U.S. government may not hit debt limit until October: analysts

By Rachelle Younglai

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States might not hit the statutory limit on its debt until October, a policy research group said on Friday, giving Republican lawmakers more time to extract spending cuts from the Obama administration in return for extending the borrowing cap.

After giving into Democratic demands in December to raise taxes and later working with them to avoid a government shutdown, Republicans have been gearing up to use the debt limit as leverage to seek fresh budget cuts and changes to the tax code.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank that analyzes the Treasury's daily and monthly cash flows, had expected the federal government to hit the congressionally-set limit on its debt sometime between early-August and mid-September.

But stronger-than-expected revenues and deeper-than-anticipated budget cuts mean the ceiling on borrowing probably will not be reach until sometime between mid-August and mid-October, the group said on its website on Friday.

"October is a nasty month," BPC economic policy director Steve Bell said in an interview, noting that major government payments are due in October.

If Congress does not raise the borrowing cap before the Treasury hits the limit, the government will no longer be able to borrow money to pay its bills, including interest on its bonds, raising the risk of a damaging debt default.

In an attempt to avoid being blamed for a default, Republicans in the House of Representatives are pushing legislation to require the Treasury to pay bondholders and Social Security retirement benefits before other bills if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling on time.

The BPC said its forecast could change depending on economic conditions and when updated financial information became available.

Nearly $90 billion may soon be pumped into government coffers by the now-profitable government-controlled housing finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to account for deferred tax assets that were written down.

The think tank, however, does not think the disbursement to the Treasury will be that high. "We do expect that there will be a payment of some size in June but it is our opinion that the number is more likely to be in the $20 billion range and not in the rumored $100 billion range," Bell said.

The Treasury has said it could not forecast an exact date for when Congress must raise the debt ceiling due to delayed tax filings and uncertainty about the effect of the government budget cuts.

(Reporting by Rachelle Younglai; Editing by Paul Simao)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-government-may-not-hit-debt-limit-until-215216483.html

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Was that the president in my Beijing taxi?

A rumor that Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled undetected among the commoners of Beijing sparked enormous interest, echoing popular lore of?Chinese emperors moving about in disguise.

By Peter Ford,?Staff Writer / April 18, 2013

China's President Xi Jinping speaks during a meeting with Bill Gates (not in picture), on April 8, 2013.

Tyrone Siu/Reuters

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When was the last time the Chinese president hailed a Beijing taxi?

Skip to next paragraph Peter Ford

Beijing Bureau Chief

Peter Ford is The Christian Science Monitor?s Beijing Bureau Chief. He covers news and features throughout China and also makes reporting trips to Japan and the Korean peninsula.

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Just a few weeks ago, if taxi driver Guo Lixin is to be believed. Mr. Guo told a Hong Kong newspaper on Thursday that President Xi Jinping took an incognito ride in his cab last month, and chatted about ? what else? ? air pollution.

The news sparked enormous interest on the Chinese Internet, with most of those posting comments on Twitter-like social media platforms apparently believing the tale, but many skeptical about the value of the president?s alleged outing.

Stories about Chinese emperors passing disguised amongst their subjects, so as to learn first hand about their lives, are a staple of Chinese TV soap operas. The official media have recently made a point of presenting Mr. Xi as a ?man of the people.?

According to Ta Kung Pao, the Hong Kong daily to whom Mr. Guo gave his account, two men got into his taxi on the evening of March 1. One of them, he said, looked uncommonly like Xi, head of China?s ruling Communist Party and on the verge of being elected the country?s president.

When he commented on the fact, his mystery passenger replied ?you are the first taxi driver to recognize me,? Guo said, before writing a note wishing the driver ?safe and smooth journeys.?

There are those who saw the story as a PR exercise, pointing out that Ta Kung Pao is a strongly pro-Beijing paper. Official Chinese websites ran the story, too, giving it a degree of credibility, or at least of government approval.

Other observers were dubious about the real identity of Guo?s passenger because the handwriting of his note had nothing in common with handwriting that the verified President Xi has left in visitors? books around the country.

The story sat well, however, with the Communist Party?s propaganda efforts to build the president?s image as a forthright, honest fellow with the common touch. Xi has attracted attention by ordering the police not to block the traffic near places he is visiting just to let his motorcade past. Last week he mingled with fisherfolk on the southern island of Hainan, discussing their catch in the same way that a Western politician might on a flesh-pressing jaunt.

Not everyone is impressed, however. ?The most effective plainclothes visit is to look at Weibo every day,? commented Feng Xincheng, a well known newspaper editor, referring to Sina Weibo, a censored but nonetheless lively Twitter-like service where public criticism of the authorities is common.

It did not seem from taxi driver Guo?s account that Xi (if it was indeed he) learned much that he did not already know. As soon as he recognized his passenger Guo broke out in a cold sweat, he said, and told the distinguished man in the front passenger seat that he thought the Communist Party and government policies were correct, if not always well implemented.

?Xi,? meanwhile, fed his ordinary citizen interlocutor the same pap as government officials feed the public about how long it will take and how hard it will be to clean up Beijing?s pollution.

Neither the alleged president nor his driver ended up much the wiser, it seems. And then on Thursday evening, the official Xinhua news agency stamped on all the speculation with a terse one line announcement.

Ta Kung Pao?s report, said Xinhua, ?has proven to be a fake story.??

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/gKlDEKXBPOw/Was-that-the-president-in-my-Beijing-taxi

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Sony Xperia Tablet S Jelly Bean update starts tomorrow afternoon

After months of treading water with Ice Cream Sandwich, the Xperia Tablet S is finally being blessed with a taste of Jelly Bean. Starting tomorrow between the hours of 9AM - 10AM PT, Sony will begin rolling out Android 4.1.1 to its second-gen slate in the US, Canada and Latin America. While release details are scarce, the company stated that it will issue a changelog alongside the update. Though Jelly Bean is likely on its way to becoming yesterday's news, at least Sony is keeping its promise and that's gotta count for something, right?

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Jay-Z's 'Open Letter' Gets Musical Response From Common, Wyclef Jean

Common and Wyclef drop unofficial remix to Jay-Z's fiery track just two days after Pitbull released his own version.
By Rob Markman

Common
Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/ Getty Images

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1705762/jay-z-open-letter-common-wyclef.jhtml

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Online Grocer Relay Foods Raises $8.25 Million To Expand, Redesign & Go Mobile

Relay Foods, an online grocer which sources its foods from local vendors, has raised $8.25 million in new funding. The company says it will be working with Battery Ventures and TomorrowVentures to beging building out a mobile platform and expanding its team in the months ahead. The capital infusion was raised through a common stock-only sale, the company notes.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/zY1a_lkA3CA/

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How communities effectively punish antisocial behavior

Apr. 7, 2013 ? New research provides an insight into how groups of people tackle social dilemmas and effectively punish those engaging in anti-social behaviour.

Neighbours playing loud music is an example of where a social dilemma can arise about who should tackle the wrong-doer if a whole group of people is affected. If everyone expects someone else to punish the wrongdoer, the loud music will persist. However, research by the University of Oxford and the ETH Zurich has revealed that when a group can identify a strong member from amongst themselves, it is more likely that this results in a tacit agreement about who should punish the wrongdoer.

By contrast, when a group finds it hard to identify which of their members is the strongest, the wrongdoer is less likely to be deterred, say the findings published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a laboratory experiment, the researchers involved 120 volunteers, divided into groups of four, to play games with money tokens. Each player was given a bank of 140 money tokens with one of the four randomly assigned as the cheat. The cheat could decide whether to refrain from cheating and gain nothing, or risk cheating to potentially gain 70 tokens from each of the three players. The three players had to decide independently whether to challenge the cheat to reclaim the money for themselves, as well as the other players -- the snag being that the challenge would entail a monetary cost to the challenger while the free-riding players would retrieve the full 70 tokens. However, if none of the players challenged the cheat, the cheat would keep their tokens and get away with it.

First, the cost for the player challenging the cheat was set at 30 tokens, meaning that player could only claim 40 tokens while a free-rider received back 70 tokens. In this set of games, about one-third (35 per cent) of the players challenged the cheat to reclaim the money, despite the cost to themselves.

A marked change in the pattern emerged, however, when the costs to the challengers were made slightly unequal. While two of three players would lose 40 tokens for challenging the cheat, the other one of the three would only lose 30 tokens. In these games, a tacit agreement set in that the strongest of them, i.e. the player with the least to lose, should challenge the cheat, even though the differences in the monetary strengths of the players were only small. The researchers also varied the size of the penalty that would be imposed on the cheat to assess what role this played to stop cheating behaviour.

They found that in groups with a strong player, money tokens were reclaimed from the cheat by the strong player in 83 per cent of cases. What is more, when the penalty for cheating was increased from 0 to 40 penalty points, this resulted in a substantial reduction of cheating in groups with a strong player; a reduction as high as in groups with all equal players where the penalty for cheating was increased from 0 to 120 penalty points.

Surprisingly perhaps, the researchers discovered that when the wrongdoer knew that there was a strong player in the group and the risk of punishment was therefore high, this proved to be as effective a deterrent as monetary penalties three times higher in groups with players of equal strength.

Co-author Dr Wojtek Przepiorka, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, said: 'Our findings help us understand how social order was possible in human prehistory, where official law enforcement bodies did not exist. It suggests that the natural order was for groups where someone was marked out as the strongest would be more likely to challenge the wrongdoer. The idea of who was strongest would have varied according to the society's norms and culture: it could be body size, wealth, valour or other endowments.

'Interestingly this certainty of being punished can be a stronger deterrent than the size of the penalty itself. This is also informative of cooperative behaviour amongst members of a community and indicates how social norms may have developed.'

Andreas Diekmann, Professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich, who also authored the study, said: 'It is important to learn more about how social order has emerged in human groups without third party intervention. In contrast to previous studies, with our experiment we were able to demonstrate that it is possible to solve cooperation problems without assuming individuals with punitive preferences. A very small degree of inequality amongst the group members is enough to make the punishment of wrongdoers more likely and this has a deterrent effect. As a result, antisocial behaviour is reduced substantially even though punishment is rarely exercised.'

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Journal Reference:

1. W. Przepiorka, A. Diekmann. Individual heterogeneity and costly punishment: a volunteer's dilemma. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013; 280 (1759): 20130247 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.0247

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/living_well/~3/HocihPqN_Ug/130407144507.htm

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NKorea warns embassies it can't guarantee safety

MOSCOW (AP) ? North Korea has warned diplomats in Pyongyang that it can't guarantee the safety of embassies in the event of a conflict and suggested they may want to evacuate their staff, Russia's top diplomat said Friday.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is demanding an explanation from the North Koreans ? asking whether the warning is an order to evacuate the North Korean capital or merely a proposal to consider doing so.

"This proposal has been sent to all the embassies in Pyongyang," Lavrov said. "We are now trying to clarify the situation. We asked our North Korean neighbors a few questions that need to be asked in this situation."

About two dozen countries have embassies in North Korea. Lavrov said during a visit to Uzbekistan as saying that Russia is in touch with China, the United States, Japan and South Korea ? all members of a dormant talks process with North Korea ? to try to figure out the motivation behind the warning.

"We are very much worried by inciting of tensions, even though it's verbal so far," Lavrov said. "We would like to understand the reasons behind the proposal to evacuate the embassies, whether it's a decision of the North Korean leadership or a proposal. We were told it's a proposal."

North Korea's government did not comment on the embassy warnings. Tensions have been roiling in the past few weeks following a North Korean nuclear test and the country's subsequent warnings to South Korea and the United States that it would be prepared to attack.

Britain's Foreign Office confirmed that it had received the warning, which it called part of ongoing rhetoric from Pyongyang to portray the U.S. as a threat.

"The British Embassy in Pyongyang received a communication from the North Korean government this morning saying that the North Korean government would be unable to guarantee the safety of embassies and international organizations in the country in the event of conflict from April 10th," it said in a statement.

Britain said it was "considering next steps" and had no immediate plans to withdraw from Pyongyang.

Sweden said North Korea's foreign ministry had a meeting with foreign diplomats but didn't order them to leave.

"It was a meeting that dealt with the security situation in the country, where the North Koreans asked whether there was any need for assistance in case of an evacuation," Swedish Foreign Ministry spokesman Teo Zetterman said.

Sweden also represents the United States, which doesn't have an embassy or any direct diplomatic presence in North Korea. Any Americans in North Korea would be NGO workers or tourists but it's not officially known how many might be there.

"This is just an escalating series of rhetorical statements, and the question is, to what end?" U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters in Washington.

"This is an unpredictable regime and an unpredictable situation," Nuland said. "Our posture remains to be prudent, to take appropriate measures, in the defense and deterrence sphere, both for ourselves and for our allies, but to continue to urge the DPRK to change course, because this is not going to end their isolation."

The U.S. Embassy in Seoul also issued a notice to Americans in South Korea, saying it had "no specific information to suggest an imminent threat to U.S. citizens or facilities."

The U.N. says its staff was continuing to work in North Korea while Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon studied the North Korean message to consider evacuating U.N. personnel.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said a U.N. representative joined diplomats at a meeting Friday in Pyongyang and that U.N. staff "remain engaged in their humanitarian and developmental work throughout the country."

Asked whether Ban would go to Pyongyang, Nesirky said the U.N. chief has offered to facilitate dialogue "to help to bring people together."

"Dialogue is what's needed to try to turn the volume down. The volume has been turned up tremendously high in recent days and the volume needs to be turned back down again and the secretary-general is certainly keen to help," he said.

Nesirky added that the U.N. was "providing very important life-saving assistance to people, particularly children" in North Korea.

Russia has appeared increasingly upset with North Korea, strongly criticizing its neighbor for its "defiant neglect" of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

"We are counting on maximum restraint and composure from all sides," a Russian foreign ministry statement said Friday.

Other nations with diplomatic missions in North Korea, such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria and India, also said they were weighing the situation carefully. The Czechs said they had no plans to withdraw; the Romanians and Bulgarians were speaking with the 27-nation European Union about the situation.

"Naturally, we assess that there is no outside threat to North Korea whatsoever," said Marcin Bosacki, spokesman for Poland's Foreign Ministry. "In our opinion, the current military rhetoric is exclusively directed to the internal audience and does not reflect the true international intentions of the country."

_____

AP writers Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Danica Kirka in London, Matt Lee in Washington, Edith Lederer at the United Nations, Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria, Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania, Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland, and Karel Janicek in Prague, Czech Republic, contributed to this story.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nkorea-warns-embassies-cant-guarantee-safety-153142245.html

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Hillary Clinton fans fine with 2016 run

Hillary Rodham Clinton stayed on safe political ground Tuesday, advocating women's rights globally in a 12-minute speech, but that was enough to excite fans imploring the former first lady, senator and secretary of state to run again for president three years from now.

Clinton, perhaps as popular as ever in her 22 years in national politics, said she has "unwavering faith in the untapped potential of women and girls." She spoke at the Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards, at Washington's Kennedy Center. The event, highlighting efforts such as expanding education for girls and fighting domestic violence worldwide, marked her first public speech since ending her much-praised stint as secretary of state.

As members of the group Ready for Hillary cheered outside, the 2016 political buzz was inevitable. Vice President Joe Biden ? another potential Democratic candidate ? spoke later at the same event.

If Clinton has any jealousy, she didn't show it. She praised Biden effusively, especially for his role in Congress' recent renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

Biden returned the compliment a half-hour later, after Clinton had left the stage, telling the mostly female audience of more than 2,000 that "there's no woman like Hillary Clinton."

Biden said Clinton's declaration in China nearly two decades ago ? "Women's rights are human rights," she said at the time ? "still echoes forcefully around the world." Women everywhere, he said, "are entitled to every single opportunity that any man is."

Clinton, 65, has said she has no plans for a second presidential bid, but she hasn't ruled it out. Democrats argue among themselves whether she has the desire and energy to go through the grueling campaign process she knows so well. But many see her as a prohibitive favorite whose head start would be so big that other potential candidates might starve for funds and attention.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll in January found that 67 percent of Americans held a favorable view of Clinton. That's her highest rating since the poll began measuring her popularity in the 1990s. It spans her eight years in the Senate.

"It's hard to overstate the breadth and depth of enthusiasm for a Hillary run," said Doug Hattaway, a former Clinton campaign aide and now a Washington-based consultant. She built a national base of supporters in 2008, when she lost a hard-fought nomination fight to Barack Obama, and she's widely respected after her turn heading the State Department, Hattaway said.

"A lot of donors, volunteers and potential campaign workers will wait to hear what she decides before committing to other candidates," he said, although "anyone with their eye on 2016 is already working on it."

Mo Elleithee, a top spokesman for Clinton's 2008 campaign, said it's much too early to press her for an answer.

"My advice to everyone is to chill out," Elleithee said. "There's no need for all this breathless anticipation at this point," he said, and political activists should focus on next year's mid-term elections.

Noting that Clinton said she has no intention of running, he said, "I think that's where her head is." But he said he shares "the enthusiasm" for a Clinton candidacy.

There may be no one in America with a clearer view of what it takes to run for president.

Clinton was a highly visible adviser and defender of her husband, Bill, then the Arkansas governor, when he was elected president in 1992 in 1996. Her eight years as first lady included the excruciating Monica Lewinsky scandal and her husband's impeachment.

On the same day her husband's successor was elected, Clinton handily won a Senate seat from New York. She breezed to re-election in 2006 and was the early favorite for the 2008 presidential nomination.

But Obama used his early opposition to the Iraq war, plus a keen understanding of how to win small states' delegates, to outmaneuver the Clinton team. Obama promptly tapped his former rival to be secretary of state, assuring Clinton another prime post at the center of national policy and politics.

Some Democrats want the party to look to younger candidates, noting that Clinton will turn 69 shortly before Election Day 2016, and Biden will turn 74 soon after. Those drawing notice include New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, 55, and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, 50.

As runner-up in the 2008 Democratic primary, Clinton arguably is the party's heir apparent. Republicans, not Democrats, typically nominate the next-in-line contender.

With the early GOP presidential picture wildly scrambled, it's possible that Republicans will tap a newer, younger nominee while Democrats consider one of the nation's best-known figures, and certainly the most high-profile female politician.

Clinton is scheduled to speak Friday at the Women in the World Summit in New York.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/too-early-2016-not-hillary-014608943.html

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