HSBC to pay $1.9B to settle money-laundering case

FILE -- In a July 30, 2012 file photo people walk past a logo of HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong . HSBC, the British banking giant, will pay $1.9 billion to settle a money-laundering probe by federal and state authorities in the United States, a law enforcement official said Monday Dec. 10, 2012. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu, file)

FILE -- In a July 30, 2012 file photo people walk past a logo of HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong . HSBC, the British banking giant, will pay $1.9 billion to settle a money-laundering probe by federal and state authorities in the United States, a law enforcement official said Monday Dec. 10, 2012. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu, file)

(AP) ? HSBC, the British banking giant, said Tuesday it will pay $1.9 billion to settle a money-laundering probe by federal and state authorities in the United States.

The probe of the bank ? Europe's largest by market value ? has focused on the transfer of funds through the U.S. financial system from Mexican drug cartels and on behalf of nations like Iran that are under international sanctions.

Stuart Gulliver, Group Chief Executive of HSBC, released a statement Tuesday saying: "We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again."

The bank also said it has reached agreements over investigations by other U.S. government agencies. It also expects to sign an agreement with British regulators shortly.

A U.S. law enforcement official said Monday that the investigation by federal and state authorities will result in HSBC paying $1.25 billion in forfeiture and paying $655 million in civil penalties. The $1.25 billion figure is the largest forfeiture ever in a case involving a bank. Under what is known as a deferred prosecution agreement, the financial institution will be accused of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and the Trading With the Enemy Act.

Under the arrangement, HSBC will admit to certain misconduct, the official said, but the details of those admissions to be made in a New York court were not immediately available early Tuesday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the source was not authorized to speak about the matter on the record.

Nevertheless, the agreement means the bank won't be prosecuted further if it meets certain conditions, such as strengthening its internal controls to prevent money laundering. The Justice Department has used such arrangements often in cases involving large corporations, notably in settlements of foreign bribery charges.

The London-based bank said it is cooperating with investigations but said those discussions are confidential.

In regard to HSBC and Mexico, a U.S. Senate investigative committee reported that in 2007 and 2008 HSBC Mexico sent about $7 billion in cash to the United States. The committee report said that large an amount of cash indicated illegal drug proceeds.

In another case Monday, Standard Chartered, another British bank, signed an agreement with New York regulators to settle their investigation with a $340 million payment. The bank was accused of scheming with the Iranian government to launder billions of dollars.

Money laundering by banks has become a priority target for U.S. law enforcement. Since 2009, Credit Suisse, Barclays, Lloyds and ING all paid heavy settlements related to allegations that they moved money for people or companies that were on the U.S. sanctions list.

?Credit Suisse, Switzerland's second-largest bank, agreed to pay $536 million. The authorities said the bank violated U.S. economic sanctions by hiding the booming illegal business it was doing for Iranian banks.

?Barclays paid $298 million. The big British bank allegedly engaged in $500 million in illegal transactions with banks in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Myanmar for more than a decade.

?Lloyds, another major British bank, agreed to forfeit $350 million for allegedly helping customers skirt U.S. sanctions on business transactions with Sudan, Iran and Libya.

?Big Dutch bank ING paid $619 million to settle charges that it secretly moved billions of dollars through the U.S. financial system on behalf of Cuban and Iranian customers.

Last summer, the Senate investigation concluded that HSBC's lax controls exposed it to money laundering and terrorist financing.

HSBC bank affiliates also skirted U.S. government bans on financial transactions with Iran and other countries, according to the report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. And HSBC's U.S. division provided money and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh thought to have helped fund al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, the report said.

The report also blamed U.S. regulators, claiming they knew the bank had a poor system to detect problems but failed to take action.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the committee chairman, cited instances in which HSBC had promised to fix deficiencies after being sanctioned by regulators but failed to follow through.

Levin also said the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the U.S. agency that oversees the biggest banks, tolerated HSBC's weak controls against money laundering for years and said agency examiners who had raised concerns were overruled by their superiors.

HSBC had a 2011 net income of $16.8 billion and operates in about 80 countries around the world. It grew quickly in recent years by acquiring banks around the world that became its affiliates. Its far-flung affiliates operated with a degree of autonomy that left top bank officials with less than full authority and control, experts say. Each affiliate had its own officer to oversee compliance with laws to prevent money laundering.

Nigel Morris-Cotterill, head of the Anti Money Laundering Network, a consultancy based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said international banks face conflicts between laws and regulations in different countries. "There are times when the lines are blurred, when you're not clear exactly where the edge is," he said. "If you step over the edge you get slapped, but often you don't know where the edge is."

Morris-Cotterill wasn't surprised that the U.S. had agreed to a settlement rather than prosecuting HSBC. "Almost every financial institution that is likely to be prosecuted in the U.S., both domestic and foreign, settles rather than going to court," the consultant said.

HSBC, which changed its senior management last year, said it has taken actions to strengthen and centralize compliance with anti-money-laundering laws.

"The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes," Gulliver said Tuesday. "Over the last two years, under new senior leadership, we have been taking concrete steps to put right what went wrong and to participate actively with government authorities in bringing to light and addressing these matters."

On Monday, HSBC announced that Robert Werner, a former head of the Treasury Department agencies responsible for sanctions against terrorist financing and money laundering, is taking a new position in HSBC as head of group financial crime compliance and group money-laundering reporting officer. Werner has been head of global standards assurance since August.

In January, HSBC hired Stuart Levey, a former Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, as its chief legal officer. And a former policy adviser in the Obama administration, Preeta Bansal, in October became HSBC's global general counsel for litigation and regulatory affairs.

___

Associated Press writers Marcy Gordon in Washington and Kelvin K. Chan in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-12-11-US-HSBC-Bank-Case/id-d9b42481594c4292907e140a76545092

andy cohen mozambique oosthuizen great expectations jake owen oosthuizen louis double eagle

Drug combination acts against aggressive chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Dec. 10, 2012 ? A two-prong approach combining ibrutinib and rituximab (Rituxin?) to treat aggressive chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) produced profound responses with minor side effects in a Phase 2 clinical trial at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Researchers presented the results at the 54th annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH).

"This is a patient population with a great need for more targeted therapies," said Jan Burger, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in MD Anderson's Department of Leukemia. Burger was lead author of the study.

"Many CLL patients, especially those with indolent or non-aggressive disease, do well on the standard treatment of chemotherapy and antibodies," he said. "But for a certain subset of high-risk patients, treatment often fails, and remissions, if they are achieved, are short."

According to the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results database, CLL is the most common type of adult leukemia in the United States. An estimated 16,000 new cases will be diagnosed this year, and about 4,600 people will die because of the disease. Median age of diagnosis is 72, and it is more common in men than women.

Although chemotherapy combinations have improved the cure rate for CLL, side effects often are severe. A sizeable number of CLL deaths are from secondary cancers caused by treatment.

Early studies showed potential

Ibrutinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor that thwarts B-cell receptor signaling, is a promising new targeted therapy for mature B-cell malignancies, including certain types of myeloma and lymphoma. It has been shown to be especially effective in CLL.

Over the past two years, Phase 1/2 trials at MD Anderson and other sites showed high-risk CLL patients responded as well as low-risk patients to ibrutinib. However, the response often is lessened because of persistent lymphocytosis, an increase in leukemia cells in the blood due to release of CLL cells from the tissues (lymph glands) into the blood stream. Rituximab, a well-established antibody, was added to capture the CLL cells in the blood and thereby accelerate and improve response.

"When we looked at how well the high-risk patients were doing on ibrutinib -- even though it was a small number -- we saw a great opportunity to find out if combining the two drugs would have a positive impact on these patients," Burger said.

Combination tolerated well

Forty patients with high-risk CLL were enrolled in the study earlier this year. They received:

* Daily oral doses of 420 mg ibrutinib throughout treatment

* Weekly infusions of rituximab (375 mg/m2) weeks one through four

* Monthly rituximab infusions for the next five months

At a median follow up of four months, 38 patients remained on ibrutinib therapy without disease progression. One patient died from an unrelated infectious complication, and one patient discontinued therapy due to oral ulcers.

Preliminary results: 85 percent response rate

Of 20 patients evaluated for early response at three months, 17 achieved partial remission for an overall response rate of 85%. Three achieved partial remission with persistent lymphocytosis.

Interestingly, lymphocytosis peaked earlier and the duration was shorter than with ibrutinib alone.

Treatment was well tolerated, with 13 cases of grade 3 or grade 4 toxicities, including neutropenia, fatigue, pneumonia, insomnia and bone aches. Most side effects were unrelated and transient. Many patients reported improved overall health and quality of life after three cycles of treatment.

"Although this study has a short follow-up time, we are encouraged by the fact that the vast majority of patients are responding and are able to continue on treatment, Burger said.

Development of ibrutinib for CLL crucial

Researchers said these data, together with the previous Phase 1/2 studies, emphasize the need for rapid further development of ibrutinib for high-risk CLL patients.

Pharmacyclics, the company that is developing ibrutinib, is proceeding with a Phase 3 multi-center clinical trial, in which MD Anderson will participate. Additionally, MD Anderson researchers will conduct a follow-up study on their research in high-risk CLL patients.

Other research team members from MD Anderson's Department of Leukemia included Michael Keating, M.D.; William Wierda, M.D., Ph.D.; Julia Hoellenriegel, M.S.; Alessandra Ferrajoli, M.D.; Stefan Faderl, M.D.; Susan Lerner, M.S.; Gracy Zacharian; Hagop Kantarjian, M.D.; and Susan O'Brien, M.D. Also participating were Xuelin Huang, Ph.D., of the Department of Biostatistics at MD Anderson; and Danelle James, M.D. and Joseph Buggy, Ph.D., of Pharmacyclics, Inc, Sunnyvale, CA.

Support for the study was provided by Pharmacyclics and CLL Global Research Foundation.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


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/top_news/top_health/~3/9SigYjRYJU0/121210163432.htm

nascar bristol narwhal st louis university mario manningham mario manningham williams syndrome hoya

Women, want to have it all? Start your own company ? Quartz

Stacey Bendet Eisner, co-owner of clothing brand Alice + Olivia, and husband Eric Eisner, founder and CEO of Double E Pictures, attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference with one-year-old daughter Scarlet in tow. Getty Images / Kevork Djansezian

?Can women have it all?? The corporate response still seems to be ?a resounding ?no.? In many parts of the world, women are still waiting for employment legislation and office politics to change and for management to be convinced of the merits of flexible work hours so that women can have a better work-family balance.

But in the sphere of entrepreneurialism, the answer, according to some highly successful startup businesswomen, is ?yes.? These women believe that what is thought of a disadvantage in the male-dominated corporate world is an advantage as an entrepreneur.

Admittedly, there are problems with having it all when you have your own company?but there is the flexibility to start companies with different profiles from lifestyle companies to high-growth companies?depending the stage of your family?s development. There is no need to sacrifice family. Instead, women with children can be better entrepreneurs. And here is why.

Having a child makes women more creative and courageous?

The first thing women say when they have a baby is how dramatically things change and how their children naturally become center of their lives.

?My life totally changed when I had Alisa, my first daughter. I was miserable after leaving my job at the World Bank and moving back to Turkey. Nobody really supported me at the beginning and I was expected to go back into the corporate world,? says Ergem Senyuva Tohumcu, a London-based eco-entrepreneur and ambassador to Turkey for Al Gore?s Climate Reality Project.

The OECD Gender and Sustainable Development report says: ?Women gravitate towards self-employment because of a lack of alternative positions, blocked mobility or the inability to find a job that fits their skills after they have kids? Entrepreneurship and self-employment may sometimes be a survival strategy for those who cannot find any other means of earning an income.?

Entrepreneurs at their core turn disadvantages into advantages and create solutions for themselves or for others. In his must-read book ?The Courage to Create,? Rollo May also describes limitations as the source of creativity and courage, other essential aspects of entrepreneurship.

?I realized that giving a birth and raising a child could be the greatest talent a woman can have. This gave me more courage in life and made me realize that I urgently need to focus my energy into co-creating a world that was clean, pure and prosperous first for our kids and for our community. This is how I started my green living Web portal yesilist.com,? says Tohumcu.

Paul Graham from Y Combinator agrees. He says ?the self? is one of the strongest sources of ideas and calls startup ideas that grow naturally out of the founders? own experiences ?organic.? Graham thinks that the most successful startups almost all begin this way.

Having a child makes women better leaders

Pinar Kaprali Gorsev is a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder of one of the first ISP companies in Turkey called turk.net. She began turk.net at 29 and had her daughter five years later in 2000. The same year, her company was sold for $40 million to Sabanci Group, Turkey?s leading industrial and financial conglomerate.

?Having a kid made me understand human beings better and how to be more flexible towards life. This has helped me have better relations with my employees. I have become more understanding than before. I can also understand the young generation better because of my daughter. This helped me create better human-centred new technologies,? says Gorsev. Having her daughter also made Gorsev a better leader, she says, which is a crucial skill in becoming a successful entrepreneur. Obviously, poor leadership causes much more entrepreneurial failures than successes, and understanding human behavior better makes mothers better leaders for sure.

Having a child provides women with a new network

Being a mother certainly changes women?s social networks. They begin interacting with other mothers to share tips on how to raise a children and how to adapt to this new lifestyle. ?I found the support in this mom?s network amazing. This is how I started my business. Everybody understands each other?s challenges so well. There is a constant support and a sharing of know-how in the network,? says Tohumcu.

A new name for women entrepreneurs with children has been coined by academia ?mumpreneurs,? or ?mompreneurs? depending on which side of the pond you hail from. In the UK, there is even tax break to encourage women with children to start their own businesses.?Jessica Alba?s?The Honest Company,??Julie Cole?s?Mabel?s Labels, Sarah Davis?FashionPhile.com, and Jessica Kim?s Babaco?are some of the pioneer ?companies started by mompreneurs. The rise of mompreneurs can even be seen from the?increasing number of women who trade on?eBay.

A successful tech entrepreneur Nilay Yuce, 30, founder of Lamagama Entertainment, an official game developer for Sony Entertainment, is currently eight months pregnant. ?I already started to see my women friends who have kids more often in order to understand what?s waiting for me. The support that I have got from my network increased. I feel more emotional, but surprisingly this makes me more tolerant in the office. I can already see that having a kid will make me a better entrepreneur, as I will take risks more responsibly. I realize that having a kid earlier would have been more helpful for my company. I didn?t need to postpone it until now.?

Having a child and having it all

When we talk about closing the gender gap, we cannot avoid discussing women?s concerns about the family-work balance. In her article for Forbes, Candida Brush misses the point of this concern. Fear of failure surely is the answer to why women perceive opportunities less than man until 45 but these are exactly the ages when women have children, either in their early 20s or by their late 30s where fear of failure mostly comes from worries about having it all.

From Silicon Valley perspective, where the competition is severe, there is an admission rate of 4% women, for example, at Y Combinator, a technology startup incubator. This extremely low rate created a lot of discussions?about why women were so noticeably absent;?however, it is interesting that none of these discussions try to include family concerns or embrace mumpreneurs.

Perhaps it is not Silicon Valley that is keeping women down. But using a different language that includes women with children and promotes mumpreneurs may have a major impact because of the prominent role Silicon Valley plays in the global entrepreneurial arena. A woman with children starting a lifestyle company one day could be the founder of a high-growth company when her kids have grown up.

Even the solutions and environment that Anne-Marie Slaughter describes in her article for The Atlantic Monthly ?Why Women Still Can?t Have It All? is very much a description of an entrepreneurial lifestyle, where flexibility and space for play and imagination are the core parameters for innovation.?Slaughter?s points on?the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking,?integrating women?s non-work lives with their work,?seeing the world anew through a child?s eyes or the new lifestyle that her child brought which broadened her world are all the same reasons why women should start companies especially after having a kid.

You can follow Gulay on Twitter at @gulayozkan. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.?

Source: http://qz.com/35457/women-want-to-have-it-all-start-your-own-company/

south carolina primary results betty white ed reed football schedule jo paterno dead south carolina tuskegee airmen

Regularly?changing your passwords is not enough

1 day

Your company and some websites force you to regularly change your passwords, like every three months or so. How often do you?need to change your passwords for all your other logins (if at all)?

Lots of organizations require mandatory password changes because it's long been considered a security "best practice." However, there are pros and cons to that rule, so before you decide if you need to regularly change your other passwords, let's take a look at the times when changing your password often makes sense???and when it doesn't.

Why companies enforce password duration policies
When you change your password every few months, it limits how long a stolen password is useful to a stealthy attacker???how long he or?she has access to your account. If someone steals your password and you don't know about it, the attacker could eavesdrop for an unlimited time and glean all sorts of information about you or do other damage.

Therefore, for decades, many security guidelines have recommended frequent password changes, usually between 30 and 180 days. Windows Server has a default of 42 days.

However, in most cases, these might now be outdated policies or recommendations. At the very least, it's highly debatable that changing passwords frequently actually does increase security.

Why changing your passwords often may be a waste of time
A?Microsoft study?a couple of years ago found that?mandatory password changes cost billions in lost productivity???for very little security payoff. Other computer security resources (Purdue University,?Health Informatics, and?Life as a CIO blog, for example) point out that the "best practice" of frequently changing passwords does little to improve security but much to increase everyone's frustration. Users typically end up choosing variations on the same simple passwords (e.g., password3) or resorting to sticky notes taped to their laptops. In other words, in some cases password changing requirements could actually?increase?risk.?

Security expert Bruce Schneier?points out?that in most cases today attackers won't be passive. If they get your bank account login, they won't wait two months hanging around, but will transfer the money out of your account right away. In the case of private networks, a hacker might be more stealthy and stick around eavesdropping, but he's less likely to continue to use your stolen password and will instead install backdoor access. Regular password changes won't do much for either of those cases. (Of course, in both instances, it's critical to change your password as soon as the security breach is found and the intruder blocked.)

In today's crazy hacker-friendly system, frequent password changes are less relevant than ever. The?NIST?says that password expiration policies are "irrelevant for mitigating cracking," because?not only are hackers totally on to our clever password tricks, they've got more advanced hardware and software:

Generally, password expiration periods are not of much help in mitigating cracking because they have such a small effect on the amount of effort an attacker would need to expend, as compared to the effect of other password policy elements. Suppose that an organization reduced its password expiration period from 60 days to 30 days. An attacker would simply need to use twice the hardware resources to compensate for this change.

Hackers have?machines that can break 348?billion?NTLM password hashes per second. (NTLM is a password encryption algorithm used in Windows. At 348 billion NTLM hashes per second, any 8-character password could be broken in 5.5 hours.)

So, really, changing all your passwords every 30 or 90 days isn't very worthwhile and isn't likely to increase your security. That's a good thing, because?many of us would rather clean the toilet than change our passwords.

Accounts for?which you might want to change your passwords regularly
As is usually the case, there are exceptions. For certain types of accounts, hackers may be more likely to "listen in" and silently stick around for months until they glean important information from you. Schneier points out that if your kid sister or the tabloid press (if you're a celebrity of some sort) has your Facebook password, for example, they'll likely listen until you change your password, which could be months or years if you never find out about it.

In general, this is Schneier's advice:

You don't need to regularly change the password to your computer or online financial accounts (including the accounts at retail sites); definitely not for low-security accounts. You should change your corporate login password occasionally, and you need to take a good hard look at your friends, relatives, and paparazzi before deciding how often to change your Facebook password. But if you break up with someone you've shared a computer with, change them all.

I would add you might consider regularly changing passwords for communication-type sites that don't have two-factor authentication: Email, especially, and things like IM or conferencing services. These are more snoop-friendly services where hackers might listen in for months before you find out. (On the other hand, you?really?should be using an email service with two-factor authentication, since it's a goldmine for hackers if they can get into it. It's probably the most important account for you to secure, along with your password manager and computer account.) Some services, including Gmail, Facebook, and Dropbox, show you active sessions, so as a general security precaution, you can check those to make sure no one else is logging into your accounts.

Above all else: Beef up your security in general
It's much more important that you choose a unique password for all accounts???one as long as possible???and strengthen all your other security options (two-factor authentication, making your password recovery questions unguessable, and backing everything up), because, in the end,?strong passwords aren't enough???no matter how often you change them.

If you have any weak or duplicate passwords anywhere, definitely change them as soon as possible. Also consider each regular security breach a reminder to?audit and update?not just your passwords, but your security setup in general???if needed. After all of that, enjoy the peace of mind that you're doing the best you can???and save yourself the hassle of changing all your passwords on a schedule.

More from Lifehacker:

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/how-often-should-you-change-your-passwords-1C7511554

james neal jackie robinson virginia tech emancipation proclamation april 16 tornadoes mitch hedberg

Live chat: Army football, today at 2:30 p.m.

"; aryZooms[imgCounter] = "javascript: NewWindow(870,675,window.document.location+'&Template=photos&img="+imgCounter+"')"; var match = /\/Times Herald-Record/.test(''); if (match==false || ''==''){ document.getElementById('purchasePhoto').style.display = "none"; } else { document.getElementById('purchasePhoto').style.display = "inline"; } bolImages=true;

Published: 2:00 AM - 12/08/12
Last updated: 2:00 PM - 12/08/12

Join Sal Interdonato, Kevin Gleason and Will Montgomery for a live chat on the Army-Navy game Saturday starting at 2:30 p.m. and running throughout the game.

Here is the link:


We reserve the right to remove any content at any time from this Community, including without limitation. Please check our Community Rules for more information. We ask that you report content that you in good faith believe violates the above rules by clicking the Flag link next to the offending comment or fill out this form. New comments are only accepted for two weeks from the date of publication.

Source: http://recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121208/SPORTS12/121209768/-1/rss02

peeps nhl playoffs masters 2012 masters the borgias shroud of turin warren sapp

Obama's Medicaid expansion: How many states are likely to rebel?

The Supreme Court ruled that states do not have to abide by the expansion of Medicaid under President Obama's health-care law. There are strong economic arguments on both sides.

By Peter Grier,?Staff writer / December 8, 2012

Alvin Hoover, CEO of King's Daughters Medical Center in Brookhaven, Miss., stands by the emergency-room station. He says hospital administrators worry that without a Medicaid expansion, they could be saddled with rising costs from treating uninsured patients.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP/File

Enlarge

What states will participate in Obamacare?s expansion of the Medicaid program? The answer to that will have a profound effect on national and state health-care budgets and the number of uninsured US residents for years to come.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

The president?s signature Affordable Care Act raises the income level for Medicaid eligibility up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line. That?s one of the major ways the health reforms attempts to expand coverage. If all states participate, 21 million will get Medicaid coverage, reducing the number of uninsured in America by 48 percent, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.

But the Supreme Court ruling which upheld ACA?s core individual mandate for health insurance also held that Uncle Sam can?t make states go along with the Medicaid expansion. So right now, governors and state legislators across the country are facing a tricky decision: Should they dive in and accept the expansion? After all, the federal government is promising to pay virtually all the costs of such a move, at least for now.

Or should they decline to join in something which could eventually gobble a larger share of their states? budgets?

So far, twice as many states have said ?yes? than have said ?no.? According to a review by consulting firm Avalere Health cited in The Washington Post?s Wonkblog, there are 17 participant states as opposed to 9 confirmed nonparticipants.

The breakdown here is generally along red state/blue state lines, as determined by which party holds the governor?s office. Texas and Florida both said ?no,? for instance. (Yes, President Obama won Florida, but the GOP?s Rick Scott is governor.) Maryland, Illinois, and California are ?yeses.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/YAvqT90ADdE/Obama-s-Medicaid-expansion-How-many-states-are-likely-to-rebel

chomp national enquirer kate gosselin helicopter crash matt jones whitney houston in casket photo resolute

lauretta scarlatti: The Natural Thyroid Diet. | Top Health & Fitness ...

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Source: http://fuentessid309.typepad.com/blog/2012/12/lauretta-scarlatti-the-natural-thyroid-diet-top-health-fitness.html

andrew bynum the time machine michelin tires michelin tires rett syndrome where the wild things are josh smith

'Amour' takes top prize from LA film critics

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? The French-language drama "Amour" has been chosen as the year's best film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, whose prizes are among a flurry of year-end honors that help sort out the Academy Awards race.

Among other honors the group announced Sunday, the 1950s cult drama "The Master" earned three awards: best director for Paul Thomas Anderson, best actor for Joaquin Phoenix and supporting actress for Amy Adams.

"The Master" also was chosen as best-picture runner-up.

"Amour" star Emmanuelle Riva, who plays an elderly, ailing woman being cared for by her husband, shared the best-actress honor in a tie with Jennifer Lawrence for the lost-soul romance "Silver Linings Playbook."

Newcomer Dwight Henry was chosen as supporting actor for the low-budget critical darling "Beasts of the Southern Wild."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/amour-takes-top-prize-la-film-critics-233040603.html

Bath And Body Works Dicks Sporting Good office max office max jcp Sports Authority Hollister

Why Not Build This Year's Gingerbread House Using CAD and Lasers?

We've all seen our fair share of crooked gingerbread houses, daubed with frosting to the point where they look less like a building and more like a bomb site. Johan von Konow has a solution to that problem, though: design the building using CAD and manufacture it using laser cutters. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/wdtFonM4EJg/why-not-build-this-years-gingerbread-house-using-cad-and-lasers

American flag Happy 4th of July 4th Of July Desserts fireworks fireworks 4th of July Andy Griffith