House Republican budget to seek Medicare reforms (Reuters)

BALTIMORE (Reuters) ? Republicans in the House of Representatives will put forward a budget plan this year that will seek substantial reforms to health benefits for the elderly and make aggressive strides toward reducing deficits, a senior lawmaker said on Friday.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said he wanted his budget plan to offer voters an alternative vision to the "cradle-to-grave welfare state" that he says Democratic President Barack Obama is promoting.

The House Republican budget resolution will contain reforms to Medicare, the healthcare program for Americans 62 and over, such as providing subsidies to help recipients pay for private insurance, based on their wealth and medical needs.

"We haven't written it yet, but we're not backing off on the kinds of reforms we've advocated," Ryan told reporters at a retreat for House Republicans in Baltimore.

Ryan said there was emerging bipartisan support for such "premium support" plans as the best way to save Medicare, which he said was going broke.

The Wisconsin congressman caused an uproar last year by proposing a plan effectively to privatize Medicare by turning the popular $525 billion fee-for-service program into a system of vouchers to be used by recipients to buy private insurance.

The plan was enough to rattle elderly voters and was cited as a key factor in the defeat of a Republican candidate in a normally conservative New York state congressional district last year.

In December, Ryan and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden unveiled a new approach to cut Medicare costs through a "premium support" model that allowed seniors to buy insurance through a regulated exchange while retaining Medicare's traditional fee-for-service model. The plan was viewed by critics as a ploy to soften opposition to future reforms.

The Obama administration has steadfastly opposed reforms that would end Medicare for seniors or amount to what it calls "radical privatization" of the program.

Representative Tom Price, who heads the House Republican Policy Committee, said there was a lot of enthusiasm at the Baltimore retreat to tackle fundamental reform of "automatic spending programs" such as Medicare and Social Security.

BUDGET REFORM PLANS

Ryan said his budget plan would aggressively shrink deficits to put U.S. debt on a downward path, adding the United States would be in a situation similar to some debt-stricken European countries in a few years if no action was taken. He did not specify an amount for planned cuts.

"We feel we have an obligation to show the country our plan to pre-empt a debt crisis in this country. What matters most as is that we get the trajectory right," he said.

Despite the controversy raised about the House's last budget plan, Ryan insisted that Americans be offered an alternative as a vision of what the Republicans would accomplish if elected.

"People want to be bolder on the budget. People feel good about our budget experience and the budget we passed, even the Northeasterners, the people from the tough seats, they feel we did the right thing on the budget and they want to keep doing it."

Ryan also said he hoped to reform the budgetary process, which he said was outdated and broken, noting the Senate had not passed a budget resolution in nearly three years.

The House Budget Committee is working on 10 bills to reform the annual budget process, including a provision that would force the two houses of Congress, along with the White House, to work on a joint budget resolution early in the year, for votes later in the year.

In the process in place since 1974, the House and Senate work on separate budget bills and then work out the differences later.

Ryan said the panel would begin to refine some of the proposals in coming weeks, but the process would be halted for the committee's work on the fiscal 2013 budget plan, which will be unveiled in March. The reforms will resume later in the year once the budget plan is passed, he said.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/uscongress/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120123/pl_nm/us_house_republican_budget

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OK Go And Eytan And The Embassy Rockers Talk About Their New App: inBloom

Today two musicians sat down with me to have a chat: Andy Rubin of OK Go, and Eytan Oren of Eytan and the Embassy. But we weren't here to talk music. The dynamic duo actually built an app called InBloom and sat down with me to tell us how it came to be, and what it's all about.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/baGTXfrRLh8/

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France returns 20 Maori heads to New Zealand (AP)

PARIS ? France has handed over to New Zealand authorities 20 tattooed heads of Maori ethnic people once held in several French museums as a cultural curiosity.

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand presided over a handover ceremony Monday at the Quai Branly museum in Paris. New Zealand's embassy said it involved the single largest group of Maori heads to be repatriated.

Since 2003, New Zealand has led an ambitious program of collecting Maori heads and skeletal remains from museums around the world so they could be properly mourned and buried according to tradition.

France long resisted handing over such cultural artifacts, but a law passed in 2010 eventually paved the way for the return of the heads.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120123/ap_en_ot/eu_france_maori_heads

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Katy Perry Unfollows Russell Brand on ?Twitter?

Karzai says he's met with Afghan insurgent faction (AP)

KABUL, Afghanistan ? Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he personally held peace talks recently with the insurgent faction Hizb-i-Islami, appearing to assert his own role in a U.S.-led bid for negotiations to end the country's decade-long war.

Karzai made the announcement hours before he met with American special representative Marc Grossman to discuss progress and plans for bringing the Taliban insurgency into formal talks for the first time.

"Recently, we met with a delegation from Hizb-i-Islami ... and had negotiations," Karzai told a meeting of the Afghan parliament. "We are hopeful that these negotiations for peace continue and we will have good results," he added.

Karzai's statement was a reminder that any negotiations to end Afghanistan's war will be more complex than just talking to the Taliban's Pakistan-based leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. The two other main insurgent factions in the country have their own leaders and agendas.

Hizb-i-Islami is a radical Islamist militia that controls territory in Afghanistan's northeast and launches attacks against U.S. forces from Pakistan. Its leader, powerful warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a former U.S. ally now listed as a terrorist by Washington.

Based over the Pakistan border, Hekmatyar has ties to al-Qaida and has launched deadly attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Fighters loyal to Hekmatyar also have strongholds in Baghlan, Kunduz and Kunar provinces in the north and northeast Afghanistan.

The other main insurgent group is the feared Haqqani network, which maintains close ties to both al-Qaida and the Taliban and commands the loyalties of an estimated 10,000 fighters. The Haqqanis have been blamed for a series of spectacular attacks, including suicide bombings inside Kabul.

By showing he can bring at least one major faction to the negotiating table, Karzai may hope to boost his standing in a tentative peace process that has recently been dominated by Washington. The president has met before with representatives of Hekmatyar, whose political allies hold seats in the Afghan parliament and Cabinet, but Saturday's public announcement seemed intended to bolster Karzai's insistence on inclusion in the U.S.-led peace process.

"It should be mentioned that the Afghan nation is the owner of the peace process and negotiations," Karzai said. "No foreign country or organization can prevent (Afghans) from exercising this right."

The U.S. has repeatedly said that formal negotiations must be Afghan-led, but Karzai is reportedly uneasy with his government not being directly involved in recent preliminary talks with Taliban representatives.

U.S. representative Grossman began meeting with Karzai on Saturday, the U.S. Embassy said.

Grossman, however, stressed that any future negotiations would include Afghanistan's government.

"After our meeting with President Karzai, we will decide what to do next because we take his guidance and advice in an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process," Grossman said Friday during a stop in India.

French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet also arrived in Kabul on Saturday for talks with Afghan officials after Paris suspended training missions following the killing of four French troops by an Afghan soldier, the latest in a rising number of assaults in which Afghan security forces or infiltrators have turned their guns on coalition forces.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan early over the deaths, a potential setback for the U.S.-led coalition's efforts to build a national army and allow foreign troops to go home.

After a briefing with an Afghan general, Longuet said in footage broadcast on France's LCI TV that the killer was a 21-year-old former soldier "who deserted, who went to Pakistan, who re-engaged in the Afghan army."

Earlier in the day, the French defense minister said his mission in Kabul is to "evaluate the attitude our officials should take" in the future.

On Saturday, insurgents killed a NATO service member in southern Afghanistan, the coalition said. The statement gave no other details, nor the nationality of the casualty.

Insurgents clashed Saturday with government forces in the town of Barmal in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, said Maj. Abdul Rahman, who coordinates coalition and Afghan operations in the area.

The Paktika governor's office said four attackers were trying to enter the town's main bazaar and then move toward government offices and military bases nearby. Before they could, Afghan security forces engaged them in a one-hour gun battle and all four attackers were killed, it said.

Separately, a roadside bomb killed four Afghan civilians Saturday morning in Helmand province in the south, the Interior Ministry said.

___

Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120121/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan

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Kathy Griffin strips for David Letterman

CBS

David Letterman gave Kathy Griffin his undivided attention on "Late Show."

By Ree Hines

Comedian Kathy Griffin ushered in the new year sans dress alongside her annual countdown pal Anderson Cooper, and on Thursday night, she decided to relive the moment by stripping down for "Late Show" host David Letterman.

"Every year, I try to up the ante a little bit," Griffin told Letterman of her New Year's Eve antics. "You know, I've done it (on CNN) for?five years now and I've been fired four years in a row. So this year, I thought, 'What can I do to not get canned?'?... I thought it would be appropriate -- Times Square -- to create sort of a moment, so I took my clothes off. And I didn't tell Anderson. I really didn't tell anyone."

After sharing a clip of her nearly nude holiday moment, the 51-year-old then said, "I'll do it right now."

"Go ahead," Letterman replied.

With no more incentive necessary, the former "My Life on the D-List" star peeled off part of her dress and gave Letterman and his audience a show.

Between stares and snickers, the clearly thrilled host simply said, "Aw, man!"

Does anything Griffin does shock you anymore? Share your thoughts about her latest antics on our Facebook page.

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Also in The Clicker:

Source: http://theclicker.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/20/10199601-kathy-griffin-strips-for-david-letterman

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Two Westerners kidnapped in Pakistan: officials (Reuters)

MULTAN, Pakistan (Reuters) ? Two Western foreign aid workers were kidnapped by gunmen in the central Pakistani city of Multan on Thursday, local officials said.

Multan City Police Officer Amir Zulfiqar said one of the foreigners who had been abducted was Italian while the other was believed to be German.

"Three armed men entered the house and kidnapped two foreign nationals," Zulfiqar told reporters outside the house where they were kidnapped.

"So far we have not established a motive but it is too early to say. We are continuing investigations to try to see what happened."

The Italian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that an Italian citizen was kidnapped in Multan, in the southern part of the Punjab province.

German embassy officials in Islamabad were not immediately available for comment.

Criminal gangs often target foreign aid workers in Pakistan in hope of securing large ransoms for their release. Pakistani officials say militant groups such as the Taliban are also involved in kidnappings.

Such incidents have put off long-term investors. Foreign direct investment fell 37 percent to $531.2 million in the second half of 2011 from $839.6 million in the final six months of 2010.

Gunmen kidnapped a British doctor, working with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in the southwestern city of Quetta on January 5.

American aid worker Warren Weinstein was kidnapped from the central Pakistani city of Lahore in August last year. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for Weinstein's abduction in December.

In July, a Swiss couple was kidnapped from the southwestern Baluchistan province by the Pakistani Taliban.

(Reporting by Asim Tanveer in MULTAN, Qasim Nauman in ISLAMABAD and Silvia Aloisi in ROME; Writing by Serena Chaudhry; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120119/wl_nm/us_pakistan_italy_kidnap

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Google's Q4 results: $2.71 billion profit, $8.13 billion in revenue, Wall Street disappointed

Google just released its fourth-quarter 2011 results, and man, Wall Street is not pleased. The company reported $2.71 billion in profit (up from $2.54 a year earlier), net revenue of $8.13 billion and earnings of $9.50 per share, excluding some one-time charges. That's less than the $10.49 per share and $8.40 billion financial analysts were expecting and, as Reuters notes, it's the first time in nine quarters that Google hasn't beaten revenue estimates. Of course, the company spun its results the best it could, emphasizing that its gross revenue jumped 25 percent to $10.58 billion, making this the first time the company's raw sales exceeded $10 billion in any given quarter. Of course, that figure doesn't reflect the myriad costs associated with boosting web traffic, and investors are more concerned with that $8.13 billion in net revenue. Needless to say, Wall Street is none too impressed -- as of this writing, the company's stock was down almost nine percent in after-hours trading.

That's not to say Google is struggling. The outfit actually logged a sharp increase in clicks on its search ads, but said the fee it receives from those ads was down eight percent from both the previous quarter as well as the fourth quarter of 2010. Plus, by all metrics, Android is still on quite the tear. In a conference call with investors, the company said there are now 250 million Android devices, up 50 million from the last quarter. Some more tidbits: 7000,000 devices are being activated per day and more than 11 billion items have been downloaded from Android Market (it hit the 10-billion mark last month). Finally, Google+ now has 90 million worldwide users, more than double the figure from three months earlier. Need a deeper dive on the numbers? We've got the full financial results at the source link, with the summary earnings release below.

Continue reading Google's Q4 results: $2.71 billion profit, $8.13 billion in revenue, Wall Street disappointed

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/hWVqcuvqvCM/

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