Wendie Tomsic blog

Year-Long Unemployment Extension? Democratic Senators Float Proposal

As Democrats attempt to position H.R.6419, theEmergency Unemployment Compensation Continuation Act, for another vote in the House of Representatives, where it failed to pass on Thursday, there remains the problem of passage in the U. S. Senate, which has no vote scheduled on the unemployment benefits extension issue.Two senators, Jack Reed (D-RI) andRobert Casey (D-PA), proposed Wednesday that, instead of the stop-gap measures that have been presented thus far, unemployment extension benefits should be extended for another year.

"We are still in the process of trying to establish the schedule of the lame duck session," Reed , "in terms of the remaining days of the session, so no specifics, but think we all understand that this is something that is going to have to be done."

The current unemployment extensions are set to expire on December 1.Congress is set to recess for Thanksgiving on Monday, November 22, which means that the House has to pass the current measure by Friday, November 19, to see a vote in the Senate before the holiday recess.Otherwise, the legislation would have to wait until Congress reconvenes on Friday, November 26.

Reed said, "At this point it's not been scheduled. We're trying to make a case that there will be action but at this point I can't point to a specific time it will come up for a vote this week."

Senator Robert Casey, who joined Reed during the conference call interview, noted, "Congress must act now to preserve unemployment insurance for the two million Americans and 83,000 Pennsylvanians who will lose this financial lifeline at the end of the month. Doing nothing will hurt millions of Americans, job creation and the economic recovery."

Republicans blocked the passage of H.R.6419 because it wasn't funded or offset.Republicans are pushing for unused stimulus money to be used to pay for the extensions.

But , millions of Americans begin losing their eligibility for emergency extension benefits.For many, unemployment benefits checks, which average approximately $312 per payee per week, are part of a combination of savings, pensions, loans, and contributions that are keeping them currently financially afloat.For some, it is their only means of income.If no extension legislation is passed by the House, it is estimated that by the end of December as many asan already estimated 2-4 million individuals who once received benefits and have since become reclassified as ineligible (and who are ).

is the third such measure placed before Congress this year.A year-long extension, like the one proposed by Senators Reed and Casey, would allow for a uninterrupted continuation of benefits, providing recipients with a measure of security and Congress a respite from having to debate unemployment legislation for weeks at a time.

But such a measure would meet stiff resistance from Republicans.The last piece of unemployment benefits legislation was filibustered and , although the emergency benefits had expired at the beginning of June, leaving millions without benefits for nearly two full months.

Although any unemployment extension legislation that comes from the House of Representatives in the future will undoubtedly be paid for (Republicans will control the House in the 112th Congress, which convenes January 3), it is very doubtful that there will be any measure that allows for such an extended period of unemployment extensions.

Swedish Medical Center Receives $100,000 Gift from Evelyn Y. Davis

SEATTLE, Nov. 19, 2010 – SEATTLE, Nov. 19, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Swedish Medical Center announced today that it has received an unrestricted $100,000 gift from nationally known shareholder advocate Evelyn Y. Davis and the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation. љSince establishing her Foundation in 1989, Davis - who is from Washington, D.C. - has now made significant donations across the country to leading medical centers, nationally prominent universities, and various arts organizations.

"An unrestricted gift of this magnitude from a philanthropist such as Evelyn Y. Davis is a great vote of confidence in support of our organization," said Don Theophilus, Executive Director of the Swedish Medical Center Foundation. "We are extremely grateful to Evelyn for her generosity, which will have a very positive impact on the healthcare of this region."

Swedish will use the generous gift for priority projects. In recognition of the significant donation, Swedish is installing a plaque in the main waiting area of its First Hill campus Emergency Department.

A shareholder in more than 80 corporations, Davis has been attending shareholder meetings since 1960. She began her investment career with securities inherited from her father and is the editor of Highlights and Lowlights, a corporate newsletter dealing with corporate governance and related financial issues.

About Swedish

Established in 1910, Swedish has grown over the last 100 years to become the largest, most comprehensive non-profit health provider in the Greater Seattle area. It is comprised of four hospital campuses, a freestanding emergency department and ambulatory care center in Issaquah, Swedish Visiting Nurse Services, and the Swedish Physician Division - a network of more than 40 primary-care and specialty clinics located throughout the Puget Sound area. In addition to general medical and surgical care, Swedish is known as a regional referral center, providing specialized treatment in areas such as cardiovascular care, cancer care, neuroscience, orthopedics, high-risk obstetrics, pediatric specialties, organ transplantation and clinical research. For more information, visit .

SOURCESwedish Medical Center

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Japanese whaler cleared of ramming protest boat

WELLINGTON (AFP) – A Japanese whaler did not deliberately ram and sink a Sea Shepherd protest boat during a high-seas confrontation in Antarctic waters early this year, New Zealand investigators found Thursday.

There was no evidence either the whaler Shonan Maru II or Sea Shepherd's Ady Gil deliberately caused the January 6 collision, which sheared the bow off the militant environmental group's hi-tech trimaran, Maritime New Zealand said.

Instead, the government agency blamed poor seamanship on both sides for the accident, which occurred as Sea Shepherd boats harassed Japanese harpooners in a campaign to prevent whaling in Antarctic waters.

"(It) appears to have resulted from a failure by both masters and the crew of both vessels to appreciate and react appropriately to the potential for the collision," the inquiry found.

The environmental group had accused the Shonan Maru II of deliberately crashing into the much smaller protest boat, describing it as an act of piracy. One of the Ady Gil's crew suffered broken ribs in the collision.

The New Zealand inquiry noted there had been a number of incidents in the weeks before the collision, including an attempt by the Ady Gil to foul the Shonan Maru II's propeller with a mooring line.

"(This) contributed to a tense operating environment and probable uncertainty over each other's intentions," it said.

The Ady Gil's skipper Pete Bethune told the inquiry that about two minutes before the crash, the whaler aimed powerful water jets at his vessel but he did not order the boat to retreat.

"I was like, 'No mate, we're just gonna sit here and take this' ... my intention was to just glare at these guys as they went past," he told investigators.

The whaler then veered toward the protest boat, which investigators said "rendered a close-quarters situation inevitable", prompting the Ady Gil to accelerate forward at the last minute in an attempt at evasive action.

Maritime NZ said both sides "failed to comply with international collision regulations and to act as prudent seafarers should have". It did not make any recommendations for prosecutions.

Attempts to tow the Ady Gil to a French Antarctic base were abandoned after two days and Sea Shepherd left the boat to sink, although the report said it was unclear whether or not it was salvageable.

A month after the collision, Bethune boarded the Shonan Maru II, saying he wanted to confront its captain about the crash, and subsequently spent five months in custody in Japan before being deported to his native New Zealand.

The 45-year-old had a public falling out with Sea Shepherd and last month accused it of deliberately scuttling the Ady Gil to gain publicity for its cause, a charge the group strongly denies.

Bethune said Thursday he felt vindicated by the report, arguing it placed the bulk of blame of the Shonan Maru II because Ady Gil had right of way when the collision occurred.

"It's the equivalent of two cars approaching traffic lights and it was the Japanese who ran the red light," he said.

Bethune added: "When you're doing three knots, and an 800 tonne boat is passing you doing 15 knots, you don't expect them to try and run you over."

Japan hunts whales in southern waters around Antarctica using a loophole in a 1986 international moratorium that allows "lethal research".

The hunt has resulted in a spate of clashes in recent years as conservation groups such as Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace seek to disrupt the Japanese fleet's activities.

Japan's fisheries agency, the quasi-governmental Institute of Cetacean Research, and Kyodo Senpaku, the contractor that sends out the harpoon ships every year, all declined immediate comment on the report from New Zealand.

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UK Retailer Pulls Toshiba Folio 100 Tablet From Stores

U.K.-based consumer electronics vendor Dixon's Retail on Monday confirmed that is has pulled Toshiba's Folio 100 tablet from store shelves because of high return rates.

The Folio tablet, which started shipping to consumers earlier this month, has been pulled from the shelves of retail stores owned by Dixon's such as PC World. The tablet .

"We have taken the Toshiba Folio off sale temporarily as we have had a high level of returns and we do not want to give our customers a bad experience of what is actually a very good product," wrote Simon Branney, a Dixon's spokesman, in an e-mail.

"We are working with Toshiba to identify what the issue is and hope to have a resolution very soon," Branney wrote.

When contacted, Toshiba Europe could not elaborate on the issue resulting in heavy return rates.

"Toshiba is aware of reports regarding customer returns of Folio 100 in the U.K. We are currently working with Dixon's Retail to evaluate the situation," said Gianluca Dianese, head of strategic marketing for the Europe and Middle East region at Toshiba Europe, in an e-mail.

Toshiba started shipping the Folio 100 tablet in Europe earlier this month. The Folio includes a 10.1-inch screen, and runs Google's Android 2.2 OS. It is powered by Nvidia's Tegra chip, which includes a dual-core Arm processor and a graphics core capable of playing 1080p high-definition video. Depending on the features, Toshiba said the device is priced between €399 and €529 (US$546 and $723).

This is a big setback for Toshiba, which is pushing the Folio 100 as an iPad competitor as it tries to grab share in the fast-growing tablet market. Research firm Gartner has projected tablet shipments to reach 58.4 million in 2011.

The Folio 100 tablet will not ship to the U.S., a spokesman for Toshiba America said in an e-mail on Monday. The company is planning different form factors for the U.S. market, the spokesman said, without providing further details.

U.N.-backed investigators shake up Guatemala

GUATEMALA CITY – In this nation whose murder rate more than triples that of Mexico, judges and prosecutors are underpaid, underprotected and under attack by organized crime. Guatemala teeters on the edge of failed-state status.

Yet a U.N.-backed investigative team that has by all counts been highly effective in prosecuting criminals is suddenly meeting stiff resistance from the very people who should stand to gain from a stronger rule of law: Guatemala's political and business elite.

The pushback comes as nearly half the territory in a country of 14 million is controlled by drug gangs and other criminals, with violence even at the capital's swankiest addresses. More than 96 percent of murders go unsolved, and just last month stray bullets killed three bystanders at a crowded restaurant in the capital's hotel district.

"We live in a terrifying anarchy," psychologist Oscar Quintero said on a TV show where mental health experts discussed coping strategies.

The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG in Spanish, was launched three years ago at Guatemala's request to dismantle illegal security groups, many of them tied to the military and a legacy of the 1960-1996 civil war, and to end criminal impunity. It has also taken on rampant vigilante justice, which includes contract killings of criminals.

The work by a team of cops and prosecutors from 25 nations has landed a raft of senior officials in jail — a remarkable feat for a country whose elite has long made sure that law enforcement was selective and the penal code lax.

Eduardo Stein, a well-respected vice president from 2004 to 2008 who helped bring the commission into Guatemala, has now accused it of "going out of control" for filing extra-judicial execution charges against top officials from his government over the allegedly pre-meditated killing of prison inmates. Stein and other businessmen have suggested the commission be put under local political control, arguing that it has overstepped its mandate and even operated outside the law.

Its director, former Costa Rican attorney general Francisco Dall'Anese, rejects the campaign for local control as sabotage, part of "a dark campaign by powerful groups" seeking to dissolve the commission, although he declined to name names.

"It is touching people we never expected it to touch," said Pedro Pablo Marroquin, editor of the La Hora newspaper. "And the problem is, we live in a society where some people are untouchable."

Facing trial on criminal charges dominated by embezzlement are former President Alfonso Portillo, a son of ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt, an ex-defense minister, two former interior ministers, a prisons director, three national police chiefs and two anti-narcotics police commanders.

Then there are the convictions, all surprisingly swift, for murderers, drug cartel enforcers and kidnappers, including members of Mexico's notoriously violent Zeta narco gang.

"All the cases we've brought to justice have so far ended in prison sentences for the accused," said Carlos Castresana, the Spanish magistrate who led the commission until August, told The Associated Press. "It's an earthquake for a country like Guatemala."

On Castresana's anti-corruption recommendations, 1,700 police officers were purged, a handful of senior prosecutors forced to resign and six judges dropped from the Supreme Court. Human Rights First has praised the commission for pushing the criminal justice system to arrest "hitherto untouchable ex-military leaders."

In the most celebrated of its 38 cases to date, the commission saved President Alvaro Colom's political skin. In a videotape divulged the day after his May 10, 2009 shooting death, prominent lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg told a stunned nation that were he killed, it would be because Colom had ordered it. The opposition nearly had Colom impeached.

As it turned out, Rosenberg was despondent for personal reasons and arranged his own murder, the commission determined. It put 16 investigators on the case, using court-approved wiretapping in Guatemala for the first time. The commission has pioneered, as well, the use in Guatemala of what are common investigative tools elsewhere: plea-bargaining and testimony via videoconferences to protect witnesses.

The independent commission, whose head is named by the U.N. secretary-general, works within Guatemala's justice system in hopes it can one day stand on its own. Its annual budget of $20 million is provided by donor nations, including the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and the Nordic countries. Colom told the AP he is asking that the commission's mandate, which expires in September, be extended for at least two more years.

At the heart of the dispute over the commission is a case it began investigating two years ago.

On Sept. 25, 2006, more than 3,000 police and soldiers retook the Pavon prison farm — the country's biggest — from inmates who ran a crack cocaine lab inside and rented out plush homes on the grounds to fellow prisoners.

Then-Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann, a former head of Guatemala's two main business associations, was arrested in Spain last month on charges of ordering the deaths of seven inmates — as well as three others in a separate case. Vielmann has said the prisoners died in putting up a fight. An extradition request by Guatemala is pending.

Also under arrest in the case is Alejandro Giammattei, who was director and security boss for the prisons. Giammattei is a onetime presidential candidate who had also run Guatemala City's transit and water utilities. Arrest warrants have been issued for two other men who are now fugitives: the then-head of the national police, Erwin Sperisen, and the deputy chief of its criminal division, Javier Figueroa.

Vielmann and Giammattei were seen at Pavon after the inmates were captured, stripped naked and escorted to where they would be killed, prosecutors told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the case's political sensitivity. After they were executed, said one prosecutor, the killers dressed the men in clothes lacking bullet holes and planted inoperable weapons on them.

Photos from the court case provided to the AP by prosecutors, and which the commission showed to foreign ambassadors this week, support those allegations.

One shows Sperisen and Vielmann inside the prison during the raid, prosecutors say, while others show inmate Luis Alfonso Zepeda before he was killed, wearing a tan shirt and carrying a shoe, and afterward, wearing both shoes and a blue shirt.

Another shows inmate Jorge Eduardo Batres lying dead in a bedroom with objects strewn beneath the corpse, indicating his body was placed in the room after it was searched. Prosecutors say that's inconsistent with Vielmann's claim the day of the raid that Batres died in a gunfight while resisting capture.

Asked about the photos, Vielmann's lawyer, Francisco Palomo, doubted their validity as evidence, saying it's not clear exactly when they were taken.

"What you have is photos that can't be legally fixed in a day or hour," he told the AP.

Colom has suggested Vielmann be tried in Spain.

"It's a paradigmatic case, complicated, politically complicated," he told the AP.

It is also a case bound to test the many vulnerabilities of Guatemala's fragile justice system, such as the protection of witnesses, judges and prosecutors.

More than five prosecutors have been killed in the past year, according to Ronny Lopez, chief of organized crime prosecutions. Lopez and his wife survived separate attempts on their lives, he said, but one of his wife's bodyguards was killed.

The annual budget of Guatemala's witness-protection program is just $700,000. The government has also stopped funding special homes for witnesses.

"It took us two years to get a witness protection program going and the moment we stopped pushing," said Castresana, the government sends them "to the same old lousy hotels in a district where the mafias hunt them like rabbits."

Two witnesses in major cases were recently murdered, said Dall'Anese, refusing to identify the cases or offer any other details "because I don't want to jeopardize other witnesses."

Attracting honest, capable prosecutors is also a challenge. There are no in-house detectives, and the police aren't trusted. The ones who do the investigative heavy-lifting earn less than $1,000 a month.

Another obstacle for the commission: Some of the very politicians who invited its creation became its quarry. One is Francisco Jimenez, a former interior minister accused of bid-rigging a contract for Guatemala's national ID card.

"We are like the emergency room doctor who intervenes in extreme cases, but that can't solve the deep-seated problems," said Castresana.

Director Dall'Anese is less aggressive than his predecessor. But he put two former Costa Rican presidents in prison for corruption, and he promises to be no less tenacious in Guatemala.

Anyone who tries to halt the commission's work, he said during a public forum in Panama on Oct. 26, is apt to regret it. "We're like a tractor that plows up whomever gets in its way."