Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and may make it harder for many to get health, educational and social services, a new analysis suggests.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/46062678#46062678
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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley reacts at right after Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, gets the crowd to sing "Happy Birthday" for her during a rally at his campaign headquarters in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. Behind him, from left are, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio; former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty; Romney's wife Ann; and Haley (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley reacts at right after Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, gets the crowd to sing "Happy Birthday" for her during a rally at his campaign headquarters in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. Behind him, from left are, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio; former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty; Romney's wife Ann; and Haley (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, campaigns in Irmo, S.C., Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, carries 7-month-old Leah Locklear as he campaigns in Irmo, S.C., Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Graphics lists average tax rates paid by U.S. taxpayers:
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) ? Facing newly barbed questions about his wealth, Mitt Romney on Thursday refused to bow to pressure to immediately release his tax returns in the rocky home stretch of South Carolina's Republican primary. Though still the nomination front-runner, he also lost his claim to an Iowa victory just as Newt Gingrich emerged as a stronger threat.
"You'll hear more about that. April," was all Romney had to say in response to a shouted question about his tax records from the crowd gathered outside his campaign headquarters here.
The event was his only one ahead of an evening debate in which questions about his wealth were all but certain.
He has reluctantly agreed to release his tax returns but has spurned calls from his rivals and even allies ? including key supporter New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ? to do so immediately. He says people will have to wait until April, probably after the GOP has settled on a nominee. Romney also has not yet explained why he keeps part of his fortune in the Cayman Islands. His campaign says he does not receive a tax break on the money there.
The silence from Romney's campaign on details of his holdings was just one element of a political day that underscored the unpredictability of Saturday's South Carolina primary.
In a blow to Romney, Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the race and endorsed Gingrich, a move that could start to consolidate conservative support behind the former House speaker.
That shrunk the field, leaving Romney and Gingrich on stage Thursday night with just Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Santorum claimed an Iowa win during the day ? the state party said he did have the biggest share of the votes it could count ? and he continued to fight Gingrich for the mantle of Romney's chief conservative foe.
Romney barely mentioned Perry at all, leaving him out of a speech to supporters and only mentioning him in passing when pressed by reporters afterward.
"Terrific guy, terrific conservative," Romney said. "We're going to miss him on stage tonight."
One bright spot on an otherwise dreary day came when a key South Carolina donor and former Perry supporter, David Wilkins, said he would support Romney instead of backing Gingrich.
But Romney also was grappling with the announcement from the Iowa GOP that Santorum actually led him by 34 votes in the final tally of the state's leadoff caucuses, though no winner has been declared. At the very least, it was a symbolic setback for a Romney campaign reeling from a series of bumps over the past few days.
In a written statement, Romney called the Iowa results a "virtual tie" and praised Santorum's "strong performance" in the state.
It was a far different type of day when Romney touched down in South Carolina just over a week ago, coming off what appeared to be twin victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Since then, Romney has been confronted by attacks from his opponents on everything from his tax returns to his changed positions on social issues like abortion. And he's made unforced errors talking about his own personal wealth and defending the private equity firm he founded, Bain Capital.
On Tuesday, Romney disclosed that he pays an effective tax rate of about 15 percent, lower than what he would pay if he earned a regular paycheck rather making most of his income in dividends, capital gains and the like. He also called "not very much" the amount he earned in speechmaking fees: $373,327.62 for 12 months in 2010 and early 2011.
His campaign has repeatedly refused to answer more questions about his fortune, and the candidate himself has tried to change the subject as Gingrich inches up in polls.
Recognizing the threat, Romney has assailed Gingrich's claims that he helped President Ronald Reagan create jobs. He says Gingrich is living in "fantasyland."
Regardless of the outcome of the primary Saturday, the former Massachusetts governor's past 10 days have played into the hands of Democrats who are looking to paint him as an out-of-touch multimillionaire during the general election.
In the meantime, Democrats planned a series of news conferences to argue that the work Romney did at Bain Capital wasn't the same as bolstering American manufacturing.
President Barack Obama's campaign advisers contend voters are unlikely to back a wealthy Republican with financial-industry ties at a time of lingering economic distress.
The questions about Romney's wealth began last week in New Hampshire when he told an audience he knew what it was like to worry about being "pink-slipped" and losing a job. A day later, he said, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me" ? a comment about health insurance companies that his rivals used to paint Romney as out of touch with ordinary Americans.
In a moment that was clearly unscripted, Romney disclosed for the first time Tuesday that, despite his wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars, he has been paying taxes in the neighborhood of 15 percent, far below the top maximum income tax rate of 35 percent, because his income "comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past."
During 2010 and the first nine months of 2011, the Romney family had at least $9.6 million in income, according to a financial disclosure form submitted in August.
The maximum marginal U.S. income tax rate of 35 percent applies ? in theory more than practice ? to households with taxable income of over about $388,500.
Like many wealthy people, the Romneys have been helped by changes in federal tax policy that have placed much lower tax rates on investment income ? from dividends, interest and capital gains from the sale of stocks and other assets ? than on wages and salaries.
Under the Bush-era tax cuts strongly supported by most Republicans, such investment income, including gains on securities held for a year or longer, is subject to a tax rate of 15 percent.
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A mathematical model suggests that birds or unmanned aerial vehicles will always crash when flying at certain speeds in a built-up environment
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Republican presidential candidate former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stands with his wife Callista as they greet audience members at the end of the Republican presidential candidate debate at the North Charleston Coliseum in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Republican presidential candidate former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stands with his wife Callista as they greet audience members at the end of the Republican presidential candidate debate at the North Charleston Coliseum in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Republican presidential candidates, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gestures to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at the Republican presidential candidate debate at the North Charleston Coliseum in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Republican presidential candidates, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, participate in the Republican presidential candidate debate at the North Charleston Coliseum in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Republican presidential candidate former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is seen during a commercial break at the Republican presidential candidate debate at the North Charleston Coliseum in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Mitt Romney perpetuated one unsubstantiated claim, about his record at Bain Capital, and more or less corrected himself on another, about President Barack Obama's health care law, in the latest Republican presidential debate.
His rivals flubbed history, Newt Gingrich blaming a Democratic president for a jobless rate he never had, and Ron Paul painting an idyllic picture of life before Medicare that did not reflect deprivations of that time.
A look at some of the claims in the debate Thursday night and how they compare with the facts:
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ROMNEY: "We started a number of businesses; four in particular created 120,000 jobs, as of today. We started them years ago. They've grown ? grown well beyond the time I was there to 120,000 people that have been employed by those enterprises. ... Those that have been documented to have lost jobs, lost about 10,000 jobs. So (120,000 less 10,000) means that we created something over 100,000 jobs."
THE FACTS: Romney now has acknowledged the negative side of the ledger from his years with Bain Capital, but hardly laid out the full story. His claim to have created more than 100,000 jobs in the private sector as a venture capitalist remains unsupported.
Romney mentioned four successful investments in companies that now employ some 120,000 people, having grown since he was involved in them a decade or ago or longer. From that, he subtracted the number of jobs that he said are known to have been lost at certain other companies.
What's missing is anything close to a complete list of winners and losers ? and the bottom line on jobs. Bain under Romney invested in scores of private companies that don't have the obligation of big publicly traded corporations to disclose finances. Romney acknowledged that he was using current employment figures for the four companies, not the number of jobs they had when he left Bain Capital, yet took credit for them in his analysis.
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GINGRICH: "Under Jimmy Carter, we had the wrong laws, the wrong regulations, the wrong leadership, and we killed jobs. We had inflation. We went to 10.8 percent unemployment. Under Ronald Reagan, we had the right job ? the right laws, the right regulators, the right leadership. We created 16 million new jobs."
FACT CHECK: Sure, inflation was bad and gas lines long, but under Carter's presidency unemployment never topped 7.8 percent. The unemployment rate did reach 10.8 percent, but not until November 1982, nearly two years into Reagan's first term.
Most economists attribute the jobless increase to a sharp rise in interest rates engineered by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in an ultimately successful effort to choke off inflation. Unemployment began to fall in 1983 and dropped to 7.2 percent in November 1984, when Reagan easily won re-election.
The economy did add 16 million jobs during Reagan's 1981-1989 presidency. Gingrich's assertion that "we created" them may have left the impression that he was a key figure in that growth. Although Gingrich was first elected to the House in 1978, his first Republican leadership position, as minority whip, began when Reagan left office, in 1989.
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PAUL: "I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early '60s, before we had any government (health care). It worked rather well, and there was nobody on the street suffering with no medical care. But Medicare and Medicaid came in and it just expanded."
THE FACTS: Before Medicare was created in the mid-1960s, only about half of the elderly had private insurance for hospital care, and they were facing rising costs for those policies on their fixed incomes. Medicare was hugely contentious at the time, seen by many doctors as a socialist takeover, but few argued that the status quo could be maintained.
A Health, Education and Welfare Department report to Congress in 1959, during the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower, took no position on what the federal government should do but stated "a larger proportion of the aged than of other persons must turn to public assistance for payment of their medical bills or rely on 'free' care from hospitals and physicians."
Paul advocates a return to an era when doctors would treat the needy for free. But even in the old days, charity came with a cost. Research from the pre-Medicare era shows that the cost of free care was transferred to paying customers and the insurance industry.
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ROMNEY: "I could have stayed in Detroit, like him, and gotten pulled up in the car company. I went off on my own. I didn't inherit money from my parents. What I have, I earned. I worked hard, the American way."
THE FACTS: It's true there's no evidence Romney's wealthy family gave him a trust fund, or helped him secure a job at Bain Capital, where he would ultimately make his fortune. But it's not entirely the case that his success is wholly the result of his own hard work.
Romney's father, George, was an automobile industry CEO and a Michigan governor. He paid for Mitt to attend the Cranbrook School, a private boarding school in the Detroit area. The education didn't hurt Romney's ability to get into Harvard, where he earned law and business degrees in 1975.
While Romney appears to have gotten a job at Bain out of college on his own, the Boston Globe book "The Real Romney" reports that Romney's parents helped him and his wife buy their first home when he was in his early 20s.
On Thursday night, the Romney campaign did not dispute the finding that Romney's parents helped pay for that house, in the Boston suburb of Belmont.
___
ROMNEY: "The executive order is a beginning process. It's one thing, but it doesn't completely eliminate Obamacare. ... We have to go after a complete repeal. And that's going to have to have to happen with a House and a Senate, hopefully, that are Republican."
THE FACTS: With that statement, Romney essentially corrected his repeated suggestions in early debates and speeches that he would eliminate President Barack Obama's health care law with a stroke of the pen on his first day in office ? a power no president has.
In one variation of the claim, he had vowed in a Sept. 7 debate that on Day One, he would sign an executive order "granting a waiver from Obamacare to all 50 states." This, despite the fact that the law lays out an onerous process for letting individual states off the hook from its requirements, and that process cannot begin until 2017.
Now he acknowledges the political reality that a Republican president would need Republican control of Congress to have a strong shot at repealing the law.
___
Associated Press writers Steve Peoples, Jim Drinkard, and Christopher S. Rugaber contributed to this report.
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Billed as a free app, Ask the Cheesemonger for iPhone and iPod Touch is anything but. You?ll get a paltry glimpse of the app?s content before being prompted to upgrade to the full version of the cheese-filled directory, but is it worth shelling out extra cash? For its regular price of $2.99, my vote is ?no.?
The good news is that the app upgrade is currently on sale for a more palatable 99 cents. ?Although the app containing information on more than 300 cheeses, synthesizing the information will take some work by neophytes.
The Cheese Challenge 10-question quiz isn?t particularly engaging, and if you?ve taken it once, there?s little point in viewing it again. The ?Ask the Cheesemonger? section is better, but currently offers fewer than 50 Q&As including the worthless ?Is the moon made of cheese?? There is a function to ask your own question, but this simply launches your native mail program so you can send an email. It seems the cheesemongers know their stuff, but it?d be useful if the answers linked back to cheeses described in the app.
Ask the Cheesemonger also offers a pairing service ? figure out what beverage to serve with a cheese you?ve bought, or select the beverages you?ve currently got on tap to see which cheese pairs the best. This feature is easy to use, however, because the applicable cheeses are displayed in list format, you?ll still have to do additional research into each to see if its even one you?d enjoy ? names alone aren?t enough in this situation.
Really, the best feature of Ask the Cheesemonger is its Search Category function on the main cheese tab. This filter will help you narrow your focus as you can search by country, milk type or cheese style, among others. It?s definitely a better jumping-off point than going through the cheeses alphabetically.
Don?t pay full price for Ask the Cheesemonger, but if you?re willing to spend the time sorting through all of the varieties of cheese, you?ll probably come out with a solid understanding of fromage.
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NEW DELHI (Reuters) ? India and China have agreed to try to avoid flare-ups along their disputed 4,000-km border through the Himalayas, a positive development in often fractious relations between Asia's emerging giants.
The two countries, which fought a brief but bloody border war in 1962, have increased their military presence on each side of the border in recent years as their fast-growing economies permit more spending on defense of remote regions.
Under an agreement signed on Tuesday, high-level diplomats and military officials will aim at "timely communication" about border incidents and meet once or twice a year.
"Its main task is to deal with affairs concerning maintaining the peace and tranquility of the border area," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said at a briefing on Wednesday.
However, the two countries are still a long way from agreeing on their territory -- China says most of India's Arunachal Pradesh state is part of Tibet. For its part, India claims China's isolated Aksai Chin plateau near Kashmir as its own.
"Both sides reiterated that before the border issue is resolved, they will together strive to preserve the peace and tranquility of the border," Liu said.
Shyam Saran, a former foreign secretary for India, said the pact was a sign the two sides wanted to better manage ties as they grow and compete for resources and allies in Asia and beyond.
"The two countries are emerging powers, whose respective strategic profiles are intersecting at multiple points," Saran wrote in a column in the Business Standard newspaper.
China's close relationship with India's main rival Pakistan, -- as well as other neighbors such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar Bangladesh and Nepal -- has given an urgency to New Delhi's strategy of forging ties with Washington, Japan and Australia, along with Southeast Asian nations.
"On the Chinese side there is concern that its more assertive posture of the past couple of years had triggered a rapid and continuing build up of countervailing coalitions in the strategic Indo-Pacific theatre," Saran said.
Swaran Singh, an expert on Indo-Chinese relations at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the pact gave momentum to future talks but its relevance would depend on the wider relationship.
"For 25 years, India and Pakistan have had a hot line and the generals are supposed to ask each other what they had for breakfast," Singh said. "But when the relationship is bad, nobody picks up the phone."
(Reporting By Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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