Andrew Mason, CEO and founder of Groupon, has just been replaced by Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonisis, who will take over the new position of Office of the Chief Executive. They will serve as interim co-CEOs while they hunt for a replacement to take over permanently.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/bbNVllHylAw/
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FILE - In this Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks at the White House in Washington about potential automatic budget cuts, accompanied by emergency responders, a group of workers he says could be affected if state and local governments lose federal money as a result of the cuts. As economic policy goes, experts say, the automatic spending cuts that kick in Friday, March 1, are a bad idea. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
FILE - In this Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama speaks at the White House in Washington about potential automatic budget cuts, accompanied by emergency responders, a group of workers he says could be affected if state and local governments lose federal money as a result of the cuts. As economic policy goes, experts say, the automatic spending cuts that kick in Friday, March 1, are a bad idea. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
This combo made from undated photos provided by the Santa Cruz Police Department shows Santa Cruz police Sgt. Loran "Butch" Baker, left, and officer Elizabeth Butler. Baker and Butler were killed while responding to a sexual assault report Tuesday afternoon, Feb. 27, 2013 at the doorstep of a suspect who was chased down and killed half an hour later. (AP Photo/Santa Cruz Police Department)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? As economic policy goes, experts say, the automatic spending cuts that kick in Friday are ? to use a technical term ? bone-headed.
Fortunately, the self-inflicted wound isn't going to leave a deep scar on an economy that is otherwise looking pretty good. It's a fiscal speed-bump on the road to economic recovery, which is why the stock market is nearing an all-time high despite Washington's latest display of legislative paralysis.
That's a marked change from the past two years, when budget battles rattled consumer and business confidence and triggered big selloffs.
"Businesses and consumers have begun to look away from the histrionics and the battles going on in Washington," says Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. "They're beginning to realize that organic growth in the private economy is beginning to pick up speed."
From Wall Street to Main Street, Americans are too busy spending, hiring and investing to panic over Washington's latest budgetary melodrama.
They've seen this movie before. And this time, the ending doesn't scare them.
Even with Friday's trigger date for the cuts drawing near, Americans have been pouring money into the stock market. The Dow Jones industrial average has jumped nearly 8 percent this year and is approaching a record high.
Consumers are also growing more confident. And last month, orders for U.S. factory goods that reflect companies' investment plans surged by the most in more than a year. It showed that more businesses have become more upbeat about their prospects.
Only 27 percent of Americans surveyed for a Pew Research Center/USA Today poll last week said they had heard a lot about the looming spending cuts. And according to a Washington Post poll conducted late last month, less than a third of Americans said they thought the cuts would have a big impact on their own finances.
Why less concern this time?
The stakes aren't nearly as high as they were two months ago, when lawmakers engaged in a budget standoff over the so-called fiscal cliff. Economists had warned that the cliff's tax increases and spending cuts would send the economy back into recession if they remained in place for much of 2013.
By contrast, no one is talking about a recession this time, no matter what Congress does or doesn't do. The financial squeeze will be milder. And it will be delayed.
For one thing, the cuts are smaller than they seem: Actual spending will likely drop $44 billion in the budget year that ends Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget. That's only slightly more than 1 percent of federal spending.
Of that, about 80 percent will come from discretionary programs, which includes everything from environmental protection to defense spending. The rest will come from Medicare and other entitlement programs.
What's more, federal agencies must give workers a month's notice before imposing furloughs, which will likely force many to take one day a week of unpaid leave indefinitely. So the pay and spending power of government workers and many contractors won't be affected until April at the earliest.
Perhaps more important, the delay gives lawmakers time to seek a deal that might retroactively reverse the spending cuts before they could do much damage to the economy.
"If it lasts a matter of a few weeks or a few months, I don't think it will have any measurable impact on growth," Baumohl says.
Scott Anderson, chief economist at the Bank of the West, estimates that if the budget cuts lasted only through March, economic growth would drop just 0.1 percentage point in 2013. That change would reduce his estimate of growth for the year from 1.8 percent to 1.7 percent.
Not that the spending cuts won't hurt many workers and consumers. And the longer the cuts are in place, the more they will slow growth, depress hiring and keep unemployment stranded at high levels.
If the automatic spending cuts aren't reversed, they would reduce economic growth in 2013 to 2 percent from 2.6 percent, wipe out 700,000 jobs and keep unemployment at 7.4 percent or higher through 2014, according to calculations by Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm.
Growth would rebound to 3.4 percent in 2014, the firm says. In part, that's because the Federal Reserve is expected to keep short-term interest rates near zero to blunt the economic damage from the spending cuts.
The spending cuts are taking effect just as the economy shows its most sustained improvement since the recession officially ended in June 2009.
The housing market, which had helped slow the economy's growth from the housing bust in 2006 until last year, is finally recovering. Sales of new homes rose last month to the highest level in 4? years. Home prices rose in December from a year earlier by the most in more than six years.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that business investment in buildings, machines and software rose at an 11.2 percent annual pace the last three months of 2012.
Companies are hiring more, too: Private employers added an average of 208,000 jobs a month in November, December and January, up from an average 155,000 from August through October.
That job growth is giving more people money to spend. After stagnating since the recession ended, hourly pay has risen faster than inflation the past three months. Families have reduced their debts and are in a better position to spend ? although they did get pinched when a Social Security tax cut expired in January, raising the annual tax bill of someone earning $100,000 a year by $2,000.
Without the political dysfunction, Baumohl says, the economy would be growing at a healthy 3 percent annual pace.
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Eyes hooked up to the tail can help blinded tadpoles see, researchers say.
These findings could help guide therapies involving natural or artificial implants, scientists added.
A major roadblock when it comes to treating blindness and other sensory disorders is how much remains unknown about the nervous system and its ability to adapt to change. To learn more about the relationship between the body and the brain, researchers wanted to see how capable the brain was of interpreting sensory data from abnormal "ectopic" locations from which it normally does not receive? signals.
Eye on the tail
Scientists experimented with 134 tadpoles of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis, a common lab animal. They painstakingly grafted new eyes onto places such as their torsos and tails and then surgically removed their original eyes. [See Images of the Odd-Eyed Tadpoles]
"We do a lot of work to understand regenerative biology, and that entails experiments that change the body," researcher Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, told LiveScience. "We have four-headed worms, six-legged frogs, and many other unusual creatures here as part of our work on bioelectricity and organ regeneration."
These experimental tadpoles then received a vision test the researchers first refined on normal tadpoles. The tadpoles were placed in a circular arena half illuminated with red light and half with blue light, with software regularly switching what color light the areas received. When tadpoles entered places lit by red light, they received a tiny electric zap. A motion-tracking camera kept tabs on where the tadpoles were.
Remarkably, the scientists found that six tadpoles that had eyes implanted in their tails could apparently see, choosing to remain in the safer blue-light areas.
"The brain is not wired to find an eye on the tail, since it's never happened before and thus is not something the brain has evolved specifically to deal with, and yet it can recognize this patch of tissue as providing valuable visual information," Levin said.
"These findings suggest that the brain has remarkable plasticity and may actually take a survey of its body configuration to make use of different body arrangements," Levin added. "If it were not the case, then every time a mutation produced an improvement in body plan ? a large significant change in anatomy ? the animal would die and the beneficial mutation would be lost."
Rather, when a mutation makes a change in the body plan of an embryo, the brain-body programs that tell an eye to see and a hand to grasp, for instance, "don't suddenly become useless," Levin said. "The brain can map its activity onto a wide range of configurations of the body. This modularity makes it much easier for complex new body features to evolve."
Augmentation technology
The transplanted eyes came from tadpole donors genetically modified to generate a red fluorescent protein. As such, the researchers could see under a microscope whether these eyes sent red nerves outward in the body. Half the recipient tadpoles had no such nerves grow, while about a quarter had nerves projecting toward the gut and the other quarter had nerves extending toward their spine.
The six tadpoles that could see well all had nerves plugged into their spine, which makes sense ? their eyes apparently linked with their central nervous system.
"This has implications not only for regenerative medicine ? replacing damaged sensory and motor organs ? but also for augmentation technology," Levin said. "Perhaps you'd like some more eyes, maybe ones that see in infrared?" [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]
One question Levin and his colleagues often get asked "is whether the tadpoles are experiencing sight from these ectopic eyes like they do from normal eyes," Levin said. "We have no idea what a tadpole is experiencing. This is a philosophical question that is not immediately tractable.
"Another thing people sometimes assume is that this capability is only for tadpoles or 'lower' animals," Levin said. "In fact, this kind of thing probably works in humans also, as evidenced by related studies over the last few years. Brain plasticity is a fundamental aspect of the function of the nervous system and its interface to the body."
The researchers seek to figure out three other aspects: which brain regions are processing the sensory data, how many extra eyes a frog brain can handle, and how the brain knows that this piece of tissue on the tail is providing visual data, and not simply indicating an infection, injury or other sense like smell, Levin said.
Levin and his colleague Douglas Blackiston detailed their findings online today (Feb. 27) in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
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Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/whoa-mutant-tadpoles-sprout-eyeballs-tails-230629273.html
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In this Feb. 28, 2013, photo, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio pauses while meeting with reporters during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, to answer questions about the impending automatic spending cuts that take effect March 1. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
In this Feb. 28, 2013, photo, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio pauses while meeting with reporters during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, to answer questions about the impending automatic spending cuts that take effect March 1. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Senate Democratic leaders finish a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2013, after answering questions about the impending automatic spending cuts that take effect March 1. From right to left are, Senate Majority Whip Sen. Richard Durbin of Ill., Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
In this Feb. 28, 2013, photo, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif., joined by fellow House Democratic women, gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, to talk about the impending automatic spending cuts that will most likely take effect late Friday, March 1. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A fiscal deadline all but blown, President Barack Obama says he once again wants to seek a big fiscal deal that would raise taxes and trim billions from expensive and ever growing entitlement programs. But with automatic federal spending cuts ready to start taking their toll, the path toward that grand bargain Obama campaigned on last year has significantly narrowed.
The president has summoned the top bipartisan congressional leadership to the White House, a meeting designed to give all sides a chance to stake out their fiscal positions with a new threat of a government shutdown less than four weeks away. There were no expectations of a breakthrough.
But for Obama, Friday's session would be his first opportunity to spell out his 10-year, $1.5 trillion deficit reduction plan in a face-to-face meeting with congressional allies and adversaries.
His chances are squeezed by anti-tax conservatives, by liberals unwilling to cut into Medicare and Social Security, and by a Republican leadership that has dug in against any new revenue after ceding to Obama's demands two months ago for a higher tax rate for top income earners.
On Thursday, two ill-fated proposals aimed at blunting the blame over the cuts ? one Democratic and the other Republican ? failed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate. Obama placed the responsibility on Republicans.
"They voted to let the entire burden of deficit reduction fall squarely on the middle class," he said.
The White House is still betting that once the public begins to experience the effects of the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts the pain will be unbearable enough to force lawmakers to reconsider and negotiate. But the consequences of the cuts ?the so called sequester ? will likely be a slow boil. Obama this week said the effect "is not a cliff, but it is a tumble downward."
Indeed, much of the impact won't be felt for weeks or more than a month; others, like possible teacher layoffs, wouldn't take place until the new school year in the fall.
And yet, the next likely showdown ? the expiration of a six-month spending bill on March 27, with its built-in threat of a government shutdown ? will loom before that, meaning that the leverage the White House would hope to have won't materialize until late.
Polls also show that the public is not as engaged in this showdown as it has been in past fiscal confrontations and an NBC-Wall Street Journal Post survey indicates that Obama has lost some ground with the public in his handling of the economy.
Still, White House officials also say they believe Republicans will once again give way to additional tax revenue in part to avoid drastic cuts and in part to win reductions in Medicare and Social Security spending from Obama that they have been unable to get from Democrats before.
"I am prepared to make some tough decisions, some of which will garner some significant frustration on the part of members of my party, but I think it's the right thing to do," Obama told top business executives this week.
Given Washington's entrenched partisanship, Obama's effort could be dismissed as either another failed attempt at negotiations or as simply an effort to lay blame on Republicans for blocking compromise.
The odds aren't with the president.
Many conservatives are willing to accept the automatic cuts as the only way to reduce government spending, even though the budget knife cuts into cherished defense programs. Likewise, many liberals are beginning to embrace the cuts as a way to protect revered big benefit programs that have long been identified with the Democratic Party.
Moreover, many programs for low-income Americans are protected from the immediate cuts while the Pentagon ? whose budget has long been a target of the left ? faces across the board cuts of 8 percent and up to 13 percent in some of its accounts.
More than 20 Democrats in Congress, including veteran Rep. Ed Markey, a candidates for the Senate from Massachusetts, have signed a letter pledging not to cut Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security benefits in efforts to reduce the deficit.
Obama's plan calls for $580 billion in new revenue over 10 years by limiting the value of itemized deductions and certain tax exclusions to no more than 28 percent. That means taxpayers with a tax rate greater than 28 percent would face a tax increase.
While Obama also regularly talks about closing loopholes to gain more revenue, his tax plan would close many corporate loopholes to lower corporate tax rates, not to generate more revenue. He aims to drop corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 28 percent for most corporations and down to 25 percent for manufacturers.
In exchange for new tax revenue and a tax overhaul, Obama has offered to reduce spending in health care programs such as Medicare by $400 billion over 10 years, change an inflation formula for government benefits that would result in lower cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and other programs, and reduce other spending for total reductions of $900 billion over 10 years.
Those cuts, together with about $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction already achieved over the last two years through spending cuts and a year-end tax increase on taxpayers making more than $400,000 would achieve a $4 trillion deficit reduction target.
Republicans though are unimpressed, and House Speaker John Boehner rejected it when Obama first offered it in December.
"Last year we proposed generating new revenue through tax reform," Boehner said Thursday. "We did that as an alternative to the president's demand for higher tax rates. Ultimately, the president got his revenues and he got it his way through higher rates. Given those facts, the revenue issue is now closed."
At the other end of the spectrum, liberals are seeking to silence White House talk about cutting entitlements.
"They're almost on a daily basis talking about (reducing) Social Security benefits," said Adam Green, founder of the liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "There's no rational or political reason to do so, except some ill-conceived idea that Americans would value a grand bargain, even one that robs their grandparents of thousands of dollars."
Follow Jim Kuhnhenn on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jkuhnhenn
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Feb. 28, 2013 ? When Jim Thomas and his global team of researchers returned to the Madang Lagoon in Papua New Guinea, they discovered a treasure trove of new species unknown to science.
This is especially relevant as the research team consisted of scientists who had conducted a previous survey in the 1990s.
"In the Madang Lagoon, we went a half mile out off the leading edge of the active Australian Plate and were in 6,000 meters of water," said Thomas, Ph.D., a researcher at Nova Southeastern University's National Coral Reef Institute in Hollywood, Fla. "It was once believed there were no reefs on the north coast of Papua New Guinea since there were no shallow bays and lagoons typical of most coral reef environments. But there was lots of biodiversity to be found."
Thomas and his team discovered new species of sea slugs (nudibranchs), feather stars (crinoids) and amphipods (genus Leucothoe). There was more variety of these indicator species found than there is in the entire length of Australia's 1,600-mile Great Barrier Reef.
"This was an astonishing discovery," Thomas said. "We returned to our labs and began to formally assess our collections. We had no idea this lagoon's bounty was so profound."
The international team Thomas led included researchers from and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, the California Academy of Sciences and the National Botanical Gardens of Ireland. Their 3-week expedition ended late last year. While in Madang, they joined a large French contingent of scientists from the Paris Museum of Natural History.
The NSU-led research team's findings will be shared with the local villagers, as well as regional and federal governments. It will also be published in peer-reviewed journals.
The Madang Lagoon faces many environmental threats by land-based pollution from a recently opened tuna cannery whose outfall is very close to the lagoon's reefs.
"Hopefully, our discoveries will strongly encourage governing bodies to recognize the environmental importance of the lagoon and work to stop the pollution," Thomas said.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/uiK6nfuUp-Q/130228155436.htm
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PRESTON, Conn. (AP) ? A woman who picked up her two young grandsons from daycare and was supposed to bring them home so the 2-year-old could open his birthday presents instead drove them to a neighboring town and shot and killed the children and herself, state police and family members said.
The bodies of 47-year-old Debra Denison and her grandsons, 2-year-old Alton Perry and 6-month-old Ashton Perry, were found Tuesday night in a car parked near Lake of Isles in Preston, in the southeastern part of the state.
State police called the deaths a double murder-suicide Wednesday, saying they believe Denison shot the boys and herself. Autopsies were planned.
Family members said Denison had bipolar disorder and a history of mental health problems. A state police spokeswoman, Sgt. Donna Tadiello, said Denison left a suicide note but declined to say where it was found.
Tuesday was Alton's second birthday. Denison picked up the children from their daycare in North Stonington Tuesday afternoon and was supposed to bring them home so Alton could open his presents, family members said.
"I wanted him to come home and play with his new toys and have a good day," Alton's mother, Brenda Perry, told WVIT-TV.
The grandmother was friendly and talkative when she picked up the children and did not give any indication of distress, according to Nikki Salaun, director of the Kidds & Co. daycare center in North Stonington.
Salaun and daycare center co-owner Christine Hare said the boys' mother worked at the daycare center herself a couple years and had mentioned that the grandmother had a history of mental health troubles. They said they keep going over the pickup in their minds but there is nothing they could have done differently.
"Brenda obviously put her on the list thinking she would be OK," Hare said. "We go with the parents. We can't override their wishes. Obviously if she had come here obviously distraught, we would have intervened."
After helping Denison to her van with the children, they discovered she had taken the wrong car seat. When they could not get in touch with her by phone, they alerted the boys' mother, and police soon issued an alert.
Marcia White, a paternal great-grandmother of the slain boys, said Denison insisted on picking the children up alone even when their mother asked her to bring along another relative. White says Denison's struggles with mental health were well known and Perry told Denison the boys were too much for her to handle.
White said Perry told her that Denison asked to pick the boys up to be with Alton on his birthday.
"She was apparently very convincing," White said.
Denison also had a 13-year-year-old son and, in her suicide note, she said in part that God was watching over him on Tuesday, White said.
In Facebook postings late Tuesday and Wednesday morning, Brenda Perry thanked people for their prayers and said she loved her sons.
"God (has) two beautiful angels helping him now," the postings said. "My boys are in an amazing place we got a few great angels watching over us. love you Ashton and alton."
On Monday she wrote: "So excited making mini cupcakes and play dough for Altons day tomorrow can't believe 2 years old already. So blessed"
Perry and her husband, Jeremy, told WVIT that Denison had a gun and suffered from split personalities.
A man who answered the door at the couple's home on Wednesday declined to comment to an Associated Press reporter. A man at the address listed for Denison said the family is asking for people to keep their distance.
Denison was armed with a gun when she left her home Tuesday afternoon and had permission to pick up the boys from daycare, state police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said.
The bodies were found at about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, about two hours after state police issued a statewide Amber Alert for Denison and the boys.
Salaun, the daycare center director, said both children were very happy. Alton was always laughing and smiling was nicknamed "the greeter" because he always went to see visitors at the door while other children hung back.
"He would never get close, but he would come right up and look at you like, 'Hey, look at me,'" she said. "He was definitely a personality in the program."
Denison had two convictions for minor driving offenses, said Peggy Muckle, a clerk at New London Superior Court. She was fined $35 in 2003 for following too closely and, in 2004, she pleaded guilty to reckless driving but a judge did not require her to pay the $100 fine.
____
Associated Press writers Michael Melia and Dave Collins contributed to this report from Hartford, Conn.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cops-grandma-shot-self-young-grandsons-car-145334468.html
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ZURICH (Reuters) - Three people, including the suspected assailant, have been killed in a shooting at a factory near the Swiss city of Lucerne, police said on Wednesday.
Seven others were injured in the attack which happened just after 9 a.m. (0800 GMT) at a wood processing company in the town of Menznau, west of Lucerne, the police said in a statement.
Emergency services were at the scene and the area had been cordoned off. A news conference is due at 2 p.m. (1300 GMT).
Last month, a gunman killed three women and injured two men in the Swiss village of Daillon, stirring a debate about Switzerland's firearm laws that allow men to keep guns after their mandatory military service.
There is no national gun register but some estimates indicate that at least one in every three of Switzerland's 8 million inhabitants keeps a gun, many stored at home. Citizens outside the military can apply for a permit to purchase up to three weapons from the age of 18 in a country where sharp shooting and hunting are popular sports.
A shooting in the Zug regional parliament in 2001, in which 14 people were killed, prompted calls to tighten laws, but the majority of Swiss citizens rejected a proposal in 2011 for extra measures such as lock-ups for guns outside service periods.
(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/three-killed-seven-injured-shooting-swiss-factory-124134215.html
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