
This piece is the latest in a series by feminists of color, curated by Roxane Gay. To submit to the series, email rgay@salon.com.
“TransCanada is pleased to confirm that at approximately 10:04 am Central Time on Saturday, December 7, 2013, the company began to inject oil into the Gulf Coast Project pipeline as it moves closer to the start of commercial service,” TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard announced Monday.
Cute.
In the coming weeks the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, which stretches from Oklahoma to Texas, will be injected with about 3 million barrels of oil. Once it’s filled, according to FuelFix, TransCanada will be able to start making deliveries to Gulf Coast refineries — which could happen by the end of this year. By mid-January, up to 700,000 barrels will be flowing through the 485-mile pipeline.
The oil company obviously couldn’t help rubbing its 2.3 billion dollar baby’s success in the face of the protestors and activists who are fighting to keep the Keystone project from going forward. Objections range from the contention that the last thing a warming Earth needs is more fossil fuels to specific concerns about the southern leg of the pipeline’s shoddy construction.
The most controversial part of the project, though, remains in limbo: TransCanada can’t construct the border-crossing northern leg of the pipeline, which will tap directly into Canada’s oil sands, without U.S. approval. Its ultimate victory, as before, hinges on whether or not President Obama decides to take a stand for clean energy.
Federal judge rules that data sent through peer-to-peer file sharing is not private http://isbigbrotherwatchingyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/19b2a__gun_ban__2013-11-13-image-7.jpg
Some potential new legal precedence is being set by a federal judge in Vermont, after ruling that data shared via peer-to-peer file-sharing services should not be expected to be private.
The ruling came out of a case regarding child pornography, where the defendants attempted to have evidence dismissed based on the grounds in which it was obtained. The three defendants said that police scooped the pertinent data from a peer-to-peer network illegally, without a warrant.
In this case, law enforcement had made use of the Child Protection System, which is an assortment of software tools designed to track down child pornography online. The tools send out automated searches for files known to contain data of this kind, and then maps out matching files with an IP address, data and time, as well as various other details about the particular computer.
District Court Judge Christina Reiss denied the motion to have the scraped data be dismissed, saying that the defendants gave up any privacy they had by making the files available through the P2P service. Even though the police software was entirely automated, Reiss says that the data could have been obtained manually or by a member of the public just the same.
“The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the only information accessed was made publicly available by the IP address or the software it was using,” Judge Reiss explains. “Accordingly, either intentionally or inadvertently, through the use of peer-to-peer file-sharing software, Defendants exposed to the public the information they now claim was private.”
Amazon.com to offer Sunday delivery in the US through US Postal Service http://isbigbrotherwatchingyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cb0fc__p-89EKCgBk8MZdE.gif
IDG News Service – Amazon.com is getting the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages on Sundays to its customers, adding an additional facility to help it compete in the Internet retail market.
The Sunday delivery will start in Los Angeles and New York, with plans to roll out the service to “a large portion” of the U.S. population by 2014, Amazon said Monday. Sunday delivery will come to Houston, Dallas, New Orleans and Phoenix among other places, the company said.
The service is free for Amazon’s Prime members, who pay US$ 79 per year for unlimited two-day shipping and other facilities, Amazon said. Customers will see the Sunday delivery option at checkout when available, it added.
Not all products will be eligible for Sunday delivery, but the service already covers millions of items, Amazon said.
Financial details about the deal with the U.S. Postal Service were not disclosed. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
To get items to customers quicker, Amazon has expanded its delivery before. In 2009, for instance, it started a same-day delivery service dubbed Local Express Delivery for seven U.S. cities and has expanded that service to four more areas since then.
The service is currently available in New York, Las Vegas, Chicago, Washington D.C. and other locations.
Other companies followed. Same-day delivery was introduced by eBay in 2012. The company currently offers delivery in about an hour from certain local stores in Chicago, New York and San Francisco areas.
Google is also interested in offering same-day delivery to its customers. In March, the search giant started a pilot called Google Shopping Express to serve San Francisco Bay Area residents.
Loek is Amsterdam Correspondent and covers online privacy, intellectual property, open-source and online payment issues for the IDG News Service. Follow him on Twitter at @loekessers or email tips and comments to loek_essers@idg.com
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
Of the many things to note about the seven-minute lesbian sex scene in “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” a French drama about a teenage girl who becomes passionately involved with a slightly older woman, is how very long it seems to go on.
While there is little radical about lesbian sexuality on-screen these days (“The Killing of Sister George” led the way in 1968, and by 2010 “The Kids Are All Right” featured a lesbian couple who liked gay male pornography), the sex scene in “Blue” is certainly among the most graphic and physically intense.
It is brightly lit, so we see every crash of flesh against flesh, every pinch and grip. The younger Adele (played by Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) slap each other’s breasts, pull each other’s hair, scissor bodies, mount and dismount.
CNN wondered if it might be the “sexiest film ever.” The IFC Center in Greenwich Village, which is showing the film, has been criticized by a parents group for allowing teenagers into the NC-17 film. (The Flicks art house cinema in Boise, Idaho, has declined to show the film.)
But not everyone, it seems, has been turned on by the movie, including the very people the film aims to depict: lesbians.
Among the loudest critics has been Julie Maroh, the French writer who wrote the graphic novel of the same name, on which this film was based. On her blog in May, she described the sex scene as “a brutal and surgical display” that turned the lovemaking between two women “into porn.”
“It appears to me that this was what was missing on the set: lesbians,” Ms. Maroh wrote. She added that she went to a screening where everyone was giggling during the sex scenes. “The gay and queer people laughed because it was not convincing, and found it ridiculous.” Marcie Bianco, writing on After Ellen, a lesbian pop cultural website, said the two women “scissoring” their bodies was a classic visual trope of lesbian pornography made by men. Jane Czyzselska, editor of Diva, a popular lesbian magazine in Europe, said that “straight men are excluded from lesbian sexuality because of their gender, so perhaps seek to control it by imagining their fantasies on-screen.”
Abdellatif Kechiche, the film’s acclaimed Tunisian-French director, was also accused of abusing his stars. Ms. Seydoux said she felt trapped on the set and disrespected while shooting the sex scenes. (Mr. Kechiche, in response, called her an “arrogant, spoiled child” and intimated he may take legal action against her.)
That a lesbian sex scene is directed by a heterosexual man and portrayed by heterosexual women should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever walked into a video shop that caters to pornography or typed “lesbian porn” into a web browser.
Mark Kernes, senior editor at AVN, a trade magazine for the adult-film industry, said, “Most lesbian porn is made by men for male consumers who like to imagine themselves as part of a threesome.”
This class of pornography does not appear to appeal to most lesbians. That’s the underlying joke of a popular YouTube video called “Real Lesbians React to Lesbian Porn,” in which a half-dozen lesbians in their 20s are videotaped in what looks like a hotel room, watching a lesbian pornography film that features ridiculously long fake nails and stilettos. In addition to lots of “Oh, my Gods,” laughter and shaking of heads, one woman says, “It’s gross and it’s not sexy and it’s not true.”
Sex between women hasn’t been entirely co-opted by the male gaze: lesbian directors have also imagined same-sex desire. Chantal Akerman’s 1976 film, “Je, tu, il, elle,” (“I, You, He, She”) and Donna Deitch’s 1985 film “Desert Hearts” were landmarks. The rise of New Queer Cinema in the 1990s and directors like Rose Troche (“Go Fish,” 1994) ushered in a new generation of sex-confident storytelling that reached a mainstream apotheosis with Showtime’s “The L Word,” a sexy, glossy soap set among Los Angeles lesbians that ran from 2004 to 2009.
Ilene Chaiken, who produced “The L Word,” made the sex scenes explicit, though more conventionally sexy (lots of hands gliding over stomachs, artfully mussed sheets) than the graphic physicality of “Blue.”
If “Blue” stands alone in its big-screen explicitness, among the first companies occupying the small niche of lesbian pornography made by lesbians was Fatale Media, started in 1985 by Nan Kinney in San Rafael, Calif. Ms. Kinney said she was fed up with straight-male produced pornography. “I couldn’t relate to it,” she said. “It wasn’t what I or my friends were doing in bed.”
Fatale videos feature real-life female couples, and popular titles include “Suburban Dykes” from the late 1980s. “All lesbians of a certain age have seen that movie,” Ms. Kinney said, laughing.
Meanwhile, just as Mr. Kechiche faces criticism for exploitation, the adult-film pendulum is swinging in another intriguing direction. Some lesbian feminist producers in San Francisco, like Shine Louise Houston and Jiz Lee, now argue that male directors are capable of making good lesbian pornography, provided they show respect and sensitivity to their performers.
Annie Sprinkle, a former prostitute turned pornography producer, said her favorite lesbian sex scene was in “Bound,” a 1996 feature film starring Gina Gershon and directed by the Wachowski brothers.
Madison Young, a lesbian pornographic film producer, said that the 1997 movie “Chasing Amy” had been her touchstone. She watched it when she was 17, “while my conservative mother slept in her bedroom of our suburban home nestled in the normalcy of southern Ohio,” she said. The film, Ms. Young added, opened her eyes “to what queer sex was, what possibilities existed, the fluidity of sexuality and identity, and all this was achieved as directed by a straight hetero male.”
Indeed, some lesbians have found the sex scene in “Blue” to their liking, judging by the reactions outside the IFC on Monday night.
“The performances are amazing: they transmit everything to you,” said Karina, a 39-year-old who lives in Manhattan, who went to the movie with a friend. “It was the first time I have seen a ‘real’ lesbian sex scene in a movie. For a man, he got the feeling between two women and a woman discovering herself very well.”
Five years after the Wall Street coup of 2008, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives is as bought and paid for as ever. We heard about the Citigroup crafted legislation currently being pushed through Congress back in May when Mother Jones reported on it. Fortunately, they included the following image in their article:
Unsurprisingly, the main backer of the bill is notorious Wall Street lackey Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a former Goldman Sachs employee who has discovered lobbyist payoffs can be just as lucrative as a career in financial services. The last time Mr. Himes made an appearance on these pages was in March 2013 in my piece: Congress Moves to DEREGULATE Wall Street.
More from the New York Times:
The House is scheduled to vote on two bills this week that would undercut new financial regulations and hand Wall Street a victory. The legislation has garnered broad bipartisan support in the House, even after lawmakers learned that Citigroup lobbyists helped write one of the bills, which would exempt a wide array of derivatives trading from new regulation.
Remember what George Carlin observed:
“Bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”
The bills are part of a broader campaign in the House, among Republicans and business-friendly Democrats, to roll back elements of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the most comprehensive regulatory overhaul since the Depression. Of 10 recent bills that alter Dodd-Frank or other financial regulation, six have passed the House this year. This week, if the House approves Citigroup’s legislation and another bill that would delay heightened standards for firms that offer investment advice to retirees, the tally would rise to eight.
But simply voting on the bills generates benefits for both House lawmakers and Wall Street lobbyists, critics say. For lawmakers, it comes in the form of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. The banks, meanwhile, welcome the bills as a warning to regulatory agencies that they should tread carefully when drawing up new rules.
“The House is the odd man out in terms of doing Wall Street’s bidding,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit group critical of the financial industry. “They’re letting Wall Street write the law to its own benefit in ways that harm the public.”
Wall Street’s support from the House extends beyond favorable votes. When bank executives are called to testify before Congress, industry lobbyists distribute proposed questions to lawmakers and their staff, seeking to exert some control over the debate, according to emails written by staff members on the House Financial Services Committee that were reviewed by The Times.
The legislation, Mr. Himes said in an interview, poses no financial risk to the country. And while he is the second-largest recipient among House Democrats of financial sector donations, that is not what is compelling his vote, he said.
“It hardly determines, thank goodness, how legislators think about these issues,” said Mr. Himes, a former Goldman Sachs executive.
“After inflicting so much pain and suffering on the American people, now is not the time to let the largest banks back into the casino,” Representative Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement.
Sorry ma’m you’re just a little late.
Some House bills have the explicit purpose of delaying new regulation. One bill scheduled for a vote this week could temporarily restrain the Labor Department from imposing a new rule requiring some financial advisers to take on a fiduciary duty to clients when providing retirement investment advice. Such a duty would demand that the advisers act in the best interest of the client.
The bill that Citigroup helped draft takes aim at one of the more contentious provisions in Dodd Frank, a requirement that banks “push out” some derivatives trading into separate units that are not backed by the government’s insurance fund. The goal was to isolate this risky trading and to prevent government bailouts.
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), denounces ”Obamacare” as he speaks on the Senate floor on Capitol Hill in Washington, in this still image taken from video, September 24, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/U.S. Senate TV/Handout
By Thomas Ferraro and David Lawder
WASHINGTON | Wed Sep 25, 2013 6:58am EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican Senator Ted Cruz slogged into the second day of his marathon attack on Obamacare from the Senate floor on Wednesday, showing almost no signs of relenting after speaking for nearly 16 hours.
Standing in a nearly empty Senate chamber, Cruz made his case to deny funding to implement President Barack Obama’s landmark overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system, calling it the country’s “biggest jobs killer.”
Most of the Tea Party firebrand’s Republican colleagues shunned his diatribe against the health insurance reform law, which is delaying Senate consideration of a stop-gap funding measure needed to avoid a government shutdown in six days.
Elected from Texas last November, Cruz at times strides the Capitol attired in cowboy boots. But on Wednesday morning, his feet were clad in tennis shoes. In black, they matched his suit.
“Obamacare isn’t working,” the Texas Republican said in between stories about the struggles of his Cuban immigrant father and reciting Doctor Seuss verse. A professed carnivore, he recounted the tribulations of Christmas dinner with his future wife’s vegetarian family.
Cruz began talking at 2:41 p.m. (1841 GMT) on Tuesday. His performance had the look of a filibuster, a procedural hurdle used to block legislation. Except in this case, it won’t.
Under Senate rules, Cruz must yield the floor by noon (1600 GMT) on Wednesday for a procedural vote that will start the Senate towards final passage of the bill to keep government agencies funded through November 15 — including Obamacare money.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Cruz was joined on the Senate floor only by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who provided him short breaks from speaking. Lee and Cruz spent the summer whipping up conservative anger against the healthcare law.
As dawn approached, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, also a Tea Party conservative, took the lectern, giving a Cruz a break, which the Texas lawmaker used to stretch with knee bends on the Senate’s floor.
Republicans agree with Cruz’ contention that Obamacare is a “disaster,” but most of the 46 Senate Republicans are expected to line up instead with their party leaders in support of the emergency spending bill.
Cruz wants to block the funding measure unless it contains no money to implement Obamacare.
Polls show most Americans oppose the health care law despite its goals of providing healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured people, but even more oppose a government shutdown.
Provided Cruz can remain on his feet, he could go on for several more hours until a procedural vote scheduled for midday on Wednesday.
“I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand,” he said as he started his pitch.
Cruz went on to talk about his father “flippin’ pancakes,” making “green eggs and ham,” “the travesty of Obamacare,” and, proudly, about his unpopularity among many fellow Republicans.
Practically every day, he said: “I now pick up the newspaper to learn what a scoundrel I am.”
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives last week passed a version of the spending measure that denied funds to Obamacare. That will be stripped from the Senate version, which also will be shorter to
The House will have to decide whether to pass the revised bill or find a compromise with the Senate. Unless new funding is quickly approved, a government shutdown would begin on Tuesday.
At this point, it is unclear what the House Republican leadership would do, generating plenty of anxiety among their own members.
A House aide said of her boss: “He is definitely stressed.”
The aide said the congressman opposes a shutdown but is under pressure from constituents to stop Obamacare.
Republicans uniformly want to repeal Obamacare. But many see that as a political impossibility as long as Democrats control the Senate and hold the presidency.
ON NOTICE
Club for Growth, a conservative group influential among Republicans, put senators on notice that it expected them to support Cruz’s bid and block Democrats from eliminating the provision to defund Obamacare.
But Cruz’s fellow Republicans were moving in the other direction one day after the party’s top two leaders in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn, refused to lend their support to Cruz.
Senator Orrin Hatch, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee that oversees Obamacare, announced he would side with McConnell rather than Cruz.
Senator Lindsey Graham said he expects a majority of the Senate’s Republicans to reject Cruz’s strategy, which risks a government shutdown that would likely be blamed on Republicans.
“I think most Republicans believe, no matter how sincere you are about defunding Obamacare, that this approach would blow up in our face,” Graham said.
Once the battle over the government funding bill is resolved, Congress will grapple with another fiscal crisis – a possible and unprecedented U.S. government default unless it agrees to raise the $ 16.7 trillion U.S. borrowing authority by sometime next month or early November.
Republicans are expected to place demands on any bill to increase the debt limit, including one to delay for a year implementation of Obamacare, now set to begin kicking in next month.
(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by W Simon)
(This story was refiled to remove duplicate paragraph)
American long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad had passed the three-quarter mark on her swim across the Florida Straits on Monday, attempting to become the first person to swim from Cuba without a shark cage.
Nyad, 64, was “swimming strongly” more than 39 hours after she set off from Havana, according to blog updates on her website (www.diananyad.com). She had swum more than 80 miles of the 103 miles to the Florida Keys.
The marathon swimmer is making her fifth and final attempt at the crossing, this time using a protective silicone mask to better protect her from the poisonous jellyfish that forced her to end one of two attempted crossings last year.
Nyad said at the outset that the custom-made mask slows her and makes it more difficult to breath. Officials initially estimated it could take up to three days to complete the swim, but Nyad was benefitting from a favorable current, her crew members said.
The treacherous Florida Straits has been conquered only once, by Australian Susie Maroney, who used a protective cage at age 22 during a 1997 swim. The cage glided on ocean currents and enabled Maroney to make the journey in just 25 hours.
Australian endurance swimmer Chloe McCardel abandoned her quest in June to make the crossing after she was severely stung by a jellyfish 11 hours into her attempt.
Nyad departed on Saturday morning accompanied by five support boats that also provide her with food and water.
John Bartlett, a member of Nyad’s crew, wrote on her website on Sunday that she had swum farther than on any previous attempt. Her swimming speed had reached 2 mph, he said, “increasing progressively throughout the day.”
As night fell on Sunday, Nyad put on a jellyfish-protection suit, the website said. She did not immediately use her protective mask. Instead, the exposed parts of her face were slathered with a special protective cream dubbed “Sting Stopper,” it said.
An isolated thunderstorm was reported in the area where Nyad was swimming. Crew member Candace Hogan wrote that Nyad was approaching shallower waters “which could spell danger from jellyfish.”
“We can almost see the glow of Key West,” Hogan added.
At one point on Sunday, the website said, Nyad floated on her back kicking and led a crew of 35 people keeping her on course through the strong Gulf Stream current in singing “Happy Birthday” to a crew member.
“Diana is feeling strong and very coherent,” an earlier update read. “She is joking for the first time all day. The only concern is that she is throwing up everything she eats.”
Earlier Sunday, Nyad was stopping every 40 minutes to eat, taking several bites of scrambled eggs and pasta, the blog said.
Her long-distance accomplishments include swimming around the island of Manhattan in 1975 and a swim from the Bahamas to Florida in 1979.
Alvaro Lopez Tardon needed to launder tens of millions of dollars in proceeds from selling thousands of kilograms of cocaine trafficked from South America to Europe, so he turned to Miami condos, federal authorities say.
A new Harvard University study found that gun bans don’t lower the murder rate. That hasn’t prevented the California Legislature from firing a fusillade of new gun-control laws.
AB 711, by Assemblyman Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, would make California the first state in the nation to prohibit the use of all lead ammunition for hunting. According to Sam Paredes with Gun Owners of California, extensive research has shown that traditional lead ammunition does not pose a health hazard for hunters. And a recent study found that, despite 99 percent hunter compliance, a ban on using lead ammunition in certain areas of the state under AB 821 of 2008 failed to reduce lead poisoning in condors.
AB 180, by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, would repeal state firearms preemption in Oakland by allowing the city to enact ordinances more restrictive than state laws on the registering and licensing of firearms. AB 180 would allow the city of Oakland to create anti-gun policies much more strict than the rest of the state. Criminals still could get guns in other California cities, or in Nevada.
AB 231, by Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, would expand the law pertaining to the storage of firearms. This bill would make it a crime if a child gets access to an unlocked firearm. According to Gun Owners of California, AB 231 is a misguided proposal that imposes unprecedented liability on legal gun owners.
President Obama is seen on a video camera as he delivers a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2010. In addition to footage of official events, the White House now has thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes video that it will archive.
Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
President Obama is seen on a video camera as he delivers a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2010. In addition to footage of official events, the White House now has thousands of hours of behind-the-scenes video that it will archive.
Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
President Obama’s second term is just seven months old, but people in the White House are already starting to look at what happens when it ends.
A massive archiving project is already under way: Letters, photos and even scribbled to-do lists with doodles in the margins go to the National Archives and eventually on to the Obama presidential library.
But one part of the project is a unique challenge for this presidency: dealing with all the footage filmed by the White House videographer.
While a photographer has been an official part of the White House staff since John F. Kennedy was president, an official videographer is something new.
Arun Chaudhary spent the entire 2008 campaign and the first two years of the administration filming Obama behind the scenes.
“We are definitely talking about thousands and thousands of hours,” he says, “and that’s just … my camera.”
Chaudhary and his successors have filmed Obama on the basketball court, in the Oval Office and palling around with Elena Kagan seconds before he nominated her to the Supreme Court.
Military videographers have long filmed official White House events, like speeches and ceremonies. So, for example, this video of Obama speaking Portuguese to an audience in Brazil is the sort of thing that would be part of any presidential record:
But now there’s also video showing the president practicing those phrases backstage before the speech — asking a young woman if he’s going to make a fool of himself and saying it’ll be her fault if he gets the words wrong:
“The difference between me and the military folks,” Chaudhary says, “is that I’m getting a lot of this backstage material that previously wasn’t official.”
It all seems appropriate for the social media age, when even the most ordinary moments get preserved for posterity. But Chaudhary, who chronicled his time filming the president in a book called First Cameraman, has started to worry about what will happen to all of these White House home movies when Obama leaves office.
While the material will go to the National Archives and eventually to the Obama presidential library, Chaudhary says there are crucial differences between official and casual events that make his material much harder to search.
“I could put the text of a speech into a file or something next to the video of the speech … and then when you’re searching for a specific line, it can come up,” he says. “But to actually have someone transcribe every casual conversation the president had with anyone while I was filming, I can tell you would take a long time.”
Those transcripts don’t exist, and nobody plans to create them. The behind-the-scenes footage is labeled by date and place. But beyond that, the contents will remain a mystery until someone combs through and catalogs them.
White House videographer Arun Chaudhary stands in front of Air Force One in 2010.
Charles Dharapak/AP
“The style of videography and the type of material I was capturing gives so much valuable context to these more easily searchable events, so I think it’s what will be lost when someone is making a documentary in the future,” Chaudhary says.
He’s not the only one who’s worried about this. Journalists, political scientists and filmmakers share his concern.
Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University, has devoted her career to chronicling the White House.
“I first started coming into the White House when Gerald Ford was president,” she says.
She relies heavily on presidential libraries for her research. And she says candid video could be a vital tool for understanding a presidency.
“A videographer is going to take pictures where you actually see the president’s interactions — and that’s something you really want to get a sense of,” she says.
Sharon Fawcett, who ran the presidential library system for the National Archives until retiring two years ago, says this kind of material has the potential to illuminate a presidency in new ways.
“I think it’s hugely important,” she says. “Having this video diary with this information in it will be a great source for future historians to find out what the president was thinking and how his thinking may have evolved, what kind of conversations he was having with people.”
That’s if the video becomes easily usable. People who work on these issues dream of a Google-style video search that will let people comb through footage looking for, say, any mention of health care or any time a specific person appears.
Chaudhary says tech geniuses have spent years trying and failing to solve this puzzle.
“Search engine optimization with video is very, very hard,” he says. “Finding videos you’re looking for is very, very hard, and in terms of sort of digital stuff, it’s this real holy grail. People talk about it all the time.”
So it’s not just a government problem. Chaudhary says if YouTube had this cracked, we’d know about it.
Mozilla has signed mobile payments company Bango to allow operator billing on the Firefox OS marketplace. That means that users on the soon-to-be-released Firefox phones will be able to pay for their apps via their phone bills.
This confirms a scoop that we had in February, where we first announced the Mozilla and Bango marriage.
Carrier billing is still not a common feature in smartphone app stores, where billing is typically charged to user credit cards, as it is with Google Play and the iOS App Store. But it’s especially significant in emerging markets, where credit card penetration is far from ubiquitous, and the prepaid segment remains sizable.
And as Mozilla positions its upcoming mid-range devices towards markets such as Latin America and Asia, the ability to provide carrier billing will help address the many unbanked users which don’t have credit cards.
Bango isn’t a stranger to large telecoms deals. The Cambridge-based firm signed a deal with mobile carrier Telefonica in January to power carrier billing for Telefonica’s services, covering the latter’s 314 million subscriber base.
The anticipated Firefox OS is Mozilla’s smartphone operating system based entirely on open Web standards such as HTML5. Mozilla is positioning it as an alternative for powering low-cost and mid-range devices, in particular by offering carriers more control over the inner workings of the phone, compared with Android, for example.
Bango raised $ 10.2 million in February 2013 to continue growing its customer base. It already provides carrier billing options to large clients such as Facebook, Amazon, BlackBerry and Opera, to name some, and says it has a reach of about a billion users.
October 1999
August 7, 2005, AIM: BGO
In the era of mobile technology, collecting payments has emerged as a central and complex challenge. Bango (AIM: BGO) powers payment and analytics on the mobile web, providing users with a massively smooth payment experience. Bango’s pervasive presence across the web creates a platform effect for partners, identifying hundreds of millions of users and maximizing the number of one-click payments. Global leaders plug into Bango: customers include Facebook, BlackBerry World, Windows Phone Store, Amazon and major mobile brands including CNN,…
BEIJING (Reuters) – British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Plc channeled bribes to Chinese officials and doctors through travel agencies for six years to illegally boost sales and to raise the price of its medicines in China, police said on Monday.
LAC-MEGANTIC, Quebec (Reuters) – Investigators sifted through the charred remains of Lac-Megantic’s historic downtown early Wednesday morning, as they searched for clues into what could turn out to be North America’s worst railway disaster since 1989.
