IRS apologizes for targeting conservative groups

FILE - In this Aug. 2, 2012 file photo, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Douglas Shulman testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, before the House Oversight Committee. The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - In this Aug. 2, 2012 file photo, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Douglas Shulman testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, before the House Oversight Committee. The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

"That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review," Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

"The IRS would like to apologize for that," she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice.

Agency officials found out about the practice last year and moved to correct it, the IRS said in a statement. The statement did not specify when officials found out.

About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called on the White House to investigate.

"Today's acknowledgement by the Obama administration that the IRS did in fact target conservative groups in the heat of last year's national election is not enough," McConnell said. "I call on the White House to conduct a transparent, government-wide review aimed at assuring the American people that these thuggish practices are not under way at the IRS or elsewhere in the administration against anyone, regardless of their political views."

Many conservative groups complained during the election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.

The forms, which the groups made available at the time, sought information about group members' political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.

Certain tax-exempt charitable groups can conduct political activities but it cannot be their primary activity.

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that the IRS was not targeting groups based on their political views.

"There's absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people" who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee.

Shulman was appointed by President George W. Bush. His 6-year term ended in November. President Barack Obama has yet to nominate a successor. The agency is now being run by acting Commissioner Steven Miller.

"The Ways and Means Committee has persistently pushed the IRS to explain why it appeared to be unfairly targeting some political groups over others ? a charge they repeatedly denied," said Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., chairman of the Ways and Means oversight subcommittee.

"The IRS's 'too little too late' response is unacceptable, and I will continue to work to ensure there are protections in place so no American, regardless of political affiliation, has their right to free speech threatened by the IRS," Boustany said.

Tea Party groups were livid on Friday.

"I don't think there's any question we were unfairly targeted," said Tom Zawistowski, who until recently was president of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, an alliance of tea party groups in the state.

Zawistowski's group was among many conservative organizations that battled the IRS over what they saw as its discriminatory treatment of their effort to gain non-profit status. The group first applied for non-profit status in June 2009, and it was finally granted on Dec. 7, 2012, he said ? one month after Election Day.

During the 2012 election, many tea party groups applied for tax-exempt status under section 501 (c) (4) of the federal tax code, which grants tax-exempt status to social welfare groups. Unlike other charitable groups, these organizations are allowed to participate in political activities but their primary activity must be social welfare.

That determination is up to the IRS.

Lerner said the number of groups filing for this tax-exempt status more than doubled from 2010 to 2012, to more than 3,400. To handle the influx, the IRS centralized its review of these applications in an office in Cincinnati.

Lerner said this was done to develop expertise among staffers and consistency in their reviews. As part of the review, staffers look for signs that groups are participating in political activity. If so, IRS agents take a closer look to make sure that politics isn't the group's primary activity, Lerner said.

As part of this process, agents in Cincinnati came up with a list of things to look for in an application. As part of the list, they included the words, "tea party" and "patriot," Lerner said.

"It's the line people that did it without talking to managers," Lerner. "They're IRS workers, they're revenue agents."

In all, about 300 groups were singled out for additional review, Lerner said. Of those, about a quarter were singled out because they had "tea party" or "patriot" somewhere in their applications.

The IRS statement said that once applications were chosen for review, they all "received the same, even-handed treatment."

Lerner said 150 of the cases have been closed and no group had its tax-exempt status revoked, though some withdrew their applications.

"Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale," the IRS said in a statement. "We fixed the situation last year and have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through our system."

Marcus S. Owens, who spent a decade leading the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, said Friday that it made sense that the problem arose among workers in Cincinnati because the agency "really has delegated a lot of authority" to local offices to make decisions about handling their workload.

But Tea Party groups weren't buying the idea that the decision to target them was solely the responsibility of low-level IRS workers.

"It is suspicious that the activity of these 'low-level workers' was unknown to IRS leadership at the time it occurred," said Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, which describes itself as the nation's largest tea party organization. "President Obama must also apologize for his administration ignoring repeated complaints by these broad grassroots organizations of harassment by the IRS in 2012, and make concrete and transparent steps today to ensure this never happens again."

___

Associated Press reporters Alan Fram and Steve Peoples in Boston contributed to this report.

___

Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-05-10-IRS-Political%20Groups/id-20fdc4c200e14a92a44b999f72e3efd2

cinco de mayo Mike Jeffries Abercrombie nascar Charles Ramsey Interview Limo Fire Mayweather vs Guerrero Mario Machado

Solar Eclipse PHOTOS: 'Ring Of Fire' Crosses Australia, Pacific On May 9, 2013

SYDNEY -- Skygazers across the Australian Outback were among the lucky few to witness a solar eclipse on Friday as the moon glided between Earth and the sun, blocking everything but a dazzling ring of light.

The celestial spectacle, known as a "ring of fire" eclipse, is the second solar eclipse visible from northern Australia in six months. In November, a total solar eclipse plunged the country's northeast into darkness, delighting astronomers and tourists who flocked to the region from across the globe to witness it.

Friday's eclipse, also called an annular solar eclipse, is not considered as scientifically important or dramatic as November's, because the moon is too far from Earth ? and therefore appears too small ? to completely black out the sun. Unlike a total solar eclipse, which essentially turns day into night, an annular eclipse just dims the sunlight.

"A total eclipse is overall far more spectacular, far more emotional," said Andrew Jacob, an astronomer at Sydney Observatory. Still, he said, Friday's eclipse "will give you a nice ring of sunlight in the sky ? it will be quite different."

At remote outposts across Australia, scientists and spectators gathered to watch as the eclipse began casting its approximately 200-kilometer-wide (120-mile-wide) shadow at dawn over Western Australia, before moving east through the Northern Territory and the top of Queensland state. The shadow was drifting across Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the tiny island nation of Kiribati, and will eventually end in a largely uninhabited area of the Pacific Ocean.

The eclipse lasted between three and six minutes, depending on its location, and blacked out around 95 percent of the sun at its peak. A partial eclipse was visible to people in other parts of Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand and the South Pacific.

U.S. astronomer Jay Pasachoff, who traveled to Australia to view his 57th solar eclipse, drove to a remote hill in the Outback about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the Northern Territory town of Tennant Creek, where he and around 100 others enjoyed one of the best and longest views of the eclipse in Australia.

Amateur astronomers clicked away on cameras and local high school students measured the drop in temperature as the moon moved in front of the sun and blocked out much of the light. The moment, Pasachoff said, was magical.

"The color of the light changes in an eerie fashion, and you sense that something very strange and weird and wonderful is going on," said Pasachoff, an astronomy professor at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Also on HuffPost:

"; var coords = [-5, -72]; // display fb-bubble FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, 'top', {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: 'clear-overlay'}); });

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/09/solar-eclipse-photos-ring-of-fire-australia-may-2013_n_3249732.html

big brother iOS 6 bank of america Yunel Escobar Eye Black Cruel Summer Endeavor shaun white

Background noise in the operating room can impair surgical team communication

May 10, 2013 ? Ambient background noise -- whether it is the sound of loud surgical equipment, talkative team members, or music -- is a patient and surgical safety factor that can affect auditory processing among surgeons and the members of their team in the operating room (OR), according to a new study that appears in the May issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. The findings are the first to demonstrate that a surgeon's ability to understand spoken words in the OR is directly affected by noise in the environment.

"The operating room is a very fast-paced, high-demand, all senses running on all cylinders type of environment," said study coauthor Matthew Bush, MD, assistant professor of surgery at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, Lexington. "To minimize errors of communication, it is essential that we consider very carefully the listening environment we are promoting in the OR."

To assess the effects of ambient noise on communication in the OR, the researchers created a noise environment similar to that of an OR and tested 15 surgeons with one to 30 years of operating experience. The surgeons' ability to understand and repeat words was tested using the Speech In Noise Test-Revised (SPIN-R) under four different listening conditions typical of OR environments. These conditions included quiet, filtered noise through a surgical mask and background noise both with and without music. Subjects were tested in two situations: engaged in a specific surgical task and task free.

The study showed a significant decrease in speech comprehension with the presence of background noise when the words were unpredictable. In addition, the surgeons demonstrated considerably poorer speech comprehension in the presence of music compared with a quiet environment or one with OR noise present. However, the addition of music became a significant barrier to speech comprehension only when the surgeon was engaged in a task.

The researchers concluded that OR noise can cause a decrease in auditory processing, particularly in the presence of music. Further, the ability to understand what is being said becomes even more difficult when the conversations carry critical information that is unpredictable.

Currently, miscommunication is one of the most frequently cited causes of preventable medical errors. For this reason, there is a growing interest in identifying overlooked variables that can lead to communication breakdowns among health care professionals.

Therefore, these study results have important implications in the real world because surgical teams carry on critical conversations during surgical procedures that often include discussions about medications and dosing as well as the blood supply that should be on hand. Because some of these details might sound similar, clear communication is crucial to avoiding medical errors (ie: a request for the drug heparin might be heard as Hespan).

"Our main goal is to increase awareness that operating room noise does affect communication and that we should foster the best environment in which we can communicate better," Dr. Bush explained. "This effort means that the surgical team needs to work diligently to create the safest environment possible, and that step may mean either turning the music off or down, or limiting background conversations or other things in the environment that could lead to communication errors and medical mistakes."

In future studies, the researchers plan to look at a larger population of surgeons, especially those who are hearing impaired, as well as other operating team members such as anesthesiologists and nurses.

"I think it's important to demonstrate the effect of environmental operating noise on communication on a variety of different players in the operating room setting," Dr. Bush said. "Another step from here is to not only see how noise affects our understanding of speech, but how it affects our tasks, how it affects our ability to perform surgical procedures efficiently and effectively. That is a different stage and different study design completely, but these questions are all ahead of us as we investigate the effects of environmental sound on operating room communication."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/6CS4nT0oZZY/130510124558.htm

the bee gees woodward keratosis pilaris rock and roll hall of fame 2012 brandon rios oklahoma news nascar news

Minn. House approves gay marriage; would be 12th

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) ? A pivotal vote Thursday in the Minnesota House positioned that state to become the 12th in the country to allow gay marriages and the first in the Midwest to pass such a law out of its Legislature.

The 75-59 vote was a critical step for the measure, which would allow same-sex weddings beginning this summer. It's a startling shift in the state, where just six months earlier voters turned back an effort to ban them in the Minnesota Constitution.

The state Senate plans to consider the bill Monday and leaders expect it to pass there too. Gov. Mark Dayton has pledged to sign it into law.

"My family knew firsthand that same sex couples pay our taxes, we vote, we serve in the military, we take care of our kids and our elders and we run businesses in Minnesota," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Karen Clark, a Minneapolis Democrat who is gay. "... Same-sex couples should be treated fairly under the law, including the freedom to marry the person we love."

Hundreds of supporters and opponents gathered outside the House chamber up to and during the debate, chanting and waving signs. They sang "We Shall Overcome" and a John Lennon song in the minutes before the vote.

Four of the House's 61 Republicans voted for the bill, while two of its 73 Democrats voted against it.

Opponents argued the bill would alter a centuries-old conception of marriage and leave those people opposed for religious reasons tarred as bigots.

"We're not. We're not," said Rep. Kelby Woodard, R-Belle Plaine. "These are people with deeply held beliefs, including myself."

Pro-marriage demonstrators filled the hallways outside the House chambers, some dressed in orange T-Shirts and holding signs that read, "I Support The Freedom to Marry." Behind them, opponents held up bright pink signs that simply read, "Vote No."

Among the demonstrators was Grace McBride, 27, a nurse from St. Paul. She said she and her partner felt compelled to be there to watch history unfold. She said she hopes to get married "as soon as I can" if the bill becomes law. The legislation would allow her to do so starting Aug. 1.

"I have thought about my wedding since I was a little girl," she said.

On the other side of the divide, the Rev. Steve Goold of New Hope Church led followers in a morning prayer before they set out to lobby lawmakers. He told them they had the power to change minds, but urged them to be respectful.

"Do not shout and boo. Pray," Goold said. Galina Komar, a recent Ukrainian immigrant who lives in Bloomington, brought her four-year-old daughter and one-year-old son to the Capitol to express her religious concerns.

"I do believe in God, and I believe God already created the perfect way to have a family," Komar said.

But gay marriage supporters also boasted faith leaders in their ranks.

"I've celebrated marriages for same-sex couples, but I've never been able to sign a marriage license for any of them," said the Rev. Jay Carlson, pastor at a Minneapolis Lutheran church. "I look forward to the day when I can."

Eleven other states allow gay marriages ? including Rhode Island and Delaware, which approved laws in the past week. Minnesota would be the first state in the Midwest to pass the measure out of the Legislature.

Iowa allows gay marriages because of a 2009 court ruling. Leaders in Illinois ? the only Midwestern state other than Minnesota with a Democratic-led statehouse ? say that state is close to having the votes to approve a law too.

But most other states surrounding Minnesota have constitutional bans against same-sex weddings, so the change might not spread to the nation's heartland nearly as quickly as it has on the coasts and in New England.

The Minnesota push for gay marriage grew out of last fall's successful campaign to defeat a constitutional amendment that would have banned it. Minnesota became the first state to turn back such an amendment after more than two dozen states had passed one over more than a decade.

The same election put Democrats in full control of state government for the first time in more than two decades, a perfect scenario for gay marriage supporters to swiftly pursue legalization. They tapped the cross-section of citizens, businesses, churches and others who spoke out against the amendment and staged rallies as part of a lobbying effort to build support.

The bill cleared committees in both chambers in March, and with a succession of national polls showing opposition to gay marriage falling away nationally.

"There are kids being raised by grandparents, single parents, two moms or two dads," said Rep. Laurie Halverson, a Democrat from the Twin Cities suburbs. "Some of those folks are my friends. And we talk about the same things as parents. We talk about large piles of laundry, and how much it hurts to step on a Lego. That's what we do, because we're all families."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/minn-house-approves-gay-marriage-12th-200825261.html

blackhawks harry connick jr cher Marc Maron amanda knox Carolyn Moos Danny Brown

Nerve stimulation for severe depression changes brain function

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

For nearly a decade, doctors have used an implanted electronic stimulator to treat severe depression in people who don't respond to standard antidepressant therapy.

Now, preliminary brain scan studies conducted by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are beginning to reveal the processes occurring in the brain during stimulation and may provide some clues about how the device improves depression. They found that vagus nerve stimulation brings about changes in brain metabolism weeks or even months before patients begin to feel better.

The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Brain Stimulation and are now available online.

"Previous studies involving large numbers of people have demonstrated that many with treatment-resistant depression improve with vagus nerve stimulation," says first author Charles R. Conway, MD, associate professor of psychiatry. "But little is known about how this stimulation works to relieve depression. We focused on specific brain regions known to be connected to depression."

Conway's team followed 13 people with treatment-resistant depression. Their symptoms had not improved after many months of treatment with as many as five different antidepressant medications. Most had been depressed for at least two years, but some patients had been clinically depressed for more than 20 years.

All of the participants had surgery to insert a device to electronically stimulate the left vagus nerve, which runs down the side of the body from the brainstem to the abdomen. Once activated, the device delivers a 30-second electronic stimulus to the vagus nerve every five minutes.

To establish the nature of the treatment's effects on brain activity, the researchers performed positron emission tomography (PET) brain imaging prior to the initiation of stimulation, and again three and 12 months after stimulation had begun.

Eventually, nine of the 13 subjects experienced improvements in depression with the treatment. However, in most cases it took several months for improvement to occur.

Remarkably, in those who responded, the scans showed significant changes in brain metabolism following three months of stimulation, which typically preceded improvements in symptoms of depression by several months.

"We saw very large changes in brain metabolism occurring far in advance of any improvement in mood," Conway says. "It's almost as if there's an adaptive process that occurs. First, the brain begins to function differently. Then, the patient's mood begins to improve."

Although the patients remained on antidepressants for several months after their stimulators were implanted, Conway says many of those who responded to the device eventually were able to stop taking medication.

"Sometimes the antidepressant drugs work in concert with the stimulator, but it appears to us that when people get better, it is the vagus nerve stimulator that is doing the heavy lifting," Conway explains. "Stimulation seems to be responsible for most of the improvement we see."

Additionally, the PET scans demonstrated that structures deeper in the brain also begin to change several months after nerve stimulation begins. Many of those structures have high concentrations of brain cells that release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers and also helps regulate emotional responses.

There is a consensus forming among depression researchers that problems in dopamine pathways may be particularly important in treatment-resistant depression, according to Conway. And he says the finding that vagus nerve stimulators influence those pathways may explain why the therapy can help and why, when it does work, its effects are not transient. Patients who respond to vagus nerve stimulation tend to get better and to stay better.

"We hypothesized that something significant had to be occurring in the brain, and our research seems to back that up," he says.

###

Washington University School of Medicine: http://www.medicine.wustl.edu

Thanks to Washington University School of Medicine for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 80 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128180/Nerve_stimulation_for_severe_depression_changes_brain_function

wichita brian wilson storm chasers david blaine

Iran says it has built new drone

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? Iran's defense minister says Iran has built a new, radar-evading drone that can do surveillance and fire on enemy targets.

The semi-official Fars news agency on Thursday quoted Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as saying that the new aircraft ? dubbed Epic, or Hemaseh in Farsi ? can fly at high altitudes.

He did not elaborate on its capabilities.

In recent years, Iran has been pursuing a drone program alongside its military program, which has aimed to produce missiles, jet fighters, destroyers, light submarines and torpedoes.

Iran claims it has captured an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel CIA spy drone and at least three ScanEagle aircraft in recent months.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iran-says-built-drone-185446148.html

us supreme court breaking dawn part 2 trailer mississippi state chris carpenter chris carpenter dick cheney hcg drops

US suicide rate rose sharply among middle-aged

NEW YORK (AP) ? The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed a startling 28 percent in a decade, a period that included the recession and the mortgage crisis, the government reported Thursday.

The trend was most pronounced among white men and women in that age group. Their suicide rate jumped 40 percent between 1999 and 2010.

But the rates in younger and older people held steady. And there was little change among middle-aged blacks, Hispanics and most other racial and ethnic groups, the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

Why did so many middle-aged whites ? that is, those who are 35 to 64 years old ? take their own lives?

One theory suggests the recession caused more emotional trauma in whites, who tend not to have the same kind of church support and extended families that blacks and Hispanics do.

The economy was in recession from the end of 2007 until mid-2009. Even well afterward, polls showed most Americans remained worried about weak hiring, a depressed housing market and other problems.

Pat Smith, violence-prevention program coordinator for the Michigan Department of Community Health, said the recession ? which hit manufacturing-heavy states particularly hard ? may have pushed already-troubled people over the brink. Being unable to find a job or settling for one with lower pay or prestige could add "that final weight to a whole chain of events," she said.

Another theory notes that white baby boomers have always had higher rates of depression and suicide, and that has held true as they've hit middle age. During the 11-year period studied, suicide went from the eighth leading cause of death among middle-aged Americans to the fourth, behind cancer, heart disease and accidents.

"Some of us think we're facing an upsurge as this generation moves into later life," said Dr. Eric Caine, a suicide researcher at the University of Rochester.

One more possible contributor is the growing sale and abuse of prescription painkillers over the past decade. Some people commit suicide by overdose. In other cases, abuse of the drugs helps put people in a frame of mind to attempt suicide by other means, said Thomas Simon, one of the authors of the CDC report, which was based on death certificates.

People ages 35 to 64 account for about 57 percent of suicides in the U.S.

The report contained surprising information about how middle-aged people kill themselves: During the period studied, hangings overtook drug overdoses in that age group, becoming the No. 2 manner of suicide. But guns remained far in the lead and were the instrument of death in nearly half of all suicides among the middle-aged in 2010.

The CDC does not collect gun ownership statistics and did not look at the relationship between suicide rates and the prevalence of firearms.

For the entire U.S. population, there were 38,350 suicides in 2010, making it the nation's 10th leading cause of death, the CDC said. The overall national suicide rate climbed from 12 suicides per 100,000 people in 1999 to 14 per 100,000 in 2010. That was a 15 percent increase.

For the middle-aged, the rate jumped from about 14 per 100,000 to nearly 18 ? a 28 percent increase. Among whites in that age group, it spiked from about 16 to 22.

Suicide prevention efforts have tended to concentrate on teenagers and the elderly, but research over the past several years has begun to focus on the middle-aged. The new CDC report is being called the first to show how the trend is playing out nationally and to look in depth at the racial and geographic breakdown.

Thirty-nine out of 50 states registered a statistically significant increase in suicide rates among the middle-aged. The West and the South had the highest suicide rates. It's not clear why, but one factor may be cultural differences in willingness to seek help during tough times, Simon said.

Also, it may be more difficult to find counseling and mental health services in certain places, he added.

Suicides among middle-aged Native Americans and Alaska Natives climbed 65 percent, to 18.5 per 100,000. However, the overall numbers remain very small ? 171 such deaths in 2010. And changes in small numbers can look unusually dramatic.

The CDC did not break out suicides of current and former military service members, a tragedy that has been getting increased attention. But a recent Department of Veterans Affairs report concluded that suicides among veterans have been relatively stable in the past decade and that veterans have been a shrinking percentage of suicides nationally.

___

Associated Press writer Jeff Karoub in Detroit contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/us-suicide-rate-rose-sharply-among-middle-aged-160018154.html

cnn News nbc news msnbc reddit abc news Boston Police Scanner