Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/288374207?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, March 3, 2013
Greece faces bailout review, plays down public sector job losses
ATHENS (Reuters) - Officials from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund return to Athens on Sunday to assess Greece's performance under a bailout plan as the government plays down the prospect of public sector job cuts.
The heads of the "troika" mission from the EU, IMF and the European Central Bank will meet Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras to review progress on privatizations, tax administration reforms, bank recapitalization and steps to shrink the public sector.
International lenders unlocked aid in December after Greece's coalition government adopted austerity measures to bring the bailout plan back on track, with Athens aiming for a primary budget surplus this year for the first time since 2002.
Greece's euro zone partners and the IMF have urged strict adherence to the plan to shore up public finances, a line echoed by the head of the Euro Working Group of senior officials who prepare decisions of euro zone finance ministers.
"All that was agreed in the bailout plan must be implemented. These reforms were agreed to make the Greek economy stronger, flexible and more competitive," Euro Working Group chief Thomas Wieser told Greek newspaper Realnews.
In its sixth year of recession, Greece has agreed to shrink its public sector by 150,000 by 2015 to cut its wage bill, mainly through attrition: hiring one new person for every 10 who retire.
Athens wants to avoid public sector layoffs with unemployment already at a record 27 percent and likely to rise as the economy is projected to shrink 4.5 percent this year.
But the government must transfer 25,000 employees to a so-called mobility scheme by the end of this year, where workers will earn reduced pay for a year and may face layoffs if vacant spots are not found in the broader public sector.
Finance Minister Stournaras played down talk of imminent job cuts in comments to Sunday's To Vima newspaper: "The public sector has shrunk by 75,000 people in the last one and a half years, there will be no layoffs," he was quoted as saying.
Bank recapitalization will be another topic on the agenda. Bankers have asked for an extension to an end-April deadline to wrap up a scheme to restore the solvency of the country's four biggest lenders.
Inspectors will also review steps taken to address shortcomings in tax collection and fighting tax evasion, and privatizations.
(Reporting by George Georgiopoulos; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/greece-faces-bailout-review-plays-down-public-sector-192028566--business.html
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Source: Boy, 6, killed as crossing guard takes break
By By Jonathan Vigliotti, Shimon Prokupecz and Ida Siegal, NBCNewYork.com
NEW YORK -- A 6-year-old boy was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer one block from his school Thursday morning while the crossing guard was taking a break, according to a law enforcement official.
The boy, identified as Amar Diarrosova, was walking with his 9-year-old brother and was crossing First Avenue in East Harlem just before 8 a.m. when the tractor-trailer turned right onto the avenue from 117th Street.
The older boy was not struck.
A law enforcement official told NBC 4 New York that the 55-year-old crossing guard was allowed the short personal break, but did not note it in her memo book. She has been suspended from her job, police said.?
The children were one block from PS 155 and were in the crosswalk, police said.?
Diarrosova was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The driver was cited for failure to yield and failure to exercise due care, police said.
More news from NBCNewYork.com
The boy's distraught parents did not speak to reporters as they returned to their apartment except to answer a question about how the 9-year-old brother was doing after the accident.?
"He's OK, thank you," the boy's father said.?
'Sweet boy'
It's unclear why the parents were not with the young boys as they walked to school, which is 12 blocks away from where they live.?
Family friend Maya Toure called Amar a "sweet boy," telling NBC 4 New York the boy loved school and "he prayed a lot."?
City Councilwoman Melissa Mark Viverito questioned whether the intersection has enough crossing guards to protect children from the heavily traveled roadway.?
"People have to take breaks," she said. "People are working and they're out on the street and they have to do what they have to do. But if there's any way we can create of look at whether there's any plans to make sure there's coverage if the person has to step away for any reason."?
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Saturday, March 2, 2013
'Jack The Giant Slayer' Likely To Be 2013's First Big-Budget Flop
Film should take #1 at box office, but given its bloated budget, that will be a hollow victory, analysts say.
By Ryan J. Downey
Ewan McGregor in "Jack The Giant Slayer"
Photo: Warner Bros.
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1702836/jack-giant-slayer-movie.jhtml
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Friday, March 1, 2013
Action video games boost reading skills, study of children with dyslexia suggests
Feb. 28, 2013 ? Much to the chagrin of parents who think their kids should spend less time playing video games and more time studying, time spent playing action video games can actually make dyslexic children read better. In fact, 12 hours of video game play did more for reading skills than is normally achieved with a year of spontaneous reading development or demanding traditional reading treatments.
The evidence, appearing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 28, follows from earlier work by the same team linking dyslexia to early problems with visual attention rather than language skills.
"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment," said Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua and the Scientific Institute Medea of Bosisio Parini in Italy. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."
The findings come as further support for the notion that visual attention deficits are at the root of dyslexia, a condition that makes reading extremely difficult for one out of every ten children, Facoetti added. He emphasized that there is, as of now, no approved treatment for dyslexia that includes video games.
Facoetti's team, including Sandro Franceschini, Simone Gori, Milena Ruffino, Simona Viola, and Massimo Molteni, tested the reading, phonological, and attentional skills of two groups of children with dyslexia before and after they played action or non-action video games for nine 80-minute sessions. The action video gamers were able to read faster without losing accuracy. They also showed gains in other tests of attention.
"These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision," Facoetti said.
Still, there is great hope for early interventions that could be applied in low-resource settings. "Our study paves the way for new remediation programs, based on scientific results, that can reduce the dyslexia symptoms and even prevent dyslexia when applied to children at risk for dyslexia before they learn to read."
And, guess what? Those kids will also be having fun.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Sandro Franceschini, Simone Gori, Milena Ruffino, Simona Viola, Massimo Molteni, Andrea Facoetti. Action Video Games Make Dyslexic Children Read Better. Current Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.01.044
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/v58p555cvgM/130228124132.htm
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Bloomberg Businessweek expresses 'regret' over cover illustration
Bloomberg Businessweek is taking a beating from critics who say the magazine's current cover?featuring a cartoon illustration of what appears to be a black family rolling in cash from a housing rebound?is racist.
"Our cover illustration got strong reactions, which we regret," Josh Tyrangiel, Bloomberg Businessweek's editor-in-chief, said in a statement to Yahoo! News. "If we had to do it over again we'd do it differently."
The cover depicts the cash-grabbing family members as stereotypical caricatures inside a two-story pink home above the headline "The Great American Housing Rebound."
"Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns," the subhead reads. "What could possibly go wrong?"
"The claim that minorities are creating a housing bubble through flipping, no-look bids, and 300% returns is simply not reality," Jacob Gaffney wrote on HousingWire.com. "Flipping is a form of fraud and not a typical transaction. No-look bids are not exclusive to Hispanic and African-American investors. No one is making a 300% return."
"Businessweek Warns That Minorities May Be Buying Houses Again," Matthew Yglesias wrote on Slate.com.
"It?s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process," Ryan Chittum wrote on the Columbia Journalism Review.
Andres Guzman, a Peru-born, Minneapolis-based artist, was commissioned by Bloomberg BusinessWeek for the illustration. "I was asked to make an excited family with large quantities of money," Guzman wrote on his Tumblr page. "I slipped in my lovely cat, Boo which was my favorite part. Too bad I wasn?t asked to draw large quantities of cats. Drawing dollars was a drag."
Bloomberg BusinessWeek has become known for its provocative covers. Tyrangiel was named Advertising Age's 2012 Editor of the Year because of his willingness--along with creative director Richard Turley--to push the envelope.
Last year, the magazine published a cover featuring two commercial jets having plane sex (under the headline "Let's Get It On") to illustrate the Continental-United merger. It also published a cover featuring Mitt Romney?then in the heat of the Republican primary?with the cover art from Bruce Springsteen's 1984 album "Born in the U.S.A." displayed in front of the former Massachussetts governor's backside, supporting the coverline: "SCORNED IN THE USA."
"I'm glad that our covers have captured a lot of attention and that some people call them controversial, but that's really only because the stories themselves are controversial," Tyrangiel told Ad Age. "Part of it is that we have a group of people here who are not afraid to handle really hot subjects."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/bloomberg-business-week-housing-cover-racist-173444874.html
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As budget cuts loom, is government shutdown next?
FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Barack Obama will meet Friday with the top leaders in the House and Senate to discuss what to do about automatic cuts to the federal budget, White House and congressional leaders said. The meeting is set to take place hours after the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will have officially kicked in. This suggests both sides are operating under the assumption a deal won't be reached to avert the cuts ahead of the March 1 deadline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Barack Obama will meet Friday with the top leaders in the House and Senate to discuss what to do about automatic cuts to the federal budget, White House and congressional leaders said. The meeting is set to take place hours after the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will have officially kicked in. This suggests both sides are operating under the assumption a deal won't be reached to avert the cuts ahead of the March 1 deadline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks in Newport News, Va. President Barack Obama will meet Friday with the top leaders in the House and Senate to discuss what to do about automatic cuts to the federal budget, White House and congressional leaders said. The meeting is set to take place hours after the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will have officially kicked in. This suggests both sides are operating under the assumption a deal won't be reached to avert the cuts ahead of the March 1 deadline. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)
The Capitol plaza is seen as automatic spending cuts are set to take effect on March 1, in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Barack Obama will meet Friday with the top leaders in the House and Senate to discuss what to do about automatic cuts to the federal budget, White House and congressional leaders said. The meeting is set to take place hours after the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will have officially kicked in. This suggests both sides are operating under the assumption a deal won't be reached to avert the cuts ahead of the March 1 deadline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Barack Obama will meet Friday with the top leaders in the House and Senate to discuss what to do about automatic cuts to the federal budget, White House and congressional leaders said. The meeting is set to take place hours after the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will have officially kicked in. This suggests both sides are operating under the assumption a deal won't be reached to avert the cuts ahead of the March 1 deadline. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? With big, automatic budget cuts about to kick in, House Republicans are turning to mapping strategy for the next showdown just a month away, when a government shutdown instead of just a slowdown will be at stake.
Both topics are sure to come up at the White House meeting Friday between President Barack Obama and top congressional leaders, including Republican House Speaker John Boehner. A breakthrough on replacing or easing the imminent across-the-board spending cuts still seems unlikely at the first face-to-face discussion between Obama and Republican leaders this year.
To no one's surprise, even as a dysfunctional Washington appears incapable of averting a crisis over economy-rattling spending cuts, it may be lurching toward another over a possible shutdown.
Republicans are planning for a vote next week on a bill to fund the day-to-day operations of the government through the Sept. 30 end of the 2013 fiscal year ? while keeping in place the new $85 billion in cuts of 5 percent to domestic agencies and 8 percent to the military.
The need to keep the government's doors open and lights on ? or else suffer the first government shutdown since 1996 ? requires the GOP-dominated House and the Democratic-controlled Senate to agree. Right now they hardly see eye to eye.
The House GOP plan, unveiled to the rank and file on Wednesday, would award the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs with their line-by-line budgets, for a more-targeted rather than indiscriminate batch of military cuts, but would deny domestic agencies the same treatment. And that has whipped up opposition from veteran Democratic senators on the Appropriations Committee. Domestic agencies would see their budgets frozen almost exactly as they are, which would mean no money for new initiatives such as cybersecurity or for routine increases for programs such as low-income housing.
"We're not going to do that," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. "Of course not."
Any agreement needs to pass through a gantlet of House tea party conservatives intent on preserving the across-the-board cuts and Senate Democrats pressing for action on domestic initiatives, even at the risk of creating a foot-tall catchall spending bill.
There's also this: GOP leaders have calculated that the automatic cuts arriving on Friday need to be in place in order for them to be able to muster support from conservatives for the catchall spending bill to keep the government running. That's because many staunch conservatives want to preserve the cuts even as defense hawks and others fret about the harm that might do to the military and the economy. If the automatic cuts are dealt with before the government-wide funding bill gets a vote, there could be a conservative revolt.
"The overall sequester levels must hold," said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.
Little to no progress has been made so far between House and Senate leaders and the White House, and given the hard feelings engulfing Washington, there's no guarantee that this problem can be solved, even though the stakes ? a shutdown of non-essential government programs after March 27 ? carry more risk than the across-the-board cuts looming on Friday.
The funding plan for the rest of the fiscal year will be a main topic at the White House meeting on Friday, the March 1 deadline day for averting the across-the-board cuts.
Obama, speaking to a group of business executives Wednesday night, said the cuts would be a "tumble downward" for the economy, though he acknowledged it could takes weeks before many Americans feel the full impact of the budget shrinking.
The warring sides in Washington have spent this week assigning blame rather than seeking a bipartisan way out. In a glimpse of the state of debate on Wednesday, Republicans and the White House bickered over whether the cuts would be under way by the time Friday's meeting started. A spokesman for Boehner said they would be in place; the White House countered that Obama would in fact have until midnight Friday to set them in motion.
The cumbersome annual ritual of passing annual agency spending bills collapsed entirely last year ? not a single one of the 12 annual appropriations bills for the budget year that began back in October has passed Congress ? and Congress has to act by March 27 to prevent a partial shutdown of the government.
By freezing budgets for domestic agencies, the Republican plan would deny an increase for a big cybersecurity initiative, additional money to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal and money to build new Coast Guard cutters. GOP initiatives such as more money for the Small Business Administration or fossil fuels research would be hurt as well, but there's little appetite for the alternative, which is to stack more than $1 trillion worth of spending bills together for a single up-or-down vote.
But the GOP move to add the line-by-line spending bills for the Pentagon and veterans' programs to the catchall spending bill would give the military much-sought increases for force readiness and the Veterans Administration additional funding for health care.
That approach has few fans in the White House, which is seeking money to implement Obama's signature efforts to overhaul financial regulation and the nation's health care system, or within the Democratic Senate, where members of the Appropriations Committee want to add a stack of bills covering domestic priorities such as homeland security, NASA and federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI.
"You need balance," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "We feel as strongly about the domestic side as we do defense."
The catchall spending measure, known as a continuing resolution or CR inside Washington, was originally seen as a potential must-pass measure to avert Friday's cuts or make them less severe. But no serious talks to avert the cuts have been under way.
On Thursday, Democrats will force a vote on a measure that would forestall the automatic cuts through the end of the year, replacing them with longer-term cuts to the Pentagon and cash payments to farmers and installing a minimum 30 percent tax rate on income exceeding $1 million. But that plan is virtually certain to be toppled by a GOP-led filibuster vote.
Republicans in turn are considering offering a measure that would give Obama authority to propose a rewrite to the 2013 budget to redistribute the cuts. Obama would be unable to cut defense by more than the $43 billion reduction that the Pentagon currently faces, and would also be unable to raise taxes to undo the cuts. The GOP plan would allow a resulting Obama proposal to go into effect unless Congress passed a resolution to overturn it.
The idea is that money could be transferred from lower-priority accounts to accounts funding air traffic control or meat inspection. But the White House says that such moves would offer only slight relief. At the same time, however, it could take pressure off of Congress to address the sequester.
In the House, where Republicans in the past Congress passed legislation to replace the cuts, Boehner has said it's now up to Obama and the Senate to figure a way out. The Senate never took up the House-passed bills, which expired when the new Congress was seated in January.
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