Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/267910306?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, December 2, 2012
New York City ~ Property Tax: Tax Relief Proposed for Homeowners ...
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and Finance Commissioner David Frankel announced new property tax relief initiatives to assist New Yorkers whose homes were severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
If authorized by the City Council, the Finance Department will issue an interest-free extension on the next property tax bill for residential properties damaged beyond repair or in need of extensive structural repairs before they can be reinhabited. The grace period will postpone payments due on January 1, 2013, to April 1, 2013.
The City also proposed to reimburse homeowners for a portion of the property taxes due this fiscal year so that the payments more accurately reflect properties? post-storm values. If enacted, the reimbursement measure would equal $794 on average per property and would require approval from the New York Legislature.
Release, Office of New York City Mayor Bloomberg, November 29, 2012
This entry was posted in State Tax Headlines, Tax Headlines. Bookmark the permalink.north korea missile nerlens noel don t trust the b in apartment 23 world financial center shabazz muhammad angela corey zimmerman charged
Business Marketing and Running It Correctly | We Do Games ...
Do you run a web based business? In case yes, are you satisfied with the existing income? Even if you are satisfied with the money which you?re currently making, you may be trying to make even more. Then you must assess your marketing plan, if you are using any marketing strategy.
When it comes to marketing a web based business, you will often find that it is easier to market a web based business than it is a storefront business. The sole cause of this easiness is simply the world wide web. The wonderful world of internet will facilitate you in promoting your business. A few of those methods are briefly discussed below.
One of the many ways that you can go about marketing your business on the web is by using on-line discussion boards, which are also commonly referred to as online forums. Online discussion boards or on-line forums are communities where web users can come together and discuss activities or interests they may share. There are many internet message boards or forums which allow participating members to have what is termed as a signature.
Internet searches can greatly influence income of your small business on-line. Subsequently, your website whether you are in product sale business or not should be optimized for the search engines like google. This process is simply called search engine optimization. With regard to search engine optimization, content is really important. Your website needs to be filled with content that the search engines will notice, as well as content which the website visitors can read. If you need help with this, you may want to consider hiring the services of a search engine optimization consultant and a professional content writer.
The above tools are few means to improve search engine optimization and ultimately the earnings of your on-line business. For making the most out of your small business and acquiring success, utilize more than one of these marketing strategies.
Want to find out more about small business marketing tips, then visit Jenn Joliksky?s site on how to choose the best video seo for your needs.
Source: http://wedonetwork.co.uk/wedotech/2012/12/01/business-marketing-and-running-it-correctly/
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Saturday, December 1, 2012
U.N. vote recognizes state of Palestine; U.S. objects
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The 193-nation U.N. General Assembly on Thursday overwhelmingly approved the de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on the world body to issue its long overdue "birth certificate."
The U.N. victory for the Palestinians was a diplomatic setback for the United States and Israel, which were joined by only a handful of countries in voting against the move to upgrade the Palestinian Authority's observer status at the United Nations to "non-member state" from "entity," like the Vatican.
Britain called on the United States to use its influence to help break the long impasse in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Washington also called for a revival of direct negotiations.
There were 138 votes in favor, nine against and 41 abstentions. Three countries did not take part in the vote, held on the 65th anniversary of the adoption of U.N. resolution 181 that partitioned Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.
Thousands of flag-waving Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip set off fireworks and danced in the streets to celebrate the vote.
The assembly approved the upgrade despite threats by the United States and Israel to punish the Palestinians by withholding funds for the West Bank government. U.N. envoys said Israel might not retaliate harshly against the Palestinians over the vote as long as they do not seek to join the International Criminal Court.
If the Palestinians were to join the ICC, they could file complaints with the court accusing Israel of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious crimes.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the vote "unfortunate and counterproductive," while the Vatican praised the move and called for an internationally guaranteed special status for Jerusalem, something bound to irritate Israel.
The much-anticipated vote came after Abbas denounced Israel from the U.N. podium for its "aggressive policies and the perpetration of war crimes," remarks that elicited a furious response from the Jewish state.
"Sixty-five years ago on this day, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 181, which partitioned the land of historic Palestine into two states and became the birth certificate for Israel," Abbas told the assembly after receiving a standing ovation.
"The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the State of Palestine," he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded quickly, condemning Abbas' critique of Israel as "hostile and poisonous," and full of "false propaganda.
"These are not the words of a man who wants peace," Netanyahu said in a statement released by his office. He reiterated Israeli calls for direct talks with the Palestinians, dismissing Thursday's resolution as "meaningless."
ICC THREAT
A number of Western delegations noted that Thursday's vote should not be interpreted as formal legal recognition of a Palestinian state. Formal recognition of statehood is something that is done bilaterally, not by the United Nations.
Granting Palestinians the title of "non-member observer state" falls short of full U.N. membership - something the Palestinians failed to achieve last year. But it does have important legal implications - it would allow them access to the ICC and other international bodies, should they choose to join.
Abbas did not mention the ICC in his speech. But Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told reporters after the vote that if Israel continued to build illegal settlements, the Palestinians might pursue the ICC route.
"As long as the Israelis are not committing atrocities, are not building settlements, are not violating international law, then we don't see any reason to go anywhere," he said.
"If the Israelis continue with such policy - aggression, settlements, assassinations, attacks, confiscations, building walls - violating international law, then we have no other remedy but really to knock those to other places," Maliki said.
In Washington, a group of four Republican and Democratic senators announced legislation that would close the Palestinian office in Washington unless the Palestinians enter "meaningful negotiations" with Israel, and eliminate all U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority if it turns to the ICC.
"I fear the Palestinian Authority will now be able to use the United Nations as a political club against Israel," said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the sponsors.
Abbas led the campaign to win support for the resolution, which followed an eight-day conflict this month between Israel and Islamists in the Gaza Strip, who are pledged to Israel's destruction and oppose a negotiated peace.
The vote highlighted how deeply divided Europe is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At least 17 European nations voted in favor of the Palestinian resolution, including Austria, France, Italy, Norway and Spain. Abbas had focused his lobbying efforts on Europe, which supplies much of the aid the Palestinian Authority relies on. Britain, Germany and many others chose to abstain.
The traditionally pro-Israel Czech Republic was unique in Europe, joining the United States, Israel, Canada, Panama and the tiny Pacific Island states Nauru, Palau, Marshall Islands and Micronesia in voting against the move.
'HOPE SOME REASON WILL PREVAIL'
Peace talks have been stalled for two years, mainly over Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which have expanded despite being deemed illegal by most of the world. There are 4.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
After the vote, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice called for the immediate resumption of peace talks.
"The Palestinian people will wake up tomorrow and find that little about their lives has changed save that the prospects of a durable peace have only receded," she said.
She added that both parties should "avoid any further provocative actions in the region, in New York or elsewhere."
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said he hoped all sides would use the vote to push for new breakthroughs in the peace process.
"I hope there will be no punitive measures," Fayyad told Reuters in Washington, where he was attending a conference.
"I hope that some reason will prevail and the opportunity will be taken to take advantage of what happened today in favor of getting a political process moving," he said.
Britain's U.N. ambassador, Mark Lyall Grant, told reporters it was time for recently re-elected U.S. President Barack Obama to make a new push for peace.
"We believe the window for the two-state solution is closing," he said. "That is why we are encouraging the United States and other key international actors to grasp this opportunity and use the next 12 months as a way to really break through this impasse."
(Additional reporting by Andrew Quinn in Washington, Noah Browning in Ramallah, Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem, Robert Mueller in Prague, Gabriela Baczynska and Reuters bureaux in Europe and elsewhere; Editing by Eric Beech and Peter Cooney)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/palestinians-win-implicit-u-n-recognition-sovereign-state-002420090.html
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Moody's downgrade eurozone bailout fund
BERLIN (AP) ? Rating agency Moody's has stripped the eurozone's new ?500 billion ($615 billion) bailout fund of its top credit rating.
Moody's announced Friday to downgrade the European Stability Mechanism's long-term debt rating from AAA to Aa1, maintaining a negative outlook.
The agency said its decision was driven by its earlier downgrade of France. The eurozone's second-largest economy guarantees a sizable part of the ESM's loan capacity.
ESM chief Klaus Regling called the decision "difficult to understand," saying it does "not sufficiently acknowledge ESM's exceptionally strong institutional framework, political commitment and capital structure."
The ESM ? one of the 17-nation eurozone's key tools in fighting off its debt crisis ? continues to be assigned a top-notch long-term rating by Fitch. Moody's and Fitch also see the fund's short-term credit rating as AAA.
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Precisely engineering 3-D brain tissues
ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2012) ? Borrowing from microfabrication techniques used in the semiconductor industry, MIT and Harvard Medical School (HMS) engineers have developed a simple and inexpensive way to create three-dimensional brain tissues in a lab dish.
The new technique yields tissue constructs that closely mimic the cellular composition of those in the living brain, allowing scientists to study how neurons form connections and to predict how cells from individual patients might respond to different drugs. The work also paves the way for developing bioengineered implants to replace damaged tissue for organ systems, according to the researchers.
"We think that by bringing this kind of control and manipulation into neurobiology, we can investigate many different directions," says Utkan Demirci, an assistant professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).
Demirci and Ed Boyden, associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT's Media Lab and McGovern Institute, are senior authors of a paper describing the new technique, which appears in the Nov. 27 online edition of the journal Advanced Materials. The paper's lead author is Umut Gurkan, a postdoc at HST, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital.
'Unique challenges'
Although researchers have had some success growing artificial tissues such as liver or kidney, "the brain presents some unique challenges," Boyden says. "One of the challenges is the incredible spatial heterogeneity. There are so many kinds of cells, and they have such intricate wiring."
Brain tissue includes many types of neurons, including inhibitory and excitatory neurons, as well as supportive cells such as glial cells. All of these cells occur at specific ratios and in specific locations.
To mimic this architectural complexity in their engineered tissues, the researchers embedded a mixture of brain cells taken from the primary cortex of rats into sheets of hydrogel. They also included components of the extracellular matrix, which provides structural support and helps regulate cell behavior.
Those sheets were then stacked in layers, which can be sealed together using light to crosslink hydrogels. By covering layers of gels with plastic photomasks of varying shapes, the researchers could control how much of the gel was exposed to light, thus controlling the 3-D shape of the multilayer tissue construct.
This type of photolithography is also used to build integrated circuits onto semiconductors -- a process that requires a photomask aligner machine, which costs tens of thousands of dollars. However, the team developed a much less expensive way to assemble tissues using masks made from sheets of plastic, similar to overhead transparencies, held in place with alignment pins.
The tissue cubes can be made with a precision of 10 microns, comparable to the size of a single cell body. At the other end of the spectrum, the researchers are aiming to create a cubic millimeter of brain tissue with 100,000 cells and 900 million connections.
Answering fundamental questions
Because the tissues include a diverse repertoire of brain cells, occurring in the same ratios as they do in natural brain tissue, they could be used to study how neurons form the connections that allow them to communicate with each other.
"In the short term, there's a lot of fundamental questions you can answer about how cells interact with each other and respond to environmental cues," Boyden says.
As a first step, the researchers used these tissue constructs to study how a neuron's environment might constrain its growth. To do this, they placed single neurons in gel cubes of different sizes, then measured the cells' neurites, long extensions that neurons use to communicate with other cells. It turns out that under these conditions, neurons get "claustrophobic," Demirci says. "In small gels, they don't necessarily send out as long neurites as they would in a five-times-larger gel."
In the long term, the researchers hope to gain a better understanding of how to design tissue implants that could be used to replace damaged tissue in patients. Much research has been done in this area, but it has been difficult to figure out whether the new tissues are correctly wiring up with existing tissue and exchanging the right kinds of information.
Another long-term goal is using the tissues for personalized medicine. One day, doctors may be able to take cells from a patient with a neurological disorder and transform them into induced pluripotent stem cells, then induce these constructs to grow into neurons in a lab dish. By exposing these tissues to many possible drugs, "you might be able to figure out if a drug would benefit that person without having to spend years giving them lots of different drugs," Boyden says.
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. The original article was written by Anne Trafton.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Umut Atakan Gurkan, Yantao Fan, Feng Xu, Burcu Erkmen, Emel Sokullu Urkac, Gunes Parlakgul, Jacob Bernstein, Wangli Xing, Edward S. Boyden, Utkan Demirci. Simple Precision Creation of Digitally Specified, Spatially Heterogeneous, Engineered Tissue Architectures. Advanced Materials, 2012; DOI: 10.1002/adma.201203261
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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/top_news/top_health/~3/fUfdj_J3bHc/121129143454.htm
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Christmas present ideas for babies and toddlers
Review
I don?t think I?ve ever been more aware of the potential pitfalls of Christmas gluttony than this year. Having a toddler who is becoming increasingly aware of the idea of ?presents?, I?m keen not to get into a cycle of materialistic abandon, buying everything in sight for my beautiful girl.
That said, she does have a range of gorgeous things to open on Christmas Day. Some of these are second hand (a ?10 wooden doll?s house I?m going to paint) and some are new. The brand spanking new presents are all things I know she?ll love and get lots of use from. And there is no pink in sight.
The toys
I love wooden toys. There?s something old-fashioned and wholesome about them. Plus, they look so much prettier than a lot of the plastic stuff around for kids.
This bundle of toys was bought from a website I write and blog for ? Mums and Me ? and I was beyond excited to take delivery of them. Each puzzle, stamp or game in the collection has an educational focus and the bright colours are sure to appeal to my bright loving toddler. She was given a Melissa and Doug puzzle for Christmas last year which is still her favourite, so I know these toys from the same brand will be met with delight.
The books
I?m planning to get Frog a few second hand books from our local charity shop this year, as she has lots and lots of books already which she reads religiously every day. That said, there was a book we were given earlier this year which I would highly recommend if you have a pre-schooler who enjoys reading.
Arlo Needs Glasses by Barney Saltzberg is all about a dog who finds out he needs specs. The pop-up book is beautifully illustrated and very funny. Kids can take out the different types of glasses and try them on Arlo, an activity that my two year old loved.
I like the fact there are no princesses or annoying cartoon characters in it and she likes the interactive nature of the book. The only word of warning comes from the fact it?s a pop-up book and toddlers are rough. We?ve had to make Arlo a mum / Frog activity only. She?s not allowed near it without supervision!
The snuggly stuff
She?s a bit big for babygrows and little comforters now, but my toddler is still a lover of snuggles and reclining like the Queen on the sofa with a blanket.
This blanket from Jelly Babys will be the new living room cosy item of choice after Christmas.
Unlike Frog?s two ?magic? blankets, it?s not an insipid tone of pink and has not a fluffy patch in sight. But it?s bright, soft and very snuggleable (I may just have made that word up).
Jelly Babys are an award winning online retailer in all things baby and toddler. They do some beautiful comforters for tiny babies, gorgeous soft toys and unique cot bumpers. There?ll be some very happy members of the family on Christmas Day (by the way, if you?re a member of my family then look away now ? chances are you?ll be opening one of these soon).
As for the rest of it, Frog will be opening some homemade items lovingly sewn by my mum, some chocolate lovingly bought by me and some outfits lovingly purchased by her granny from the north.
Despite all of this, I?m quite proud of the fact I haven?t spent a fortune on her and I know she?ll be just as excited to wake up with her mum still at home on a weekday morning, which she hasn?t had all year. When I asked her earlier today what happens on Christmas Day, she replied, ?Mummy and Daddy time, family, chocolate and presents?, in that order.
Love that girl.
Source: http://www.mothersalwaysright.com/toddler-christmas-list/
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