Month: January 2018

Advertisement PHILADELPHIA — It is not difficult to find an all-male panel at the annual January mega-gathering of American economists. They are as common as PowerPoint presentations and pie charts. One such panel this year met to sleepily critique President Trump’s economic policies, but it was overshadowed by another panel, two ballrooms away, that jolted a profession that prides itself on cool rationality. That panel on Friday was stocked with women, each of whom presented new research that revealed…

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The N.S.A. began collecting Americans’ international phone calls and emails without a warrant in October 2001 as part of the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 Stellarwind program. In 2008, after the program had come to light, Congress legalized a form of it by enacting Section 702 of the FISA law. That law enabled the program to expand to Silicon Valley firms, not just telecoms, and to all foreign intelligence purposes, not just counterterrorism. In late 2012, Congress extended the law…

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Advertisement The Children’s Health Insurance Program, better known as CHIP, covers nearly nine million children whose parents earn too much for Medicaid, but not enough to afford other coverage. But the program, which ran out of funding in September, is at a crisis point. Congress passed a stopgap spending bill late last month that was expected to keep CHIP running through March, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said some states could run out of money as…

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The bill is “unnecessary at best,” he added, “and quite possibly harmful to youngsters that want an honest conversation.” Cornerstone Policy Research, a conservative New Hampshire group that opposed the bill, also raised concerns, suggesting that conversion therapy isn’t an issue in the state. “No youth or parents have ever filed an ethical complaint against a licensed professional counselor in New Hampshire for forcing someone into therapy,” the group said in a statement. Supporters of the ban said conversion…

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Advertisement WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve’s economic stimulus campaign continued to generate large profits in 2017, helping to reduce the federal deficit, but the windfall is showing signs of tapering. The Fed, which remits its profits to the Treasury Department, disclosed on Wednesday that its payments last year totaled $80.2 billion — about 12 percent less than the $91.5 billion in 2016. The decline in profits reflects the Fed’s efforts, as the economy gains strength, to conclude the economic…

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But his bare-knuckle partisanship had begun to wear on a district that is affluent and increasingly moderate. As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Mr. Issa routinely ripped into Mr. Obama, his aides and his cabinet, as well as their handling of a gunrunning investigation known as Fast and Furious, the Internal Revenue Service’s slow-walking of political groups’ applications for nonprofit status, the terrorist attack on an American government compound in Benghazi, Libya, and many other matters. Without Mr….

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Justice Breyer fleshed out the point. “Every year a certain number of people die, and every year a certain number move to California,” he said. “We don’t want them on the voter roll. That used to be a big problem, voting dead people.” The case concerns Larry Harmon, a software engineer and Navy veteran who lives near Akron, Ohio. He voted in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections but skipped the next one, saying he was unimpressed by the…

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Because the disintegration of truth, science, and journalism is so fashionable. Give me a break @Topshop https://t.co/n3t4RHn9Ys This exploitation of anything remotely iconic or zeitgeist-ish by the fashion industry is so crude and so recurrent that I’m starting to regret not thinking about these things before they hit the market Powered by WPeMatico

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The I.R.S. excuses hardship cases from collection efforts to ensure that households can still pay for basic living expenses. But an analysis by the advocate’s office found that 45 percent of the collections by private contractors were from taxpayers whose incomes fell below the minimum threshold, including those who received Social Security disability payments. The report underscored Ms. Olson’s repeated complaints that Congress is underfunding the agency, warning that the new tax law will bring added pressures that will…

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