Saturday, December 31, 2011

davidnakamura: Obama postpones request to raise nation's debt limit by $1.2 trillion after Congress objects http://t.co/BArdEPU1

Twitter / David Nakamura: Obama postpones request to ... Loader Obama postpones request to raise nation's debt limit by $1.2 trillion after Congress objects

Source: http://twitter.com/davidnakamura/statuses/152827018218717184

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Ban on Iranian oil will upset our economy

Ban on Iranian oil will upset our economy

Our economy is bound to be affected by the closure of Strait of Hormuz route and US ban on the Iranian oil. Our economy is already facing a tough time as Rupee is at its lowest against the US Dollar.

'; } } } if (google_ads[0].bidtype == "CPC") { google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length; } document.write(s); return; } google_ad_client = 'pub-9372192619832074'; google_ad_channel = '9759277419'; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '2'; google_ad_type = 'text'; google_image_size = '728x90'; google_feedback = 'on'; google_skip = google_adnum; // --> RUPEE IS getting weaker day by day in the global market and it is pathetically low at Rs 53 plus against the US Dollar. Crude may remain $ 100 or above in 2012 and the New Year is going to be a crucial year as far as the prices of Crude Oil are concerned. There is no way that the Crude oil will be cheaper; it is bound to vary between $ 100 and $ 120 per Barrel without fail.
The main factor will be the ongoing political conflict between Iran and the US. Certainly their conflict will affect the global market and so the economy of our Country too.

Iran has very recently threatened to cut off about fifth of the World?s Oil Supply by closing Strait of Hormuz. The unrest in Iraq will be yet another important factor in the prices of Crude Oil during the year 2012.

The United States and some of the European countries are very strongly pressurizing Iran in ending its nuclear programmes which Iran is unwilling to do.


Iran has already refused their move despite four rounds of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council. The US and other European countries have thus decided to boycott the Iranian oil.

US President Obama is going to sign legislation and if approved and enforced, he may impose harsh penalties on all the buyers of the Iranian Oil.

Besides with the closing of Strait of Hormuz route, the sailing of Iranian oil tankers will take much longer time to deliver the consignments and with extra time consumption, oil will become dearer too. Our economy is bound to be effected by the closure of the route and the ban.

Source: http://www.merinews.com/article/ban-on-iranian-oil-will-upset-our-economy/15863359.shtml

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Friday, December 30, 2011

Yemen government workers rally against corruption

Protesters gesture during a demonstration demanding the prosecution of Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa, Yemen, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

Protesters gesture during a demonstration demanding the prosecution of Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa, Yemen, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

Protesters chant slogans during a demonstration demanding the prosecution of Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa, Yemen, Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

(AP) ? Labor strikes spread through Yemen Wednesday as workers demanded reforms and dismissal of managers over alleged corruption linked to the country's outgoing president.

Corruption was one of the grievances that ignited mass protests against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in February. After months of stalling, Saleh last month signed an agreement to transfer power.

The deal includes immunity for prosecution for the longtime leader, but protesters reject that. They are also demanding that his relatives and associates, also suspected of corruption, be removed from their posts in the government and military and put on trial.

The strikes are following a pattern. Workers lock the gates to an institution, and then they storm the offices of their supervisors, demanding their replacement with bosses who are not tainted with corruption allegations. So far the scenario has played out in 18 state agencies.

"This is the real revolution, the institutions revolution," said Mohammed Gabaal, an 40-year-old accountant who is on strike. "The president has appointed a ring of corrupt people all over government agencies."

The case of the Military Economic Institution stands out. Hundreds of workers demonstrated in front of the building on Wednesday.

The key agency hauls in significant revenues from naval transport and other investments, but its budget is kept secret. Striking workers are demanding dismissal of the agency manager, Hafez Mayad, who is from Saleh's tribe and is seen as one of the regime's most powerful and corrupt figures.

Opponents of the Saleh regime charge that armed civilians who attacked protesters in the capital of Sanaa got their funds from Mayad.

Other strikes are under way at the state TV, Sanaa police headquarters and another institution affiliated with the military.

The wave of strikes began last week when employees of the national airline, Yemenia Airways, walked off their jobs demanding dismissal of the director, Saleh's son-in-law, charging him with plundering the company's assets and driving it into bankruptcy. The government gave in to the demands.

Months of political turmoil in Yemen, pitting tribes and army units against each other during mass demonstrations as Saleh fought to stay in power, have given the dangerous al-Qaida branch in Yemen more freedom of action. The Islamist militants have taken over territory in Yemen's south, including several towns.

A military official said three soldiers and three militants from Ansar al-Sharia group, which is suspected of links to al-Qaida in Yemen, were killed in clashes Wednesday in the provincial capital of Abyan, Zinjibar. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-12-28-ML-Yemen/id-d89aa47af59a43a5b0e153a501a08225

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The Texas Comptroller's Office today announced that a full homestead property tax exemption established in 2009 for totally disabled military veterans will be extended to their surviving spouses after January 1.

New Property Tax Exemption for Veterans? Surviving Spouses

(AUSTIN) ? Texas continues to do its part to keep helping military veterans and their families.? A full homestead property tax exemption that began in 2009 to help totally disabled military veterans will extend to their surviving spouses after January 1.

?This new provision will help families who have been a part of the tremendous sacrifice that veterans have given our country,? said Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.? ?Texas voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that will allow surviving spouses of totally disabled veterans to continue to claim a full homestead exemption and not pay property taxes on their home.?

In 2009, veterans began receiving an exemption for the total appraised value of their residential homesteads if they have received 100 percent disability rating or are considered unemployable by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.? Based on information provided by appraisal districts, about 35,300 veterans currently receive that exemption.

The homestead exemption for surviving spouses of veterans who received the exemption begins January 1. Senate Bill 516 allows the total homestead exemption if a surviving spouse does not remarry after a disabled veteran passes away and the property remains the homestead of the surviving spouse.

Surviving spouses would have to apply for the tax exemption through their county appraisal district.? The application form containing property tax exemptions has been updated for residents and appraisal districts to use.? It can be found at? http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxinfo/taxforms/50-114.pdf.

Source: http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?r5668397138

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Thursday, December 29, 2011

An Annual Roundup of Small-Business News - NYTimes.com

Dashboard

A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

Until I started writing this weekly column, I never realized how many things can affect my small business. And I never realized how many smart people there are writing about and interpreting these things to try to help people like me better understand them. Of all of the pieces I reviewed this year, here are the best.

BEST ARTICLE ABOUT MAKING MONEY 37Signal?s Jason Fried a piece that every business owner should read. A sampling: ?People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.?

BEST SMALL-BUSINESS VIDEO OF THE YEAR I?m a certified public accountant (although not a very good one and that?s not how I make my living). As you may have heard, we C.P.A.s are not generally considered the life of the party. But the New Jersey firm of WithumSmith&Brown put that myth to rest with this hilarious video. (Surprisingly, it was made before April 15.)

BEST PREDICTION As a business owner with three kids in high school, I agree with PayPal?s Peter Thiel when he says the next bubble is higher education: ?Parents see kids moving back home after college, and they?re thinking, ?Something is not working. This was not part of the deal.??

BEST CONFESSION FROM AN ECONOMIST Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw confessed that there was a lot he didn?t know about the economy. For example: ?A striking feature of today?s labor market is the rise of long-term joblessness. The average duration of unemployment is now almost 40 weeks, about twice what it reached in previous recessions. The long-term unemployed may well lose job skills and find their future prospects permanently impaired. But because we are in uncharted waters, it is hard for anyone to be sure.?

BEST EXPLANATION OF ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS My business has hundreds of customers and over the years I?ve seen a lot of people succeed beyond anyone?s expectations. There are times when I wonder how they do it. How do you explain success? Feross Aboukhadijeh, a student at Stanford University, says that none of us really knows what we?re doing. ?Don?t listen to successful entrepreneurs. The folks who succeed have no way to know if their success was due to talent, skill, and planning, or merely dumb luck. If you ask them though, they?ll confidently spout reason after reason why they ? and no one else ? could possibly own 90 percent of the desktop PC market, or whatever they achieved. In their minds, it couldn?t have turned out any other way. Most of this is just after-the-fact rationalization, though. The truth is, they succeeded and have no idea why. They?re just explaining it in the best way they can.?

BEST COMMENTARY ABOUT WALL STREET: This tweet from the deadly Egyptian Cobra that went missing from the Bronx Zoo in April offered a pithier critique than any of the Occupiers.

BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE STORY It comes, believe it or not, from Amtrak. Yes, Amtrak. Sarah Green, an associate editor at Harvard Business Review told this tale about an Amtrak employee whose service elicited this response from her: ?You?ll just do that? Just like that? That?s, that?s amazing.?

BEST BAD TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS When you?re a business owner, it sometime seems like everyone is an expert on how to run your business. Matt Krautstrunk lists five terrible tips for entrepreneurs, including my favorite, which challenges the sanctity of the business plan: ?Anybody who tells you that you need a business plan either doesn?t understand the competitive landscape or is ?old school.? Nowadays, business plans are used primarily for attracting investors, and often fail to account for changing external factors.?

BEST REASON TO BE OPTIMISTIC Foreign Policy magazine?s Amy Myers Jaffe believes that it will soon be the Americas, not the Middle East, that will rule energy markets: ?By the 2020s, the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. endowment of unconventional oil is more than 2 trillion barrels, with another 2.4 trillion in Canada and 2 trillion-plus in South America ? compared with conventional Middle Eastern and North African oil resources of 1.2 trillion. The problem was always how to unlock them economically.?

BEST TIPS FOR LIVING A FULFILLING LIFE Peter Bregman lists three questions that help him live a fulfilling life, including: ?What is this day about? How will it bring me one day closer to what I want to achieve for the year? What is most important for me to accomplish today? I set my watch to beep every hour, interrupting myself for one minute to reconnect with my purpose for the day. In that minute, I ask myself two questions: Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now? Am I being who I most want to be right now??

BEST REASON NOT TO START COMPANY WITH YOUR SPOUSE Michael Idov opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop, which then destroyed his life. ?Within weeks, Lily and I ? previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage ? were at each other?s throats. I hesitate to say which was worse: working the same shift or alternating. Each option presented its own small tortures. Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves ? or, as we saw it, each other ? on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee. After four more months, we grew suspicious of each other?s motives, obsessively kept track of each other?s contributions to the cause (?You worked three days last week!?), and generally waltzed on the edge of divorce. The marriage appears to have been saved by a well-timed bankruptcy.?

BEST CAREER ADVICE FOR FUTURE ENTREPRENEURS Bob Cringely has some advice for his son: ?Getting, keeping or making that future job starts with understanding the distribution system and your place in that process. And to survive even mid-term the key is to position yourself as the linchpin. Your knowledge has to be critical to the success or failure of the process. That would seem to call for specialization but specialists often don?t see the ball even coming. You need a broader view. So for an education ? are you going to a school that helps you to develop serendipitous opportunities for your lifetime??

BEST WAY TO SOLVE ALL OF OUR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS Matt Yglesias explains how eliminating paper money could end recessions: ?Now we come to the miracle of the cashless society. Stop for a moment and ask yourself why the interest rate can?t be reduced much below 1 percent. The trouble is cash. At any given time, relatively little paper currency circulates in the United States. Instead, most of the American money supply consists of bank accounts and other electronic stores of value. People prefer to keep money in bank accounts because it?s convenient and because you get interest on it. If the rates were driven below zero ? in effect a tax on holding cash in the bank ? people would just withdraw money and store it in shoe boxes instead. But what if you couldn?t withdraw cash? What if all transactions were electronic, so the only way to avoid keeping money in a negative-rate account was to go out and buy something with the money? Well, then, we would have solved our depression problem. Too much unemployment? Lower interest rates below zero, Americans will start spending and investing again, the economy will grow, and unemployment will go back down to its ?natural rate.??

Have a great holiday and see you in January!

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/this-year-in-small-business-the-best-reads/

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Will school union contract talks bear fruit?

Three employee unions have agreed to keep talking about contract concessions that could help the Janesville School District balance its 2012-13 budget. Those talks are scheduled to continue in a closed session Thursday.

The teachers union, the Janesville Education Association, is the largest of three unions.

Previously, the school board asked the unions to make pension payments that many state and local government employees started making this year. If all district employees made those payments this school year, the district could have saved about $3.7 million. Those payments would be an estimated 5.8 percent of each worker?s pay this year and 5.9 percent starting next month.

Dave Parr, president of the JEA, has said that in order to get concessions, the school board would have to give up something in return.

Does that bode well for fruitful talks? What could the board give that the unions might accept and would still benefit the district overall?

We?ll share our perspective in our editorial Wednesday.

Greg Peck can be reached at (608) 755-8278 or gpeck@gazettextra.com. Or follow him on Twitter or Facebook

Source: http://gazettextra.com/weblogs/opinion-matters/2011/dec/27/will-school-union-contract-talks-bear-fruit/

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Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Prostate Cancer Diagnosis

Every year, thousands of men receive the diagnosis of prostate cancer. Because of the high number of men afflicted with this disease, annual screening tests have been put into place to hopefully catch prostate cancer in its early stages. A number of tests also exist to confirm the presence of prostate cancer after an abnormality is found through screening.

  1. Regular Screening

    All men over the age of 50 should be screened annually for prostate cancer. African-American men and men with a strong family history of prostate cancer have been shown to have higher rates of prostate cancer and need to start their screening at age 40 (or even earlier if family members have developed prostate cancer at younger ages).

    Additionally, any men who have symptoms suggestive of prostate cancer need to undergo testing.

    Appropriate screening involves both a yearly digital rectal exam and prostate specific antigen blood test.

    • Digital Rectal Exam (DRE)

      During this exam, the physician inserts a lubricated, gloved finger (digit) into the rectum. Because of the prostate?s location just in front of the rectum, the physician is able to feel the edge of the prostate where the majority of cancers begin. Abnormalities such as bumps or hardness of the prostate can be detected in this way.

      This test is usually completed in 5 to 10 seconds and most men have little discomfort during it.

    • Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) Blood Test

      A small sample of blood is taken and then sent to a lab for analysis. PSA is a protein that is only produced by prostate cells. As the prostate enlarges, whether due to cancer or another cause, the amount of PSA produced increases.

      High levels of PSA or rapid increases in the PSA level can alert the physician to a possible underlying cancer.

  2. Prostatic Biopsy

    If an abnormality is found on the DRE or the PSA test, the physician will typically order a biopsy of the prostate.

    A biopsy involves taking a very small sample of tissue from the prostate. This is done using a thin needle that is placed into the prostate. A tiny amount of tissue is trapped in the needle while it is in the prostate and then the needle is pulled out. This is repeated in a number of locations throughout the prostate so as to minimize the chance of missing an area where cancer may is present.

    This procedure is usually done by an urologist or other surgeon in their office and involves using local anesthesia to minimize pain.

    The tissue samples are then sent to a pathologist (a specialized physician who diagnoses diseases based on their appearance under a microscope) who makes the final diagnosis of prostate cancer.

    At this time, the pathologist can also look at the cancer cells to determine how abnormal they are. This is called the cancer?s ?grade?. A high grade means that the cells are very abnormal and that the cancer is more likely to spread.

    An excellent video is available that illustrates how a prostate biopsy works.

  3. Tests to Determine the Extent of the Cancer

    Testing does not stop after the pathologist has determined whether or not cancer is present. In order to treat the cancer effectively, the physicians caring for you must know how far the cancer has spread.

    To determine this, a number of tests can be used. Your physician will determine which of these are the best choices for your particular situation, but all work to detect cancer that has spread outside of the prostate.

    • Ultrasound ? A thin ultrasound probe is inserted into the rectum. The ultrasound can show if nearby organs and tissues have been invaded by cancer.
    • Bone Scan ? Prostate cancer often spreads to bones if not detected early. For this reason, this test can be done to provide a detailed picture of the body?s bones. Areas of cancer in the bones can then be detected by your physician.
    • CT Scan or MRI ? These two tests can be used to provide a detailed look at the organs and tissues in the abdomen and pelvis. Only large, bulky areas of cancer outside of the prostate can be seen with these, so they need to be combined with other tests to be most useful.
    • Lymph Node Biopsy ? Lymph nodes are small structures located all over the body. Cancers often spread to nearby lymph nodes earlier than to other tissues. By surgically removing some of the lymph nodes near the prostate and having them analyzed for the presence of cancer, your physician can confirm that the cancer has not spread outside of the prostate.

All of these tests help to determine how far the cancer has spread or the ?stage? of your cancer. Staging helps your physician determine the best treatment option for you.

Sources:

Gerber GS, Goldberg R, Chodak GW. Staging of prostate cancer by tumor volume, prostate-specific antigen, and transrectal ultrasound. Urology 40 (4): 311-6, 1992.

Stone NN, Stock RG, Unger P. Indications for seminal vesicle biopsy and laparoscopic pelvic lymph node dissection in men with localized carcinoma of the prostate. J Urol 154 (4): 1392-6, 1995.

Source: http://prostatecancer.about.com/od/symptomsanddiagnosis/a/diagnosis.htm

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