Archives for January 2014

The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes Monday’s regular weekly auction of new three- and six-month bills and an auction of four-week bills on Tuesday.

At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.07 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.09 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.01 percent.

The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week:

WEDNESDAY

Leon County, Fla., $75 million of revenue bonds. Competitive.

New Jersey Educational Facilities Authority, $200 million of revenue bonds. Competitive.

Ohio, $150 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive.

Oxnard, Calif., $50 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive.

THURSDAY

San Francisco Unified School District, $205 million of general obligation bonds. Competitive.

ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK

Columbus, Ohio, $97.5 million of general obligation securities. J. P. Morgan Securities.

Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, $150 million of finance revenue bonds. Barclays Capital.

Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, $81.8 million of revenue bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities.

Massachusetts, $100 million of Northeastern University debt securities. Barclays Capital.

Texas, $240 million of permanent university fund bonds. J. P. Morgan Securities.

Troy, Mich., School District, $56 million of debt securities. Stifel Nicolaus.

Walled Lake, Mich., Development Finance Agency, $67.5 million of school building bonds. Stifel Nicolaus

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/business/economy/treasury-auctions-set-for-the-week-of-jan-6.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Gene B. Sperling, President Obama’s top economic adviser, said the program was critical to addressing the lingering issue of unemployment, providing emergency assistance for 1.3 million people who are still looking for work.

“That requires a full-court press,” he said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “It does require more bipartisan effort to create jobs.”

Appearing on two Sunday talk shows, Mr. Sperling continued the Obama administration’s push to restore the support system that provides up to 47 weeks of supplemental payments for unemployed Americans who are still looking for jobs, a program that had been in place since 2008 until it expired last month.

In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama promised to sign legislation extending emergency benefits, calling the lapse in support for struggling Americans “cruel” and warning that it would be a drag on the economy.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Sunday that the current proposal to renew emergency unemployment benefits for three months needed the support of at least four Republicans in addition to Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, who co-sponsored the bill, when the Senate returns on Monday.

Arguing that the majority of Americans support extending unemployment benefits, Mr. Reid called Republicans in Congress “out of touch.”

“Republicans around America want us to do something to extend these benefits,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Why? Because it’s good for the economy. It’s good for the country.”

House Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, have stipulated that any extension of unemployment benefits must be offset with spending cuts.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said on the ABC program “This Week” that he did not object to extending unemployment insurance as long as it was fully funded and done in a way that stimulated job growth, such as through tax breaks for areas with high unemployment.

“I have always said that I’m not opposed to unemployment insurance,” he said. “I am opposed to having it without paying for it.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a top Democrat, said on ABC that Republicans should help restore unemployment benefits, especially with congressional races approaching at the end of the year.

“If they don’t, it’s going to be an election in 2014,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/us/politics/democrats-press-case-for-restoring-unemployment-program.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Gene B. Sperling, President Obama’s top economic adviser, said the program was critical to addressing the lingering issue of unemployment, providing emergency assistance for 1.3 million people who are still looking for work.

“That requires a full-court press,” he said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “It does require more bipartisan effort to create jobs.”

Appearing on two Sunday talk shows, Mr. Sperling continued the Obama administration’s push to restore the support system that provides up to 47 weeks of supplemental payments for unemployed Americans who are still looking for jobs, a program that had been in place since 2008 until it expired last month.

In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama promised to sign legislation extending emergency benefits, calling the lapse in support for struggling Americans “cruel” and warning that it would be a drag on the economy.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Sunday that the current proposal to renew emergency unemployment benefits for three months needed the support of at least four Republicans in addition to Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, who co-sponsored the bill, when the Senate returns on Monday.

Arguing that the majority of Americans support extending unemployment benefits, Mr. Reid called Republicans in Congress “out of touch.”

“Republicans around America want us to do something to extend these benefits,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Why? Because it’s good for the economy. It’s good for the country.”

House Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, have stipulated that any extension of unemployment benefits must be offset with spending cuts.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said on the ABC program “This Week” that he did not object to extending unemployment insurance as long as it was fully funded and done in a way that stimulated job growth, such as through tax breaks for areas with high unemployment.

“I have always said that I’m not opposed to unemployment insurance,” he said. “I am opposed to having it without paying for it.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a top Democrat, said on ABC that Republicans should help restore unemployment benefits, especially with congressional races approaching at the end of the year.

“If they don’t, it’s going to be an election in 2014,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/us/politics/democrats-press-case-for-restoring-unemployment-program.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

WASHINGTON — Russia’s slide from democratic reforms and its relationships with international peers threaten to undercut the spirit of the Olympic Games it hosts next month, failed presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Sunday.

Romney, who led 2002’s Winter Games in Salt Lake City, said he also worried about security preparations but predicted Russia has done everything it can to prevent violence and to protect athletes at the Sochi games.

“I don’t think any major global event that brings people from all over the world together like that can possibly escape the threat of violence,” said Romney, whom Republicans picked to challenge President Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012.

Twin suicide bombings in the Russian city of Volgograd left 34 victims dead last week, just 400 miles from where the Sochi Games will be held.

No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings, but they highlight just how vulnerable the games could be to militant attacks. Separatists seeking to carve out an Islamic state in the North Caucasus have mounted attacks across Russia for nearly two decades, following wars between separatist Chechen rebels and Russian forces.

“Russia has a special problem given the threats that have been leveled,” Romney said.

“There’s no question about it. It’s very, very frightening to have any kind of Olympic event on your national soil,” he added.

Romney’s criticism of Russia is hardly new. During his presidential campaign, Romney called Russia “our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

Picking up that criticism, Romney said Russian President Vladimir Putin has not done enough to pressure Iran to curb its nuclear program or push Syrian President Bashar Assad from power. He also criticized Russia for harboring Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents disclosing several secret spy programs, and for shifting away from democratic reforms that Olympic organizers sought to reward when they picked Sochi to host the games.

“Were it my choice, I would not vote for Russia to hold the Winter Olympics or the Summer Olympics. But it’s not my choice,” Romney said.

Russia also has faced criticism over its new anti-gay law, mounting costs and environmental concerns about the games.

Asked during a “Fox News Sunday” interview whether Russia’s behavior undercut the Olympic games’ sprit, Romney answered yes. He invoked the 1936 Berlin games that took place under Adolf Hitler and his fellow Nazis.

“Hitler’s presence there, that certainly undercut the Olympic message,” Romney said. “And surely that can happen in our time, theoretically or specifically.”

___

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/01/05/us/politics/ap-us-sochi-romney.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The tornado that hit Joplin on May 22, 2011, was the single deadliest in the United States since records were first kept in 1950, according to federal agencies that track storm impacts.

“Milestones are important in the road to recovery and this certainly is a big one for us,” said C.J. Huff, superintendent of Joplin schools. “We have worked hard to get to this point.”

About 1,450 students, who have been attending classes in temporary buildings since the storm, will move to two new elementary schools – Irving Elementary and Soaring Heights Elementary – as well as to East Middle School, Huff said. The openings were due on Monday, but all Joplin schools will be closed due to cold weather.

Joplin’s new high school will open next fall to replace the school demolished in the tornado. The students are now in a former store adjacent to a shopping mall.

Five schools were destroyed and four others were damaged by the tornado, according to school officials.

All of Joplin’s schools have been outfitted with safe rooms, where students and staff can take refuge in case of a tornado, Huff said.

“We said early on that we were going to build back bigger and better than before the storm, and the new schools are example of that,” Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr said.

Rohr said 90 percent of the 7,500 homes and 500 commercial buildings destroyed in the tornado have been replaced. The three new schools cost $65 million, and were funded mostly through insurance and a bond issue voters approved in April 2012.

Seven students and a staff member of the school district were among those who died after the tornado struck on a Sunday afternoon.

(Reporting by Kevin Murphy; Editing by Edith Honan and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/01/05/us/05reuters-usa-missouri-schools.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

It’s been a year since Kenneth and Jacquelyn Johnson’s son was found dead inside a rolled-up gym mat at his high school — the victim, investigators concluded, of a freak accident. Authorities determined 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson fell head-first while reaching for a shoe and was trapped. Almost a full day passed before his body was discovered.

The Johnsons, however, do not accept those findings. Their attorneys say authorities may have covered up evidence that someone killed the teenager. A grim post-mortem photo of his swollen, distorted face has been posted by the family on protest signs and websites to help rally support for reopening the investigation.

“My family won’t be satisfied until someone is behind bars and someone is convicted for what happened,” says Kenneth Johnson, pacing the sidewalk one Friday afternoon as his wife sat with her sister and mother. “Going over it with common sense, how can it be an accident?”

He’s not alone in wondering. Last month, about 200 people joined Johnson’s family outside the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta for a rally calling for answers. The gathering was billed as: “Who Killed K.J.?”

Word has spread through social media, with one Facebook page — “R.I.P. Kendrick Johnson” — drawing more than 25,000 followers. The Florida attorney who represented Trayvon Martin’s family took up the Johnsons’ cause in October, drawing more attention to the case. Now the U.S. attorney for middle Georgia is conducting a formal review.

Perhaps it’s the bizarre manner in which the teenager was found dead that leaves some disbelieving. Or lingering doubts about how police in the South treat cases involving black victims. Or that a grieving family simply cannot come to terms with a tragic loss.

Johnson’s supporters won’t let his case be put to rest. But is there evidence someone killed him?

____

It was the morning of Jan. 11, 2013, at Lowndes High School, a sprawling campus attended by 3,000 students near the Georgia-Florida state line. Philip Pieplow’s gym class was filling out a survey. Some students sat on the bleachers in the school gymnasium, while others climbed atop a cluster of 21 wrestling and cheerleading mats standing three-deep against a wall.

The rolled-up mats stood just over 6 feet high, each measuring nearly 3 feet across. Soon students who had clambered on top of them began yelling for help. A pair of feet clad in socks could be seen inside the center hole of one mat.

“I reached (and) grabbed one of his ankles hoping for a response,” Pieplow said in a written statement included in the investigative file on Kendrick’s death. “There was none, and I knew he was lifeless at that point.”

Students began calling 911 and, within minutes, police and paramedics arrived.

At the same time, Jacquelyn Johnson was at the school asking if her son had shown up for class, guidance counselor Dana Hutchinson later told investigators. Kendrick hadn’t come home the night before.

The youngest of four children, Kendrick grew up in Valdosta, one of the largest cities in rural south Georgia. His grandmother affectionately called him her “peculiar grandchild,” because he tended to be quieter than his brothers and sisters.

A junior at Lowndes High, Kendrick made average grades but had a knack for numbers. He kept accounts in his head of his allowances, his father says, and saved cash in stashes throughout his bedroom.

He also liked sports, having played 8th-grade basketball and football and track when he started high school. After taking a year off from team sports, Kendrick was working toward rejoining the football team, his father says.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/01/05/us/ap-us-wrestling-mat-death.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Since Facebook launched almost 10 years ago, users have sought to expand their social networks for financial gain, winning friends, bragging rights and professional clout. And social media companies cite the levels of engagement to tout their value.

But an Associated Press examination has found a growing global marketplace for fake clicks, which tech companies struggle to police. Online records, industry studies and interviews show companies are capitalizing on the opportunity to make millions of dollars by duping social media.

For as little as a half cent each click, websites hawk everything from LinkedIn connections to make members appear more employable to Soundcloud plays to influence record label interest.

“Anytime there’s a monetary value added to clicks, there’s going to be people going to the dark side,” said Mitul Gandhi, CEO of seoClarity, a Des Plaines, Ill., social media marketing firm that weeds out phony online engagements.

Italian security researchers and bloggers Andrea Stroppa and Carla De Micheli estimated in 2013 that sales of fake Twitter followers have the potential to bring in $40 million to $360 million to date, and that fake Facebook activities bring in $200 million a year.

As a result, many firms, whose values are based on credibility, have entire teams doggedly pursuing the buyers and brokers of fake clicks. But each time they crack down on one, another, more creative scheme emerges.

When software engineers wrote computer programs, for example, to generate lucrative fake clicks, tech giants fought back with software that screens out “bot-generated” clicks and began regularly sweeping user accounts.

YouTube wiped out billions of music industry video views last December after auditors found some videos apparently had exaggerated numbers of views. Its parent-company, Google, is also constantly battling people who generate fake clicks on their ads.

And Facebook, whose most recent quarterly report estimated as many as 14.1 million of its 1.18 billion active users are fraudulent accounts, does frequent purges. That’s particularly important for a company that was built on the principle that users are real people.

Twitter’s Jim Prosser said there’s no upside. “In the end, their accounts are suspended, they’re out the money and they lose the followers,” he said.

LinkedIn spokesman Doug Madey said buying connections “dilutes the member experience,” violates their user agreement and can also prompt account closures.

Google and YouTube “take action against bad actors that seek to game our systems,” said spokeswoman Andrea Faville.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city of 7 million in South Asia, is an international hub for click farms.

The CEO of Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World said he has paid workers to manually click on clients’ social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. “Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine,” Shaiful Islam said.

A recent check on Facebook showed Dhaka was the most popular city for many, including soccer star Leo Messi, who has 51 million likes; Facebook’s own security page, which has 7.7 million likes; and Google’s Facebook page, which has 15.2 million likes.

In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo, said it would stop buying Facebook fans after its inspector general criticized the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers.

In one case, its fan tally rose from about 10,000 to more than 2.5 million.

Sometimes there are plausible explanations for click increases.

For example, Burger King’s most popular city was, for a few weeks this year, Karachi, Pakistan, after the chain opened several restaurants there.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/01/05/us/ap-us-click-farms.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

But looked at a different way, the federal government has succeeded in preventing the poverty rate from climbing far higher. There is broad consensus that the social welfare programs created since the New Deal have hugely improved living conditions for low-income Americans. At the same time, in recent decades, most of the gains from the private economy have gone to those at the top of the income ladder.

Half a century after Mr. Johnson’s now-famed State of the Union address, the debate over the government’s role in creating opportunity and ending deprivation has flared anew, with inequality as acute as it was in the Roaring Twenties and the ranks of the poor and near-poor at record highs. Programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps are keeping millions of families afloat. Republicans have sought to cut both programs, an illustration of the intense disagreement between the two political parties over the best solutions for bringing down the poverty rate as quickly as possible, or eliminating it.

For poverty to decrease, “the low-wage labor market needs to improve,” James P. Ziliak of the University of Kentucky said. “We need strong economic growth with gains widely distributed. If the private labor market won’t step up to the plate, we’re going to have to strengthen programs to help these people get by and survive.”

In Washington, President Obama has called inequality the “defining challenge of our time.” To that end, he intends to urge states to expand their Medicaid programs to poor, childless adults, and is pushing for an increase in the minimum wage and funding for early-childhood programs.

But conservatives, like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, have looked at the poverty statistics more skeptically, contending that the government has misspent its safety-net money and needs to focus less on support and more on economic and job opportunities.

“The nation should face up to two facts: poverty rates are too high, especially among children, and spending money on government means-tested programs is at best a partial solution,” Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution wrote in an assessment of the shortfalls on the war on poverty. Washington already spends enough on antipoverty programs to lift all Americans out of poverty, he said. “To mount an effective war against poverty,” he added, “we need changes in the personal decisions of more young Americans.”

Still, a broad range of researchers interviewed by The New York Times stressed the improvement in the lives of low-income Americans since Mr. Johnson started his crusade. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, millions of women have entered the work force, malnutrition has all but disappeared. After all, when Mr. Johnson announced his campaign, parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing.

Many economists argue that the official poverty rate grossly understates the impact of government programs. The headline poverty rate counts only cash income, not the value of in-kind benefits like food stamps. A fuller accounting suggests the poverty rate has dropped to 16 percent today, from 26 percent in the late 1960s, economists say.

But high rates of poverty — measured by both the official government yardstick and the alternatives that many economists prefer — have remained a remarkably persistent feature of American society. About four in 10 black children live in poverty; for Hispanic children, that figure is about three in 10. According to one recent study, as of mid-2011, in any given month, 1.7 million households were living on cash income of less than $2 a person a day, with the prevalence of the kind of deep poverty commonly associated with developing nations increasing since the mid-1990s.

Both economic and sociological trends help explain why so many children and adults remain poor, even putting the effects of the recession aside. More parents are raising a child alone, with more infants born out of wedlock. High incarceration rates, especially among black men, keep many families apart. About 30 percent of single mothers live in poverty.

In some cases, government programs have helped fewer families because of program changes and budget cuts, researchers said. For instance, the 1996 Clinton-era welfare overhaul drastically cut the cash assistance available to needy families, often ones headed by single mothers.

“As of 1996, we expected single mothers to go to work,” Professor Ziliak said. “But if they’re shelling out most of their weekly pay in the form of child care, they can’t make sense of doing it.”

The more important driver of the still-high poverty rate, researchers said, is the poor state of the labor market for low-wage workers and spiraling inequality. Over the last 30 years, growth has generally failed to translate into income gains for workers — even as the American labor force has become better educated and more skilled. About 40 percent of low-wage workers have attended or completed college, and 80 percent have completed high school.

Economists remain sharply divided on the reasons, with technological change, globalization, the decline of labor unions and the falling value of the minimum wage often cited as major factors. But with real incomes for a vast number of middle-class and low-wage workers in decline, safety-net programs have become more instrumental in keeping families’ heads above water.

The earned-income tax credit, for instance, has increased employment among single mothers and kept six million Americans above the poverty line in 2011. Food stamps, formally known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, kept four million Americans out of poverty in 2011.

Above all, the government has proved most successful in aiding the elderly through the New Deal-era Social Security program and the creation of Medicare in the 1960s. The poverty rate among older Americans fell to just 9 percent in 2012 from 35 percent in 1959.

But for working-age households, both conservatives and liberals agree that government transfer programs alone cannot eliminate poverty. The answer, the White House has said, is in trying to improve households’ earnings before tax and transfer programs take effect.

“Going forward, the biggest potential gains that could be made on poverty would be in raising market incomes,” said Jason Furman, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “In the short run, that means things like the minimum wage, and in the long run, things like early education.”

If Congress approved a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from its current level of $7.25, it would reduce the poverty rate of working-age Americans by 1.7 percentage points, lifting about five million people out of poverty, according to research by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

But in the meantime, the greatest hope for poorer Americans would be a stronger economic recovery that brought the unemployment rate down from its current level of 7 percent and drew more people into the work force. The poverty rate for full-time workers is just 3 percent. For those not working, it is 33 percent.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/50-years-later-war-on-poverty-is-a-mixed-bag.html?partner=rss&emc=rss