Paid liar? Jay Carney refuses to respond to Issa?s accusation

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, a fierce critic of the Obama administration, branded White House press secretary Jay Carney a "paid liar" this past weekend, accusing him of covering up what Issa believes was a coordinated effort to use the Internal Revenue Service to target conservatives.

But when given the opportunity to respond to Issa's attack at Monday's press briefing, Carney dismissed it.

"I hadn?t heard that. That?s amazing," Carney joked when asked about the fiery comments, eliciting laughs from reporters gathered in the Brady Press Briefing Room. Carney then deflected questions about Issa's accusation, saying, "I?m not going to get into a back and forth with Chairman Issa," and he repeated that same turn of phrase throughout questioning about Issa from four different reporters.

Issa, on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday, said that the IRS targeting effort was "a problem that was coordinated, in all likelihood, right out of Washington headquarters" and that Carney is the administration's "paid liar" and is covering it up.

Republican senators including John McCain of Arizona, former Obama senior adviser David Plouffe and former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs criticized Issa's choice of words.

Carney also declined to say whether he spoke with Obama about Issa's attack and stated that the comments he believes Issa and other critics take issue with are quotes Carney repeated from the inspector general's report, which found no evidence of influence or pressure from higher-ups on the IRS officials who targeted conservatives.

Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George and the IRS?s new acting Commissioner Danny Werfel on Monday head to the fourth Capitol Hill hearing on the IRS scandal. Monday's hearing is being held by a House Appropriations subcommittee.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/paid-liar-jay-carney-refuses-respond-issa-insult-172745322.html

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'Accidental' GST legislation set to grab extra $1 billion from insurers ...

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OTTAWA ? Canada?s insurance industry faces a $1-billion GST bill at the end of this month, thanks to a federal tax move critics say smacks of a ?banana republic.?

The massive tax hit applies to some financial services that insurers say were never before subject to GST.

The GST now owed is retroactive seven years, back to 2005, when the federal Finance Department issued a news release saying it planned to amend tax legislation ? something it didn?t get around to implementing until 2010.

Critics say that apart from the body blow to the books of domestic insurers, the ?massively distortive? tax grab sends a signal to global investors that Canada is no place to do business. That message, they say, challenges any claim the Harper government is a tax-cutter and a good steward of the economy.

?I have lost count of the number of times that global tax directors have used the words ?banana republic? when I describe this legislation to them,? says Michael Firth, a tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada, and chief among the critics.

?They don?t believe it. They go, ?You?re kidding me? Can they really do this???

For its part, the Finance Department says it hasn?t changed GST legislation at all, but rather clarified rules that were poorly drafted when the GST was born in 1991.

The slow-motion train wreck began with an obscure Tax Court of Canada ruling in 2003, in which the judge sided with insurer State Farm against the Canada Revenue Agency.

The company successfully argued the GST does not apply to certain common financial transactions, and therefore it owed no money to the taxman.

The Finance Department issued a statement and background document on Nov. 17, 2005, saying it planned to amend GST legislation to effectively overturn the judge?s ruling, warning the amendments would be retroactive to the date of the release.

Controversial draft legislation appeared Jan. 26, 2007, and the measure was finally passed in an omnibus budget bill in 2010, whacking certain kinds of financial services with GST retroactively.

The amendments, however, have sown as much confusion as the original law, at least as it applies to the arcane world of insurance financing.

Only last year did the industry wake up to the reality that the revamped GST rules left them exposed to as much as $1 billion in back taxes.

?In discussions I have had with affected insurers, most only became aware of the issue in 2012,? Denis Brown of MSA Research Inc. wrote in an industry newsletter this April.

?Like me, many did not take it seriously until December of 2012, always assuming that wiser heads at Revenue and Finance would intervene and fix the problem.?

Insurance companies caught by the new rules must pay their now-higher GST bills for 2012 by June 30, and face having their filings for the previous six years retroactively revised upward.

The rules directly affect companies who have cross-border transactions with related firms for reinsurance, a term for the method by which insurance risk is spread around by insuring the insurers.

Calculating just how much extra GST is owed has been likened to counting moonbeams, with no consensus on precisely what gets counted as taxable or how. The original 2005 release and backgrounder from Finance Canada did not mention reinsurance at all; only in 2011 did the Canada Revenue Agency indicate that some reinsurance transactions could be caught by the new rules.

Joel Baker, president and CEO of MSA Research Inc., which closely monitors the property, life and health insurance industries, has estimated the additional GST bill for 2012 alone could be up to $200 million, or more than $1 billion in total once retroactivity to November 2005 is counted.

Baker notes not all insurers will be affected, and that the impact on premiums for customers is unclear.

The beneficiary of all that tax money is the federal treasury, as well as provincial treasuries where the GST has been harmonized with provincial sales tax. Many insurance firms are based in Ontario where the so-called HST or harmonized sales tax is 13 per cent.

?The unduly expansive and retroactive application of this initiative based upon a 2005 news release, creates an unreasonable and unmanageable retroactive liability that is incompatible with the commercial certainty that should be inherent in tax policy,? Frank Swedlove, president of the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association Inc., complained to Finance Canada in a letter last August.

Finance Canada, meanwhile, insists it has not changed any GST rules.

The GST amendments ?were introduced in response to court decisions that extended tax relief beyond what was intended under the GST/HST,? spokeswoman Stephanie Rubec said in an email. ?The amendments did not change tax policy in this area.?

The insurance industry is clinging to the faint hope Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will cede ground before June 30. In the meantime, industry accountants are busily completing 2012 GST forms for the end of June.

Finance Canada created a small internal group last year charged with reviewing how GST impacts the financial sector, which is generally exempt from the value-added tax. But the result of the exercise, which is examining tax regimes in other countries, is at least a year away.

Firth says Canada?s tightening of the screws on the financial sector is the polar opposite of the policy of the European Union, whose countries also have value-added taxes like the GST. In Europe, policy-makers do not want their financial sector tax-hobbled, unable to complete with global financial leviathans.

But in this country, he said, federal politicians are acutely aware that big financial institutions have little sympathy among ordinary Canadians.

?The government seems to be confident that if you extinguish the rights of financial institutions, it is an unattended funeral,? Firth said.

Source: http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/06/02/accidental-gst-legislation-set-to-grab-extra-1-billion-from-insurers/

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A step closer to artificial livers: Researchers identify compounds that help liver cells grow outside body

June 2, 2013 ? Prometheus, the mythological figure who stole fire from the gods, was punished for this theft by being bound to a rock. Each day, an eagle swept down and fed on his liver, which then grew back to be eaten again the next day.

Modern scientists know there is a grain of truth to the tale, says MIT engineer Sangeeta Bhatia: The liver can indeed regenerate itself if part of it is removed. However, researchers trying to exploit that ability in hopes of producing artificial liver tissue for transplantation have repeatedly been stymied: Mature liver cells, known as hepatocytes, quickly lose their normal function when removed from the body.

"It's a paradox because we know liver cells are capable of growing, but somehow we can't get them to grow" outside the body, says Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, a senior associate member of the Broad Institute and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

Now, Bhatia and colleagues have taken a step toward that goal. In a paper appearing in the June 2 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, they have identified a dozen chemical compounds that can help liver cells not only maintain their normal function while grown in a lab dish, but also multiply to produce new tissue.

Cells grown this way could help researchers develop engineered tissue to treat many of the 500 million people suffering from chronic liver diseases such as hepatitis C, according to the researchers.

Lead author of the paper is Jing (Meghan) Shan, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Members of Bhatia's lab collaborated with researchers from the Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School and the University of Wisconsin.

Large-scale screen

Bhatia has previously developed a way to temporarily maintain normal liver-cell function after those cells are removed from the body, by precisely intermingling them with mouse fibroblast cells. For this study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the research team adapted the system so that the liver cells could grow, in layers with the fibroblast cells, in small depressions in a lab dish. This allowed the researchers to perform large-scale, rapid studies of how 12,500 different chemicals affect liver-cell growth and function.

The liver has about 500 functions, divided into four general categories: drug detoxification, energy metabolism, protein synthesis and bile production. David Thomas, an associate researcher working with Todd Golub at the Broad Institute, measured expression levels of 83 liver enzymes representing some of the most finicky functions to maintain.

After screening thousands of liver cells from eight different tissue donors, the researchers identified 12 compounds that helped the cells maintain those functions, promoted liver cell division, or both.

Two of those compounds seemed to work especially well in cells from younger donors, so the researchers -- including Robert Schwartz, an IMES postdoc, and Stephen Duncan, a professor of human and molecular genetics at the University of Wisconsin -- also tested them in liver cells generated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Scientists have tried to create hepatocytes from iPSCs before, but such cells don't usually reach a fully mature state. However, when treated with those two compounds, the cells matured more completely.

Bhatia and her team wonder whether these compounds might launch a universal maturation program that could influence other types of cells as well. Other researchers are now testing them in a variety of cell types generated from iPSCs.

In future studies, the MIT team plans to embed the treated liver cells on polymer tissue scaffolds and implant them in mice, to test whether they could be used as replacement liver tissues. They are also pursuing the possibility of developing the compounds as drugs to help regenerate patients' own liver tissues, working with Trista North and Wolfram Goessling of Harvard Medical School.

Eric Lagasse, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Pittsburgh, says the findings represent a promising approach to overcoming the difficulties scientists have encountered in growing liver cells outside of the body. "Finding a way of growing functional hepatocytes in cell culture would be a major breakthrough," says Lagasse, who was not part of the research team.

Making connections

Bhatia and colleagues have also recently made progress toward solving another challenge of engineering liver tissue, which is getting the recipient's body to grow blood vessels to supply the new tissue with oxygen and nutrients. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April, Bhatia and Christopher Chen, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that if preformed cords of endothelial cells are embedded into the tissue, they will rapidly grow into arrays of blood vessels after the tissue is implanted.

To achieve this, Kelly Stevens in the Bhatia lab worked with Peter Zandstra at the University of Toronto to design a new system that allows them to create 3-D engineered tissue and precisely control the placement of different cell types within the tissue. This approach, described in the journal Nature Communications in May, allows the engineered tissue to function better with the host tissue.

"Together, these papers offer a path forward to solve two of the longstanding challenges in liver tissue engineering -- growing a large supply of liver cells outside the body and getting the tissues to graft to the transplant recipient," Bhatia says.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/n7of-0JOFfc/130602144612.htm

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As hurricanes loom, Florida insurance lives on borrowed time

By David Adams

MIAMI (Reuters) - Mother Nature has been kind to Florida's coastline lately with a record run of seven years without a hurricane making landfall, allowing property insurers time to re-stock their depleted coffers.

As a result, when the new six-month hurricane season gets underway on Saturday, state insurance officials say the industry is ready to withstand a major storm. "We are better positioned today than I have seen in 10 years," Kevin McCarty, who heads the state's Office of Insurance Regulation, told Reuters.

Still, industry experts question whether Florida's state-controlled insurance system is able to cope in the long term.

"It's very fortunate for Florida that is has been able to build up its reserves, but the fact of the matter is that Florida is living on borrowed time," said Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute.

Just this week, Republican Governor Rick Scott signed a new property insurance law designed to reduce the state's exposure to hurricane losses by gradually steering homeowners towards private insurers. The new law also slashes the value of homes that the state-run Citizens Property Insurance can cover, down from $2 million to $700,000.

Because of its size and geographical position, with 1,200 miles of coastline on a peninsula sticking out into the warm waters where the Caribbean meets the Atlantic, Florida is a uniquely risky insurance market. Most of its insured residential and commercial property - 79 per cent - lies in coastal areas vulnerable to both wind damage and flooding.

Coastal property is valued at just under $3 trillion, according to a report due to be released next week by AIR Worldwide, a global leader in catastrophe risk modeling. Florida accounts for almost 30 percent of the nation's entire $10 trillion coastal exposure, AIR found.

Only New York has as much exposure, with $3 trillion in coastal property, and that compares to $239 billion in South Carolina and $107 billion in Georgia.

Florida is peculiar in other ways too. Unlike most other states where private companies dominate the market, Florida's insurance system is tightly controlled by the state, and requires all companies to pay into a state-run Hurricane Catastrophe Fund which acts as a safety net. Louisiana has a similar system for its state property insurer, also called Citizens, and California has its own safety net for earthquakes.

Florida's private insurance industry was ravaged in 1992 by Hurricane Andrew, which caused $26 billion in damages in Miami-Dade county. The state was badly hit again when a series of storms hit south Florida in 2004 and 2005.

Designed as a state-run insurer of last resort, Citizens has been left holding more than 1.3 million policies, making it the state's largest property insurer, with about 21 percent of the entire residential market. Due to the lack of recent storms, Citizens has managed to build up a cash surplus of about $6.6 billion, plus another $1.8 billion in reinsurance.

Citizens has tried to manage its exposure by issuing catastrophe bonds, which allow insurance companies to transfer risk to private investors. Buyers of so-called cat bonds receive enhanced returns in exchange for the risk that their principal could be wiped out in the event of disasters of a certain kind or size.

By the end of this year cat bonds will provide well over $10 billion in coverage to the south-east and Florida, according to John Seo, co-founder at cat bond investor Fermat Capital Management.

Still, critics say the state's consumer-wary politicians have allowed Citizens to charge below-market rates, leaving the insurer under-funded. They note that its total insured exposure has more than doubled since 2005, and it faces a potential $21 billion payout in the event of a once in a 100 years storm.

"With the risk transfer we have really narrowed the gap. We haven't closed the gap but we have narrowed the gap significantly," Sharon Binnun, Citizens' chief financial officer, told Reuters.

VULNERABLE TO A ONE-TWO PUNCH

Property insurance typically does not cover hurricane-related flood damage, which has to be insured separately. Private insurers don't cover many coastal homes in Florida which are insured instead by the federal flood insurance program.

The state's 'Cat Fund', created to back up private insurers after Andrew, has also managed to build a large surplus, amassing almost $12 billion to pay potential claims in the event of a major storm, according to its director, Jack Nicholson.

Although he denied it was under-funded, Nicholson said the fund was vulnerable to volatility in the municipal bond market, which it relies on to meet a $17 billion obligation mandated by the state.

A.M. Best, the main credit ratings agency for the insurance industry, said Friday it recognized the Cat Fund's position had improved of late.

The recent run of weather luck may have saved the state from bankruptcy, said Hartwig of the Insurance Information Institute, noting that if a major storm had hit Florida in the midst of the recession, the state would likely have been turned away by the bond market.

Nicholson worries that unless the Cat Fund increases its cash reserve, one big storm could leave it empty, exposing insurers to the next big storm.

If it has to borrow money to meet claims, the Fund is required to place an "assessment" on almost all insurance policies in the state, from homes to cars, no matter if they live in inland areas not prone to hurricanes. Such assessments are decried by some as a tax that provides "welfare" for wealthy beachfront homeowners. Policy holders are still paying off an assessment from the last hurricane, Wilma in 2005.

The bill signed by Governor Scott on Wednesday aims to steer homeowners away from Citizens and cap the value of homes that can be insured by the state-run company. The legislature rejected a tougher bill that would have accelerated that process by charging new Citizens enrollees much higher premiums.

"Citizens has gotten way too big...There was no way in a significant hurricane that Citizens was going to be able to pay," Scott told emergency officials in Miami on Thursday.

(Additional reporting by Sarah Mortimer in London, Harriet McLeod in South Carolina and Kevin Gray in Miami; Editing by Claudia Parsons)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-hurricanes-loom-florida-insurance-lives-borrowed-time-121045974.html

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Eat Drink Jax Talks With Mina's Bakery And Cafe | Metro Jacksonville

Tell us about Mina's Bakery & Cafe.
Mina?s Bakery is a family owned and operated European style bakery. Our cakes and pastries hail from various countries around Europe (from Russia to Greece to Hungary to Croatia). Our emphasis is on taste and quality, with no preservatives or artificial ingredients used. The bakery offers one of a kind sweets and delicious hand crafted sandwiches.

How is a European style bakery different from other types of bakeries?

European cakes differ from each other quite a bit. Every time you have a different cake you have a different experience. Every cake has its own thing going on. What is similar with various European style cakes is that they're not too sweet or too heavy. For example, Medovic, which is a huge cake, maybe 10 or 11 pounds, uses only 1 stick of butter for the whole cake. For puddings I use imported varieties that come without sugar. That lets me control the amount of sugar to use. Most of my cakes have at least one imported ingredient.

?what types of imported ingredients do you use?

For example, I don't use vanilla extract, I use vanilla sugar in almost all the cakes. I use imported puddings too. For whipping cream I use imported whipping creams that come in chocolate, strawberry and vanilla flavors, because they're not too sweet. I use German milk chocolate for my Milka Roll. For my Moskva Cake I use imported sour cherries because I can't even find sour cherries here.

?is the level of sweetness the thing that mostly differentiates European cakes?

Yes, mostly that. They're not as sweet as cakes made in America.

What makes Mina's special?

Everything is handmade by myself, Mina, from scratch. Every cake uses at least one imported ingredient to give it a true European feel. From sour cherries to Milka chocolate to poppy seeds to apricot and plum jams, there is something special in all the sweets that make them delicious and unlike anything most people have ever seen!

What sort of food do you serve in addition to your baked goods?

For lunch we focus mainly on paninis. We have a number of varieties, such as smoked turkey, Mediterranean, gyro-style and grilled cheese. We also offer a chicken salad sandwich. If you aren't in a rush we can prepare a Bosnian dish called Pita, which is homemade dough that has been stretched and filled with meat and cheese, or spinach and cheese. Pitas are a must try for food junkies - they were voted one of the top 10 foods around the world! Pita does takes a while to prepare, so we recommend calling ahead by at least 30 minutes. It's delicious but it's not something to order if you're in a rush.

Our main focus is our cakes though, which are all made in house and from scratch.

Where do your recipes come from?

Many of my recipes have been passed down to me. Baking has always been a passion of mine and many of my family members. A few recipes I?ve made up along the way as I go, combining ingredients I think taste well together, and then experimenting. I?ve even had customers bring me their family recipes that they?d like me to make for them which has been a fun and flattering way to discover even more types of cakes! The selection changes daily so there is always something new.

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Source: http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2013-jun-eat-drink-jax-talks-with-minas-bakery-and-cafe

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Is Justin Bieber?s driver?s license at risk? Neighbors allege recklessness in Ferrari

Sporty cars and celebrities are a part of California culture, but the Golden State also has things called rules of the road.

Pop star Justin Bieber, with his right foot sometimes on the pedal of a white Ferrari, may be stepping over the line of safe driving, neighbors have alleged.

Let?s just say it doesn?t sound as if the 19-year-old singer has developed very promising habits behind the wheel. And for California drivers, a few infractions noted by police can result in a suspended driver?s license.

The incident that?s put Bieber in the news this week occurred Monday, when he allegedly drove his white Ferrari at freeway speeds in what is a 25 mile-per-hour zone.

Former NFL wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson was one of the neighbors who complained. Worried about the safety of his young children within the gated community where he and Bieber own homes, Mr. Johnson got into his Prius and followed Bieber?s Ferrari in an effort to talk about his driving habits. But Bieber scurried into his house.

RECOMMENDED: How much do you know about pop culture? Take our quiz to find out!

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department received two calls and responded to the location in Calabasas. But they were also turned away.

"His security detail said he declined to talk to us based on the advice of counsel," Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said.

"Their eyewitness testimony to our deputies was definitive ? not only the speed, not only the vehicle, but Mr. Bieber was sitting and driving in the driver's side seat," Whitmore said.

The matter will soon head to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office to consider filing misdemeanor charges.

In California, drivers may have licenses suspended or revoked if they acquire a certain number of negative ?points.? Four points within a 12-month period, for example, could result in suspension.

Many rule violations result in one point. ?Reckless driving? is a two-point violation, as is a speed contest or ?exhibition of speed.?

The Memorial Day incident comes after another publicized case of alleged speeding in his community. Another neighbor said that when he complained, Bieber spit on him and threatened him, according to news reports. That incident could also result in a prosecution.

Bieber hasn?t commented this week on his driving behavior. But amid a string of bad publicity, from concert cancellations to alleged drug use, he has offered a blend of apology and self-justification.

"I want to be a good role model, but some people want me to fail,? he told US Weekly magazine this spring. He said he?s ?not perfect.?

Bieber also said "I'm young and I want to have fun. I don't think there is anything wrong with that.? He also said ?mistakes? are ?part of growing up.?

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/justin-bieber-driver-license-risk-neighbors-allege-recklessness-195042445.html

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Sublime: We're Only Gonna Die For Our Own Arrogance

There's nothing quite as awesome as when bands you like like other bands you like, and like them awesomely. Case in point: Sublime's utterly sublime cover of Bad Religion's already fantastic, lo-fi classic "We're Only Gonna Die For Our Own Arrogance."

A simple tune but catchy tune at its core, "We're Only Gonna Die etc etc" still left a lot of room open for Sublime?specifically the golden-throated Bradley Nowell?to have some fun. Despite the fact that the song's little more than a repetition of a chorus, we're still treated to bookends of wonderful ska, with some true-to-the-source punked-out nougat goodness in the center. It's just great.

Add this one to that pantheon of great covers, and someday I'll be back to talk about Goldfinger's "Rio" with you all. [Spotify, Amazon, iTunes]

For reference:

Source: http://gizmodo.com/sublime-were-only-gonna-die-for-our-own-arrogance-510869917

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