Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/301313320?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, April 25, 2013
Missouri House backs income tax cut, sales tax hike - KansasCity.com
JEFFERSON CITY ? Legislation aimed at countering massive tax cuts passed last year in Kansas cleared the Missouri House on Wednesday, putting it one vote away from the governor?s desk.
The legislation was approved by the House on a 90-68 vote, with 18 Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. That puts the bill far short of the 109 votes needed to override a veto by Gov. Jay Nixon, who earlier this year criticized the measure as a tax increase on working families and senior citizens.
The bill would gradually reduce the top individual income tax rate by two-thirds of a percent and the corporate tax rate by three-quarters of a percent. The reductions would happen over five years as long as revenue grows at least $100 million in a given year.
It also would create a 50 percent tax deduction for all businesses.
To offset some of the cost of the tax cuts, the bill gradually increases the sales tax by three-fifths of a cent, with the additional money going to schools, a new mental hospital and roads.
?I wish this tax cut would be more, but I have to pause and realize the historic nature of what we?re doing today,? said Rep. Eric Burlison, a Springfield Republican.
The bill also includes a provision making it easier to collect sales taxes on Internet purchases and creates an amnesty period in which delinquent taxpayers could pay without penalty.
Proponents of the plan say it will make Missouri more competitive with Kansas, which last year slashed state income taxes and eliminated them entirely for nearly 200,000 businesses.
Critics, however, say the result of the legislation will be budget shortfalls that will force cuts to programs like K-12 education, which is already underfunded by $600 million. When fully phased in, the tax changes in the bill are estimated to reduce state revenue by $300 million to $500 million.
?Someone, whether it?s our public education system or our senior citizens, is going to have to bear the brunt of this in the future,? said Rep. Jon Carpenter, a Kansas City Democrat.
The Senate, which passed a different version earlier this year, is expected to debate the measure Thursday morning. Republicans can agree to the changes made in the House and send the bill to the governor or ask for a conference committee to work out differences.
Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/04/24/4200709/missouri-house-backs-income-tax.html
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BBC plans 'Tweet of the Day,' radio for birds
LONDON (AP) ? Remember when tweeting was for the birds?
The BBC is hoping to revive that simpler time with "Tweet of the Day" ? an early-morning radio program dedicated to British birdsong.
Veteran naturalist David Attenborough will host the 90-second show, which will feature the song of a different bird each weekday, along with background on the species' behavior and habits.
The show on the BBC's main speech station, Radio 4, may be best appreciated by those who rise with the birds. "Tweet of the Day" will be broadcast at 5:58 a.m.
The BBC said Wednesday that 265 different birds will be featured during the year-long series, which begins next month with a recording of the cuckoo. Attenborough will host for the first month, and be followed by other BBC presenters.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bbc-plans-tweet-day-radio-birds-112446764.html
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China sends largest fleet yet to disputed islands
China sent a fleet of patrol ships today to the sea area it disputes with Japan, following a controversial visit by Japanese officials to a war shrine. The latest moves are seen as a setback for a diplomatic resolution.
Chinese surveillance ships sail in formation in waters claimed by Japan near disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China in the East China Sea Tuesday.
Kyodo News/AP
EnlargeSpats between Asia?s two most powerful nations, China and Japan, have grown uncomfortably routine since Tokyo nationalized a group of disputed islands in September. On Tuesday tensions reached a new and potentially worrisome high.
Skip to next paragraph Ralph JenningsTaiwan Correspondent
Ralph Jennings has covered news in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia for the past 14 years. He lives in Taipei and holds a degree in mass communication from the University of California in Berkeley.?
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China sent eight surveillance vessels into Japanese territorial waters, apparently to track a flotilla of Japanese activists who had gone to look at the contested area. China?s presence ? an effort to exercise authority in the region ? is its largest since Japan nationalized the uninhabited islets, Kyodo News reported.
China?s use of ships in disputed waters isn?t expected to cause a war, but it raises the specter of a miscalculation at sea that could in turn create a new diplomatic row, set off more protests in Chinese cities, and strike another blow at Japanese business caught in the crossfire. Hopes of polite negotiations are also off the map for now.
"Only when Japan faces up to its aggressive past can it embrace the future and develop friendly relations with its Asian neighbors," Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a news conference on Monday.
As if the 80 pro-Tokyo activists weren?t enough to upset Beijing, that same day 168 Japanese lawmakers visited a Shinto shrine that?s reviled elsewhere in Asia for memorializing World War II heroes. Japan occupied parts of China from 1931 to 1945. Three cabinet ministers had already visited Yasukuni Shrine over the weekend, causing calculated reaction.
In protest, a high-level Chinese military official bailed on a trip this week to Japan as the foreign ministry lashed out.?
And China?s surveillance vessels probably weren?t loaded with olive branches. The Communist country has increasingly jousted?with Japan since around 2005 as it rose to become the world?s second largest economy.
?Such an intrusion [in the East China Sea] was certainly not undertaken spontaneously, but would have been planned and coordinated some time in advance for execution as soon as an opportunity presented itself,? says Scott Harold, associate political scientist with US-based think tank the RAND Corporation.
Japan controls the disputed islets, which it calls the Senkakus, despite 40 years of competing claims from China and a wave of destructive anti-Japanese street protests in Chinese cities last year. China criticizes the Shinto shrine visits because a memorial at the venue also honors 14 major war criminals.
The two sides are also disputing rights to an undersea natural gas field, while China periodically accuses Japan of not apologizing for the war of the 1940s. Japan says it has apologized.?
China and Japan, as the world?s No. 2 and No. 3 economies, also mean a lot to each other trade wise. The number of Japanese subsidiaries in China has grown eight times since the 1990s, and they sold $147 billion worth of goods to the country in the 2011 fiscal year.
Will the two keep meeting, along with South Korea, to discuss a three-way trade agreement? After momentum last month, the latest raises concern that this puts progress on ice.
?Both sides need to be more flexible,? suggests Ralph Cossa, president with US think tank Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies. ?Japan needs to acknowledge that the territory is in dispute, at least from a Chinese perspective, and the Chinese need to acknowledge that they are under Japan?s administrative control and that a military solution is unacceptable.?
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Friday, March 8, 2013
The Red Solo Cup Gets Classy
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/jUdK0uo6Am8/the-red-solo-cup-gets-classy
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Celldex 4Q loss widens on higher R&D costs
NEEDHAM, Mass. (AP) -- Cancer drug developer Celldex Therapeutics Inc. said Thursday its fourth-quarter loss widened as higher clinical trial expenses boosted its research and development costs.
For the quarter ended Dec. 31, the Needham, Mass.-based company posted a loss of $16.8 million, or 27 cents per share, compared with a loss of $12.7 million, or 29 cents per share, in the same quarter a year earlier.
The recent quarter's results are based on 62.5 million outstanding shares, up 42 percent from the year-ago quarter.
Revenue jumped 50 percent to $3.6 million from $2.4 million.
The loss was larger than Wall Street expected, but the company's revenue beat predictions. Analysts, on average, expected a loss of 25 cents per share on $2.5 million in revenue, according to FactSet.
Research and development expenses jumped 40 percent to $13.7 million on higher costs related to a potential brain cancer treatment that the company is developing.
For the full year 2012, Celldex posted a loss of $59.1 million, or $1.02 per share, compared with a loss of $44.8 million, or $1.13 per share, in 2011. Revenue increased to $11.2 million from $9.3 million.
Celldex shares fell 33 cents, or 3 percent, to $10.67 in afternoon trading after dropping as low as $9.13 earlier in the day. Over the past 52 weeks, the stock has traded between $3.52 and $11.24.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/celldex-4q-loss-widens-higher-183725088.html
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Thursday, March 7, 2013
Do more women need diabetes care when pregnant?
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A change in testing could nearly triple the number of women diagnosed with diabetes during pregnancy, but would catching milder cases help mother or baby? A government panel is urging more research to find that out before doctors make the switch.
Gestational diabetes ? the kind that strikes during pregnancy ? is a growing problem. More women are getting it as they wait until their 30s or later to have a baby, and as they increasingly begin their pregnancies already overweight.
This is one of the most common complications of pregnancy, and just about every woman gets checked for it. That's because if mom's high blood sugar isn't controlled, the fetus can grow too large, leading to C-sections and early deliveries.
There are other problems, too: Mom can get dangerous high blood pressure; the baby can be born with low blood sugar; the baby's risk of obesity in childhood is increased. And while this kind of diabetes usually disappears when the baby's born, the mother is left with another risk. Months or years later, half of women who had it wind up developing full-fledged Type 2 diabetes.
Doctors today diagnose gestational diabetes in about 5 percent to 6 percent of U.S. pregnancies, or about 240,000 a year, according to experts convened this week by the National Institutes of Health.
Most U.S. doctors use a two-step testing method. But now there's a push for doctors to switch to a simpler one-step test that's used in other parts of the world.
The one-step approach, backed by the American Diabetes Association and World Health Organization, isn't just about the convenience of getting diagnosed in one doctor visit or two. It also would lower the blood sugar threshold for diagnosing the condition.
"The implications of this are very, very large, and there are so many unanswered questions," said Dr. Catherine Spong of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
On Wednesday, the NIH-appointed panel agreed, and said many more pregnant women would be classified with gestational diabetes ? 15 to 20 percent ? if doctors widely adopted the one-step approach.
The more aggressive approach treats milder cases with diet and exercise, not medication. But that's still a lot of women who would get extra medical care, such as nutritionist visits and doctor checks of their blood sugar and their baby's growth, not to mention uncertainty about whether C-sections would increase. That could add up to hundreds of millions of dollars in health costs annually.
But there's been no study of whether treating cases milder than are diagnosed today makes any difference to the health of mother and baby, the experts concluded.
"If we can extend benefits to mothers, their unborn children ... and impact their future health care, everybody would want to get on board even if it were more expensive," said Dr. Peter VanDorsten of the Medical University of South Carolina. He chaired the NIH panel. Doctors aren't required to follow its advice.
He called for quick research to settle the debate, saying, "We absolutely left the door ajar for reconsideration."
What's the test? Under the two-step method, nearly every woman drinks a super-sweet liquid, and has a blood test an hour later to see how the body processes the sugar. Those who fail repeat the test with a larger drink and three hours of blood tests. With the one-step method, everyone would get a single two-hour test.
The push to switch came after a study of 25,000 pregnant women in nine countries. It found that various health risks for mother and child gradually grew as mom's blood sugar rose above normal levels, even if she wasn't officially diabetic.
Some doctors already are trying the simpler approach. The Oregon Health & Science University began using it last summer, and gestational diabetes cases doubled, obstetrics chairman Dr. Aaron Caughey told the NIH meeting. But his medical center decided it's worth trying because even women with mild diabetes could benefit from nutritional counseling that insurance doesn't always cover unless they're diagnosed, Caughey said.
Wednesday's report urged doctors also to consider the anxiety that a diagnosis of even mild gestational diabetes can bring.
In Birmingham, Ala., attorney Kira Fonteneau was diagnosed with gestational diabetes after traditional two-step testing. She cried at the news even though doctors made clear she had a very mild case. She wasn't overweight, but diabetes runs in the family.
Armed with a nutritionist's advice and regular blood-sugar checks, Fonteneau quickly changed how she ate, cutting back on carbohydates. She got better.
"Knowledge is power," she said. "You want to have a healthy baby."
Her daughter Sydney, now 2, was born a healthy 5 pounds, 11 ounces. Fonteneau said she bounced back faster, gaining far less during her pregnancy than is typical for her family. She said she will pay more attention to her own health knowing she's at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes later on.
___
Online:
NIH site on gestational diabetes: http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/gestational/
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/more-women-diabetes-care-pregnant-213608694.html
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