Analysis: Compromise in Congress very unlikely

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Republicans and Democrats in Congress who congratulated themselves for passing relatively routine legislation before July 4 are returning to the Capitol for a summer stocked with political show votes and no serious role for bipartisanship.

Any thought of compromise on major issues ? taxes, spending, deficit control or immigration among them ? will have to wait until after the election or the new year.

So, too, with a farm bill. It cleared the Senate on a bipartisan vote and is now at risk for becoming sidetracked in the House in the run-up to this summer's presidential nominating conventions and the Nov. 6 election.

To pass the legislation, "I've got to work with my leadership. I've got to work with my members. I've got to work with the minority (Democrats). I've got to work with my friends in the Senate. I'm having a lot of fun," Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, told reporters with more than a trace of sarcasm several days ago.

In the interim, the House Republican leadership intends to force a vote this coming week on a repeal of President Barack Obama's health care law, recently upheld by the Supreme Court in a ruling that said the law imposes a tax on anyone who fails to purchase insurance.

Also in the pipeline is a measure to stop major new federal regulations from taking effect until joblessness recedes nationally, possibly to 6 percent from the current 8.2 percent.

Another item on the Republican to-do list for July is a measure to extend all of the tax cuts due to expire at the end of the year, including the reductions for wealthier income earners that Obama and most Democrats want to end.

Obama countered on Monday with a call on Congress to follow his prescription on taxes, not the one offered by Republicans.

Senate Democrats are not without their own July agenda, beginning with a business tax cut that is set for a test vote Tuesday.

They also want to end existing tax breaks for the costs businesses incur in moving jobs overseas. This measure dovetails nicely with Obama's attempts to cast Romney as a champion outsourcer of jobs during his career as a businessman.

In addition, they may set up a vote on legislation to require disclosure for individuals making high-dollar contributions to political organizations that spend millions on campaign commercials.

Whatever the merits of these proposals, Republican and Democratic aides say there is no expectation any of them will pass this summer. Instead, they say, each is designed to make lawmakers on the other side of the political aisle choose between a popular position on the one hand and political orthodoxy within their own party on the other.

By their own count, House Republicans have voted more than 30 times to repeal, defund or erode the health care overhaul that stands as Obama's signature domestic achievement yet fares poorly in public opinion polling. "The law I passed is here to stay," the president said late last week, brushing aside the latest Republican assault.

But if anything, Republicans are more eager than ever to hold a vote to repeal it, following a majority opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts that said the law was constitutional because it imposes a tax ? not a penalty ? on anyone who refuses to purchase insurance.

The vote will take place in the midst of a $9 million television advertising campaign by the conservative Americans for Prosperity.

The commercial includes a video of Obama saying the law "is absolutely not a tax increase." Referring to the court's ruling, the announcer rebuts him, saying, "Now we know that's not true," and the ad calls for repeal of the legislation.

The White House on Monday threatened to veto the House repeal of the health care law, saying it would cost millions of American families the security of affordable health coverage.

On tax cuts, Obama and Republicans compromised once, and they may again ? after the election.

But for now, the president has pledged he won't agree to another renewal of the reductions on individuals earning over $200,000 or couples making more than $250,000 a year. The dispute is one of the main issues to be presented to voters this fall.

It's a showdown Republicans are eager to have. "Working families and small business should not be saddled with the uncertainty of a looming tax increase as they attempt to invest and grow for the remainder of the year," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., wrote this spring in a memo to the rank and file.

More disclosure for political contributions generally enjoys public support in the polls, but Republican outside groups, more than Democratic ones, are awash in large donations from anonymous donors.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, calls the Democratic legislation a threat to the Constitution's guarantee of free speech. Its supporters "have a simple view: If the Supreme Court is no longer willing to limit the speech of those who oppose their agenda, they'll find other ways to do it," he said last month.

Nor is there much prospect for immediate compromise on a farm bill, meaning the likeliest outcome is a one-year or two-year extension of current programs that puts off difficult decisions over spending cuts.

Bipartisan legislation passed the Senate last month to cut $23 billion over a decade. The bill before the House Agriculture Committee would chop $35 billion.

Some conservatives want to slice more; other Republicans, as well as Democrats, prefer less. Several officials say It's unlikely the GOP leadership will permit the full House to vote on the bill with their own rank and file divided. That means deferring politically difficult decisions about food stamps, commodity programs and other accounts until after the election.

Lawmakers produced a short-term, one-year, solution last month to prevent an increase in interest rates on federal student loans for an estimated 7.4 million new borrowers. Another portion of the same bill pays for highway construction and other transportation programs for two years.

Its approval ended an unbroken string of nine short-term extensions dating back three years ? evidence itself of Congress' chronic difficulty in compromising.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE ? David Espo covers Congress and politics for The Associated Press.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-compromise-congress-very-unlikely-074512869.html

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Have quick review on Habits That Increase Unsaturated Fats

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Source: http://www.samrx.com/have-quick-review-on-habits-that-increase-unsaturated-fats.aspx

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Scientific study reveals that individuals cooperate according to their emotional state and their prior experiences

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2012) ? A study by researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Universidad de Zaragoza has determined that when deciding whether to cooperate with others, people do not act thinking about their own reward, as had been previously believed, but rather individuals are more influenced by their own mood at the time and by the number of individuals with whom they have cooperated before.

In addition to previous studies, this research is also based on an experiment carried out by the Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) at the Universidad de Zaragoza, together with the Fundaci?n Ibercivis and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the largest study of its kind to date in real time regarding cooperation in society. It was carried out during this past December, with 1,200 Aragon secondary students participating, who interacted electronically in real time via a social conflict prototype known as the "Prisoner's Dilemma." This game shows that the greatest benefit for individuals who interact is produced when both of them collaborate, but if one collaborates and the other does not, the latter will receive more benefits than the one who cooperates. On occasion, this allows an individual to take advantage of the cooperation of others, but if this tendency is extended, in the end, no one cooperates and as such, nobody obtains rewards.

After analyzing the information, the main conclusion drawn by the researchers is that in a situation where cooperating with others is beneficial, the way the individuals involved are organized into one social structure or another is irrelevant. A first analysis contradicts what many researchers have held based on theoretical studies.

In the experiment, the degree of cooperation in a network in which each subject interacts with four other individuals is compared to a network in which the number of connections vary between 2 and 16, that is, one that is more similar to a social network. What has been observed is that the results in the two networks are identical. "This happens because, contrary to what has been proposed in the majority of studies, people do not make their decisions based on the rewards obtained (by them or by their neighbors), but rather based on how many people have recently cooperated with them, as well as on their own mood at the time," the researchers explained.

These results help understand how people make decisions, above all in the context in which one has to decide between collaborating with or taking advantage of others. "Understanding why we do one thing or another can help in designing incentives that induce people to cooperate," the authors of the research pointed out. On the other hand, the fact that the networks are not important has implications, for organizational design, for example. The experiment revealed that people are not going to cooperate more because of being organized in a certain way. In this respect, it can be inferred that we do not have to be concerned with the design of organizational structure, but rather with motivating people individually to cooperate.

Ruling out that network organization influences in the cooperation of people, and having discovered that what is important is reciprocity, that is, cooperating according to cooperation received, will radically change the focus of a significant number of researchers who are developing theories on the emergence of cooperation among individuals.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid - Oficina de Informaci?n Cient?fica, via AlphaGalileo.

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/-sTwfu1Mwfo/120704124059.htm

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Showing Vultures A Little Love

Think of a giraffe lying on the Serengeti plain. He has just died, maybe of disease, maybe he was killed by a pride of lions, but now he's a 19-foot-long, 4,000-pound mound of meat, which very soon is going to stink and rot and muck up the neighborhood.

The lions that did it will eat roughly 35 pounds each. With five or six lions, that's a start, but there's a lot of giraffe left. Hyenas will help. Jackals will, too, but the bulk of the cleanup goes to the hero of my tale, nature's prize janitor ? hard-working, efficient, unbeloved, unadmired and now down on its luck. I am talking about the vulture. The vulture needs a little bit of love ...

... not only because these busy birds clean up giraffes (and hippos and gazelles and lions in Africa) weighing, by one estimate, about 12 million kilograms, or the weight of about 200,000 men ? but because they do it all over the world, gobbling up dead goats, cows, deer, rats at no charge, recycling that flesh back into other living things and then into the Earth.

They are built for this work. They will spot a corpse from high in the sky, swoop down, then cautiously approach, while tens, then hundreds of other vultures, seeing a gathering, will join in. If the meat is getting a little skanky, they don't care. The have a digestive system that can handle bacterial biotoxins. Rotten meat doesn't make them sick. And if they get covered in blood and body parts, that's a plus, because the odor keeps lions and other enemies away. What's more, because their diet probably makes them taste bad, says biologist Bernd Heinrich, "few animals eat them. Indeed, they use their partially digested food in projectile vomit as a defense." Ewwww.

Not only do they eat the dead ? they can play dead, too. If an enemy closes in, some vultures lie flat and get stiff, and since they're already covered with blood and rotten flesh, they make a convincing corpse. Plus (and here I'm just going all in), their babies are adorable, and I'm told they make good pets.

Professor Heinrich says a friend of his adopted (and was adopted by) a condor. This friend "traveled with it in his van and let it fly free on occasion to show off the bird's awesome size and beauty. The van was its cave, to which it returned and where it roosted contentedly as long as it was well fed on fresh meat."

Vultures have an ancient, noble lineage. Birds, after all, descend from dinosaurs, and some of our most popular dinosaurs were scavengers. T. Rexes, for example, weren't long-distance runners or agile hunters. "Their long, sharp teeth were adapted for ripping flesh," says Heinrich, making them, very possibly, one of our original "undertakers." Same goes for the flying pterosaurs with their 39-foot wing spans, who could swoop down onto giant brontosaurus corpses and, because of their size, keep their seat at the table. Heinrich calls them "supervultures."

Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images

Great-great-great-great-grandpa of vultures?

When the dinosaurs passed, huge scavenger birds like the giant teratorn replaced them. But lately, scavenger birds' diets have gotten skimpier. Woolly mammoths, giant sloths, saber tooth tigers, African gazelles, American bison ? those animals have either disappeared or have drastically diminished. It's like the Earth's kitchen has stopped serving vulture food.

Meanwhile, those animals still on the vulture menu ? goats, cattle, even deer ? are protected by humans and not allowed to spoil under the sky. Cattle farmers use every bit of the cows they slaughter, and even roadkill deer are carted off by highway departments and buried. "Vultures would do the job better if we let them," says Heinrich.

But the worst news is that vultures now have a drug problem. In Asia, where (in Hindu countries) cows are allowed to roam and die, where there are elephants, goats, monkeys and rats, vultures have held on, especially the white-rumped vulture. For centuries, the vulture was everywhere, living comfortably near human cities. Then, 20 years ago, very suddenly, it began to vanish. The collapse was so sudden, by the 1990s, biologists counted fewer than 10,000 individuals, mostly in Cambodia.

What happened? It turns out that an American drug developed to protect cattle had become popular in Asia. It's an anti-inflammatory medicine called diclofenac. When vultures descended onto a diclofenac-infused cow, many of them suffered kidney failure. So many vultures feast on a single cow that just one feed can poison hundreds and hundreds of birds.

Across Southeast Asia, teams of conservationists are now trying to wean farmers from diclofenac. They've come up with almost-as-cheap equivalents that don't poison vultures. A German pharmaceutical firm, Boehringer Ingelheim, that invented one substitute released its patent so that it can be manufactured cheaply. In several countries, officials have opened what are called "vulture restaurants." They put diclofenac-free goat corpses under the sky and invite local vultures to dine safely. It's too early to say if the campaign is working, but just in case, Indian and Pakistani scientists have learned to breed drug-free baby vultures for future release into the wild.

In North America, our vultures are luckier. Because of global warming, some of them have moved farther north into Canada, where there are herds of caribou that die in the open and increasingly remain unfrozen. There are fewer people up there, so animals aren't removed or buried. The turkey vulture, once a strictly Southern bird, says Bernd Heinrich, now breeds in Canada. "For decades I never saw a turkey vulture," he writes in his new book Life Everlasting, "but now I see them regularly every summer in Vermont and Maine." So vultures have a niche in the North.

But they're still getting clobbered in the South. Chemical companies are coming to market with ever newer rat poisons ? Havoc, Talon, Ratimus, Maki, Contrac, and d-Con's cleverly named Mouse Prufe II ? and these poisons can infect animals that feed on rats, which include not only vultures but also barn owls, ravens and sometimes crows. Flying predators love the occasional rat snack, but we humans think we can conquer the rats on our own, running the show by and for ourselves.

We should be more humble, says Bernd Heinrich. In the long run, it makes sense to protect animals that do the grunt work of the world. They do it well, they do it for free, and if we keep them around, we don't have to do it ourselves.

Vultures may not be the prettiest animals, they may, on occasion, smell like death, but if we let them slip away, if we try to manage the world all by ourselves, we will end up, increasingly, by ourselves. Alone can get expensive. Alone is riskier. But most of all, alone is lonelier.

---

Bernd Heinrich's new book is Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), and if you've never read Heinrich, then you've missed out on a poet/scientist who can go for a walk and come home with more wonderful stories than Hans Christian Anderson, and unlike Hans, Bernd's are all true. You can go into your backyard, into the woods, pick up a rock, roll over a log, poke into a tree hole and see what Heinrich sees. Can't do that with Mr. Anderson. Mermaids are really hard to find, while beetles, wasps, ravens, vultures and bees are doing remarkable things ? right outside your door.

If you want to see vulture rescue teams at work in India, Pakistan, Cambodia and Nepal, this video from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds tells the story well. That's where we got our pictures.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/07/03/156125689/showing-vultures-a-little-love?ft=1&f=1007

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Cheryl Cole to Guest Star on Glee

Glee just got a whole lot hotter.

Following rumors that never panned out last year, Jane Lynch now confirms that Cheryl Cole will appear on Glee Season 4. In what capacity? It's unclear at this time.

But here is what the hilarious woman behind Sue Sylvester had to say on the topic:

"There's been talk on set of Cheryl appearing for a year or so, but it's set to happen now. Matthew Morrison has spoken very highly of her and the younger guys on set are keen to have her on, for obvious reasons. Matthew's chatted to her and she seems keen. Cheryl's the perfect Glee fit, she can sing, she can dance and she looks good."

Glee moves to Thursday nights this fall and Cole would be the latest big name to make an appearance on the series if this rumor pans out.

Sarah Jessica Parker and Kate Hudson are already booked for extended runs, while American Idol runner-up Jessica Sanchez is nearing a deal to make her scripted television debut.

[Photo: WENN.com]

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/07/cheryl-cole-to-guest-star-on-glee/

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Bob Diamond, Barclays Chief Executive, Quits Amid Mounting Pressure Over Rate-Fixing Scandal

LONDON (AP) ? Barclays Chief Executive Bob Diamond has resigned with immediate effect, the latest scalp of a financial markets scandal that has also cost the job of the chairman.

The bank said Tuesday that outgoing-chairman Marcus Agius would lead the search for Diamond's replacement. Agius intends to stand down once a new chairman has been chosen, a spokesperson at Barclays said.

Barclays' management has come under fire since the bank was fined $453 million last week by U.S. and British regulators for submitting false reports on interbank borrowing rates between 2005 and 2009. Much of that activity originated from traders in Barclays Capital, the division which Diamond headed at the time.

"The external pressure placed on Barclays has reached a level that risks damaging the franchise ? I cannot let that happen," Diamond said. "I am deeply disappointed that the impression created by the events announced last week about what Barclays and its people stand for could not be further from the truth."

As well as facing intense media pressure over the past few days, Diamond has seen growing calls for his resignation from the political world. Both Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband have led growing calls for Diamond, a 60-year-old American, to stand down.

Diamond said he still intended to face an influential group of lawmakers on Wednesday to give the bank's explanation for the false interest rate reports.

Barclays is one of a number of banks which regularly submit estimates of what it will cost them to borrow from other banks. These estimates feed into a calculation of the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR) which is used to determine payments from a range of financial contracts.

The London rate, and the related European interbank offered rate, are the benchmarks for over $500 trillion in global contracts, including loans and mortgages.

Barclays admitted that it had submitted lower than actual figures on its interbank borrowing during the credit crisis in 2007 and 2008. Several other global banks are being investigated in other countries for similar actions.

Earlier on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/03/barclays-boss-bob-diamond-quits_n_1645205.html

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How to create a good Gaming Computer for $1000 | ArticlePDQ.com

What are the possibilities to develop a video games grade pc platform for less than $1000? Come on, man think it over; gaming computer offered for sale lately work just like below $2000, a business will you perhaps complete a computer that may be as good as Alienware, yet as well less than 50 % as much?

I asked these kinds of issues while i is in the whole process of the purchase of a for myself this coming year. I personally really love online games. I am just really keen on the time this video games business is here. It can be honestly magic on its own. What is considered much more fascinating could be the graphics generator as of late. Significantly, often it should get difficult for myself to see a real difference involving Three dimensional video and the real world. Ive never enjoyed winning contests about minimal or maybe even channel illustrations or photos. Which i choose any video games to generally be running at superior graphics on my own personal pc.

However styles problem? Very well, its very hassle-free. In order to aid games with regard to super high pictures and even seriously steady game play, youll want to produce a fine gaming computer along with that you should make funds on you will. Exactly how much specifically? Very well it can be definitely not $3000, not actually $2000. I noticed a method to put together my best gaming computer for less than $1000.

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Motherboards participate in a huge role with gaming computer, but also in the end Personally i think everthing varies according to any type of configuration you are looking for similar to 2 video charge card aid or simply multi-core model guidance. To keep dont pay as much concerning motherboards while at graphical credit cards or central processing unit. I tend to dedicate a lot of at image business cards, consequently cpu and then system board. Even, I have not undervalued the actual purpose of the excellent energy. Of course, the robust casino platform must be keen for the purpose of power.

In the end, My partner and i developed the examples below configuration for my own Laptop or computer that im satisfied to express there were an individual sport but still this my very own home pc arent able to guidance for really great images using really soft game play:

Central processing unit: Apple Primary i5-2500K Central processing unit @ Various.31 Ghz Motherboard: Gb P67A-UD3 Pictures: Whole world NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 1GB Memory Random access memory: 2x2GB Kingston Super Back button DDR Several Strength: Gigabyte Additionally 400-500 T Condition: Really dont waste material your money for wind generator tower incidents. Any most certainly ventilated scenario would most likely carry out.

I purchased the components coming from lots of boutiques and also assembled these in fact because of personally and also you know what ? that require me to pay only a $1000!

Loris Balin weblogs with regards to how to build a gaming computer

Source: http://articlepdq.com/health-fitness/how-to-create-a-good-gaming-computer-for-1000/

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