Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/314280135?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, June 23, 2013
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Ohio GOP agreement calls for larger income tax cut
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Ohio residents could see a 10 percent income tax cut paid for in part by a bump in the state sales tax under a Republican package of changes meant to be included in the state's budget.
GOP legislative leaders in the House and Senate announced the proposal, which also gives small businesses a break and closes certain tax loopholes on small cigars and magazine subscriptions, on Thursday.
State lawmakers are working to finalize Ohio's next two-year budget. They face a June 30 deadline to pass the almost $61.7 billion spending plan before the new fiscal year begins July 1.
The plan reduces the statewide income tax rate gradually over three years, beginning with an 8.5 percent tax cut on income earned in 2013 and moving to a 10 percent tax reduction by 2015.
A tax break targeted at small businesses would let people write off 50 percent of their first $250,000 in business income annually. That's similar to what the Senate passed in its version of the budget, which would let people deduct 50 percent of their first $750,000 in income.
"Make no doubt about it, we are making significant changes," said Senate President Keith Faber, a Celina Republican, at an afternoon news conference at the Statehouse.
The plan amounts to a $2.6 billion net tax reduction over three years, including more than $1 billion in the next budget year, GOP leaders said.
Among other changes, the tax package also would increase the state sales tax from 5.5 percent to 5.75 percent and apply it to digital goods such as electronic books and music downloaded online.
Virtually every Ohio business pays the commercial activities tax, but the proposal would change the threshold on who pays what.
The change would have little impact on larger businesses. But it would apply the current tax rate to those businesses making $500,000 in gross receipts, instead of those making $1 million and above.
Another change would get rid of property tax help that the state currently pays to homeowners who are subject to local levies, such as school issues. The elimination of the so-called property tax rollback wouldn't apply to existing levies, only deductions for future homeowners and new local levies. The move is expected to save the state nothing in the first fiscal year, about $34 million in 2015 and about $90 million annually in the years that follow.
Democrats argued the effect of the changes amounted to a tax increase for most.
"All Ohioans will have to pay higher taxes every time they go to the store or buy a car thanks to this Republican tax hike," state Sen. Eric Kearney, a Cincinnati Democrat, said in a written statement.
Kearney said it also would make it more difficult for schools and communities to pass levies.
The tax package is aimed at reconciling the separate tax proposals that passed the two Republican-controlled chambers of the Legislature.
The House had retained 7 percent of the 20 percent permanent income tax cut originally proposed by GOP Gov. John Kasich. Senators chose to restore a small business benefit, which Kasich also had pitched in his budget.
The governor praised the proposal in a written statement Thursday.
"This is another big step forward in Ohio's comeback," Kasich said.
A conference committee of six lawmakers, three from the House and three from the Senate, has started hashing out the differences between the two chambers' spending proposals.
Both chambers' versions of the budget also had omitted Kasich's proposed tax increase on high-volume oil and gas drillers and his plans for extending the state sales tax to professional services including those provided by legal, accounting and lobbying firms.
A House committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the new tax package on Friday, while a Senate panel plans to hear from witnesses on Monday.
The conference committee is expected to vote on a compromise budget bill early next week.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-gop-agreement-calls-larger-124814255.html
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Health insurers to pay $500 million in rebates this summer
(Reuters) - Insurers will pay $500 million in rebates to employers and individuals this summer because of President Barack Obama's healthcare law, about half the amount they paid last year.
The law, often called Obamacare, requires companies to refund customers when they spend less than 80 percent of premiums they collect on medical care.
The Department of Health and Human Services attributed the decline in rebates to insurers' adhering more closely to this requirement and to lowering premium rates for their products.
The government agency said on Thursday that 8.5 million insurance customers would receive an average rebate of about $100 per family after August 1. For 2011, 4.1 million people received about $152 per family, or a total of $1.1 billion.
The Affordable Care Act goes into full effect on January 1, 2014, when an expansion of the Medicaid health plan for the poor and subsidized state health exchanges take hold. In recent weeks, states have begun publishing premiums for new insurance products for those exchanges.
The Medical Loss Ratio, or MLR, portion of the law was first applied in full in 2011 and limits spending on administrative costs, salaries and bonuses.
Gary Cohen, deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that the insurers were paying fewer rebates in 2012 than in 2011 because they were more strictly following the law and charging lower premiums.
The centers also said the MLR rule, a new insurance rate review process that requires rate increases of more than 10 percent to be reviewed, and competition had contributed to a savings of $3.4 billion among 77.8 million people due to lower spending on premiums last year.
Cohen said other market forces could be contributing to the lower premiums. Growth in healthcare spending has slowed during recent years as consumers have cut back on doctors' services and the trend is forecast to continue.
"As they've adjusted their prices to the new rule, as they've become more efficient and more cost effective, two things happen: the number of rebates goes down and the corresponding amount of premium that people have to pay for the value they are getting for insurance comes down as well," Cohen said during a telephone briefing with reporters.
Aetna Inc, the third-largest U.S. insurer, said that MLR rebates represent 0.2 percent of the premiums it collected in 2012.
"We are delivering savings to our customers through competitive pricing, rather than waiting for a rebate check," Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said in statement.
(Reporting by Caroline Humer; Editing by Kenneth Barry)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/health-insurers-pay-500-million-rebates-summer-190038387.html
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New Android apps worth downloading: Dolphin Browser update, SmugMug, Flip Runner
A huge update to a popular app is our first app worth downloading today. That app is Dolphin Browser, and its new update adds the ability for users to add web apps to the browser that turn it almost into its own operating system. We've also got SmugMug, which lets you store and display the photos you take with your Android device online, and Flip Runner, an endless runner that lets you manipulate gravity.
What?s cool? Before its latest update, Dolphin was already a solid browser that allowed for things like tabbed and incognito browsing, the ability to sync with other browsers to download history and bookmarks from your computer, and easy sharing and other features. Now the app has added a store for web apps, making Dolphin almost like an operating system unto itself. You can nab tons of popular web apps to add to your browsing experience and customize the app's home screen to access lots of different apps and ?speed dial? web pages. Dolphin's UI has also been completely revamped as part of the update.
Who?s it for? If you're a fan of Dolphin or want a solid web browser that's a whole lot more, this one's for you.
What?s it like? You can get a similar (but maybe less robust) experience from Google's Chrome or Firefox.
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What?s cool? Snapping photos with your Android device is one of the best things about smartphones and tablets, but storing all those photos can be a pain, especially if your device's hard drive isn't especially large. SmugMug helps remedy that problem by providing unlimited online space where users can upload their photos and videos, create galleries, browse other people's images, leave comments and download your images to other devices.
Who?s it for? Android photographers, use SmugMug to have a place to store and share all your stuff.
What?s it like? Flickr and Photobucket are both solid alternatives for photo uploads.
What?s cool? Like other endless runner games, Flip Runner is a title in which players control a character that is always running, and their job is to avoid deadly obstacles in that character's path. The game includes just one control: tap the screen, and you'll reverse gravity, causing your runner to reverse which side of the game's central plane he's running along. Flipping gravity lets you dodge saw blades and spikes, but you'll have to adapt to obstacles that are upside down, too.
Who?s it for? Fans of running games will find Flip Runner puts a simple but effective twist on the genre.
What?s it like? Check out Bobbing and Polara, both of which make interesting changes to the usual runner formula.
Download the Appolicious Android app
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Friday, June 21, 2013
Estrogen is a new weapon against urinary tract infection in postmenopausal women
June 19, 2013 ? Estrogen stimulates the production of the body's own antibiotic and strengthens the cells in the urinary tract, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The results, which are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, show that estrogen supplements may help menopausal women to ward off recurrent urinary tract infections.
Urinary tract infections are among the most common diseases, affecting over half of all women at some point in life and repeatedly in 25 percent of these. Menopausal women have an increased risk of recurrent urinary tract infections, which has been associated with low estrogen levels.
Infecting bacteria first come in contact with the inside of the urinary bladder. The bladder lumen is covered with epithelial cells, acting as a fence protecting the vulnerable tissue as well as producing antimicrobial peptides -- the body's self-made antibiotic. These peptides act as rapid front line soldiers fighting infecting microorganisms. By the early action of the antimicrobial peptides, the number of bacteria can be reduced before they have a chance to multiply. In the postmenopausal woman, however, the epithelium is fragile and often damaged with occasional gaps between cells, which in turn affect the ability to resist infection.
In the current study, the researchers treated post-menopausal women with estrogen for 14 days, and then analyzed cells excreted in the urine. They found that estrogen acts on the epithelium in a way that the gaps between the cells lining the bladder lumen are healed, i.e. estrogen is gluing them together. This makes it more difficult for bacteria to break this protecting shield and reach the underlying cells.
"During menopause, women have low levels of estrogen, and therefore also low levels of antimicrobial peptides as well as a damaged lining of the lumen in the urinary tract," says study leader Dr. Annelie Brauner at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology of Karolinska Institutet. "This will give the bacteria opportunity to reach the underlying tissue, where they can hide and stay until they are triggered to cause a new infection. By treating postmenopausal women locally with estrogen the cells lining the bladder are strengthened and the body's own defense against infection is improved, making women better suited to fight infections."
This research has been funded through grants from the Swedish Research Council, ALF and the Swedish Cancer Foundation, amongst others.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/i7VC7Cqxa1I/130619164620.htm
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Lawyers eye NSA data as treasure trove for evidence in murder, divorce cases
By Bob Sullivan, Columnist, NBC News
The National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency finds the shoe is on the other foot. A defendant in a Florida murder trial says telephone records collected by the NSA as part of its surveillance programs hold evidence that would help prove his innocence, and his lawyer has demanded that prosecutors produce those records. On Wednesday, the federal government filed a motion saying it would refuse, citing national security. But experts say the novel legal argument could encourage other lawyers to fight for access to the newly disclosed NSA surveillance database.
"What's good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess," said George Washington University privacy law expert Dan Solove. "In a way, it's kind of ironic."
Defendant Terrance Brown is accused of participating in the 2010 murder of a Brinks security truck driver. Brown maintains his innocence, and claims cellphone location records would show he wasn't at the scene of the crime. Brown's cellphone provider ? MetroPCS ? couldn't produce those records during discovery because it had deleted the data already.
On seeing the story in the Guardian indicating that Verizon had been ordered to turn over millions of calling records to the NSA last month, Brown's lawyer had a novel idea: Make the NSA produce the records.
Brown's lawyer, Marshall Dore Louis, said he couldn't comment while the trial was ongoing.?
"Relying on a June 5, 2013, Guardian newspaper article ... Defendant Brown now suggests that the Government likely actually does possess the metadata relating to telephone calls made in July 2010 from the two numbers attributed to Defendant Brown," wrote U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenbaum in an order demanding that the federal government respond to the request on June 10.
The laws of evidence require that prosecutors turn over to the defense any records they have that might help prove a suspect's innocence.?
"This opens up a Pandora's box," said Mark Rasch, former head of the Department of Justice Computer Crimes Unit, and now an independent consultant. ?You will have situations where the phone companies no longer have the data, but the government does, and lawyers will try to get that data.?
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors filed a motion saying they cannot respond to Brown's request because the federal government does not have the data the suspect seeks ? cell site location information, or CSLI. The leaked court order which inspired the request included was unclear on which metadata phone companies turn over.
The government?s motion also invokes the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), which allows the prosecutors to respond to such requests "in camera," or privately with the judge, to explain what data it does or does not have.
"The (CIPA) allows the government to protect classified information by claiming that, first, the phone records are classified, and second, whether or not the government has phone records is also classified," Rasch said.
The assertion in the motion that "at the outset, the government does not possess the CSLI data," is intriguing, as it clearly refutes the notion that the NSA obtains location data as part of its routine records acquisition from telephone companies. But it's unlikely this case will yield more clues about what data the NSA does have, as additional legal discussion will be private.
Even without location data, it's easy to imagine other cases where call records might help prove a suspect's innocence. Rasch says the NSA should expect to deal with a lot of new requests for evidence now.
"The thing was, in the past, no one knew these records were there. Now lawyers know, and they will ask for it,? he said.
It's all part of the hazard of becoming, effectively, a backup server for all the nation's technology companies, said Solove.
"This is a little bit of an awakening to the government, that you can't hold massive amounts of personal data with impunity," he said. "Once you do, a lot of obligations and responsibilities kick in. One of the consequences of keeping data is that now you open yourself up to discovery."?
Different standards apply to discovery in civil cases, such as contested divorce, but Solove said it's possible lawyers in those cases could also appeal to the NSA for evidence, now that they know the records exist.
While it might seem unusual to demand data from an agency that not long ago was invisible to most Americans, Solove said it's important not to put the NSA on some kind of legal pedestal.
"The NSA is not above the law. It's a government agency, just like every other government agency. Just because it has this Harry Potter-like disappearing cloak, it's still an agency that is subject to the law," Solove said.?
Follow Bob Sullivan on?Facebook?or?Twitter.?
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