A Texas legislator introduced a state bill that would provide tax breaks to companies who intentionally violate Obama’s health care act by refusing to cover emergency contraception.
The tax break would be the same amount as the federal fine that companies are required to pay for violating the Affordable Health Care Act, or the total amount that companies pay in state taxes.
Freshman state Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R) introduced the bill in the Texas House of Representatives on Thursday in an attempt to protest the implementation of what critics refer to as “Obamacare”. The health care legislation requires company health insurance plans to fully cover employees’ contraception costs – including emergency contraception like the morning-after pill.
The contraception mandate has faced opposition from employers who are morally, religiously, or otherwise opposed to the use and funding of birth control. Stickland, a Christian Republican from Bedford, is a fierce opponent of the contraception mandate and introduced the bill to financially “protect” religious-based businesses from the fines involved in violating Obamacare.
A business that violates the Affordable Care Act faces a $100 penalty fine per employee per day, which could easily cost large companies millions of dollars.
“It is simply appalling that any business owner should have to choose between violating their religious convictions and watching their business be strangled by the strong arm of Federal mandates and taxation,” Strickland said in a statement discussing his measure, House Bill 649.
A 22-year-old Ohio father was arrested for posting a photo on Facebook of himself holding his baby daughter and a BB gun.
Dominic Gaines was charged with child endangerment for posing in a photo with his 1-year-old daughter, Paradise Gaines, while also holding what was mistaken for a deadly weapon. Police say the gun was positioned too close to the baby girl to be considered safe. The child’s mother discovered the picture and the maternal grandmother called the police.
Authorities in Colerain Township, Ohio, initially believed that Gaines was holding a handgun .
“It’s really been blown out of proportion,” the young man’s father, Wilson Dykes, told Fox 19, further explaining that the BB gun was pointed toward the ground.
While in court on Monday, Gaines referred to the incident as a misunderstanding and explained that he was playing with the gun while visiting relatives, WLWT reported.
“What had happened was he had his nephews over, as well as his daughter, they were all playing. He was playing with a BB gun with his nephews. His brother walked in and wanted to take a picture of him with his daughter, he incidentally happened to be holding the BB gun in the picture,” said attorney Andy Schoenling.
The air guns shoot plastic projectiles called “BBs”. Although being hit by a “BB” can hurt, the guns do not have the capability to kill anyone and are frequently given to children to use as toys. Certain models closely resemble a handgun in appearance, causing them to be easily mistaken for a deadly weapon.
Gaines is currently being held on $2,000 bond in the Hamilton County Jail.
The US economy unexpectedly took its biggest plunge in more than three years last quarter, contracting at an annual rate of 0.1 percent and indicating a new level of vulnerability for the economy.
The plummet marks the first time the economy contracted since the Great Recession ended and is causing concern that the US could be headed further downhill. The economy shrank from October through December, which economists attribute to a large cut in spending, fewer exports and lagging growth in company stockpiles.
Defense spending contracted at a 22 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter and saw its biggest cut in 40 years, while business inventories sharply declined, indicating that businesses will need to buy more goods in the next quarter to restock their shelves. The Hurricane Sandy recovery effort also cut about 0.5 percentage points off of fourth-quarter growth.
Gross domestic product fell at a 0.1 percent annual rate, which is a dramatic decrease from the economy’s 3.1 percent growth rate in the third quarter, the Commerce Department reported. The US economy had not plummeted this deeply since the second quarter of 2009, when the Great Recession was in its final stages.
Alan Krueger, head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, attributes the deep decline to the upcoming sequestration deadline.
“A likely explanation for the sharp decline in federal defense spending is uncertainty concerning the automatic spending cuts that were scheduled to take effect in January, and are currently scheduled to take effect on March 1st,” Krueger wrote in a White House blog post.
But uncertainty still exists as lawmakers have once again delayed a potential US default without coming up with a long-term budget plan. The new sequestration deadline could continue to harm the economy.
British scientists are attempting to preserve the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus and tied to Hebrew and Arabic.
Professor of linguistics at the University of Cambridge, Geoffrey Khan, has begun a quest to record the ancient language that’s been around for three thousand years before it finally disappears.
Prof Khan decided to record the language after speaking to a Jew from Erbil in northern Iraq. “It completely blew my mind,” Khan told Smithsonian.com.
“To discover a living language through the lips of a living person, it was just incredibly exhilarating,”he added.
By recording some of the remaining native Aramaic speakers, the linguist hopes to preserve the 3,000-year-old language on the verge of extinction. Speakers can be found in different parts of the world, from America to Iraq.
Over the past twenty years Prof. Khan has published several important books on the previously undocumented dialects of Barwar, Qaraqosh, Erbil, Sulemaniyya and Halabja, all areas in Iraq, as well as Urmi and Sanandaj, in Iran. He is also working on a web-based database of text and audio recordings that allows word-by-word comparisons across dozens of Aramaic dialects, Smithsonian.com reported.
Aramaic which belongs to the Semitic family of languages is known for its use in large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra. It is also the main language of Rabbinic Judaism’s key text, the Talmud. Parts of the ancient Dead Sea scrolls were written in Aramaic
The language was used in Israel from 539 BC to 70 AD. According to linguists it was most likely spoken by Jesus.
Data Privacy Day 2013: Twitter reveals US government makes 80% of info requests
Twitter has released its second transparency report, which demonstrated a frightening increase in requests for user data by the US government and ignited serious concerns over privacy and free expression.
The list disclosed data requests from over 30 nations, and revealed that the US government was responsible for 815 of the 1,009 information requests in the second half of 2012 – just over 80 percent of all inquiries.
Twenty percent of all US requests were ‘under seal,’ meaning that users were not notified that their information was accessed.
The overall number of requests worldwide also steadily increased last year, rising from 849 in the January to June 2012 period to 1009 in the July to December 2012 period.
Twitter’s legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel blogged that, “it is vital for us (and other Internet services) to be transparent about government requests for user information.”
“These growing inquiries can have a serious chilling effect on free expression – and real privacy implications,” he wrote.
He went on to express hopes that the publication of the transparency data would be helpful in two ways – “to raise public awareness about these invasive requests,” and “to enable policy makers to make more informed decisions.”
The majority of US requests were subpoenas, which comprised 60 percent of government demands for information. Subpoenas usually seek user information such as email addresses affiliated with accounts and IP logs. A user’s whereabouts can generally be located by the IP address they are using.
Twitter complied with US government requests 69 percent of the time, according to the report.
A new curriculum for public schools across the United States will soon make it mandatory for at least 70 percent of all assigned books to be works of non-fiction, eliminating classic works that have influenced great thinkers for centuries.
By 2014, schools in 46 out of 50 states will have adopted this new curriculum, which favors “informational texts” approved by the Common Core State Standards to prepare students for the workplace.
Suggested books included works by the Environmental Protection Agency, like the Recommended Levels of Insulation, as well as the Invasive Plant Inventory by California’s Invasive Plant Council.
While the new curriculum might provide practical information, it would also deprive students of classic literary works that have long been a part of the American culture. In studying the role of fiction in education, scientists have recently learned that fictional narratives develop human social and emotional life, giving students the ability to better understand people, the New York Times reports.
Dr. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, said that reading provides a vivid stimulation of reality that “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up on myriad interacting instances of cause and effect.”
But books such as JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rue and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird will no longer be the preferred reading assigned in US schools. Classic novels by authors including Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoyevksy, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway could soon be forgotten and replaced with textbook-style history books and other works of nonfiction put together by government departments or research groups.
“I’m afraid we are taking out all imaginative reading and creativity in our English classes,” Jamie Highfill, a teacher at Woodland Junior High School in Arkansas, told The Telegraph. “In the end, education has to be about more than simply ensuring that kids can get a job. Isn’t it supposed to be about making well-rounded citizens?”
Supporters of the new curriculum claim that informational texts would make students better prepared for both college and the workplace at a time when millions of high school students drop out of school each year. The nonfiction could teach them to write factually and concisely.
“So many kids, often as many as 50 percent, graduate high school … demonstrably not ready for the demands of a first-year college course or job-training program,” David Coleman, president of the College Board, told NPR.
The new curriculum has stirred a heated debate among academics, with some teachers and professors employed in English departments hesitant about giving up their favorite literary works.
“English is the only compulsory class where students are encouraged to think differently, to be imaginative and creative, and if we take fiction out of the English curriculum, where are our kids going to get that?” said curriculum and instruction graduate research assistant Shea Kerkhoff in an interview with Technician Online.
The 46 US states who will implement the new curriculum have already signed onto the Common Core standards and some have already adopted the new guidelines.
