Republicans unveil government funding measure

President Barack Obama welcomes his new Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, right, as he speaks to members of the media at the start of a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 4, 2013. From left are, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Obama and Hagel. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama welcomes his new Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, right, as he speaks to members of the media at the start of a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 4, 2013. From left are, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Obama and Hagel. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Republicans controlling the House moved Monday to ease a crunch in Pentagon readiness while limiting the pain felt by such agencies as the FBI and the Border Patrol from the across-the-board spending cuts that are just starting to take effect.

The effort is part of a huge spending measure that would fund day-to-day federal operations through September ? and head off a potential government shutdown later this month.

The measure would leave in place automatic cuts of 5 percent to domestic agencies and 7.8 percent to the Pentagon ordered by President Barack Obama Friday night after months of battling with Republicans over the budget. But the House Republicans' legislation would award the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments their detailed 2013 budgets, giving those agencies more flexibility on where money is spent, while other agencies would be frozen at 2012 levels ? and then bear the across-the-board cuts.

The impact of the new cuts was proving slow to reach the broader public as Obama convened the first Cabinet meeting of his second term to discuss next steps.

The Pentagon did say it would furlough thousands of military school teachers around the world and close commissaries an extra day each week. And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the spending cuts were causing delays in customs lines at airports including Los Angeles International and O'Hare International in Chicago.

Obama said he was continuing to seek out Republican partners to reach a deal to ease or head off the cuts, but there was no sign that a breakthrough was in the works to reverse them.

The new GOP funding measure is set to advance through the House on Thursday. It's aimed at preventing a government shutdown when a six-month spending bill passed last September runs out March 27.

The latest measure would provide a $10 billion increase for military operations and maintenance efforts and a boost for veterans' health programs, but would put most the rest of the government on budget autopilot. Military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq would be cut to $87 billion ? down from $115 billion last year ? reflecting ongoing troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.

"It is clear that this nation is facing some very hard choices, and it's up to Congress to pave the way for our financial future," said bill sponsor Harold Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. "But right now, we must act quickly and try to make the most of a difficult situation. This bill will fund essential federal programs and services, help maintain our national security, and take a potential shutdown off the table.

Senate Democrats want to add more detailed budgets for domestic Cabinet agencies but it'll take GOP help to do so. The House measure denies money sought by Obama and his Democratic allies to implement the signature 2010 laws overhauling the health care system and financial regulation.

After accounting for the across-the-board cuts, domestic agencies would face reductions exceeding 5 percent when compared with last year. But Republicans would carve out a host of exemptions seeking to protect certain functions, including federal prisons and fire-fighting efforts in the West, and to provide new funding for embassy security and modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The FBI and the Border Patrol would be able to maintain current staffing levels and would not have to furlough employees.

The legislation would provide about $2 billion more than the current level to increase security at U.S. embassies and diplomatic missions worldwide. Last September, a terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

A project to repair the Capitol Dome in Washington could stay on track, and NASA's space flight budget would be protected from the harshest effects of the automatic cuts, known in Washington as a sequester. An initiative to upgrade the Coast Guard fleet would be funded as well.

The across-the-board cuts would carve $85 billion in spending from the government's $3.6 trillion budget for this year, concentrating the cuts in the approximately $1 trillion allocated to the day-to-day agency operating budgets set by Congress each year. Those so-called discretionary accounts received big boosts in the first two years of Obama's presidency when Democrats controlled Congress but have borne the brunt of the cuts approved as Obama and Republicans have grappled over the budget.

Both Democrats and Republicans for months have warned the cuts are draconian and would slow the growth of the economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, for instance, says they would slow the economy by 0.6 percent and cost about 750,000 jobs.

Obama presided Monday over the first meeting of his new-look Cabinet in a sobering climate of fiscal belt-tightening, urging humane management of spending cuts for communities and families that are "going to be hurting."

"We can manage through it," the president told reporters. Obama and members of his Cabinet had been warning for weeks that the cuts would be painful, but the fact is they will be slow to take effect, with the first furloughs of government workers not due until next month. Cuts to many programs may go unnoticed entirely.

The White House budget office's 83-page sequestration order was released Friday evening, detailing the cuts to more than 1,000 separate government accounts, big and small. Cuts of 7.8 percent that are set to strike defense accounts include $5.2 billion for construction at Army bases. Other accounts are far smaller, like $32 million to operate and maintain the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Each agency is supposed to apportion the cuts equally to each "program, project and activity" within the broader accounts, which gives agency heads some flexibility since it's up to them to define what that means. And it's not clear what recourse others would have if they disagreed with an agency's choices.

"That leaves it pretty much to the administrators in the agency in which that account falls to determine how he's planning on applying it," said G. William Hoagland, a budget expert with the Bipartisan Policy Center. "I don't know that anybody's going to be held accountable if some administrator defines a project the way he wants to define it."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-03-04-Budget%20Battle/id-e5ef0e94d3df4cf7a47e58fabba9fbb3

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Can Climate-Change Denier Ken Cuccinelli Win a Swing State?

The Virginia governor?s race is the next front in the escalating war over global warming.

The leading Republican candidate, state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, is an unapologetically partisan firebrand who has drawn the national spotlight for his crusade against the science of climate change. He launched a two-year investigation of University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann?which the Virginia Supreme Court eventually shut down. He has sued to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating the fossil-fuel pollution that causes global warming. In his new book, The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty, Cuccinelli ramped up his attack on EPA?s climate rules, warning that they?ll slow the U.S. economy and force Americans to live in a future of brownouts and endless gas-station lines.

His likely opponent, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, is planning to attack Cuccinelli for his hard-right views on climate change as part of a broader effort to paint the Republican as an extremist on a range of hot-button issues, including abortion, gay rights, and immigration, the McAuliffe campaign says.

But Cuccinelli?s climate crusade, in particular, will resonate with his party?s base nationally as well as with conservative Virginians. The race is kicking into gear just as President Obama declared, in his State of the Union and inaugural speeches, that he plans to aggressively fight climate change?a cause the president sees as a legacy issue. And Obama?s climate agenda is almost certain to lead to more of the EPA regulations that Cuccinelli has warred against.

That clash of views will erupt this year in a purple state that?s become a crucial battleground in presidential politics. Environmentalists and the coal industry expect to invest heavily to influence the race. Green groups will train their fire on Cuccinelli in hopes of sending a message to the Republican Party that denying climate change could cost them elections.

?Cuccinelli is one of the most high-profile climate deniers in the country, and it?s an opportunity to put that extreme view to the question,? said Navin Nayak, senior vice president for campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, which raised $14 million to back pro-environment candidates in the 2012 elections. ?People in D.C. will feel the ripple effects of this race, and we want to make sure they see being a climate denier is really bad politics.?

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a powerful Washington organization that lobbies for the interests of the coal industry and which spent heavily to support Republican candidates last year, is keying its sponsorship of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. to the contest. Earnhardt races later this year in Richmond, ?where I expect we will be heavily recruiting supporters to our Power Army,? wrote the coal group?s spokeswoman, Lisa Camooso Miller, in an e-mail, referencing the group?s thousands of volunteers who fan out to do everything from pressing candidates on energy policy at town-hall meetings to waving pro-coal signs at campaign rallies.

The battle will play out across a landscape that is a concentrated microcosm of the environmental and economic dilemmas facing policymakers. Virginia?s Eastern Shore is among the regions most vulnerable to severe physical and economic disruption from climate change. Several scientific studies have named Norfolk as one of the three U.S. cities most at risk of damage from extreme storms and flooding exacerbated by climate change. A study of the impact of global warming on the coastal region of Hampton Roads, home to the world?s largest naval base, the only U.S. shipyard that builds nuclear submarines, and the tourist mecca of Virginia Beach, found that rising sea levels could wreak up to $25 billion of economic havoc over time.

But in the state?s poor and rural Appalachian south and west, where coal mining is a cornerstone of the economy, EPA rules curbing coal burning could deliver an economic wallop. Coal-fired power plants are the biggest U.S. source of the greenhouse-gas pollution that causes global warming. There?s no question that Cuccinelli?s stance will play well there. However, appealing to that small portion of the state?which Mitt Romney did in 2012?won?t be enough to win the Governor?s Mansion. The majority of Virginia?s voters live in the Tidewater region, Richmond, and the moderate-to-liberal enclave of Northern Virginia.

Still, Larry Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia, said Cuccinelli could have better luck with an anti-EPA message than Romney did. ?This is something that excites Cuccinelli?s constituency. It wouldn?t play well in a presidential year,? he says, ?but in non-presidential years, turnout is low, and conservatives have done quite well.? But Sabato added, ?Maybe that?s changing because of what?s happening in Norfolk?. Maybe this will be the watershed election where this becomes a major issue, at least for Tidewater.?

Meanwhile, Cuccinelli?s other hard-right views are causing quiet heartburn among some in his party, prompting speculation that another, more moderate Republican?Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling?could run. He has declined to endorse Cuccinelli and is openly considering an independent bid. And another leading Virginia Republican is remaining noncommittal in the race: retired Sen. John Warner. Before leaving the Senate in 2009, the former Navy secretary coauthored major bipartisan legislation to tackle global warming, telling colleagues that as a military man he viewed climate change as a pressing national security threat.

Warner is disappointed in the political debate over the issue. ?I think climate change will reemerge. But the words ?climate change? are not in the political vocabulary, unfortunately,? he said in an interview. As for whom he will support for governor, he said, ?There comes a time when you ought to step out. In this case, it will come down to how I vote.?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-denier-ken-cuccinelli-win-swing-state-211530258--politics.html

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HIV baby 'cured' by treatment

3 March 2013 Last updated at 18:26 ET

A baby girl in the US born with HIV appears to have been cured after very early treatment with standard drug therapy, researchers say.

The Mississippi child is now two-and-a-half years old and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.

More testing needs to be done to see if the treatment would have the same effect on other children.

But the results could possibly lead to a cure for children with HIV.

If the girl stays healthy it would be only the world's second reported cure.

Dr Deborah Persaud, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, presented the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.

"This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants," she said.

Continue reading the main story

?Start Quote

I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk and deserved our best shot?

End Quote Dr Hannah Gay University of Mississippi Medical Center Cocktail of drugs

In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown became the first person in the world believed to have recovered from HIV.

His infection was eradicated through an elaborate treatment for leukaemia that involved the destruction of his immune system and a stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection.

In contrast, the case of the Mississippi baby involved a cocktail of widely available drugs already used to treat HIV infection in infants.

It suggests the treatment wiped out HIV before it could form hideouts in the body.

These so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly re-infect anyone who stops medication, said Dr Persaud.

The baby was born in a rural hospital where the mother had only just tested positive for HIV infection.

Because the mother had not been given any prenatal HIV treatment, doctors knew the baby was at high risk of being infected.

Researchers said the baby was then transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

Once there, paediatric HIV specialist Dr Hannah Gay put the infant on a cocktail of three standard HIV-fighting drugs at just 30 hours old, even before laboratory tests came back confirming the infection.

"I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk and deserved our best shot," Dr Gay said.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21651225#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Microsoft Word 2013

Microsoft Office is like a hardware store packed with everything from power drills to light bulbs?in other words, packed with everything from Word and Outlook to Publisher and OneNote?and Microsoft wants you to buy everything in the store even if you only need one or two tools. Go to Microsoft's online Office store, and the top of the page displays options for buying the whole suite in various combinations including the Office 365 subscription service, plus separate editions for home, business, and professional use. But scroll down the page, and you'll see tiny icons that let you buy the Office apps separately. Microsoft has always offered this option, but you need to look for it. Many Office users only need Word, so it makes sense to buy only Word, for a one-time $109.99.

If you don't count Web browsers, Word is the most-used app on the planet?and probably the most complex and full-featured as well?so we're posting this full-scale review of the latest version, Word 2013. I'll focus first on what's new in Word, and then on some long-standing features that are hard to find in recent versions?or hard to understand even after you find them.

What's New and Different
Word for Windows has gone through 15 versions since its first Windows version in 1989, and recent versions tend to improve on existing features rather than adding new ones. Aside from interface changes, the biggest new feature in Word 2013 is its ability to import PDF files, and, unfortunately, Microsoft's implementation has some major flaws. Word does an impressive job of converting a PDF file into a Word document so that you can edit it in Word like any other Word document, but Word doesn't let you overwrite the original PDF with your edited version. If you want to save the edited version in PDF format, you have to export it to a PDF file with a different name from the original?and then, if you want to replace the original with the edited version, you have to delete the original and rename the revised version so that it has the same name as the original one.

I can see why Microsoft did this: it's almost inevitable that an imported and edited PDF will end up with different formatting and layout from the original PDF, simply because Word and other applications have different ways of laying out a page, and Microsoft didn't want you to lose the original PDF formatting when you merely edited a few sentences. But Microsoft should at least have given expert users an option to overwrite the existing PDF file. (Like Word, the open-source LibreOffice suite gives an error message when you try to overwrite an edited PDF, but Corel's WordPerfect Office has the advantage of letting you save over the existing file.)

One new feature reflects the fact that Word documents are likely to be read on screen as well as on paper. An Online Video tool in the Ribbon's Insert tab lets you place a "live" YouTube or other video in the middle of the document. Unlike the pictures in newspapers that Harry Potter reads, the videos won't be live on paper, but anyone who opens the document on screen will be able to click the video to play it. Another feature cleans up Word's display of comments, making it possible to place a comment within an existing comment, and collapse a whole block of comments to save screen space.

Other new features in Word 2013 mostly provide easier ways of doing things that you could do already. The best such feature are the new alignment guides?green horizontal and vertical lines that appear on the page as you move an image or chart around a document, so you can line it up exactly where you want to. I used to bang my head on the table while trying to figure out where Word was placing an image that I moved through a document, and sometimes needed to dig deep into the menu structure to find the layout option I wanted.

Another new feature that protects my desk and forehead from damage: the positioning options that now appear on an image's right-click menu?no more digging into a dialog box to set layout options that place an image in-line with text or with text flowing around or above it. The pen tools provide similar abilities for drawing borders on tables or table cells. Instead of diving into complex dialog boxes for setting table borders, I can now click on a Border Painter tool in the Ribbon and click on the border that I want to paint with a special color or line thickness.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/xxfznprYcv8/0,2817,2416138,00.asp

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Big cuts spur calls to Congress from irate constituents (reuters)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

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Utahns climb to mount battle against cancer | The Salt Lake Tribune

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Drinking in Kerala: Rum, rum everywhere | The Economist

AT 11 O'CLOCK on a Saturday morning, there are already a dozen men queuing?at a ramshackle liquor shop near Kovalam beach, a popular tourist spot in?the small southern Indian state of Kerala. A regular stream of scooters and?auto-rickshaws brings ever more punters. Come dusk, the queue will be many?times longer, according to one rickshaw driver parked outside. ?This is our?one problem,? he says.

Perhaps surprisingly, sleepy Kerala is India?s booziest state. It gets through 8.3 litres (15 pints) of alcoholic drinks per person per year, according to a 2008 report by Johnson Edayaranmula, the director of a national alcohol and?drug-awareness group based in the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram.?Punjabis, often stereotyped as India?s party animals, came second with 7.9 litres. The national average was 5.7 litres. A 2011 report by one of?India?s largest trade bodies similarly found that ?Kerala accounted for 16%?of national alcohol sales, the largest proportion of any state. Mr?Edayaranmula warns that all data must be approached with caution, given the?prevalence of illicit sales. Yet, even if those were included, he is confident that Kerala would remain in first place.

Keralites say their drinking culture, and not just the amount imbibed, is intense. Men sit alone in dingy bars, on beaches, or at home, and drink with the sole purpose of getting drunk. A bar-owner in Thrissur, an inland city off the tourist trail, says a solitary customer will happily sink 6 ?pegs?, or 60ml shots, of rum or brandy in an hour. Fortunately, he says, Keralites are too laid-back for drunken brawls. But campaigners say other outcomes, such as mental illness, unhappy ?marriages, and lower economic productivity are big causes for concern. The state had India's second-highest rate of reported suicides in 2011.

Kerala?s leaders are also worried. On February 20th, the state?s coalition government, led by the dynastic Congress party that also runs India?s national coalition, raised the drinking age from 18 to 21.?In January, it appointed a one-man commission to assess the state's problem with alcoholism. Moreover, as of last summer, bars can only open at 8am?this might not sound all that strict, but they used to open at dawn to catch market traders on their way to work. Some high court judges ?recently called for bars to stay closed during the day altogther.

Home-made spirits such as arrack and toddy, made from fermented coconut water or palm tree sap, have long been part of Kerala?s culture. Yet Keralites say today?s widespread binge-drinking, driven by commercially brewed liquor bought in bars and shops, is a modern phenomenon. Since the 1980s, Keralite men have been going to the Persian Gulf en masse for work and sending home large pay packets. Periods under a Communist-led?coalition government and strong trade unions have deterred many industries that could have created jobs at home. Many emigrant workers then retire early, coming home to a quiet state where there is little to do. ?There is no doubt that the Gulf boom has had an effect [on drinking]. The easy money is there,? says Mr Edayaranmula.

For those who do find work at home, the state also has the highest wages in?India for many manual jobs. ?Even a [builder] is getting paid a lot?if they?get 500 rupees ($9.15) a day, they can spend 200-300 rupees drinking,? the?bar owner in Thrissur says of his customers. A tropical climate contributes?further to a slower pace of life. In short, Keralites increasingly have the?means and time to get sozzled.

The politicians, while keen to clamp down, are in a bind. The Kerala State Beverages Corporation, a state-owned monopoly that controls all liquor shops and ?wholesale booze sales to bars, is booming. KSBC's taxes contributed over $1.2bn to Kerala?s coffers in 2011-12, accounting for a fifth of the state?s overall revenues. Kerala?s three fellow southern states ? Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh ? have similar monopolies. Therefore while bars? opening hours are debated, KSBC shops, like the one by Kovalam beach, are open 11 hours a day and seven days a week. The state still seems in two minds as to what costs more: slow-moving citizens or sober ones.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/03/drinking-kerala

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