Bruderschaft MC HR ft TH & CEM 7 Nation Army.AVI PLANTATION FISHING FOR STRIPED BASS vs9eating says: Nation – News of the Day From Across the Nation http://t.co/k0pXWsd
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Commission will suggest fund-raising changes allowing local authorities to lend money against the value of property Local councils are poised to take on a major financial services role under proposed reforms to be unveiled on Monday of the funding system for the care of elderly and disabled people. Under the scheme local authorities will be empowered to make a loan at a preferential rate against the value of a property owned by someone entering a care home. The loan would be redeemed on the sale of the property after the person dies. The plan is part of a series of ideas drawn up by a government commission led by the economist Andrew Dilnot. The proposals seek to inject more funding into the care system by tapping into people’s assets. The typical 55- to 64-year-old in the UK has total wealth of £200,000. Although the centrepiece of Dilnot’s report will be a recommended cap of about £35,000 on individual liability for care costs, which would require underwriting by the government, other proposals will seek to make it easier for people to draw on their assets without having to sell their home during their lifetime. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation about a million elderly homeowners have properties worth more than £100,000 yet qualify for means-tested benefits. Charities and welfare groups are calling on the government and Labour to seize the opportunity presented by Dilnot to begin a shakeup of the care funding system. An open letter from 26 leading charities declared on Sunday: “We expect all parties to deliver on this.” Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has reiterated his offer to engage in cross-party talks on the Dilnot proposals with an “open mind”, setting aside his party’s previous policy of a national care service. However, there are fears the issue will again be kicked into the long grass because of the potential cost to the Treasury – which amounts to perhaps £2bn to underwrite the cap, plus as much again if ministers accept a recommendation to raise significantly the ceiling of £23,250 personal assets above which the state currently offers no assistance with care costs. In a BBC interview, the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, promised “a very positive response” to Dilnot. But he added: “We are going to treat it as the basis for engagement … it is part of the overall questions that need to be answered.” In a blog on the Liberal Democrat Voice website, the care services minister, Paul Burstow, said: “Don’t expect … to hear the government’s final word on social care. The Dilnot report will mark an important milestone on the road to reform, but there are other questions and more milestones to come.” A No 10 source said the report was something to be looked at “very carefully”. There would not be a detailed government response straight away. An estimated 20,000 people sell their home each year to pay for their care costs, which for one in four people exceed £50,000, and for one in 10 run to more than £100,000. The so-called hotel costs, meaning accommodation and food in care homes, come on top of this. One of the key issues in Monday’s report, which applies to England and Wales, will be what Dilnot says about these extra costs, which can be as much again as the bill for care alone. The proposal for councils to lend to homeowners entering residential care represents a radical development of a little-known existing provision for deferred payment of care home fees. Under the Health and Social Care Act 2001, councils can make a deferred payment arrangement by taking a charge on an individual’s property. But interest is not levied until 56 days after the person’s death, making the scheme unattractive for councils. The key difference under the new plan is that the council would make a return on the loan from day one, being able to charge interest straight away. The Local Government Association reported last year that demand for such arrangements had almost doubled over 18 months because the housing market slump had made it hard to sell property. The association said at the time restrictions could be considered if such requests kept increasing. A spokesman was at the weekend unable to say if councils had begun to limit the number of arrangements. Another scheme studied by the Dilnot commission is the Rowntree Foundation’s “home cash plan” pilot, run with a financial services company and three councils. It enables homeowners to free up money from the value of their property to pay for care at home. Under the scheme, in Maidstone, Kent, and in the London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, and Islington, people can borrow an initial £5,000 and further instalments up to a £30,000 ceiling. However, the arrangements carry fees of about £1,000. Long-term care Welfare Older people Carers Social care Health Local politics Local government Ed Miliband David Brindle Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk
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Prince William and Kate made an unscheduled walkabout to greet hundreds of supporters outside City Hall Sunday undeterred by anti-monarchist, French-speaking separatists protesting nearby. (July 3)
Continue reading …The All American Flash Mob: Singers at Mall Belt Out “America the Beautiful,” Wave US Flags… And Plug Japanese Water Purifiers? (Video)
July 3, 2011 No Comment
This is what democracy looks like– A group of patriotic singers surprised the shoppers at a food court recently. The patriotic flash mob stood and Sang “America the Beautiful,” they waved American flags, and they plugged Kangen water purifiers. Happy … Continue reading → Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Gateway Pundit Discovery Date : 03/07/2011 07:05 Number of articles : 2
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Feminist reaction against country’s ‘misogynist reflexes’ continues as poll shows voters split on political comeback France is divided over Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s possible return to public life, with 49% of voters saying they would like to see him back on the political scene. But even his allies concede that he would be returning to a country that is much changed. The feminist uproar against machismo, sexism, harassment and what one commentator called the “misogynist reflexes” of France sparked by Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in May shows no signs of abating. In the seven weeks since the Socialist presidential hopeful was charged with attempted rape and sexual assault, French society has undergone massive soul-searching in its attitudes to women. It was not the DSK case itself that sparked feminist street demonstrations but comments by the French elite, perceived as belittling both rape and women. Caroline de Haas, head of the group Osez le Feminisme , said: “The DSK affair showed that women were fed up with inequalities and machismo of French society.” That anger will continue, she warned. More than 40 feminist groups on Sunday held the biggest conference on women’s rights in a decade, with 600 activists present. Some said interest in the feminist cause had been boosted by the DSK affair, which had sparked a surge in calls to rape counsellors in France. Others hoped that doubts over the credibility of the New York maid in the case would not put off other women from reporting rape. According to a poll for Le Parisien newspaper, 60% of leftwing sympathisers want a political comeback by Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist once tipped to beat Nicolas Sarkozy and win the 2012 presidential election. Pollsters are now expected to dissect whether, regardless of the outcome of the case, his popularity among Frenchwomen will have fallen steeply, as some commentators predict. Although free from house arrest, Strauss-Kahn still faces charges of attempted rape and sexual assault. Both sides accept a sexual encounter took place in his New York hotel suite on 14 May – his lawyers say it was consensual, the hotel maid’s lawyers say it was a brutal sex attack. Stéphane Rozès, head of the political consultants CAP, said whether Strauss-Kahn could return would depend on whether he was cleared of all charges and specifically “what explanation is given by the judge”. He said France had been “traumatised” by the case, but one clear change in French life had been a new confidence among women to speak out about sexism and allegations of sex crimes. He said perception of Strauss-Kahn’s political competence had not changed among voters but his perceived “presidential standing” had been dented among both women and men. However, France would not now begin judging politicians “based on their private lives”, he argued, unless their behaviour was criminal. But Le Monde on Sunday showed some taboos had been broken, running a portrait of Strauss-Kahn with personal details that would have been unthinkable two months ago: former advisers and MPs dissected his philandering, womanising and what the paper called a “fatality of temperament”, “taste for pleasure and risk” and a confidence he wouldn’t get caught that verged on “amorality”. The paper detailed how when an adviser warned him about a 2003 story about involvement in an orgy at a swingers’ club he replied: “You’re just jealous.” In April, he had told reporters from Libération: “Yes, I like women, so what?” The paper said very few of his advisers dared warn against his thrill-seeking. Chantal Jouanno, the sports minister who admitted that French politics was so sexist that she dare not wear a skirt in parliament, told Europe 1 radio: “He hasn’t presented a very positive image, between his taste for luxury and other subjects.” The attitude towards alleged sex crimes in French politics seems to have been transformed. Last week saw parliamentary immunity lifted from Georges Tron, the former civil service minister whom President Nicolas Sarkozy forced to resign over sex assault allegations not long after Strauss-Kahn’s arrest. Tron has now been charged with rape and sexual assault relating to allegations that he attacked women who worked for him in his role as mayor in Draveil, south of Paris, for Sarkozy’s UMP. The women said they were emboldened to come forward after the Strauss-Kahn affair. Tron denies the accusations. “Without the psychodrama of New York, would Tron’s accusers have spoken out? And would Nicolas Sarkozy and [the prime minister] François Fillon have ejected a personality who had become a nuisance?” asked the political writer Bruno Dive in Sud Ouest. This week the Socialist party will decide whether to expel the senator Jacques Mahéas, who was convicted of sexual harassment last year. Socialist politician Pierre Moscovici said that Strauss-Kahn was not yet considering a political future in France but was trying to restore his honour after “worldwide humiliation”. Dominique Strauss-Kahn France Europe Feminism Women Gender Angelique Chrisafis guardian.co.uk
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Liam Byrne insists leaked letter from Eric Pickles office shows ministers ‘haven’t been straight with the House of Commons’ Ministers have been accused of repeatedly misleading MPs about the impact of their £26,000 cap on welfare payments after it emerged that Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, secretly warned the plan would cost more money than it saved and increase homelessness by 20,000. Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, insisted that Pickles’s comments, set out in a letter from his private secretary to No 10 that was leaked to the Observer , showed that a succession of ministers “haven’t been straight with the House of Commons”. They have either dismissed claims that the cap would increase homelessness, or insisted its likely impact was impossible to quantify. The benefit cap, announced by George Osborne, the chancellor, to the delight of the Tory right at the Conservative party conference last autumn, is one of the most high-profile and controversial of the government’s myriad welfare reforms. The welfare bill still has to go through the Lords and Pickles’s letter will embolden peers seeking to amend it so the cap is less punitive. The letter, sent on Pickles’s behalf by Nico Heslop, his private secretary, explicitly says welfare cuts could make 40,000 families homeless. “Our modelling indicates that we could see an additional 20,000 homelessness acceptances as a result of the total benefit cap. This on top of the 20,000 additional acceptances already anticipated as a result of other changes to housing benefit,” Heslop wrote. The letter was sent in January. Since then, ministers and officials have made a series of Commons statements that Labour believes are hard to square with what Pickles was telling No 10 in private. Those highlighted by Labour include: • The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) publishing an impact assessment in February saying that it was “not possible to quantify” the cost to local councils generated by the welfare cap and the likelihood that it will require councils to house some families made homeless. • Grant Shapps, the housing minister, citing the DWP’s impact assessment when specifically asked by a Labour MP if he had an estimate of the number of households that would be made homeless as a result of the benefit cap. • Maria Miller, a welfare minister, telling Karen Buck, a Labour MP, to “get real” when asked about the impact of the benefit cap on homelessness. “I do not accept that the policies we are advocating will have the impact on homelessness that she talked about,” Miller said. • Chris Grayling, another welfare minister, saying: “I do not deny that the benefit cap may result in individual cases of housing mobility [ie, people having to move], but I do not believe that the measure will exacerbate [the problem].” Byrne said on Sunday night: “The idea that you can go out and say that there is no further evidence that you are aware of, four months after the Department for Communities wrote to the prime minister saying there was different evidence, is breathtaking. “We want answers from Iain Duncan Smith [the work and pensions secretary] in the House of Commons about why his department hid official government evidence that his policy would make 40,000 families homeless.” Byrne’s colleague Caroline Flint, the shadow communities secretary, said: “It has become clear that while Eric Pickles defends his government housing policies in public, in truth he doesn’t believe in them. The public and parliament have a right to know why time and again his department dismissed the very same housing concerns he secretly raised with the prime minister.” It is understood that Labour will try to force Pickles and Duncan Smith to respond to an urgent question on this in the Commons chamber on Monday. But it is up to the Speaker, John Bercow, to decide whether to accept the move. In the letter, the Department for Communities and Local Government suggested that the impact of the policy could by ameliorated by ensuring child benefit is not included in those benefits that count towards the cap. But on Sunday , the DWP, which is in charge of the plan to impose a £26,000 cap on the total amount of benefits than can be claimed in any year by an unemployed family, confirmed that Pickles’s proposal had been rejected and that child benefit would be taken into account when the cap comes into force in 2013. In the letter, Heslop also claimed the benefit cap would cost the exchequer money. Although it was projected to save £270m, that sum “does not take account of the additional costs to local authorities (through homelessness and temporary accommodation),” he said. “In fact, we think it is likely that the policy as it stands will generate a net cost.” He also said that up to 23,000 affordable rental units could be lost because the benefit cap would stop developers charging the rents they wanted, giving them less incentive to build property. The DWP said it did not recognise the figures in the letter, and did not accept the cap would increase homelessness. “You know what councils are like – when they have concerns, they are very vocal about it,” one source said. “The cap only comes in at £26,000 and that’s equivalent to a gross income of £35,000 for a family that’s working. And the minute someone enters into part-time work, they are exempted from the cap,” the source went on. “There might be some people who have to move to a less expensive area. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have anywhere to live. We are very optimistic about the behavioural change that this will bring about. We have already started to change housing benefit. And have you seen droves of homeless people? No, you have not.” The Department for Communities said Pickles was “fully supportive of the government’s policies on benefits”. A source said Pickles had not personally raised the issues set out in the letter with cabinet colleagues, either formally or informally. A spokesperson for the DWP said: We cannot carry on with a situation where people on benefits can receive more in welfare payments than hard-working families and where a life on benefits robs people of achieving their potential. No one needs to be homeless because of these reforms. Many working families live on this amount of money.” Welfare Homelessness Eric Pickles Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk
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Novak Djokovic won the men’s Wimbledon title on Sunday with a four sets win over Rafael Nadal. Djokovic, who has won 48 of 49 matches this year, beat the defending champion 6-4, 6-1, 1-6, 6-3. (July 3)
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Casey Anthony’s attorney resumed his closing arguments by ridiculing the prosecution’s forensic evidence as a “fantasy.” (July 3)
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Click here to view this media (h/t Heather of VideoCafe ) New media? They keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what they think it means. Five Villagers, comfortably ensconced within the Beltway Bubble and the DC Cocktail Circuit, sit around and discuss how “new media” has changed modern politics. Except… Showing themselves to be on the pulse of what’s happening right now, they look the 2003 smearing of John Kerry by Swiftboaters and the astroturfed uprising of the town halls prior over the summer before the ACA vote. And they point to YouTube (?) and viral videos as the stuff that changed the world. But really, who played the Swiftboat ads ad nauseam to an audience perhaps not inclined to get their news from the internet (who gets their news from YouTube, for crying out loud?)? It was the mainstream media on the content-starved 24 hour news channels who played those videos and played right into the hands of these insidious partisan astroturf groups. It was Drudge and his rumors that ruled the mainstream airwaves. Sarah Palin did serious damage to Obama’s health care reform? No…the mainstream media that lapped up every ghostwritten Facebook entry and breathlessly repeated them verbatim did damage…and even then, polls showed that most Americans wanted even more than the ACA offered. The whole concept of “death panels” SHOULD have been laughed off by any responsible media outlet, but instead was left for the “new media” on the left to push back against. Katty Kay tries to give all the Villagers an out, by claiming that these videos reflected the zeitgeist of the American people…but did they? At best, they reflected the zeitgeist of a very, very small percentage of American millionaires and corporations. I think there are very cogent arguments that new media has changed American politics. But it’s also very clear that the old guard of the mainstream media is completely behind the curve on how and why.
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Gmail’s getting a makeover. According to a post on the Gmail Blog, Google’s popular email service will soon roll out updates to the Gmail interface that are designed to streamline the appearance of the tool to make it easier for users to manage their mail. “Over the years, adding countless features to Gmail has made it an increasingly powerful communication hub, but along the way the interface has also become more cluttered and complex,” wrote Jason Cornwell, User Experience Designer for the service. “That’s one of the reasons we’re embarking on a series of interface updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful.” As part of this revamp, Google Calendar will be getting a new look, too. (Click here to see a sample of the Calendar redesign.) The changes will be gradually rolled out over the next few months. Right now, users can apply Google’s new settings to preview two of the upcoming themes, which feature different information densities. While the two themes available now are fairly simple, Google promises that updated themes with colors and illustrations are on their way. Google also notes that some Labs features will not display properly in the preview. To try out the new themes, simply go to Mail Settings in Gmail, then to the “Themes” tab. The new themes are titled “Preview” and “Preview (dense),” and they appear at the bottom of the list of available themes. Choose one to test-drive the new Gmail for yourself, or view screenshots of the new setup (below). LOOK:
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