American News Broadcasting: September 2014

INDEX RANKS NORWAY TOPS FOR WELL-BEING OF ELDERLY

BY DAVID CRARY

AP WRITER

NEW YORK (AP) -- A global index reflecting economic security, health and other factors - and not deducting for cold winters - ranks Norway and Sweden with the highest level of well-being for older people. Of the 96 nations in the index, Afghanistan ranked last.

The Global AgeWatch Index, released on Tuesday, was compiled by HelpAge International, a London-based nonprofit with affiliates in 65 countries. Its mission is to help older people challenge discrimination, overcome poverty and lead secure, active lives.

The 13 indicators measured in the index include life expectancy, coverage by pension plans, access to public transit, and the poverty rate for people over 60.

Scores of countries were not ranked due to lack of data for some of the criteria, but HelpAge said the countries included in the index are home to about 90 percent of the world's 60-plus population.

Switzerland, Canada and Germany joined Norway and Sweden in the top five. The United States was eighth, Japan ninth, China 48th, Russia 65th and India 69th.

According to HelpAge, there are now about 868 million people in the world over 60 - nearly 12 percent of the global population. By 2050, that's expected to rise to 2.02 billion, or 21 percent of the total, the group said. In dozens of countries

- including most of eastern Europe - the over-60 segment will be more than 30 percent of the population.

HelpAge launched the index in 2013. Among the changes for 2014 were the inclusion of five more countries, and Norway replacing Sweden with the highest ranking.

The new report devotes special attention to the issue of pensions and their role in helping older people remain active and self-sufficient. It praised several Latin American nations, including Bolivia, Peru and Mexico, for steps to extend pension coverage even to older people who did not contribute to pension plans when they were younger. Peru's government established a means-tested pension program in 2011 that gives the equivalent of about $90 every two months to older people living in extreme poverty.

According to HelpAge, only half the world's population can expect to receive even a basic pension in old age. It urged governments to move faster to extend pension coverage as their elderly populations swell.

Release of the Index was timed to coincide with the United Nations International Day of Older Persons on Wednesday. Various events were planned in dozens of countries to call on governments and civic institutions to better address the needs of older people.

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Online:

http://www.helpage.org/global-agewatch/

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Follow David Crary on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CraryAP

EBay is spinning off PayPal

EBay has announced that it will separate PayPal into its own business. Next year, eBay and PayPal will be independent publicly-traded companies, Fortune reports.

Activist investor Carl Icahn advocated for the separation in January. The tax-free spinoff will be completed in late 2015.

Fortune notes that the split will "allow the separated businesses to focus more on their distinct core competencies: e-commerce and payments." In a statement, eBay said that while the businesses have done well together, the company found that "keeping eBay and PayPal together beyond 2015 would clearly become less advantageous to each business strategically and competitively."

Dan Schulman, an American Express executive, is PayPal's new president, and he'll be PayPal's CEO after the separation. Devin Wening, the president of eBay Marketplaces, will become eBay's CEO after the split.

- Meghan DeMaria

Wisconsin Reporter Was Sent to Cover Michelle Obama’s Speech and What She Says an Aide Told Her Had Her ‘Creeped Out’

by Jonathon M. Seidl

Meg Kissinger is a seasoned reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin’s well-known newspaper. She’s seen a lot in her days. But what she said happened at a speech by Michelle Obama in the state on Monday left her utterly “creeped out.”

Kissinger took to her Facebook and Twitter page to describe what happened. In short, she said, aides for both the first lady and Wisconsin Democratic candidate for governor, Mary Burke, told her she was banned from talking to members of the crowd.

Kissinger was in Hudson, Wisconsin, covering the first lady’s speech in which she was stumping for Burke.

“[A]ssigned to cover Michelle Obama’s speech today and was told by a Mary Burke aide and one for the White House that I could not speak to the people in the crowd,” she said on her Facebook page. “To say that I was creeped out is an understatement. This is what reporters do in America: we speak to people. At least that’s how I’ve been doing things — at all kinds of political events — since 1979.”

(Source: Facebook)

In a follow-up comment to her post, she added that she’s “never seen anything like it in 35 years as a reporter”:

(Source: Facebook)

She recounted the same events on Twitter:

(Source: Twitter)

The odd encounter did make it into her story for the Journal Sentinel [emphasis added]:

At the Burke event, a number of people in the crowd were upset about a lack of seating. Several people, including a woman using two canes, complained that she had nowhere to sit.

Reporters and photographers were cordoned off in a central area with chairs and tables. Several people in the crowd asked if they could have extra chairs reserved for the media — but reporters were initially forbidden from handing them over. Eventually, some of the Burke staff gave the extra chairs to attendees.

Burke and White House staff also told reporters not to talk to people in the crowd before the event.

Kissinger’s encounter bolsters charges by the media that the administration is one of the most guarded ever.

Inventor of World Wide Web warns of threat to internet

London (AFP) - The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.

Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users' privacy.

"If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life," Berners-Lee said at the London "Web We Want" festival on the future of the internet.

"If a Government can block you going to, for example, the opposition's political pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power."

"Suddenly the power to abuse the open internet has become so tempting both for government and big companies."

Berners-Lee, 59, is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a body which develops guidelines for the development of the internet.

He called for an internet version of the "Magna Carta", the 13th century English charter credited with guaranteeing basic rights and freedoms.

Concerns over privacy and freedom on the internet have increased in the wake of the revelation of mass government monitoring of online activity following leaks by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

A ruling by the European Union to allow individuals to ask search engines such as Google to remove links to information about them, called the "right to be forgotten", has also raised concerns over the potential for censorship.

"There have been lots of times that it has been abused, so now the Magna Carta is about saying...I want a web where I'm not spied on, where there's no censorship," Berners-Lee said.

The scientist added that in order to be a "neutral medium", the internet had to reflect all of humanity, including "some ghastly stuff".

"Now some things are of course just illegal, child pornography, fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank, that's illegal before the web and it's illegal after the web," Berners-Lee added.

Rick Perry: White House must address beheading

By KENDALL BREITMAN | 9/29/14 9:21 AM

Rick Perry said on Monday that the Obama administration will have to address the beheading of an Oklahoma woman in what the Texas governor noted closely resembles an act of terrorism.

“At some point in time, the administration does have to address this as what is appears to many people that it is — and that is an act of violence that is associated with terrorism,” Perry said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

On Thursday, Alton Nolen, 30, allegedly attacked two women at a Vaughan Foods plant in Moore, Oklahoma. During the attack, one woman was beheaded. Investigators have discovered that Nolen had recently converted to Islam and had made radical Islamic comments on social media. According to two FBI officials who spoke to The Washington Post, the incident is being treated as an act of “workplace violence.”

“I think Americans are confused about what this is,” Perry said. “This is a clear case of an individual going in and doing something that does not meet their definition of ‘workplace violence,’ so I think any rational thinking American is going to look at this and go, ‘This is more than just normal workplace violence.’”

During the interview, Fox News’ Steve Doocy said that if the incident was not connected to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, after the group had released its own beheading videos, then “it’s the craziest connection ever.”

Perry said the act “seems to fall into that type of activity” but said to “give the appropriate time to really do the investigation to make sure that this is in fact the case.”

On Monday, Moore police officers will officially present murder and “other charges” against Nolen to the district attorney, according to The Associated Press.

Preble County Heritage: Two Causes | One Community [Eaton, Ohio / Preble...

Top 10 Richest Women in the World

LikeShareTweet.com – Top 10 Richest Women in the World

This Pretty Girl Was Seeking a Rich Husband. The Reply She Got From a Banker Was Priceless!

The following is what a woman posted on a dating forum seeking a rich husband:

I’m going to be honest of what I’m going to say here. I’m 25 this year. I’m very pretty, have style and good taste. I wish to marry a guy with $500k annual salary or above. You might say that I’m greedy, but an annual salary of $1M is considered only as middle class in New York.

My requirement is not high. Is there anyone in this forum who has an income of $500k annual salary? Are you all married? I wanted to ask: what should I do to marry rich persons like you? Among those I’ve dated, the richest is $250k annual income, and it seems that this is my upper limit. If someone is going to move into high cost residential area on the west of New York City Garden(?), $250k annual income is not enough.

I’m here humbly to ask a few questions:

1) Where do most rich bachelors hang out? (Please list down the names and addresses of bars, restaurant, gym)
2) Which age group should I target?
3) Why most wives of the riches are only average-looking? I’ve met a few girls who don’t have looks and are not interesting, but they are able to marry rich guys.
4) How do you decide who can be your wife, and who can only be your girlfriend? (my target now is to get married)

-Ms. Pretty

A philosophical reply from the CEO of J.P. Morgan was then posted in response:

Dear Ms. Pretty,

I have read your post with great interest. Guess there are lots of girls out there who have similar questions like yours. Please allow me to analyse your situation as a professional investor.

My annual income is more than $500k, which meets your requirement, so I hope everyone believes that I’m not wasting time here.

From the standpoint of a business person, it is a bad decision to marry you. The answer is very simple, so let me explain.

Put the details aside, what you’re trying to do is an exchange of “beauty” and “money” : Person A provides beauty, and Person B pays for it, fair and square.

However, there’s a deadly problem here, your beauty will fade, but my money will not be gone without any good reason. The fact is, my income might increase from year to year, but you can’t be prettier year after year.

Hence from the viewpoint of economics, I am an appreciation asset, and you are a depreciation asset. It’s not just normal depreciation, but exponential depreciation. If that is your only asset, your value will be much worse 10 years later.

By the terms we use in Wall Street, every trading has a position, dating with you is also a “trading position”.

If the trade value dropped we will sell it and it is not a good idea to keep it for long term – same goes with the marriage that you wanted. It might be cruel to say this, but in order to make a wiser decision any assets with great depreciation value will be sold or “leased”.

Anyone with over $500k annual income is not a fool; we would only date you, but will not marry you. I would advice that you forget looking for any clues to marry a rich guy. And by the way, you could make yourself to become a rich person with $500k annual income. This has better chance than finding a rich fool.

Hope this reply helps.

Holder resigning as attorney general, official says

FoxNews.com

FoxNews.com
Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce Thursday that he is resigning from the Obama administration, a Justice Department official confirmed to Fox News. The decision would cap a tumultuous six-year term for the nation's top law enforcement official.

Holder is one of the few Cabinet officials to have stayed on since the beginning of the Obama presidency. The Justice official said Holder has agreed to remain on the job until his successor is confirmed.

According to the official, Holder has discussed his plans with Obama on "multiple occasions" in recent months.

"[He] finalized those plans in an hour-long conversation with the president at the White House residence over Labor Day weekend," the official said. The official added that Holder has "no immediate plans" after leaving the post.

Holder, who previously worked in private practice and before that was a federal prosecutor, was one of the most controversial members of the Obama administration.

He was held in contempt of Congress by the Republican-led House in 2012 for failing to provide key information about the botched Operation Fast and Furious program. He is the only sitting Cabinet member to have been held in contempt of Congress.

Holder and GOP lawmakers routinely clashed, over Fast and Furious but also over his department's handling of the IRS targeting scandal, its civilian prosecution of terror cases, surveillance of media outlets and other issues. His hearing appearances were at-times combative; some lawmakers even sought to impeach him.

During the contempt fight, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was quoted saying Holder's "arrogance knows no bounds."

In that debate, Holder was blasted by Republicans for not turning over documents related to the gun-running probe along the Southwest border. Democrats decried the contempt push, in an election year, as political.

Holder is the fourth-longest serving attorney general in U.S. history, and the first black attorney general.

The 63-year-old former judge and prosecutor, who took office in early 2009, also grappled with divisive questions on the handling of captured terrorism suspects.

In his first few years on the job, Holder weathered a firestorm over an ultimately-abandoned plan to try terrorism suspects in New York City. The attorney general gave up the effort, but he continued to maintain that civilian courts were the most appropriate venue. He argued that his original plan was vindicated by the successful prosecution in New York of Usama bin Laden's son-in-law -- this week, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Under Holder's watch, the Justice Department also cracked down on news media reporting on national security matters. The department secretly subpoenaed phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors and used a search warrant to obtain some emails of Fox News' James Rosen as part of a separate leak investigation.

Holder eventually agreed to overhaul department policies with regard to dealing with media.

The attorney general was often outspoken in his public remarks. He even referred to America in 2010 as a "nation of cowards" in discussing matters of race. He later lamented that "systemic and unwarranted racial disparities remain disturbingly common."

He was known to weigh in on matters of racial fairness, taking steps to improve police relations with minorities, enforce civil rights laws and remove racial disparities in sentencing. Most recently he became the Obama administration's face in the federal response to the police shooting last month of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Mo. In the shooting's aftermath, he enlisted a team of criminal justice researchers to study racial bias in law enforcement.

A former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Holder was pulled away from private practice to reshape a Justice Department that had been tarnished by a scandal involving fired U.S. attorneys and that had authorized harsh interrogation methods for terrorism suspects.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

West Coast warming linked to naturally occurring changes

BY TONY BARBOZA

Naturally occurring changes in winds, not human-caused climate change, are responsible for most of the warming on land and in the sea along the West Coast of North America over the last century, a study has found.

The analysis challenges assumptions that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been a significant driver of the increase in temperatures observed over many decades in the ocean and along the coastline from Alaska to California.

Changes in ocean circulation as a result of weaker winds were the main cause of about 1 degree Fahrenheit of warming in the northeast Pacific Ocean and nearby coastal land between 1900 and 2012, according to the analysis of ocean and air temperatures over that time. The study, conducted by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Washington, was published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Natural, wind-driven climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean, such as El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, are already known to exert a powerful influence on sea and land temperatures over years and even decades.

This latest research shows that similar changes in atmospheric and ocean circulation can drive trends that last a century or longer, overshadowing the effects of human-generated increase in greenhouse gases, the study's authors said.

"Changing winds appear to explain a very large fraction of the warming from year to year, decade to decade and the long-term," said study leader James Johnstone, an independent climatologist who did most of the work when he was at the University of Washington's Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean.

When coastal wind speeds weaken, they result in less evaporation from the sea surface and unusually low pressure that alters ocean currents and causes temperatures to rise over time.

The study found that weakening winds accounted for more than 80% of the warming trend along the Pacific Northwest coast between Washington and Northern California. In Southern California, weaker winds were responsible for about 60% of the increased warming.

If global warming had been the most powerful influence on land and sea temperatures, those temperatures would have been different, the study's authors said. Most of the warming in the region occurred before 1940, when greenhouse gas concentrations were lower and winds were weaker, the study found. In contrast, winds have strengthened since 1980 and coastal ocean cooled, even as the rise in greenhouse gases has accelerated.

The study focused only on trends at the regional level and did not offer conclusions about the influence of naturally occurring winds on warming throughout the world. If anything, the results reinforce what scientists have known for years: that global climate projections fall short in predicting how temperatures are actually changing at the regional scale.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved in the study, said its conclusions about long-term trends were probably overstated because the quality of data from the early 20th century was poor and unreliable. The results may also reflect the fact that the northeast Pacific is an area of the globe where past studies have shown the "signal" of climate change is low relative to the "noise" of natural variability.

"There is no doubt that regionally, the changes in temperature are dominated by changes in the atmospheric circulation that likely have little or nothing to do with climate change," Trenberth said. But, he added, "this does not call into question the concept of global warming."

tony.barboza@latimes.com