For some families, SB 213 would have increased the Child Health Plan Plus enrollment fee to $20 per month. It's insulting to eligible parents to suggest that they would not pay the increased fees. Read More... More on Health Insurance
As negotiations continue on a bill that would end the government shutdown in Minnesota, the state's hungry got some encouraging news.
The Star Tribune reports that food shelves will receive their federal food supply, after initially being deemed "non-critical" and temporarily halted during the shutdown. Advocates told St. Louis Park Patch that continuing to stock shelves was crucial during the shutdown.
"There was literally one million pounds of food that wouldn't have been distributed," Joan Wadkins, a spokeswoman for the food shelf Second Harvest Heartland said.
Clearly, Congress needs some motivation. So let's pay them on commission. If they don't produce, they don't get paid. If the current state of affairs is any indication, we'd save a lot of money. Read More... More on Congress
AMPLONA, Spain (AP) â€" Tens of thousands of people packed Pamplona's main square Wednesday for the launch of the "chupinazo" rocket â€" the start of Spain's most famous bull-running festival. (Scroll down for photos)
Mayor Enrique Maya heralded the first of nine days of uninterrupted festivities in the northern town as he lit the fuse from a balcony overlooking a frenzied crowd.
"Men and women of Pamplona, Long Live San Fermin!" Maya screamed, as revelers sprayed a fountain of wine, sangria, water and cava into the air. Many used toy water pistols, or leather wineskins to squirt alcohol into the mouths of those who asked. Onlookers on balconies followed suit.
In just eight months since opening up shop, Pressed Juicery has become West LA's preeminent juice bar, featuring freshly pressed blends that are equally healthful and delicious. Read More... More on LA Restaurants
WASHINGTON — When an award-winning journalist recently revealed he's an illegal immigrant, two of the key players in his tale turned out to be educators who helped keep his secret. It's the kind of story teachers and principals scattered across the country know well.
With some 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., educators increasingly find themselves caught between their obligation to educate each child and conflicting guidance, or simply no direction at all, about whether to help such students beyond the classroom.
Former Vice President Al Gore has a clear picture of climate reality, but a hypocritical and counter productive view of political reality. Read More... More on Climate Change
Where's the creative fire for you? What do you do during fallow periods? When you have either given up, or are "blank"? What helps you trust your process? What kind of accompaniment has been most meaningful for you? Read More... More on Wisdom
WASHINGTON -- Republicans may find a resolution to make the rich share more of the pain in debt-reduction "rather pathetic," but new survey data suggest voters in swing states favor the idea -- strongly.
Poll data by the Democratic-aligned Public Policy Polling released Wednesday said voters in Ohio, Missouri, Montana and Minnesota back hiking taxes on the wealthy -- even for people with incomes as low as $150,000.
The respondents were asked: "In order to reduce the national debt, would you support or oppose raising taxes on those with incomes over $1,000,000 a year?"
Alberto's bones were like flimsy pieces of cartilage floating in a soft, thin layer of skin and fat. I could feel a tiny set of ribs rise and recede each time I lifted, rocked and held him, fearing that any quick movement would hurt his fragile body. Read More...
LONDON -- More than 30 years after the world's first test-tube baby was born and despite modest advances, scientists are still struggling to dramatically improve the odds for infertile couples trying to have children.
Though new techniques have been introduced in recent years, in-vitro fertilization remains a costly, stressful process, with only about a 25 percent chance of success in most cases.
Print advertising is heading for the rich pickings of the internet. Magazines and newspapers are floundering and as a result we journalists are being hammered financially, with word count, publication and page reductions. Read More...
The real-estate-loving Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne have listed their Cape Cod-inspired mansion for $12.99 million.
Located in the celeb-heavy enclave of Hidden Hills, this six bedroom, ten bathroom home was featured in the June 2011 issue of Architectural Digest.
Designed by Martyn Lawrence-Bullard of Bravo's Million Dollar Decorator, the home features less goth-like elements than one might imagine. In fact, it seems almost like a doll house, with gilded mirrors and a sprawling 2.25 acre lawn. Bullard, a friend of Sharon's, has worked with her before -- most notably on her Sierra Towers pied-Ã -terre which he designed on the season premiere of the Bravo series.
For his next relationship, I urge George to choose a woman who's been there, done that, had her tubes tied or whose ovaries have packed up of their own accord. Read More... More on Marriage
DETROIT — Disgraced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick claims in an upcoming book that an unspoken alliance of political adversaries, Detroit business leaders and an aggressive media capitalized on a sex and perjury scandal to send him from leading one of America's largest cities to a prison cell.
The former politician bills "Surrendered! The Rise, Fall and Revelation of Kwame Kilpatrick" as the true tale of his saga. While he takes responsibility for an affair with an aide and lies told during a civil trial, he also blames plenty of others for his downfall.
FRANKFURT, Germany — Fancy footwork is a Brazilian tradition, and Erika produced some samba skills to lead her team to a 3-0 win over Equatorial Guinea on Wednesday at the Women's World Cup.
The South Americans secured the top spot in Group D.
WASHINGTON -- During a Twitter town hall Wednesday, President Obama was asked whether he would consider invoking the 14th Amendment to pay government obligations if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Obama did not rule out such an option, but instead insisted that the situation should not get to a place where such drastic measures would be needed.
"I don’t think we should even get to the constitutional issue," Obama said after outlining the issue. "Congress has a responsibility to make sure we pay our bills. We've always paid them in the past. The notion that the U.S. is going to default on its debt is just irresponsible, and my expectation is that over the next week to two weeks that Congress, working with the White House, comes up with a deal that solves our deficit, solves our debt problems and makes sure that our full faith and credit is protected."
Obama didn't address what he might do if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling, leaving open the door for unilateral executive action.
In the last six or seven months alone, there are enough examples of Republicans botching very basic ideas and facts to fill stacks of "Bushism" style novelty calendars. Read More... More on Sarah Palin
The Hindu scriptures explain that we come into this world with a certain number of breaths and the countdown begins the moment we exit the womb. Every moment should be lived to prepare our consciousness for the final moment. Read More... More on Hinduism
LONDON — Companies rushed to pull ads from British tabloid News of the World on Wednesday amid public outcry over alleged phone hacking, but media mogul Rupert Murdoch insisted his top executive in Britain, Rebekah Brooks, would not resign.
As reports emerged that employees at the paper – owned by Murdoch's News Corp. media empire – hacked into the phones of missing schoolgirls and families of victims in London's 2005 terror attacks, the backlash from consumers escalated.
It's likely that phone hacking is the first major death rattle of the print press (or at the very least, the tabloid press). The media will continue to go through periodic spasms as news increasingly moves (and is broken) online. Read More...
In an industry where everyone is kicking, clawing and fighting for the limelight, the fashion industry has one powerfully guarded and well-kept secret. Until now... Meet Rushka Bergman. Read More...
It is perhaps unsurprising that 25-year-old Alexandra Monir has already released her first novel. But when one realizes she also wrote and recorded songs to complement it, and that she's penning her second book, it's hard not to be impressed. Read More... More on Authors
FRANKFURT, Germany — Erika's brilliant footwork got a frustrated Brazil on track for a 3-0 win over Equatorial Guinea to secure the top spot in Group D at the Women's World Cup.
After the Africans neutralized the heavy favorites with dogged defending for 49 minutes, Erika controlled a loose ball on her chest, then tapped it from her right foot to the left to send a volley flying past goalie Miriam from 13 yards.
Newsweek's July 4 cover featuring a simulated Princess Di next to Kate Middleton as part of piece in which editor Tina Brown imagines the late princess at age 50 (an illustration of Diana holding an iPhone is part of the package) provoked critics who claimed the image was in poor taste but the issue also underperformed with advertisers just as Newsweek seemed to be gaining traction on the business side.
David "Cannonball" Smith, also known as "The Human Home Run," lived up to his nickname on Tuesday night when he shot out of a 35-foot cannon and over the wall of LeLacheur Park in Lowell, Mass.
In the video, created by "hobbyist astronomer" Alex Cherney, we're treated to a spectacle in the sky, courtesy of a colorful sunset, dark floating clouds and a vertical band of zodiacal light. The constellation Orion also makes an appearance toward the end of the time lapse.
Cherney used over 30 hours of exposure, collected between 2009 and 2010, to make the award-winning video.
Mike Reinhardt and Nate Watson, both 31, met 10 years ago as undergraduates at Central Bible College, a school of 650 in Springfield, Mo., that "train[s] ministers and missionaries for tomorrow's Church." The friends first met when Watson walked by Reinhardt's dorm room and noticed him listening to the Smashing Pumpkins.
U.S. Senator Mark Udall sent a letter to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) urging immediate action to help three of Colorado’s largest sawmills which are struggling financially.
Udall is requesting that the USFS and USDA work with the sawmills to modify some contract terms so the mills can remain open. Intermountain Resources, Mountain Valley Lumber and Delta Timber are the three mills in jeopardy. Intermountain Resources, the largest of the three mills, went into receivership in June 2010.
The mills employ hundreds of Coloradans and play a part in the fight against the bark beetle and wildfires by providing the infrastructure to help clear millions of acres of fallen or beetle-killed trees and processing them into wood products.
Press Association -- The current courts system protects the rich and wealthy more than it does the families of murder victims, the victims' tsar has said.
Louise Casey called for a new law to guarantee the rights of victims' families to help them cope better with the ordeal of going through the justice system.
Defendants' rights were already protected, she said, but while wealthy celebrities were pursuing injunctions to protect their privacy in the High Court, victims' families were being put through traumatic ordeals in the witness box.
President Obama is holding a Twitter town hall at 2:00 PM ET. The AP explains the format:
The 2 p.m. EDT event is expected to focus on jobs and the economy. Twitter "curators" will help select questions for the president that are representative of the most popular topics submitted online, the White House said.
While questioners will have to limit their inquiries to 140 characters, Twitter's maximum message length, the president will have no such restrictions. Instead of answering via Tweet, Obama will go the more traditional route and answer verbally in front of a live audience gathered in the East Room of the White House.
Aloha may mean hi, hello, love, but nothing translates the grand groundswell of emotion felt when you say "aloha" or express it in some form or another. That's why I love the "aloha shirt." Read More... More on Spirit
California lawmakers passed a bill Tuesday that would make the state the first to require public schools to teach lessons on historical and current contributions of gays and lesbians.
The bill now goes to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who has not indicated whether he will sign the document, the Associated Press Reports. The regulation would also prohibit the use of any materials that reflects negatively on gays.
This Wednesday: Ten things I can do every day -- even when I can't do anything else.
We've all had days where it seems as though nothing gets done. For those times when I seem to be spinning my wheels, I keep a list of things that I can do every day, even when I have no extra time, money, or energy to spare. I sometimes forget to write in my one-sentence journal and I don't always make it to the gym, but I do try to make sure I hit all these items.
When I was seventeen years old I started to participate in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. The next morning I would check for coverage in the New York Times. Sometimes the protests were ignored. Sometimes the coverage was downright distorted. I wondered if the reporter had even been to the demonstration or if the paper was just lying to the public. The New York Times now has a "Public Editor" who is supposed to work "outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper" and provide some check on the paper's accuracy and biases.
Unfortunately, at least in education, the public editor system is not working. In coverage of the debates over testing, teacher competency, unions, and charters, the Times always seems to come down on the side of Bloomberg, Gates, Duncan, Teach for America, and alternative certification and ignores people with actual classroom experience. On December 14, 2010, a Times headline told us "More and Better Tests" were the answer to improving educational performance.
While I have disagreed with the Times on a number of occasions, and in one blog post specifically accused the newspaper of promoting the latest educational "gimmick of the month," I have also encouraged teachers and teacher education students to use the Times as a literacy standard for their students and as a source of information of about local, national, and global events.
Beyond the brinkmanship and legal wrangling, Europe's path is clear. The ETS has committed to cutting emissions 21 percent against 2005 levels by 2020. Read More... More on Barack Obama
Now that Michele Bachmann is out on the stump and breaking upwards in most polls, it seems to be time to start putting her personal life through the media churn. So far, the result is mostly a litany of things you already knew, or could surmise, from her rather plainspoken Christian conservative beliefs. There's a healthy emphasis on the divisive -- and that's the rub, really. Most of what we're (re-)learning about Michele Bachmann is precisely the sort of thing both candidate and campaign don't mind being discussed. Moreover, there's plenty of muddle in the reporting, as the pieces, to varying degrees, reach for a judgment-free tone.
Let's begin with today's Washington Post, which has an article up today titled "Michele Bachmann’s husband shares her strong conservative values." Those values? Well, they primarily involve extreme antipathy for members of the LGBT community. The article leads with the quote from Marcus Bachmann that's getting such wide play of late, in which he refers to homosexuals as "'barbarians' who 'need to be educated, need to be disciplined.'†The couple, it is reported, share a "common abhorrence of homosexuality."
So, got that? The Bachmanns oppose gay rights, and as the Post relates, "Bachmann & Associates, the Christian counseling center he runs, practiced 'reparative therapy,' a method of converting homosexuals to heterosexuality often called 'praying away the gay.'" (There are persistent rumors in the ether that Marcus Bachmann may have some personal experience in such "reparative therapy," a matter that's basically too seedy for reporters to touch, though when the Post reporter makes note of the fact that Bachmann's husband "has acted as her media planner, traveling assistant and even personal shopper," I instinctively know to say, "I see what you did there.)
WASHINGTON - Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and European banks RBS and UBS were the biggest beneficiaries of very short-term Federal Reserve loans extended at the height of the financial crisis, according to data released on Wednesday.
The details of the lending program were disclosed after a lengthy legal battle eventually won by Bloomberg News LLP. The data, available on the Fed's website, showed Goldman took $15 billion in exchange for securities ranging from Treasuries to mortgage bonds. Swiss-based UBS AG (UBSN.VX), UK-based RBS Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L) and Lehman took $10 billion each.
Yes, on paper, office work doesn't sound as exciting as shooting zombies, but in practice, the following five games with corporate settings still prove that there's plenty of fun to be had by playing games at work. Read More... More on Games
One of the Ten Commandments is to "obey" our parents. Well, what happens when we think that it is not in their best interest to continue living where they are living or we feel it is unsafe, and they disagree with us? Read More... More on Death & Dying
HuffPost Sports Columnist Jordan Schultz joined Chuck Todd and The Daily Rundown of MSNBC to discuss the NBA Lockout Wednesday morning. Read More... More on NBA
Federal audits are turning up misspent taxpayer dollars in a $5 billion stimulus program aimed at lowering the utility bills of disabled, poor and older Americans by making their homes more energy-efficient.
In West Virginia, which received $38 million in weatherization funds, some of the money went for lobbying, to consultants who did little work and to recipients with connections to state officials who are doling out the funds, the Energy Department's inspector general found.
In one case, West Virginia paid $25,000 to a lawyer for writing two sentences stating that weatherization contracts had been reviewed, reportedly after four hours' work at a state office, according to a report analyzing how the federal stimulus money was used. A $20,000 consulting fee was paid to the former director of the state's weatherization program after he left the job in May 2009 even though there were no specific work requirements set for the consulting contract.
The federal program's own watchdog had warned at the outset that some of the money in the Energy Department's weatherization program, part of the Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus intended to give a jolt to the economy, could be wasted.
"I have said from the beginning of the [economic] recovery program that weatherization is high-risk," said Earl Devaney , who as chairman of the Recovery Transparency and Accountability Board is Washington's top cop overseeing how stimulus dollars are spent. Noted Devaney in a statement to iWatch News : "There was little in the way of internal controls."
Mismanagement in West Virginia ranged from giving preferential treatment to state employees and their relatives, to shoddy work at the homes of disabled and poor people who were supposed to benefit the most, the Energy Department's inspector general report found. "We found problems in the areas of weatherization workmanship, financial management, prioritization of applicants for weatherization services, and compliance with laws and regulations," the report said.
Between September 2009 and August 2010, for instance, more than half of weatherized homes that were re-inspected needed to be redone because of faulty work, the report said. Meanwhile, $2,500 was spent on lobbying in Washington - even though such use is expressly forbidden - to "get the word out" that there wasn't enough funding to administer stimulus programs, it said.
Concluded the inspector general after looking at West Virginia's books: "The risk of failing to achieve Recovery Act goals, along with the risks of fraud, waste and abuse, remain at unacceptable levels."
While the Energy Department's inspector general has examined only a handful of states, it has found evidence of a range of misspending and waste.
George Collard , an assistant inspector general for the Energy Department, said the audits show the quality of the states' programs varied greatly, and that infractions often are minor. West Virginia is one of the states with "more significant miscues," Collard told iWatch News . "That's not to say there haven't been problems in other states."
Critics say the audits show that abuses might be widespread.
"You see a lot of smoke. There's got to be a fire," said Steve Ellis , the vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit watchdog that follows government spending. The question is: "How much?"
A 2010 special report by the Energy Department inspector general warned that the weatherization program had made "little progress" in achieving its stated aims -- helping large numbers of poor Americans lower their heating bills.
States seemed to face the biggest challenge, said Collard, in managing the program's finances and making sure that the work on homes was of sufficient quality. One problem has been the sheer volume of money that flowed into state agencies ill-equipped to cope with it. As part of its job-creation stimulus law, the federal government rushed money to the states, which then handed it out to community action agencies.
West Virginia, for example, received almost eight times its usual weatherization funding through the federal stimulus grant.
Ellis, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said community agencies weren't prepared for such a big increase in funding. "These were groups used to drinking out of the water fountain at the elementary school," he said. "And they got a fire hose of cash."
At least seven more Energy Department audit reports are anticipated before the end of the year.
West Virginia officials have said they are working to improve administration of the weatherization program.
"The State of West Virginia has made a number of improvements in how they implement the weatherization program," said Kathleen Hogan, the deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency. "However, as this report shows, there is work still to be done."
Collard was hopeful that West Virginia and other states would be able to fix their programs. "While our audits have identified problems with varying levels of degree, the departments and states have been proactive about the findings of the Office of Inspector General."
Armen Gilliam, former NBA player, died at age 47 on Wednesday after suffering a heart attack in Pittsburgh, PA.
According to police, Gilliam was playing basketball at LA Fitness in Collier Township when he collapsed. He was rushed to St. Clair Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Gilliam, nicknamed "The Hammer," was selected by the Phoenix Suns with the No. 2 pick overall pick in the 1987 NBA draft.
You don't need Spanish lessons to figure out that this dirty move is against the rules.
Dare we say that Chile's Gary Medel wasn't exactly making a play on the ball when he grabbed onto Giovani Dos Santos' personal regions, not letting go until the Mexican midfielder went down in what can only be described as agony.
Despite the nauseating tactics seen in this video, Chile won the match 2-1 and will face Uruguay on Friday.
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