Celebrities on Monday reacted to the death of "Odd Couple" star Jack Klugman, who died Monday at age 90. Here are samples of sentiments expressed on Twitter:
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"R.I.P. Jack Klugman, Oscar, Quincy a man whose career spanned almost 50 years. I first saw him on the Twilight Zone. Cool guy wonderful actor." — Whoopi Goldberg.
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"You made my whole family laugh together." — Actor Jon Favreau, of "Swingers," ''Iron Man" and other films.
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"I worked with Jack Klugman several years ago. He was a wonderful man and supremely talented actor. He will be missed" — Actor Max Greenfield, of the "New Girl" on Fox.
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"So sorry to hear that Jack Klugman passed away. I learned a lot, watching him on television" — Dan Schneider, creator of Nickelodeon TV shows "iCarly," ''Drake and Josh" ''Good Burger," ''Drake & Josh."
WASHINGTON — Amid the wrangling over the so-called fiscal cliff, President Obama and congressional Republicans can agree on something: They want to lower the corporate tax rate.
The U.S. has the highest overall rate of any of the world's developed economies. It took the top spot in March after Japan reduced its rate, mimicking other countries that have lowered taxes to lure new businesses and keep existing companies from leaving.
Negotiations to avert automatic income tax increases and federal spending cuts scheduled to kick in Jan. 1 could provide the impetus for U.S. policymakers to tackle an overhaul of the corporate tax code next year.
The White House wants to put a corporate tax overhaul, along with changes to the individual income tax system, on a fast track as part of any deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff."
The centerpiece of an overhaul would be slashing the 35% corporate tax rate, a goal long sought by corporate executives and lobbyists.
Quiz: How much do you know about the 'fiscal cliff'?
"In the name of global competitiveness, I think that has largely been agreed to," Jim McNerney, chief executive of Boeing Co., said about how both parties view the need for major corporate tax changes.
In February, Obama proposed lowering the federal rate to 25% for manufacturing companies and to 28% for other firms. Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been pushing a plan to lower the rate to 25% for all corporations.
In both cases, the rate cuts would be accompanied by the elimination of some of the numerous tax breaks that allow many companies to pay a much lower effective tax rate — and sometimes to avoid paying any corporate taxes at all.
"The administration's position on this is very much in sync with what Republicans say they want, which is a lower rate and a broader base," said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden.
But there still are some obstacles to a deal.
Some Democrats want to use an overhaul to increase the amount of tax revenue coming from corporations, while Republicans want to keep the amount the same. The White House and congressional Republicans also differ on how the U.S. should treat money earned abroad.
And the business community itself is divided. Many small companies file taxes as individuals. They're opposed to any "fiscal cliff" deal that would raise their rates while giving corporations a rate reduction.
Analysts said the obstacles could be overcome because there is consensus around the broader point that the U.S. needs to bring its corporate tax rate in line with other developed nations.
"Regardless of your political persuasion, it is unquestionably the case that the nominal U.S. corporate tax rate is much higher than that of peer countries," said Edward Kleinbard, a USC law professor and former chief of staff of Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation.
The case for corporate tax reform got a boost when the overall U.S. rate of 39.1%, which includes federal, state and local corporate taxes, became the highest this year among the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Two decades ago, the U.S. was 13th.
"At one time in the '80s, we had a competitive corporate tax rate," said Dorothy Coleman, vice president of tax and domestic economic policy for the National Assn. of Manufacturers. "We've fallen behind by standing still."
Quiz: The year in business
But the rate in the tax code isn't what many companies pay because of a host of deductions and tax credits. In 2011, the effective corporate tax rate in the U.S. was 29.2%, roughly in line with the 31.9% average of the six other largest developed economies, the Obama administration said.
The White House said that parity does not mean the statutory rate shouldn't be reduced. It simply means that many tax breaks should be eliminated, allowing the rate to be lowered without adding to the deficit.
The police chief in Webster, N.Y., says that four firefighters were shot while responding to a blaze in the town near Rochester and that two are dead. (Dec. 24)
WEBSTER, N.Y.—
The police chief in Webster, N.Y., says that four firefighters were shot while responding to a blaze in the town near Rochester and that two are dead.
Chief Gerald Pickering says "one or more shooters" fired at the firefighters Monday morning. Officials say they had arrived at the scene of the blaze near the Lake Ontario shore around 6 a.m.
Officials say a fire started in one home and spread to two others and a car. Officials say there is no active shooter at the scene.
As the use of personal technology increases at work, it’s important to observe some new etiquette rules about how we use it. Here are eight of the most important rules to follow at work when it comes to cell phones, email, and other modern technology.
1. Using speaker phone when others can hear you. Playing back your voicemail messages on speaker phone or conducting an entire call on speaker phone is distracting to people trying to work around you. Even if you’re in an office with the door closed, speakerphone noises tend to travel. Don’t value your hands-free convenience over the ability of others to focus on their work.
2. Keeping your cell phone out so you can glance at it during meetings. Glancing down at your phone while you’re supposed to be focused on a meeting signals that you’re bored, not fully engaged, or don’t respect the time of the people you’re meeting with. If you must keep your phone out because you’re expecting an important call or text, explain that at the start of the meeting so that people don’t assume you’re just being rude.
3. Don’t overuse “reply all.” When multiple people are included on an email chain, they don’t all need to see your reply of “thanks” or “will do.” Only use “reply all” if everyone included truly needs to see your response; otherwise, stick with “reply” so your response goes only to the sender and doesn’t clutter multiple in-boxes.
4. Don’t email and phone with the same message; pick one or the other. Nothing is more annoying than starting to read an email, only to have the email’s sender pop his head in your office to repeat the same message.
5. Turn off your cell phone’s ringer if you leave it behind while you’re away from your desk. Ask any office worker, and you’ll hear stories about the annoying guy who leaves his phone behind with his ringer on full-volume while he goes to meetings … leaving his co-workers forced to hear repeated renditions of “Who Let the Dogs Out” or whatever else he’s chosen for his ringtone.
6. Placing calls from a noisy location. If you make a call, ensure you’re somewhere where you and the person you’re speaking with will be able to hear each other–and where you can give your full focus. It’s irritating to get a call from someone who immediately puts you on hold to order coffee because she just reached the front of the line.
7. Keep religious and political messages out of your email signature. Including religious or political messages is likely to offend or at least irritate some of your recipients, and introduces topics that don’t belong in a professional setting. Keep your sign-off neutral and professional.
8. Don’t use your work email as your personal email. In most offices, sending occasional personal emails from your work account is fine, but you should use your personal account for most personal things. If you treat your work email as your default personal account, chances are good that when you leave your job and your inbox and sent folder are full of personal messages, one of your co-workers will be stuck reading through all of them, as they clean out your account for your replacement. In the best case scenario, that’s merely a nuisance for a co-worker –but in the worst case scenario, it could lead to embarrassing revelations.
Alison Green writes the popular Ask a Manager blog, where she dispenses advice on career, job search, and management issues. She’s also the co-author of Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager’s Guide to Getting Results, and former chief of staff of a successful nonprofit organization, where she oversaw day-to-day staff management, hiring, firing, and employee development.
Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LONDON (AP) — Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported from the U.S. over his gun control views.
Morgan has taken an aggressive stand for tighter U.S. gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting. Last week, he called a gun advocate appearing on his "Piers Morgan Tonight" show an "unbelievably stupid man."
Now, gun rights activists are fighting back. A petition created Dec. 21 on the White House e-petition website by a user in Texas accuses Morgan of engaging in a "hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution" by targeting the Second Amendment. It demands he be deported immediately for "exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens."
The petition has already hit the 25,000 signature threshold to get a White House response. By Monday, it had 31,813 signatures.
Morgan seemed unfazed — and even amused — by the movement.
In a series of Twitter messages, he alternately urged his followers to sign the petition and in response to one article about the petition said "bring it on" as he appeared to track the petition's progress.
"If I do get deported from America for wanting fewer gun murders, are there any other countries that will have me?" he wrote.
Training to become a doctor takes so long that just the time invested has become, to many, emblematic of the gravity and prestige of the profession.
But now one of the nation’s premier medical schools, New York University, and a few others around the United States are challenging that equation by offering a small percentage of students the chance to finish early, in three years instead of the traditional four.
Administrators at N.Y.U. say they can make the change without compromising quality, by eliminating redundancies in their science curriculum, getting students into clinical training more quickly and adding some extra class time in the summer.
Not only, they say, will those doctors be able to hang out their shingles to practice earlier, but they will save a quarter of the cost of medical school — $49,560 a year in tuition and fees at N.Y.U., and even more when room, board, books, supplies and other expenses are added in.
“We’re confident that our three-year students are going to get the same depth and core knowledge, that we’re not going to turn it into a trade school,” said Dr. Steven Abramson, vice dean for education, faculty and academic affairs at N.Y.U. School of Medicine.
At this point, the effort involves a small number of students at three medical schools: about 16 incoming students at N.Y.U., or about 10 percent of next year’s entering class; 9 at Texas Tech Health Science Center School of Medicine; and even fewer, for now, at Mercer University School of Medicine’s campus in Savannah, Ga. A similar trial at Louisiana State University has been delayed because of budget constraints.
But Dr. Steven Berk, the dean at Texas Tech, said that 10 or 15 other schools across the country had expressed interest in what his university was doing, and the deans of all three schools say that if the approach works, they will extend the option to larger numbers of students.
“You’re going to see this kind of three-year pathway become very prominent across the country,” Dr. Abramson predicted.
The deans say that getting students out the door more quickly will accomplish several goals. By speeding up production of physicians, they say, it could eventually dampen a looming doctor shortage, although the number of doctors would not increase unless the schools enrolled more students in the future.
The three-year program would also curtail student debt, which now averages $150,000 by graduation, and by doing so, persuade more students to go into shortage areas like pediatrics and internal medicine, rather than more lucrative specialties like dermatology.
The idea was supported by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to President Obama, and a colleague, Victor R. Fuchs. In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, they said there was “substantial waste” in the nation’s medical education. “Years of training have been added without evidence that they enhance clinical skills or the quality of care,” they wrote. They suggested that the 14 years of college, medical school, residency and fellowship that it now takes to train a subspecialty physician could be reduced by 30 percent, to 10 years.
That opinion, however, is not universally held. Other experts say that a three-year medical program would deprive students of the time they need to delve deeply into their subjects, to consolidate their learning and to reach the level of maturity they need to begin practicing, while adding even more pressure to a stressful academic environment.
“The downside is that you are really tired,” said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting agency for medical schools in the United States and Canada. But because accreditation standards do not dictate the fine points of curriculum, the committee has approved N.Y.U.’s proposal, which exceeds by five weeks its requirement that schools provide at least 130 weeks of medical education.
The medical school is going ahead with its three-year program despite the damage from Hurricane Sandy, which forced NYU Langone Medical Center to evacuate more than 300 patients at the height of the storm and temporarily shut down three of its four main teaching hospitals.
Dr. Abramson of N.Y.U. said that postgraduate training, which typically includes three years in a hospital residency, and often fellowships after that, made it unnecessary to try to cram everything into the medical school years. Students in the three-year program will have to take eight weeks of class before entering medical school, and stay in the top half of their class academically. Those who do not meet the standards will revert to the four-year program.
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Stocks continued their slide in a shortened Christmas Eve trading session as hope dimmed that Washington would fix the fiscal cliff before year's end.
The Dow Jones industrial average was down 38 points, or 0.3%, to 13,152 shortly after the opening bell on Wall Street. Volumes were expected to be light in the holiday session.
The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index lost 4 points, or 0.3%, to 1,426. The technology-heavy Nasdaq was down 9 points, or 0.3%, to 3,012.
After Speaker John Boehner's "Plan B" flopped in the U.S. House, investors have become more pessimistic about the chances that Congress and President Obama would resolve the so-called fiscal cliff by Dec. 31.
Major U.S. indexes fell about 1% Friday. Economists warn that automatic spending cuts and tax increases could push the U.S. economy back into a recession.
U.S. markets will close at 10 a.m. PDT on Monday.
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No injuries were reported, but the blaze destroyed hundreds of stores and millions of dollars worth of merchandise, Afghan police and firefighters said at the scene.
Dealers at the neighboring currency exchange, the city’s largest, said they evacuated cash, computer equipment and records from their shops as the flames approached during the night. But in the morning, the market was jammed with people haggling over thick stacks of notes as smoke billowed overhead.
Col. Mohammed Qasem, general director of the Kabul fire department, said he suspected an electrical short was to blame for the fire.
Gas canisters used to heat the stores propelled the flames, along with the cloth and clothing sold by many of the vendors, Qasem said. “It made it very big in a short time.”
Firefighters from the Afghan defense department and NATO forces were sent to assist. But the city’s notorious traffic and the market’s narrow lanes made it difficult for responders to maneuver their vehicles, Qasem said.
Abdulrahman, who like many Afghans has only one name, squatted near a fire truck with his head in his hands as responders aimed a hose at the blackened ruins of a building still smoldering at noon Sunday, more than 12 hours after the fire broke out.
He said the building had contained three shops that he owned and a warehouse full of glassware, crockery and kitchen utensils.
“I lost everything,” he said.
Shirali Khan complained that police hadn't allowed him to remove the goods from his four clothing stores.
“They thought we were all robbers,” he said. “There’s only ashes left.”
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Special correspondent Hashmat Baktash contributed to this report.
Another analyst believes that Apple is losing its shine. Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein Research on Thursday trimmed his price target for the company, citing concerns that growth may be slowing. The analyst believes that iPhone sales will remain strong for at least the next two years, however Apple (AAPL) is expected to lose overall market share “if it does not bring out a lower-price device” in the wake of a changing industry. Sacconaghi notes that the iPad should continue to see success in a tablet market that is “a rocket…an absolute juggernaut,” with tablet PC shipments estimated to more than triple over the next five years. It is believed, however, that Apple will likely become a single digit growth company by 2015, unless it releases a new major product such as an HDTV.
[More from BGR: RIM’s biggest problem: It’s still scrambling to catch yesterday’s hottest mobile app]
“That said, it will have a pristine balance sheet, and be generating a mind-boggling $ 49 billion in free cash flow a year after paying its current dividend,” Sacconaghi wrote in a note to investors, according to Forbes. “More importantly, we believe that Apple’s innovation offers significant option value, which is not in our forecast. Three years ago, the iPad did not exist. Today it generates $ 32 billon in annual revenues, and as a standalone business would be the 11th biggest U.S. tech company. Potential ‘options’ for Apple investors include a lower-end iPhone, a television ‘solution,’ a larger iPad or converged device and monetizing advertising, e-commerce and search from its iOS platform (and credit card database) of 435 million users.”
[More from BGR: WhatsApp goes free for iPhone for a limited time]
The analyst kept his Outperform rating on shares of Apple, although he trimmed his price target from $ 800 to $ 750 and lowered his 2013 fiscal year EPS forecast to $ 49.41 per share, from $ 50.57.
This article was originally published by BGR
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