Fuel assistance drying up

Community activists are urging the federal government to increase fuel assistance funding, saying 50,000 households across the Bay State who depend on the aid to heat their homes may be left out in the cold by Christmas.

"We have thousands of households who do not have enough assistance," said John Drew, CEO of Action for Boston Community Development. "We're not in a position to help a lot of people right now."

ABCD has significantly less money this year, in part because of the federal sequester, to provide fuel assistance benefits to those who heat their homes with oil, Drew said.

"We're starting this winter off with about 25 percent less money than last year," he said.

The maximum benefit for the poorest families is $950, and with oil at $4 a gallon, ABCD is only able to fund one tank of oil, he said, meaning those who applied early will use up their benefits soon. ABCD estimates 5,000 households they help are maxed out and may run out by Christmas, and 50,000 across the state are in the same position.

"In past winters, we had enough money to provide two tanks for the winter," Drew said.

ABCD has received more than 17,000 applications for fuel assistance so far.

Maria Cazeau, a 54-year-old minister who was laid off and receives heating assistance, said she depends on the oil ABCD provides.

"I don't have enough money to support me, so I need that help," Cazeau said.

She said her home needs to be kept warm because a sick, elderly woman is staying with her.

In November, Gov. Deval Patrick and governors of 13 other states sent a letter to Congress seeking a boost in the funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program from the current $2.6 billion to $3.6 billion. The letter noted average winter home heating costs have increased by 6 percent.

"LIHEAP is a critical bridge of Americans — many of them elderly, disabled or caring for dependent children — who otherwise may be forced to choose between paying home energy bills and paying for food, medicine or other essentials," the letter said.

Still, Drew said more funding is anything but certain, even with the promise of a newly signed federal budget deal.

"There may be some federal money, and there may not be federal money," Drew said.

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

Chamber lists priorities for next Boston mayor

BOSTON — Boston business leaders are out with a list of priorities for the city's incoming mayor.

The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce unveiled a "growth agenda" that outlines four key initiatives the group hopes Mayor-elect Martin Walsh will focus on after taking office on Jan. 6.

The chamber is calling for Walsh to work with business and government leaders throughout Greater Boston on infrastructure improvements including the expansion of South Station, upgrades to the Port of Boston and new international connections from Logan International Airport.

The report also asks Walsh to work toward lowering of the city's commercial property tax rate, a streamlining the permitting process and relaxing the current cap on charter schools in Boston.

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

Appeals court allows horse slaughterhouses to open

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Companies in New Mexico and Missouri could begin slaughtering horses within a few weeks after a federal appeals court removed a temporary ban that was preventing domestic horse slaughter from resuming for the first time since 2007.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver lifted an emergency injunction Friday that it had issued in November after animal protection groups appealed the ruling of a federal judge in Albuquerque. The judge said the U.S. Department of Agriculture followed proper procedure in issuing permits to Valley Meat Co. in Roswell, N.M., Rains Natural Meats of Gallatin, Mo., and Responsible Transportation in Sigourney, Iowa.

The appeals court's order Friday said the groups "failed to meet their burden for an injunction pending appeal."

Blair Dunn, an attorney for Valley Meat and Rains Natural Meats, said the order lifts the emergency status of the case, meaning it will likely be months before a final decision is issued.

Dunn said the plants are ready to open, although they could agree to remain shuttered if the plaintiffs agree to post a sufficient bond to cover the companies' losses should they ultimately prevail.

"They are getting ready to go as quickly as they can. It shouldn't take too long. Not more than two weeks," he said.

The Humane Society of the United States said, however, that "the fight for America's horses is not over."

"We will press for a quick resolution of the merits of our claims in the 10th Circuit," said Jonathan R. Lovvorn, the group's senior vice president of animal protection litigation and investigations.

The plants would become the first horse slaughterhouses to operate in the U.S. since Congress effectively banned horse slaughter by eliminating funding for inspections at the plants. Congress restored that funding in 2011, but the USDA did not approve the first permits for horse slaughterhouses until this summer.

The issue has divided horse rescue and animal welfare groups, ranchers, politicians and Indian tribes about what is the most humane way to deal with the country's horse overpopulation, and what rescue groups have said are a rising number of neglected and starving horses as the West deals with persistent drought.

The companies want to ship horse meat to countries where it is consumed by humans or used as animal feed.

Valley Meat and Responsible Transportation were set to begin horse slaughter operations in August, but U.S. District Judge Christina Armijo blocked their plans while she heard the lawsuit by The Humane Society of the United States, Front Range Equine Rescue and others. The groups claimed the plants should have been forced to undergo environmental reviews under provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act.

Responsible Transportation abandoned its horse slaughter plans and converted its plant to cattle before Armijo dismissed the lawsuit in November.

Attorneys for the plants have argued that the plaintiffs are simply in court because they are morally opposed to horse slaughter and are looking for a way to delay the plants while they lobby Congress for a ban.

Proponents of a return to domestic horse slaughter point to a 2011 report from the federal Government Accountability Office that shows horse abuse and abandonment have increased since domestic horse slaughter was banned. They say it is better to slaughter the animals in humane, federally regulated facilities than have them abandoned to starve across the drought-stricken West or shipped to inhumane facilities in Mexico.

Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, calls the practice barbaric and has said blocking a return to domestic horse slaughter "is an issue of national importance and scale."

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

RV users help Amazon keep up with holiday rush

CAMPBELLSVILLE, Ky. — Twinkling lights, decorated trees and bustling campgrounds. Those are signs of the Christmas season in Campbellsville, Ky., where the Amazon.com distribution center recruits an armada of RV owners as seasonal workers to help fill holiday orders.

They're dubbed the "CamperForce" by the world's largest online retailer. The hundreds of temporary workers are assigned packing, sorting and collection duties at Amazon facilities in Kentucky, Kansas and Nevada, roles meant to keep orders flowing during the yuletide rush.

Swarms of workers take up temporary residence in campgrounds. For many, it's another short-term stint on a nonstop journey. It's a lifestyle and mindset for the retirees, empty nesters and younger parents who shuck traditions of home and work to roam from campsite to campsite, job to job.

The stints last about three months.

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

Michelin recalls 1.2 million tires in US

WASHINGTON — Tire-maker Michelin says it is recalling about 1.2 million tires sold in the U.S. because an increasing number are experiencing tread loss or rapid air loss.

The tires are commonly used for pickup trucks, heavy-duty vans, small RVs and commercial light trucks. The Greenville, S.C-based company says no deaths or injuries have been reported because of the tires.

The tires, known as Michelin LTX M/S tires, were manufactured between January 2010 and June 2012. They were sold as original equipment on some vehicles and as new replacement tires.

The company says that fewer than 200 of the tires have been returned by customers. Owners can have them replaced at Michelin stores for no charge.

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

China bans shellfish imports from US West Coast

SEATTLE — China has suspended imports of shellfish from the U.S. West Coast, cutting off one of the biggest export markets for Northwest companies.

KUOW public radio reports (http://bit.ly/1fe35To) that the Chinese government imposed the ban after discovering that recent shipments of geoduck clams from Northwest waters had high levels of arsenic and a toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning.

The Chinese government says the ban that started last week will continue indefinitely.

Clams, oysters and all other two-shelled bivalves harvested off Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Northern California are affected.

The U.S. exported $68 million worth of geoduck clams last year — most of which came from Puget Sound. Nearly 90 percent of those geoduck exports went to China.

___

Information from: KUOW-FM, http://www.kuow.org/

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

How the AP-GfK poll was conducted

The Associated Press-GfK poll on the health care overhaul was conducted by GfK Public Affairs and Corporate Communications Dec. 5-9. It is based on online interviews of 1,367 adults who are members of GfK's nationally representative KnowledgePanel.

The original sample was drawn from a panel of respondents recruited via phone or mail survey methods. GfK provides Internet access to panel recruits who don't already have it. With a probability basis and coverage of people who otherwise couldn't access the Internet, online surveys using KnowledgePanel are nationally representative.

Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.

As is done routinely in surveys, results were weighted, or adjusted, to ensure that responses accurately reflect the population's makeup by factors such as age, sex, race, education and phone usage.

No more than 1 time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than plus or minus 3.5 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all adults in the U.S. were polled.

There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions.

The questions and results are available at http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com .

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

Reading the tech tea leaves

Predictions are a tricky business, but I did tell you last year that 2013 would be the year that Best Buy started to go bye-bye, that wearable devices like the Jawbone Up would be huge and that Apple's stock surge would start to collapse. So I'm reading technological tea leaves again for 2014. Here is my five-part forecast for next year:

5: It will be the year foreign diplomacy goes social. We saw the first hint of this Nov. 23, when the Iranian president retweeted Secretary of State John Kerry's comments following a historic agreement on nukes between the two parties in Geneva.

Though I wouldn't call Kerry and the Iranian president "tweeps," Hassan Rouhani's Twitter olive branch received thousands of retweets and exposed a new way to take foreign policy directly to the people — for better or worse — in 140 characters or less. More foreign leaders, perhaps even some right here at home, are sure to follow suit.

4: Health care will go the way of the wearable. Consumers will begin to see and experience many more devices and apps that help them to monitor personal health and wellness, with metrics like blood-sugar levels, blood pressure and more. These devices will begin to automatically send information on you to your doctor, and will be pushed by health insurance carriers who see their value in disease prevention.

3: Google Glass will not come to market. Though I'm as jazzed as anyone about the prospect of augmented reality goggles that make my line of sight a whole lot smarter, I don't see how they get the price down to a level that consumers will be willing to pay. Despite many pronouncements that the product will be available to consumers in 2014, I see the device remaining with a select group handpicked by Google for their beta-testing program, at least for the next year.

2: Haptics will be the next big thing. That's a field of technology devoted to tactile feedback, or in some cases tricking your nerves into thinking they feel virtual objects that aren't actually present.

We'll start to see the first rumblings of tablets that allow you to virtually "feel" a sweater before you buy it online.

1: The next holiday shopping season will feature a new addition: 3-D printers and pens. A beneficiary of this hopefully will be the fine folks at Somerville's Formlabs, whose pioneering 3-D printer, the Form 1, is a sleek-looking producer of three-dimensional objects.

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

An unsettling time for real estate owners and investors

WASHINGTON — For one of the least productive congressional sessions in modern history, the final word about tax reform last week was entirely in character: Nothing's happening.

But is that good news or bad news for homeowners, buyers and small-scale real estate investors? A bit of both.

When House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) announced that not only will he not reveal the details of his long-awaited comprehensive tax reform bill this year but he also will not seek passage of a so-called "extenders" bill for expiring tax code benefits, it was a sweet and sour mix for real estate interests.

Camp's big reform bill — which would attempt to lower individual and corporate income tax rates to a maximum of 25 percent, is expected to call for significant cutbacks — possibly elimination — of prized real estate deductions for home mortgage interest, local property taxes and other write-offs in order to pay for lower marginal rates. With major changes like these now pushed back well into 2014 for even preliminary debate — in the middle of a re-election year for Congress — 
homeownership advocates are at least moderately relieved.

But there's a key negative here as well: The failure of tax writers to put together an extenders bill means that important expiring Internal Revenue Code provisions affecting large numbers of 
homeowners — especially relief from taxation on mortgage debt forgiveness by lenders in most states, plus current deductions for mortgage insurance premiums and energy-saving home improvements — will lapse Dec. 31. California owners are not affected by the debt forgiveness expiration because state law exempts them from taxation when lenders cancel mortgage principal debt as part of short sales. The IRS has announced that it will not levy taxes on such transactions in California even if the federal exemption for owners elsewhere expires.

Complicating matters even more: Though they were tucked away in eye-glazing discussion drafts and attracted little attention before Thanksgiving, Senate tax writers' reform-bill proposals for real estate should be unsettling for anyone owning residential investment property, such as rental houses.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, (D-Mont.) would terminate one of the oldest financial planning techniques used by real estate investors — tax-deferred exchanges under Section 1031 of the code. In a 1031 exchange, property owners can defer taxes indefinitely when they swap "like kind" investment real estate within specified time periods following IRS regulations. Under current law, investors can exchange rental real estate without incurring immediate tax liability — even if they've racked up huge paper gains on their properties. Taxes generally are not due until the investors actually sell their real estate for money.

Baucus also would increase sharply the depreciation period for residential investment real estate from the current 27.5 years to 43 years. Stretching out the depreciation schedule means investors would be able write off less per year on their properties than at present.

On top of that, the Senate reform proposal also would tax so-called "recapture" of depreciation — where the IRS requires payback of a portion of an investor's earlier write-offs — at property owners' ordinary income tax rates, rather than at lower capital gains rates, as at present.

Under Baucus' plan, mom-and-pop real estate investors — people who've purchased a small portfolio of rental houses or condos — could be hit hard. Besides the depreciation deduction stretch-out, the inability to exchange properties tax-free for others of similar or greater value would put a severe crimp on their ability to grow and manage their investments over time.

William Horan, president of Realty Exchange Corp. of Gainesville, Va., says "if Section 1031 of the code is repealed, then small investor owners would be facing massive taxes and most likely would not sell their properties. Real estate values for everyone would be lowered by removing vital investors from the market."

A more immediate concern for homeowners, however, is Congress' inability — or unwillingness — this year to extend key tax laws. Tops on the list is the mortgage debt forgiveness law. Unless Congress agrees to a retroactive extension, large numbers of owners could face big tax bills following short sales, foreclosures or loan modifications next year when lenders cancel a portion of the balances owed them.

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More

AP-GfK poll: Health law seen as eroding coverage

WASHINGTON — Americans who already have health insurance are blaming President Barack Obama's health care overhaul for their rising premiums and deductibles, and overall 3 in 4 say the rollout of coverage for the uninsured has gone poorly.

An Associated Press-GfK poll finds that health care remains politically charged going into next year's congressional elections. Keeping the refurbished HealthCare.gov website running smoothly is just one of Obama's challenges, maybe not the biggest.

The poll found a striking level of unease about the law among people who have health insurance and aren't looking for government help. Those are the 85 percent of Americans who the White House says don't have to be worried about the president's historic push to expand coverage for the uninsured.

In the survey, nearly half of those with job-based or other private coverage say their policies will be changing next year — mostly for the worse. Nearly 4 in 5 (77 percent) blame the changes on the Affordable Care Act, even though the trend toward leaner coverage predates the law's passage.

Sixty-nine percent say their premiums will be going up, while 59 percent say annual deductibles or copayments are increasing.

Only 21 percent of those with private coverage said their plan is expanding to cover more types of medical care, though coverage of preventive care at no charge to the patient has been required by the law for the past couple of years.

Fourteen percent said coverage for spouses is being restricted or eliminated, and 11 percent said their plan is being discontinued.

"Rightly or wrongly, people with private insurance looking at next year are really worried about what is going to happen," said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who tracks public opinion on health care issues. "The website is not the whole story."

Employers trying to control their health insurance bills have been shifting costs to workers for years, but now those changes are blamed increasingly on "Obamacare" instead of the economy or insurance companies.

Political leanings seemed to affect perceptions of eroding coverage, with larger majorities of Republicans and independents saying their coverage will be affected.

The White House had hoped that the Oct. 1 launch of open enrollment season for the uninsured would become a teaching moment, a showcase of the president's philosophy that government can help smooth out the rough edges of life in the modern economy for working people.

Instead, the dysfunctional website became a parable for Republicans and others skeptical of government.

At the same time, a cresting wave of cancellation notices hit millions who buy their policy directly from an insurer. That undercut one of Obama's central promises — that you can keep the coverage you have if you like it. The White House never clearly communicated the many caveats to that promise.

Disapproval of Obama's handling of health care topped 60 percent in the poll.

With the website working better and enrollments picking up, Democrats are hoping negative impressions will quickly fade in the rearview mirror. The poll found that Democrats still have an edge over Republicans, by 32 percent to 22 percent, when it comes to whom the public trusts to handle health care.

But other potential bumps are just ahead for Obama's law.

It is unclear whether everyone who wants and needs coverage by Jan. 1 will be able to get it through the new online insurance markets. Some people who have to switch plans because their policies were cancelled may find that their new insurance covers different drugs, or that they have to look for other doctors.

In the poll, taken just after the revamped federal website was unveiled, 11 percent of Americans said they or someone in their household had tried to sign up for health insurance in the new marketplaces.

Sixty-two percent of those said they or the person in their household ran into problems. About one-fourth of all who tried managed to enroll. Half said they were not able to buy insurance, and the remaining quarter said they weren't sure.

Phyllis Dessel, 63, of Reading, Pa., believes she is finally enrolled after 50 attempts online. The retired social worker, a political independent, currently has her own private insurance.

When Dessel described her experience, she jokingly asked, "Do you mind if I cry?"

Thanks to tax credits available under the law, she was able to save about $100 a month on her coverage. But she had to switch carriers because a plan with her current insurer cost more than she was willing to pay. She hasn't gotten an invoice yet from her new insurance company.

The premiums were "not at all" what she expected, said Dessel. "They were much, much higher."

A supporter of Obama's overhaul, she believes changes are needed to make the coverage more affordable.

"I think with a lot of amendments or updates, it could be very, very helpful and beneficial," said Dessel. "I know a lot of people who don't have insurance. My hairdresser, my plumber don't have insurance and they're not going to get it if it's not affordable."

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Dec. 5-9 and involved online interviews with 1,367 adults. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for all respondents.

The survey was conducted using KnowledgePanel, a probability-based Internet panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. Respondents to the survey were first selected randomly using phone or mail survey methods, and were later interviewed online. People selected for KnowledgePanel who didn't otherwise have access to the Internet were provided with the ability to access the Internet at no cost to them.

___

AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and Associated Press writer Stacy A. Anderson contributed to this report.

___

Online:

AP-GfK Poll: http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com

23.40 | 0 komentar | Read More