Results for HSC, equivalent exams out, 75.08pc pass HSC – July 27, 2011 Keyhole Heart Surgery HSC 2010 06 09 v072 [CSJH The Grace] Dana HSC – Park Jung Ah (mission) kieutip says: RT @ binishell : TRIAL HSC . THU 28th: 12:50pm start, Bini Shell exams: Legal Studies Retail Operations Photography 2U Drama Practicals cont. in Foley..
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Business secretary Vince Cable announces first phase of bureaucracy tidy-up aimed at helping high street stores Retailers will no longer have to hand over addresses of TV buyers to the television licensing authorities as part of a red-tape overhaul. Nearly two-thirds of regulations specifically aimed at shop owners will be scrapped or reformed, as part of a bureaucratic tidying-up exercise by ministers. The business secretary, Vince Cable, announced the first phase of the government’s “Red Tape Challenge” and expressed hopes that lowering the age at which one can buy Christmas crackers, among other regulatory tweaks, would help restore confidence on the high street. “There is a very serious confidence problem on the high street. Making the business environment more friendly will hopefully make a difference,” said Cable. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said that 160 out of 257 regulations for retailers would disappear or be changed, including an amendment to the Wireless Telegraphy Act that obliges retailers to notify TV Licensing of any sales or rentals of television sets – the bane of generations of students. However, the changes must go to a public consultation first. Asda was among the retailers which called for the rule to be scrapped, because it forces staff to concentrate on form-filling rather than the shop floor. The BBC, which relies on the licence fee for most of its income, has not not objected. Asked to nominate the worst regulations he had come across, Cable said rules on sales of poisons, including fly spray and toilet cleaner, were subject to an overly strict regime. “All sales of acids are based on the impression that we are all Dr Crippens wanting to dispose of bodies,” said Cable. Cable’s department has pledged to look at simplifying guidelines for selling poisons. Shopkeepers agitating to mount a Valentine’s Day window display featuring lingerie and liqueur chocolates will no longer require an alcohol licence to do so under the proposals. Marks & Spencer complained that restrictions on liqueur chocolate sales had stymied a romantic display idea at one of its stores, helping persuade BIS officials that retailers should not have to apply for an alcohol licence before stocking cognac-infused truffles. The move will require a consultation because it is covered by the 2003 Alcohol Licensing Act, but ministers are confident it will be pushed through. Mark Prisk, the business minister, said: “The idea that we have to protect younger people from liqueur chocolates in this country is one that has to be got rid of.” Age restrictions also feature in the BIS proposals and include a planned reduction in the minimum age for acquiring Christmas crackers. The current limit of 16 years of age will be reduced to the European Union limit of 12. That proposal will also have to go to public consultation. The department is also looking at standard ID requirements for purchasing alcohol and cigarettes, such as in Scotland where proof of age has to come from either a passport, a driver’s licence or a government-approved proof-of-age card. Many regulations will be swept away in the repeals bill, which is due to enter parliament early next year. Those include the Trading with the Enemy Act, which contains provisions that bar UK companies from trading with states that the country is at war with. Nearly 100 amendments to the act that are still on the statute books that permit UK businesses to trade with countries that no longer exist, such as Yugoslavia, Siam and French Indo-China. Cable said the Red Tape Challenge would be extended to 25 more themes and sectors, including employment law, by next summer. Retail industry Vince Cable Asda Marks & Spencer Dan Milmo guardian.co.uk
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• Default could cost America triple-A credit rating • Barack Obama warns of economic ‘Armageddon’ • Threat grows of government shutdown next week Congress remained deadlocked over the debt crisis on Wednesday, with House Republicans unable to muster the votes needed to pass emergency legislation before next week’s deadline. Faced with a revolt by hardline members of his own party, House leader John Boehner was having to hastily rewrite a bill he proposed earlier in the week to cut $3 trillion (£1.83tn) in federal government spending. Boehner hopes to put his new bill to the vote on Thursday after being forced to cancel a planned vote because of lack of numbers. Although the Treasury may be able to conjure up a short-term solution to prevent default on Tuesday, the row and the failure of America to tackle its burgeoning debt problem could now lose the US its triple-A credit rating, a move that could have damaging consequences for the US economy and beyond. The country’s national debt reached its congressionally set $14.3tn ceiling on 16 May and Washington has since been forced to use spending and accounting adjustments, as well as higher-than-expected tax receipts, to continue operating normally, but it can only do so until 2 August. Without agreement, the US will probably become unable to pay all its bills some time the following week. Federal spending would have to be reduced by as much as 44% for the remainder of the month, forcing the treasury to decide whether to suspend social security benefits, defence spending or stop paying government employees. Finance and business leaders have warned that failure to raise the US debt ceiling by then would send shockwaves through the fragile world economy, while President Barack Obama has predicted that a default would trigger economic “Armageddon”. Boehner needs to secure 217 votes to get his bill through, a job made more difficult by a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saying that the Republican leader’s bill would only reduce the deficit initially by $850bn, not the $1.2tn that Boehner had claimed. Hardline conservatives are demanding still bigger spending cuts. However, even if the bill were to be passed, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, promised that the Senate would kill it and Obama has said that he would veto it. A solution is most likely to come from negotiations between Reid and the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. Reid is proposing raising the debt ceiling from $14.3tn until after the 2012 elections, in return for immediate spending cuts of $1.7tn. But the CBO has also challenged Reid’s budget cuts. The office concluded that his plan would deliver $500bn less in deficit reduction than the $2.7tn Democratic lawmakers had said it would save over 10
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( The Kennedy Tax Cut Proposal – Sweeping Changes – not everybody was happy ) Click here to view this media Note: This is a repost from last year on this day. Seems the story just doesn’t change. In what became the most sweeping set of changes to Tax Cut legislation, House Bill HR-8368 passed by a vote of 271-175. It represented a radical change in the economic structure of the country by basing its operations on the theory of deficit financing . President Kennedy: “No more important legislation will come before the Congress this year than the bill before the House to reduce Federal Taxes. In fact, no more important domestic economic legislation has come before the Congress in some fifteen years.” A little too radical for some. Most Republicans voted against it as did the bloc of Dixiecrats who warned it would mean fiscal ruin for the U.S. It didn’t and the bill passed the Senate in February 1964 created the largest tax cut in history and it’s still argued about today , as no doubt this post will provoke. History is very often the gift that keeps on giving.
Continue reading …This is Your Brain After Listening to Too Many Right Wing Talking Points on the Debt Ceiling
July 27, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media I try to monitor C-SPAN’s morning call-in show Washington Journal when I get a chance just to see what viewers of that network and the public are saying about the topics of the day and this one jumped out at me this morning as being from someone who’s been watching too much Fox News or for that matter possibly a lot of the rest of our corporate media with the right wing talking points this woman rattled off when weighing in on this debt ceiling kabuki theater. How someone comes off thinking that President Obama sounds like a partisan when he has, to the dismay of liberals, bent over backwards to make concessions to Republicans, or says he’s playing the “class warfare card” is beyond me, but obviously this person has no idea what “class warfare” even means, or that they’re probably losing that war. She also was informed enough to realize that there was a deficit commission put together that went nowhere and in her defense, the one thing she said here that I agreed with completely is that doing that again may very well be a colossal waste of time, but then she lost me with saying she really didn’t understand this whole concept of the debt ceiling at all, and even though she admitted she was clueless on what they’re debating about, claimed the whole thing is just some scare tactic by both sides. It goes without saying that since she does not understand what the debt ceiling is and thought it was about future spending, she obviously has no clue that this is about approving raising the debt ceiling for spending that the Congress has already approved, and not what they might spend in the future. It also seems pretty obvious she did not listen to the president’s speech at all this week or she would already know that. It pains me to hear just how misinformed our citizens are in the United States and this is just one example coming from someone who actually knows just enough to know that a deficit commission existed but not a whole lot else on the specifics of what’s going on in this debate. This is your brain on Fox or after hearing too much right wing propaganda from somewhere else. There is class warfare going on. Unfortunately too many people don’t even understand what that means or who is waging it. Rough transcript below the fold. BRAWNER: Martha, a Republican in Kalamazoo, Michigan. MARTHA: Hi, I watched the debate last night and I was kind of hoping to hear something from Obama that would encourage the discussion. Instead it felt like it was very partisan. And I felt that he really played the class warfare card. I was expecting something a little more presidential that would help the debate. Instead, I left feeling very… I don’t know, upset with the country, for both Republicans and Democrats because I felt Obama really lacked the leadership. BRAWNER: So, Martha, on this issue of the two proposals put up by House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one thing they have in common is this idea of a super committee, that they would put together a bipartisan panel of lawmakers to recommend further cuts than the House and the Senate would have to vote up or down on. What do you make of that and to your point about leadership, do you think that that’s something that the two sides, the two parties should get behind? MARTHA: Well, I thought there was a similar committee that was meeting a year ago that came up with the way to reduce the deficit. Am I incorrect on that? BRAWNER: Yeah, the bipartisan deficit commission that the president put together. MARTHA: But nothing really came of that. I don’t understand why that did not go forward and why that doesn’t work. Yeah, I agree. I mean, we have to go back to a time when people would just talk and communicate and compromise. I totally agree with the Republicans that we cannot continue to spend. I don’t understand the whole debt limit thing. It seems like there’s a lot of scare tactics going on here, probably on both sides. But I don’t understand this scare tactic game that everyone is falling for. But what bothers me most is seeing the class warfare and seeing one group of citizens against another and playing one as the bad guy and one as the good guy. There are no bad guys or good guys. Everybody cares about the United States. Why can’t they just come to some way of working together? Karoli adds : After I read this post I started looking through my DVR recordings for some of the talking points Heather mentioned. This was today’s meme o’ the day from Fox & Friends. Point 1: President Obama’s speech was all partisan. Point 2: It was a campaign speech, not a leadership speech. Point 3: He used the term “balanced approach” SEVEN times. SEVEN. Can you remember the number SEVEN, kids? If you can remember that he said that SEVEN times, you might forget everything else he said. Or what it is he said seven times. These people probably employ CIA brainwashing operatives to write their copy. Heavy sigh. Click here to view this media
Continue reading …There isn’t enough evidence linking working at Ground Zero to cancer to justify compensating 9/11 responders for cancer treatments, a federal review has concluded. The benefits-providing Zadroga Act that was signed into law earlier this year requires periodic reviews of any evidence of cancer, the New York Times reports. But…
Continue reading …‘Oldest bird’ Archaeopteryx knocked off its perch in controversial new study
July 27, 2011 No Comment
The fossil Archaeopteryx may not have been one of the earliest birds but just another feathered dinosaur, claim scientists Archaeopteryx, the famous icon of evolution and supposedly the oldest, most primitive bird on Earth, might not have been a bird after all, scientists say. The controversial claim, if confirmed, is something of a bombshell for researchers, who have viewed the evolution of birds and feathered flight through the lens of the species since it was discovered 150 years ago. The finding leaves palaeontologists in the awkward position of having to identify another creature as the oldest and original avian on which to base the story of birdlife. Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861, just two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The spectacular fossils of an animal with the feathered wings of a bird, but the teeth and tail of a dinosaur, caused an immediate sensation in Victorian England where society was wrestling with the consequences of evolution through natural selection. Though descriptions of Archaeopteryx as a “missing link” are widely frowned upon by scientists, the creature became renowned as the most primitive bird on the planet. That view has now been challenged by researchers in China, who have tried to knock the feathered fossil off its perch in a reassessment of the bird-dinosaur family tree. Xing Xu at Linyi University and colleagues ran the fresh analysis after studying a new Archaeopteryx-like fossil bought from a dealer by the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, the world’s largest dinosaur museum . The fossil was likely excavated from the 155 million-year-old Tiaojishan Formation in eastern China. The chicken-sized creature, named Xiaotingia zhengi in honour of the scientist who established the museum as a repository for vertebrate fossils, shared several features with Archaeopteryx, including long, sturdy forelimbs that presumably allowed it to fly. But when Xu’s team reconstructed family trees to include Xiaotingia , they found the creature belonged not in the lineage of birds, but to a group of dinosaurs called deinonychosaurs. More strikingly, Archaeopteryx appeared in the same group, according to the study in Nature . Deinonychosaurs, such as the velociraptor, walked on two legs, ate meat and had viscious, retractable claws. The finding is tentative, but builds on doubts that have emerged over the special status of Archaeopteryx following the discovery of other bird-like dinosaurs and dinosaur-like birds over the past decade or so. In an accompanying article, Lawrence Witmer at Ohio University wrote: “There has been growing unease about the avian status of Archaeopteryx as, one by one, its ‘avian’ attributes (feathers, wishbone, three-fingered hand) started showing up in non-avian dinosaurs. Perhaps the time has come to finally accept that Archaeopteryx was just another small, feathered, bird-like theropod fluttering around in the Jurassic.” If Archaeopteryx was a dinosaur, this means flight evolved at least four times in vertebrates: in reptiles, birds, dinosaurs, and most recently in bats. Witmer adds that with Archaeopteryx dethroned, more recently discovered fossils, including Epidexipteryx , Jeholornis and Sapeornis , become candidates for the world’s oldest bird. On a cautionary note, he adds that the next feathered fossil unearthed in China could easily restore the premier status of Archaeopteryx. Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London , said: “The overall picture of birds being descended from meat-eating dinosaurs is now very firmly established. This is an argument over a relatively small rearrangement of some of the twigs on the evolutionary tree close to the origin of birds. It doesn’t affect much of our big picture view of how birds came from dinosaurs, but some of the minutiae: the small changes that are important to the biology of the animals. “This part of the evolutionary tree is very sensitive to small changes in how we interpret the anatomy and the combination of anatomical features we see in these animals as they are discovered. As a result, the structure of that evolutionary tree is very unstable and can flip around. Maybe Archaeopteryx wasn’t on the direct ancestral line to birds, but was part of an early experimentation in how to build a bird-like body.” Dinosaurs Fossils Evolution Zoology Controversies in science Birds Animals China Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
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John Boehner, leader of the House of Representatives, rewrites bill as America slides closer towards default territory The US Congress remained deadlocked over the debt crisis on Wednesday with Republicans in the House of Representatives unable to muster the votes needed to pass emergency legislation ahead of the deadline of Tuesday 2 August. House leader, John Boehner, faced with a revolt by hardline members of his own party, was having to hastily rewrite a bill he proposed earlier in the week to cut $3tn (£1.8tn) in federal government spending. He is hoping to put his new bill to the vote on Thursday after being forced to cancel a planned vote on Wednesday because of lack of numbers. The deepening internal divisions within Republican ranks add another layer to the uncertainty in Washington. Democratic and Republican leaders have so far been unable to reach any agreement on a deal to prevent America joining Ecuador, Ukraine and a handful of other countries that have defaulted in the last decade. Although the US treasury may be able to conjure up a short-term solution to prevent default on Tuesday, the row and the failure of the US to tackle its burgeoning debt problem could lose the US its triple-A credit rating, which would have damaging consequences for the country’s economy. Boehner needs to secure 217 votes to get his bill through, a job made more difficult by a report by the congressional budget office on Tuesday night that said his proposal would only reduce the deficit initially by $850bn, not $1.2tn as he had claimed. Hardline conservatives are demanding bigger cuts. Even if the bill was passed, the Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, promised the upper house would kill it and Barack Obama said he would veto it. A solution is likeliest to come from negotiations between Reid and the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. Reid is proposing raising the debt ceiling from $14.3tn until after the 2012 presidential elections in return for spending cuts of $1.7tn. John Boehner US Congress Barack Obama Republicans Democrats US politics United States US economy Global economy Ewen MacAskill guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Samsung to roll out Galaxy Tab 10.1 TouchWiz UX update on August 3rd in NYC, and NYC only
July 27, 2011 No Comment
Everyone else will get it eventually, of course, but Samsung is once again giving folks in New York City first dibs on its latest Galaxy Tab wares. In this case, it’s the previously announced update that brings the TouchWiz UX to the tablet, and adds things like Samsung’s Live Panel, Mini Apps, and a newly redesigned Media Hub interface. That will first be available to the press during a media event on August 3rd, after which Samsung will open the doors at its Samsung Experience store to the public from 1PM to 6PM, and let any Galaxy Tab 10.1 owner side-load the update onto their device. Needless to say, we’ll be there to bring you all the details if you aren’t able to make it yourself. Samsung to roll out Galaxy Tab 10.1 TouchWiz UX update on August 3rd in NYC, and NYC only originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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“Santa Muerte” is traditionally seen by border law enforcement agencies as the patron saint of Mexico’s drug underworld. However, law-abiding worshippers in the United States say “Holy Death” is a positive force in their lives. (July 27)
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