The first tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Andrea, formed Wednesday over the Gulf of Mexico and was expected to bring wet weather to parts of Florida’s Gulf coast over the next few days. Forecasters issued a tropical storm warning for a swath of Florida’s Gulf coast starting at Boca Grande, an island to the northwest of Fort Myers, and ending in the Big Bend area of the state. In Alabama, authorities said that 13 people had to be rescued from rough surf kicked up by the storm on Wednesday at beaches in two coastal towns. Most of those rescued didn’t require medical treatment. Andrea had maximum sustained winds near 40 mph (64 kph) as of 11 p.m., and winds were forecast to reach 45 mph (72 kph) over the next day. It was located about 270 miles (435 kilometers) southwest of Tampa. A tropical storm watch has been issued for most of northeast Florida and north to Surf City, N.C. Andrea was moving to the north at about 6 mph (10 kph) and forecasters expected the storm to continue moving northeast at a faster speed overnight and on Thursday. The center of Andrea was expected to reach the Big Bend area of Florida’s coast on Thursday afternoon, then move across southeastern Georgia, bypassing Atlanta, and over southeastern South Carolina and eastern North Carolina. It was expected to bring foul weather to those parts of Georgia and the Carolinas by Friday. Forecasters say Andrea could bring three to six inches of rain to the Florida Panhandle and southeastern Georgia, with isolated areas seeing as much as eight inches. In Florida, Gulf Islands National Seashore closed its campgrounds and the road that runs through the popular beach-front park on Wednesday. The national seashore abuts Pensacola Beach and the park road frequently floods during heavy rains. On Pensacola Beach, condominium associations asked people to remove furniture on high balconies because of the expected high winds and beach lifeguards warned tourists of possible high surf. A forecast map predicts the storm will continue along the East Coast through the weekend before heading out to sea again, though a storm’s track is often hard to predict days in advance. A National Hurricane Center advisory also says coastal areas north of Tampa could also see storm surge of several feet. –Yahoo News
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Syria's war has reached "new levels of brutality", the UN says, with evidence of fresh suspected massacres, sieges and violations of children's rights. Children have been taken hostage, forced to watch torture and even participate in beheadings, it says; others have been killed while fighting. It says it suspects there are "reasonable grounds" to believe chemical weapons have been deployed. It urges foreign powers not to increase the availability of arms in Syria. The issue of arms has been high on the international agenda of late, with the EU lifting an embargo on the sale of arms to Syria while Russia has insisted it is going ahead with the sale of an advanced S-300 surface-to-air missile defence system to Syria. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the contract had not yet been fulfilled and Russia did not want to "disturb the balance in the region". He said he was "disappointed" by the EU move. Meanwhile, a civilian died when shells exploded near the Russian embassy in Damascus, according to the UK-based activist group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Russia is an ally of President Bashar al-Assad and Syrian rebels have targeted the embassy several times since the uprising against his regime began two years ago. The international powers are struggling to set a date for a peace conference on Syria, where the conflict is believed to have cost at least 80,000 lives. - BBC NEWS
With less than a year until the Affordable Care Act starts to really kick in, there is a growing concern the group of people who are most needed to make the plan work properly are the ones most likely opt out. One of the key promises of the ACA has always been that it would lower costs for health insurance. The trick to making that happen was to get everyone to buy health care, which is why the law came with an individual mandate. In the run-up to the law's passage (and after) there was a lot of heated argument about how forcing people to buy something they don't want is un-American, but the Supreme Court upheld the mandate idea on the grounds that it's just a new kind of tax. Buy health insurance or pay the tax. Your choice. There is one little-discussed flaw, however, the could turn out to be the fatal one: The government doesn't really want people to pay the tax. In order for the plan to work, we need some people (especially young, healthy people) to pay more into the health care exchanges than they receive in services for the risk pool math to work. Yet, there are concerns that penalty or not, the people who can't afford or don't want to pay for health care won't be sold on the government-sponsored health exchanges which are meant to supplement more-expensive private insurance. Some are also arguing that the cost to buy insurance on the exchanges will be far greater than Obamacare supporters have predicted. If that's the case, then the penalty just might not be high enough. In the first year, the tax is the higher of $95 or 1 percent of your income (so $400 for someone making $40,000). The rate increases each year, to a max of the greater of $695 or 2.5 percent in 2016 (or $1,000 for someone with $40,000 of income). If you're one of the few that pays very little under the current system — the young and healthy; or the uninsured, who currently pay $0 — then your costs are definitely going up. The ACA will provide subsidies to those who can't afford it, but again, most citizens are either unaware of that fact, don't know if they will eligible, or are completely confused about to apply. (Constant predictions of bureaucratic nightmares from the bill's opponents don't help matters.) It's easy to see then why their instinct is to opt out entirely. A recent survey claims that many as 10 percent of people are planning to skip insurance and pay the penalty. More than 60 percent think they won't be able to afford it, and most have no idea what they will do come January 1, 2014. Only 19 percent said they expect to have coverage in place by the deadline. The Los Angeles Times spoke to several young people who say they have no plans to buy insurance at all, because they think that they "never get sick." In addition, by allowing young, single people to stay on their parents health insurance until they are 26, the ACA also created a huge pool of healthy young people who won't be in the market for the exchange plans because they just don't need it yet. But for those young people who are facing the penalty, why would they prefer to fork over that money to the government (and get nothing in return) as opposed to just buying health insurance? One reason is people don't know how to buy coverage. The exchanges that are being created to offer more and better alternatives to private coverage don't exist yet. They sound confusing and the costs are currently unknown or in dispute. At The New Republic Jonathan Cohn does a pretty good job of tearing down a lot of the predictions about inflated costs, but in the end even he is forced to admit that, yes, some healthy people will pay more for insurance than they do right now. But many more sick people (some of whom are currently young and healthy) will probably pay less. That's the bargain we're making to ensure that (as a country) we get better health coverage. Cohn elaborates: As Aaron Carroll wrote the other day, Obamacare involves real trade-offs: Higher-income people have to pay higher taxes, the health care industry has to endure lower payments from Medicare, and—yes—some young, healthy, affluent people have to pay more for private insurance. Those of us who support the law believe that's a worthwhile price to pay to help achieve universal coverage, given the lack of politically viable alternatives. There are other potential benefits the plan, as well, aside from just the money. But again, in order to maximize those benefits for everyone, we need everyone to play along. Even the people who won't see the benefits right away, if ever. Too many people waiting until they were old and sick to join the health insurance market is how we got into this mess in the first place. After all, almost every healthy person in the world will one day become a sick person. And the line between well and ill is a pretty thin one.
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A southeast Texas town with a history of racial unrest on Monday fired two white police officers recently captured on video slamming a black woman’s head into a countertop and wrestling her to the ground. “The amount of force used was abominable,” the woman's attorney, Cade Bernsen, told Yahoo News. The incident was captured by security cameras at the Jasper, Texas, police headquarters. Keyarika "Shea" Diggles, 25, was brought to the jail on May 5 for an unpaid fine, according to Bernsen. He said she was was on the phone with her mother trying to arrange to get the $100 owed when Officer Ricky Grissom cut off the call. There’s no audio on the video, but Diggles and Grissom were apparently arguing when Officer Ryan Cunningham comes in behind Diggles and attempts to handcuff her. When she appears to raise her hand, Cunningham grabs Diggles by the hair and slams her head into a countertop. The officers wrestle Diggles to the ground before dragging her by her ankles into a jail cell. “She got her hair pulled out, broke a tooth, braces got knocked off … it was brutal,” Bernsen said. Diggles was charged with resisting arrest for arguing with the officers, a charge dropped on Monday, according to Bernsen. Cunningham, reached by phone Monday afternoon, hung up on a Yahoo News reporter. A message left for Grissom was not immediately returned. The officers’ firing comes 15 years to the week after an infamous hate crime in Jasper, a town of about 8,000 people two hours northeast of Houston. James Byrd Jr., a black man, was tied to the back of a pickup by three white men and dragged for several miles until he was decapitated. The high-profile case triggered marches by the New Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klan. Last year, a majority-white Jasper City Council fired the town's first black chief after 16 months on the job. Rodney Pearson is now suing, claiming his civil rights were violated. “It’s a different part of the world, man, it’s crazy,” said Bernsen, who's also representing the fired police chief. Jasper's interim city manager confirmed the terminations, but referred questions about the Diggles case to the interim police chief, who was unreachable Monday afternoon. “The more things change, the more they remain the same,” Jasper City Council Member Alton Scott said of the city's racial troubles. Scott obtained the video in the Diggles’ incident and turned it over to a local TV station after he heard that her written complaint against the officers was apparently being ignored. “There’s nothing she said that could have justified what they did,” Scott said. “They are supposed to be trained professionals. They are supposed to be above that. It was inexcusable.” After terminating the officers on Monday, the council requested that the pair be investigated for possible criminal charges. Bernsen said he hopes that probe is done by the FBI or state police. “I don’t trust the Police Department as far as you can throw them,” he said. - Yahoo News (NaturalNews) News about the GMO contamination of U.S. wheat crops seems to be spreading faster than the GMOs themselves. On Friday, South Korea joined Japan in announcing a halt on imports of U.S. wheat due to the USDA's recent announcement that commercial wheat grown in the USA is contaminated with Monsanto's genetically engineered wheat.
Some Americans may still not realize this, but GMOs are outlawed or shunned nearly everywhere around the world. Only in the USA have GMOs managed to avoid being labeled or outlawed -- and that's primarily due to Monsanto's financial influence over lawmakers. Monsanto shares plummeted 4 percent on Friday following the announcement by South Korea. This is completely in line with predictions made here at Natural News, where I said earlier in the week, before Japan and South Korea announced their wheat boycotts Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/040604_GMO_contamination_wheat_South_Korea.html#ixzz2aC36mJPq Protesters lit fires and scuffled with police in parts of Istanbul and Ankara early on Sunday, but the streets were generally quieter after two days of Turkey’s fiercest anti-government demonstrations for years. Hundreds of protesters set fires in the Tunali district of the capital Ankara, while riot police fired tear gas and pepper spray to hold back groups of stone-throwing youths near Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s office in Istanbul. Istanbul’s central Taksim Square, where the protests have been focused, was quieter after riot police pulled back their armored trucks late on Saturday. Demonstrators lit bonfires among overturned vehicles, broken glass and rocks and played cat-and-mouse on side streets with riot police, who fired occasional volleys of tear gas. The unrest was triggered by protests against government plans to build a replica Ottoman-era barracks to house shops or apartments in Taksim, long a venue for political protest. But it has widened into a broader show of defiance against Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP). Interior Minister Muammer Guler said on Saturday that 939 people had been arrested in more than 90 separate demonstrations around the country. More than 1,000 people have been injured in Istanbul and several hundred more in Ankara, according to medics. The ferocity of the police response has shocked Turks, as well as tourists caught up in the unrest in one of the world’s most visited destinations. It has drawn rebukes from the United States, European Union and international rights groups. Helicopters have fired tear gas canisters into residential neighborhoods and police have used tear gas to try to smoke people out of buildings. Footage on YouTube showed one protester being hit by an armored police truck as it charged a barricade. “All dictators use the same methods, oppressing their people,” said Mehmet Haspinar, a 60-year-old retired government employee sheltering in a building entrance way as riot police fired pepper spray in an Ankara back street. Erdogan has overseen a transformation in Turkey during his decade in power, turning its once crisis-prone economy into the fastest-growing in Europe. He remains by far the country’s most popular politician, but critics point to what they see as his authoritarianism and religiously conservative meddling in private lives in the secular republic. Some accuse him of behaving like a modern-day sultan. Tighter restrictions on alcohol sales and warnings against public displays of affection in recent weeks have provoked protests. Concern that government policy is allowing Turkey to be dragged into the conflict in neighboring Syria by the West has also led to peaceful demonstrations. “It’s about democracy, and it’s going to get bigger,” said one demonstrator in a side street off Taksim Square, trying to rinse tear gas from his eyes. Erdogan has called for an immediate end to the protests and has said his government will investigate claims that the police have used excessive force. But he remained defiant. “If this is about holding meetings, if this is a social movement, where they gather 20, I will get up and gather 200,000 people. Where they gather 100,000, I will bring together one million from my party,” he said in a televised speech. –Reuters
Pandemic fears growing: new coronavirus mortality rate jumps to 60%, as Italy confirms first case6/1/2013 Nine people were killed in tornadoes that swept through central Oklahoma on Friday, part of a storm system that caused widespread flooding in Oklahoma City and its suburbs, the state's chief medical examiner said on Saturday. The dead included two children and seven adults, said Amy Elliott, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office. The death toll earlier had been reported as five. The tornadoes struck just 11 days after a twister ranked as EF5, the most powerful ranking, tore through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore and killed 24 people. The latest storms dumped up to 8 inches of rain on the Oklahoma City area, causing flash flooding that submerged parts of the sprawling metropolitan area that is home to more than 1.3 million people. Nearly two dozen people were rescued from areas cut off by rising water, the National Weather Service said. More than 70 people were treated for storm-related injuries, Oklahoma hospital officials said. - Reuters
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