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Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Around the Web?
Happy New Year! Start 2013 with a read of Wednesday’s links: Five smart ways to put that nesting urge to use – ModernMom.com The best booster seats for baby – iVillage.com Nemours Children’s Hospital incorporates nature in its treatment plans – Yahoo! Shine Getting started on eating solids – Parenting.com The one New Year’s resolution [...]
Hummer For Hire - The Ride Of Your Life
A wedding is one of the once in a lifetime events in our lives. Special and memorable occasions are very crucial in our existence. We must organize and make preparations for us to have an enjoyable moment that we could treasure. Hummer for hire can provide us with fancy experience that is worth our effort and time. Feel like a star as it takes you to the most wonderful happening that waits. This offers a grand ride for a grand moment. There is no need for you to purchase this luxurious ride and avail its pleasure because certain companies that offer its service can make it happen for you. It is absolutely a dream come true for the majority of people.
The crowd will absolutely turn their heads to check your lavish ride as you come out of it looking gorgeous. Different styles and colors are available for you to choose from and suit your personality. You can even start your party in this dreamy vehicle while you and your pals are on your way. The wide interior, trending music and latest screen can be enjoyed and will absolutely give you the mood of partying. If you are not fully satisfied with it you can ask the company to add more decors that you like. Disco lights and other stuff for a lively bonding with friends can be provided. Free drinks are even offered for your satisfaction.
With this fancy ride you will enjoy every minute in it. People who do not know where to find this great offer can browse the internet and easily see what they are looking for. There are posted pictures on the web with details about the interior and gadgets included in the vehicle. It usually accommodates fifteen to twenty people. With enough space for its passengers they will not worry about cramping their legs. Find the ideal package that suits your preferences and budget. The services' cost vary so might want to know what you want to avoid paying more than you should.
Though this kind of automobile is a symbol of class and known to be pricey you can still find cheap hummer fpr hire offers. Hummer for hire is easy to find with the aid of the internet. Browsing their website can allow you to make transactions and get served fast and easy. Know the costs of every vehicle available and compare them to determine which to opt for. For proms you can tell your friends to divide the payment for the convenience of everyone who will join. Rates are often posted in the website so that you can prepare earlier. Doing a right inquiry is very important for you.
The author writes for http://www.hummerhiresydney.com.au which provides information regarding stretch hummer for hire Sydney.
Source: http://articles.submityourarticle.com/hummer-for-hire-the-ride-of-your-life-310162
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Court overturns ruling on editing Yelp criticism
By Bob Sullivan
Free speech advocates have won the latest battle in the legal fight between critical web commenters and the businesses they target.
In a Dec. 28 decision that is only now being widely circulated, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a dissatisfied consumer's Yelp comments shouldn?t have been ordered removed from the web by a lower court.
The decision is the latest in a steady stream of court rulings that impact consumers who criticize businesses online; in this case, an appeal to First Amendment rights was successful.
Jane Perez was sued by contractor Christopher Dietz in Fairfax County, Va., after she wrote on Yelp that Dietz failed to deliver promised services and implied he might be responsible for jewelry missing from her house. In early December, a trial court ordered Perez to remove portions of her negative review, including references to the missing jewelry and to an earlier court ruling surrounding their dispute. That ruling gained national attention.
But the Virginia Supreme Court overruled the lower court, finding that "the preliminary injunction was not justified," removing restrictions on her original review and siding with Perez? argument that the lower court?s decision represented unreasonable ?prior restraint? of her right to free speech.
?The decision confirms the importance of not shutting down public discussion on the Internet just because someone doesn?t like what?s being talked about,? said Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for advocacy group Public Citizen, which filed Perez?s appeal to the supreme court. ?Review sites like Yelp are vehicles for the free flow of ideas by helping consumers make informed decisions on how to spend their hard-earned dollars.?
The ruling does not mean that Perez has no legal responsibility for her comments, however ?- the underlying case continues, and she could be liable for damages if Dietz proves in court that he was libeled. The court's ruling merely invalidates what Perez's trial attorney had earlier called judicial "copy-editing" of her Internet comments.
In its appeal to the injunction, Public Citizen argued that a court cannot forbid speech with an injunction simply to protect a business from bad publicity.
?Settled law ? forbids preliminary injunctions to protect the reputation of a business as impermissible prior restraints,? the advocacy group wrote.
?Prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,? it continued, citing a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
That hasn?t stopped companies from trying, however. Weary of reputation-killing criticism on review sites like Yelp, some businesses have taken to suing consumers for libel, claiming damages through lost future customers. Such lawsuits are meeting with mixed results: An Oregon judge dismissed one lawsuit filed by a dentist earlier this year. Months earlier, a similar lawsuit filed by a church pastor was also dismissed. On the other hand, a case filed by a neurologist in Minnesota after negative comments was initially dismissed, but reinstated by a state appeals court earlier this year. And there are dozens of other ongoing cases -- many involving health care -- including one involving a ?Chicago plastic surgeon suing former patients for $100,000 after they criticized his work online.
Still, the threat of a libel lawsuit has become a more common tactic by businesses trying to dissuade consumers from making critical comments in public forums. A Red Tape reader in Ohio complained last month that she was threatened with such a lawsuit after she placed a sign on her front lawn criticizing a home alarm company.
Levy, a lawyer with Public Citizen, said it?s important the discussion and criticism not be chilled by legal threats and that he was pleased with the Virginia Supreme Court?s ruling.
?This ruling means if you have a sound case for defamation, by all means, you can bring it, but you shouldn't expect to have (comments) taken off-line at first blush,? Levy said. ?You have to show to the satisfaction of a jury that false statements have been made about you with malice or negligence.?
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What Shell’s Kulluk Oil Rig Accident Means for Arctic Drilling
An oil rig owned by Royal Dutch Shell that ran aground near Kodiak Island, Alaska, on Monday night is still being battered by winds and high seas, raising fresh questions over the company?s plan to open the Arctic Ocean to offshore drilling. The oil rig, the Kulluk, was being towed south for repairs and improvements at a shipyard in Washington State in advance of the 2013 drilling season when crews ran into trouble during a winter storm on December 27. In a building series of mishaps, towing equipment broke, engines on the primary tug failed, and a series of relief vessels, including the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley, were unable to maintain control of the drifting rig. All the while, the storm built in strength, with winds ultimately reaching 70 knots and waves topping 50 feet at times. The Kulluk is now grounded just off the coast Sitkalidak Island, near the eastern end of Kodiak Island.
A Coast Guard rescue crew in an MH-60 Jayhawk safely hoisted a small transport crew off the Kulluk in extremely dangerous conditions. While the rig can hold up to 103 workers during drilling operations, a skeleton group of just 18 was riding the Kulluk south. The men onboard were outfitted with Mustang survival suits made for frigid water, and all had undergone survival training.
The Kulluk is carrying about 143,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 12,000 gallons of other hazardous fluids onboard. No oil has been spotted in the water and there?s no evidence of damage to the rig?s hull, according to Coast Guard officials who spoke during a press conference held at 2 pm Alaska time (6 pm Eastern) on Tuesday. Helicopters and C-130H planes are being used to monitor the rig from the air, and the Coast Guard hopes to land a crew of salvage experts onboard to assess any damage and help formulate a plan for getting the Kulluk afloat and out to sea once again. About 500 personnel are involved in the response, according to Coast Guard officials.
I visited the Kulluk for four days at the end of October while it was onsite in the Arctic. The rig is built with 3-inch steel plates and a circular shape to resist enormous pressures from pack ice. For that reason, it seems well-prepared to survive being slammed against the coast. However, the rig has no keel and only a nominal bow, which makes it a slow, rough ride while under tow in the open sea. During drilling operations, it can be moored with 12 anchor lines. It also has a single ?survival? anchor, but it?s not known whether it was deployed before running aground. Since the rig has no propulsion system, it is just an enormous floating piece of steel if it?s neither anchored to the seafloor nor attached to a tug.
Shell bought the Kulluk and leased the Noble Discoverer drillship to pursue a plan of opening the Arctic Ocean to an offshore oil industry that one day could rival Alaska?s North Slope or even the Gulf of Mexico in importance. But since purchasing offshore leases in 2005 and 2008, lawsuits, regulatory hurdles, and mishaps have prevented the company from exploring for oil. In 2012, the company finally seemed ready to begin drilling. But it fumbled several times over air permits, Coast Guard certification of an oil-spill response barge, and severe damage to a required piece of oil-spill equipment. In an echo of the current situation, the Noble Discoverer pulled anchor and nearly ran aground this summer in Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Chain of islands.
All this raises several questions about Arctic drilling, which will be addressed in the weeks and months to come.
1. Assuming the Kulluk is salvaged, will it be ready to drill in 2013, as Shell planned? How extensive will the damage prove to be?
2. What does this mean for offshore Arctic drilling overall? Critics have long argued that drilling in the Arctic Ocean is too dangerous because of harsh conditions and remote locations. The current situation is unfolding just about 50 miles from the Coast Guard?s largest installation in Alaska, Air Station Kodiak. If the Kulluk had run aground more than 1000 miles away on the coast of the North Slope, Shell would be largely on its own. The Coast Guard has no permanent facilities up there, and only one functional ice breaker, the Healy, which is meant primarily for scientific research.
3. Will Shell run into fresh regulatory challenges as it seeks to explore for oil in 2013 and beyond? Will it get to drill in 2013 as planned?
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Fifty Shades of Summer: Long-distance relationships... | Stuff.co.nz
YOUNG LOVE: What makes it stick?
Fifty Shades of Summer is a series of essays on the many variations of love and romance. This is the true story that inspired a setting for Christchurch writer? TANYA MOIR'S novel, Anticipation, due out in March.
It's the island, I suppose, that makes me think of Jamie. For over two years I've been writing about that scrap of land, a mangrove-fringed hideaway with a ramshackle house, cut off from the world by the tide. An imaginary place.
But once upon a time, before I dragged it north in my wake and anchored it in the sheltered waters of the Waitemata, my island had a template. It rose - and rises still - 10 degrees to the south, on a tidal shelf in the roaring forties. It's the place I think of first, it seems, when I think of summer, and romance.
Jamie took me there.
We'd driven through Invercargill, heading west, between the Oreti River's mouth and Foveaux Strait, where the sun thins into the sea - a rough country of salt and paddock and marsh, of windblown gorse and muddy horses. And there it was, to the south of the road, a green hillock fringed with trees, dabbling its rocky toes in the shallows of Bluff Harbour.
''Careful,'' we warned each other as we waded off the southern end of the Earth. Beset, on all sides, by cinematic dangers. Quicksand! The white-horse-capped charge of an early tide. Jamie led the way across. Testing the ground, making sure it was safe. Holding back a sandy hand to me. I had visions of him sinking, suddenly, up to his neck. For what seemed like hours, we picked our way over the mud, each poised to leap to the other's rescue.
We were going to visit Jamie's great-grandmother. She lived there, on the island, alone. I have no idea why. Indeed, I'm ashamed to say I remember nothing about her. Just her house. Its elegant decay. Its dust. The snaky tangle of her garden.
I'm not sure how long we spent there. We explored, Jamie and I, following each other through undergrowth that drooped with the weight of fairy tales, hedges and thickets where sleeping beauties waited to be woken.
I didn't want to go home. We had to, of course, before the tide came in. The sea followed in our footsteps, and by the time we'd reached the mainland the island was cut off again, lost to all but its owner. I was too tired, I think, from all that sun, that sea air, to feel melancholy. We could go back another day.
I climbed into the car and drifted off as we drove home, my head on Jamie's shoulder.
Twenty-three years later, I got an email from my friend Sharon on the subject of True Love. Did I remember my first?
Well, of course. His name was Jamie. He took me to an island. It's not the sort of thing a girl forgets.
Drifting at my desk, four floors above the crowds on a wintry Oxford St, I remembered the end of that southern summer's day. Was it Jamie's grandmother up there in the front seat, driving us home? We were, if I remember rightly, 6 years old. Dozing in the back, two salty, sandy Southland kids, full of a chivalry learnt, I assume, from Gilligan's Island. Tarzan. John Wayne. We were too young to read romance.
The phone on my desk rang. ''He was here last night. Jamie. He lives in Rome.''
For the last five years, so had I - my husband and I had moved to London a few weeks earlier. Otherwise, we would probably have been at Sharon's house that night too. A night, seemingly, when the conversation turned to first love. And a colleague's boyfriend gave my friends - the gathered Italians, Canadians, Brits - a name that should have meant nothing to them. The name of a girl from the southern ends of the Earth.
''And you remember him too,'' Sharon said.
I did. I remembered the river where we used to play. The distant scent of the main channel, clean and cold, beyond the shimmer of hot gravel. And closer, under the willows, above the wild mint, its silty, musty old bed. I remembered the track that tunnelled down there through the willow glades from the back door of Jamie's grandparents' place, a grand, rambling brick house on the southern edge of my home town. A town where the slam of a car door carried the length of the single street, and sometimes it felt like the stretch of the yellow dog in the door of the engineering works was the only thing to happen all day. And I remembered that it was somewhere along that track - beneath the vault of trees, in the slow-turning shafts of green light - that I said I'd marry Jamie.
''Why?'' Sharon wanted to know. ''What made it stick?''
I couldn't remember the last time we saw each other. I couldn't remember whether Jamie stopped coming to stay in his grandparents' house or I stopped going to visit. I just remembered the light and the sun, and how easy it was, back then, to hold each other's eyes.
We never did go back to the island. Long-distance relationships are tough, and there were 60 kilometres between us. I have a nasty feeling I left Jamie for a cowboy, in the end. It wasn't the same.
- ? Fairfax NZ News
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Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/8134800/Long-distance-relationships-are-tough
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Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Details of tentative deal averting 'fiscal cliff'
Highlights of a tentative agreement Monday between the White House and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., aimed at averting wide tax increases and budget cuts scheduled to take effect in the new year. The measure would raise taxes by about $600 billion over 10 years compared with tax policies that expire at midnight Monday. It would also delay for two months across-the-board spending cuts otherwise set to begin slashing the budgets of the Pentagon and numerous domestic agencies.
Highlights include:
?Income tax rates: Extends decade-old tax cuts on incomes up to $400,000 for individuals, $450,000 for couples. Earnings above those amounts would be taxed at a rate of 39.6 percent, up from the current 35 percent. Extends Clinton-era caps on itemized deductions and the phase-out of the personal exemption for individuals making more than $250,000 and couples earning more than $300,000.
?Estate tax: Estates would be taxed at a top rate of 40 percent, with the first $5 million in value exempted for individual estates and $10 million for family estates. In 2012, such estates were subject to a top rate of 35 percent.
?Capital gains, dividends: Taxes on capital gains and dividend income exceeding $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for families would increase from 15 percent to 20 percent.
?Alternative minimum tax: Permanently addresses the alternative minimum tax and indexes it for inflation to prevent nearly 30 million middle- and upper-middle income taxpayers from being hit with higher tax bills averaging almost $3,000. The tax was originally designed to ensure that the wealthy did not avoid owing taxes by using loopholes.
?Other tax changes: Extends for five years Obama-sought expansions of the child tax credit, earned income tax credit, and an up to $2,500 tax credit for college tuition. Also extends for one year accelerated "bonus" depreciation of business investments in new property and equipment, a tax credit for research and development costs and a tax credit for renewable energy such as wind-generated electricity.
?Unemployment benefits: Extends jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed for one year.
?Cuts in Medicare reimbursements to doctors: Blocks a 27 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors for one year. The cut is the product of an obsolete 1997 budget formula.
?Social Security payroll tax cut: Allows a 2 percentage point cut in the payroll tax first enacted two years ago to lapse, which restores the payroll tax to 6.2 percent.
?Across-the-board cuts: Delays for two months $109 billion worth of across-the-board spending cuts set to start striking the Pentagon and domestic agencies this week. Cost of $24 billion is divided between spending cuts and new revenues from rules changes on converting traditional individual retirement accounts into Roth IRAs.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/details-tentative-deal-averting-fiscal-cliff-204222418--finance.html
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