Japan Cancels U.S. Wheat Order on GMO Fear

Reuters – by Naveen Thukral and Risa Maeda
SINGAPORE/TOKYO, May 30 (Reuters) – A strain of genetically modified wheat found in the United States fuelled concerns over food supplies across Asia on Thursday, with major importer Japan cancelling a tender offer to buy U.S. grain.
Other top Asian wheat importers South Korea, China and the Philippines said they were closely monitoring the situation after the U.S. government found genetically engineered wheat sprouting on a farm in the state of Oregon.  
The strain was never approved for sale or consumption.
Asian consumers are keenly sensitive to gene-altered food, with few countries allowing imports of such cereals for human consumption. However, most of the corn and soybean shipped from the U.S. and South America for animal feed is genetically modified.
“We will refrain from buying western white and feed wheat effective today,” Toru Hisadome, a Japanese farm ministry official in charge of wheat trading, told Reuters.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday said the wheat variety was developed years ago by biotechnology giant Monsanto Co. It was never put into use because of worldwide opposition to genetically engineered wheat.
Wheat, long known as the staff of life, is the world’s largest traded food commodity and it is used in making breads, pastries, cookies, breakfast cereal and noodles.
Asia imports more than 40 million tonnes of wheat annually, almost a third of the global trade of 140-150 million tonnes. The bulk of the region’s supplies come from the United States, the world’s biggest exporter, and Australia, the No. 2 supplier.
The USDA said there was no sign that genetically engineered wheat had entered the commercial market, but grain traders warned the discovery could hurt export prospects for U.S. wheat.
“Asian consumers are jittery about genetically modified food,” said Abah Ofon, an analyst at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore. “This is adding to concerns that already exist on quality and availability of food wheat globally.”
In 2006, a large part of the U.S. long-grain rice crop was contaminated by an experimental strain from Bayer CropScience , prompting import bans in Europe and Japan and sharply lowering market prices. The company agreed in court in 2011 to pay $750 million to growers as compensation.
BUYERS CAUTIOUS, SEEK DETAILS
A major flour miller in China, which has been stocking U.S. wheat in recent months, said importers will tread carefully.
China has emerged as a key buyer of U.S. wheat this year, taking around 1.5 million tonnes in the past two months. Chinese purchases in the year to June 2014 are estimated to rise 21 percent to 3.5 million tonnes, according to the USDA, with most shipments coming from the United States, Australia and Canada.
Japan’s Hisadome said the government has asked U.S. authorities to provide more details of their investigation and Japan will stop buying the wheat concerned, at least until a test kit is developed to identify genetically modified produce.
There is no U.S.-approved test kit to identify genetically engineered wheat. The USDA has said it is working on a “rapid test” kit.
The Philippines, which buys about 4 million tonnes of wheat a year and relies mainly on U.S. supplies, is waiting for more details from the USDA before acting, an industry official in Manila said.
An agriculture ministry source in South Korea said the government is reviewing the discovery, adding the country thoroughly inspects products from the United States as part of safety checks.
“I won’t be surprised if other countries start cancelling or reducing their purchases of U.S. wheat, particularly Asian countries, putting pressure on wheat demand,” said Joyce Liu, an investment analyst at Phillip Futures in Singapore.
The benchmark Chicago Board of Trade wheat futures eased half a percent on Thursday after rallying in the previous session.
Genetically modified crops cannot be grown legally in the United States unless the government approves them after a review to ensure they pose no threat to the environment or to people.
Monsanto entered four strains of glyphosate-resistant wheat for U.S. approval in the 1990s but there was no final decision by regulators because the company decided there was no market.
The St. Louis-based firm downplayed the incident in a statement posted on its website. “While USDA’s results are unexpected, there is considerable reason to believe that the presence of the Roundup Ready trait in wheat, if determined to be valid, is very limited,” it said.
Still, importers are not in a position to shun wheat from the United States, which accounts for about a fifth of the global supplies, analysts and industry officials said. (Additional reporting by Karl Plume in CHICAGO, Niu Shuping in Beijing, Erik dela Cruz in MANILA, Jane Chung in SEOUL and Yayat Supriatna in JAKARTA; Editing by Amran Abocar and Richard Pullin)

Sound Shore, Mount Vernon hospitals seek bankruptcy

The Sound Shore Medical Center in New Rochelle. / File photo by Matthew Brown / The Journal News

Written by

Jane Lerner

NEW ROCHELLE — Sound Shore Medical Center and Mount Vernon Hospital have filed for bankruptcy as part of a plan to be acquired by a Bronx hospital, officials said Wednesday.
The plan would let both Westchester County hospitals remain open and operate as part of Montefiore Medical Center while the application is before U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
The Sound Shore Health System, which includes Mount Vernon Hospital, has signed an “asset purchase agreement” with Montefiore for the Bronx hospital to buy its assets as well as some of its debts, according to a statement.
The deal includes the Helen and Michael Schaffer Extended Care Center in New Rochelle. Both hospitals said they expect to close the deal by the end of the year. Terms were not disclosed.
While the case is making its way through Bankruptcy Court, Sound Shore and Mount Vernon will continue to provide uninterrupted care for patients.
Workers at Sound Shore and Mount Vernon were told of the plan during meetings Wednesday afternoon with CEO John Spicer.
“It was very positive,” said Kathy Santoiemma, a nurse for 36 years. “There aren’t going to be any layoffs, and they are going to come in and fix things up and even expand services. We are very happy and relieved.”
Montefiore long has been mentioned as a possible suitor for the financially weakened Sound Shore system, which includes Mount Vernon — considered the most likely hospital in the region to close. Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla had said it was exploring a plan to merge with Sound Shore, but the Valhalla hospital said this month that it was ending those talks.
Montefiore has been increasing its presence in Westchester. It recently bought a large office building in Tarrytown for its computer and business departments. Montefiore has outpatient facilities in Yonkers and Hartsdale.
“Montefiore has always been in search of a Westchester strategy, and this may give it to them,” said Kevin Dahill, president of Northern Metropolitan Hospital Association.

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Top US tax breaks to cost $12 trillion over decade, benefit wealthy : CBO

 

 

By David Lawder

WASHINGTON | Wed May 29, 2013 7:06pm EDT

(Reuters) - The top ten U.S. tax deductions, credits and exclusions will keep $12 trillion out of federal government coffers over the next decade, and several of them mainly benefit the wealthiest Americans, a new study from the Congressional Budget Office shows.
The top 20 percent of income earners will reap more than half of the $900 billion in benefits from these tax breaks that will accrue in 2013, the non-partisan CBO said on Wednesday.

 

Further, 17 percent of the total benefits would go to the top 1 percent of income earners -- families earning roughly $450,000 or more. The same group that was hit with a tax rate hike in January.
The benefits of preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends, a break worth $161 billion this year, go almost entirely to the wealthy, including 68 percent to the top one percent of earners.
House Democrats, who requested that Congress' budget referee conduct the study, argued that it backs up President Barack Obama's proposed approach to tax reform and deficit reduction: raise revenues by limiting the amount tax preferences for the wealthy.
"This shows that we could achieve a significant amount of deficit reduction by limiting the preferences to the highest income earners," said Representative Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
Although the study did not provide income thresholds, U.S. Census Bureau data for 2011 shows the top 20 percent of household income extends to down to $101,582, a level that is considered middle-class in many parts of the United States. The lowest quintile topped out at $20,262 in the Census data.
MIDDLE-CLASS AID
But the study also showed that benefits for the largest of the tax preferences, the exclusion for employer-paid health benefits, worth $3.4 trillion over 10 years, are more evenly distributed, with well over half of the benefits going to the middle 60 percent of earners.
The middle 20 percent of earners also got the biggest benefit from excluding a portion of Social Security and Railroad Retirement benefits, a perk worth $414 billion over 10 years.
Three other big tax breaks, the $2 trillion exclusion of net pension contributions and earnings over 10 years, the $1 trillion deduction for mortgage interest and the $1.1 trillion deduction for state and local taxes, also benefited the top 20 percent disproportionately.
Representative Sander Levin, the highest ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, the panel that is trying to advance tax reform this year, said the study shows that Republicans would have to greatly reduce tax breaks that benefit the middle class in order to achieve their goals of reducing tax rates and balancing the budget.
"The CBO report underscores the need to go beyond the rhetoric of lowering tax rates without indication of how that would be achieved or the implications for economic growth and tax equity," Levin said.
A spokesperson for Ways and Means Committee's Republican Chairman, Dave Camp, could not immediately be reached for comment on the study.
Republicans want to reform the tax code by eliminating certain deductions, credits and exclusions, but they do not want to divert any resulting revenues toward deficit reduction. Instead they want to use the savings to lower rates, which they say will accelerate economic growth and increase revenue collection.
Democrat Van Hollen said his favored approach would be to limit the total amount of deductions for the top 2 percent of income earners, or families earning $250,000 or more, while leaving intact much of the top 10 tax breaks, which also include deductions for charitable contributions and tax credits for earned income and children.
These latter two tax breaks, which are largely aimed at the working poor, provide two thirds of their $118 billion in 2013 benefits to the lowest 40 percent of wage earners, the CBO said in the study. Over 10 years, these two credits will cost $1.2 trillion.
(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

All Wars Are Bankers' Wars

Chicago Closes 50 Public Schools, Spends $100 Million in Taxpayer Funds on Private College Stadium

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Bio

Jaisal Noor is a New York City and Baltimore-based independent journalist. His print, radio and TV reports have appeared on The Real News, Free Speech Radio News and Democracy Now! He also teaches US history at schools and colleges across New York City

Transcript

JAISAL NOOR, PRODUCER: Despite months of protests and civil disobedience, Chicago's board of education voted Wednesday, May 22 to close 50 Chicago public schools, the largest such wave of closings in U.S. history. The schools are almost all exclusively located in black and Latino low-income neighborhoods in Chicago's South and West Side.The months-long efforts of parents, teachers, and students to convince the board to rethink the closures, and even prevent the vote from taking place, ultimately failed.TAMMIE VINSON, TEACHER ARRESTED FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: Our message to the mayor is to basically just to listen to the people of Chicago. We're citizens. We've been here longer than he have in most cases. We're taxpayers. We're parents. We're teachers. We're community members. And all we want is a fair and equitable education for our children.NOOR: Some of the most outspoken critics of the school closings have been the members of their local school councils, or LSCs. Unique to Chicago, LSCs provide teachers, parents, and community members direct oversight in how their school is run. Among the schools voted to be closed is Delano Elementary on Chicago's West Side, where Avanette Temple serves as the school councils' elected vice chair.AVANETTE TEMPLE, VICE CHAIR, DELANO ELEMENTARY LSC: [inaud.] my kids went to Delano. So I've been involved with Delano for 30 years. I call Delano the motherboard of the neighborhood. Delano has pushed out doctors, lawyers, teachers, home owners, business owners.NOOR: Delano was one of the 50 schools voted to be closed, even though the hearing officer tasked with monitoring the closing process, retired judge Clifford Meacham, recommended Delano be taken off the list. He noted the school was improving academically and had strong roots to the community. And while Chicago Public Schools has maintained closed down schools will be replaced with those that are higher performing, Meacham noted that Delano is to be replaced with the worst-performing schoolLocal school council member Temple says they are not closing Delano to help its students.~~~
 TEMPLE: This is a beautiful community. And they want to take our community. Like I say, they have been wanting Delano for years. INTERVIEWER: Why do they want it?TEMPLE: Prime property. Look where you're at. You're at the Blue Line, the Green Line. You're five minutes from downtown. You're in the park. You have all these grey stones. It's just a beautiful area, very beautiful.~~~Avanette Temple is not alone in linking policies like school closings to the displacement of working class communities of color.In a piece posted to The Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog, Leslie T. Fenwick, dean of the Howard University School of Education writes that such policies are "really about exporting the urban poor, reclaiming inner city land, and using schools to recalculate urban land value. This kind of school reform is not about children, it's about the business elite gaining access to the nearly $600 billion that supports the nation's public schools. It's about money."But critics note that Chicago is simultaneously transferring hundreds of millions in tax dollars meant for public education to the private sector, including $100 million for De Paul University, a private institution, to build a new sports stadium.Longtime community member Avanette Temple says she sees a parallel between current protests against school closings and the decades-old movements waged by Chicago's communities of color for community control of schools and the creation of local school councils. She says closing schools will deny students access to a quality education because it will force them to walk through dangerous gang-infested areas.TEMPLE: I think that blacks have been marching for the longest. We're still marching. Hispanics have been marching for the longest. They are still marching. And like I asked Rahm Emanuel to walk the walk, you need to. You're sending us back into the '60s. He couldn't do it. So I feel that you don't care for us. You don't care for us as parents, as a community, our children. You don't care.NOOR: While 50 schools were voted to be closed in Chicago, Seattle teachers were celebrating a victory in their months-long boycott of mandated standardized tests.Lois Weiner, a professor of education and longtime advocate of grassroots education reform, says it's important to compare the two.PROF. LOIS WEINER, NEW JERSEY CITY UNIV.: Juxtaposition of these two events should really give us pause. One of the reasons it should give us pause is that the boycott and the anti-testing movement are primarily white middle-class parents and teachers, and they have more political clout than poor working-class people of color. And so one of the challenges that we face is how to unite these two movements, because i don't think either movement can succeed at the expense of the other.NOOR: And while Weiner says Chicago activists failed in keeping their 50 schools open, they did achieve at least one important victory.WEINER: It succeeded in showing the world that the puppets on the board of education were not representing the people of Chicago. It exposed that to the world. But, you know, these powerful elites are willing to do that. That's what we've seen all over the world, from Greece to Spain, to England. They're willing to sit tight against these mass demonstrations and even civil disobedience.And so the question is: what's next?NOOR: Weiner argues activists need to change tactics, including pressuring union leadership to mobilize their members to demand the Democratic Party stop supporting school closures nationally as President Obama has done through Race to the Top and in cities like Chicago with a Democrat, Rahm Emanuel, serving as mayor. She also supports teachers and community members taking over their schools in order to save them.WEINER: One of the things that I think we need to prepare to do is to occupy the schools, just as the CIO did in organizing industry in the '30s. They occupied the factories. And I think the difference is we need to occupy the schools and make them sites of educational liberation, so that we show that it is we who control education, not these elites who have hack politicians who do their work. But to do that requires a phenomenal amount of mobilization and consciousness and radicalism on the part of parents and students and teachers and community activists.NOOR: Reporting for The Real News, this is Jaisal Noor.

Initial jobless claims unexpectedly jumped to 354,000 last week

Job seeker Anu Vatal of Chicago speaks with Patrice Tosi of BluePay, seated, during a career fair in Rolling Meadows, Ill. (M. Spencer Green / Associated Press / May 29, 2013)

 

By Jim Puzzanghera

May 30, 2013, 7:02 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- First-time jobless claims unexpectedly rose to 354,000 last week, but the four-week average remained in the range of moderate labor market growth.
The number of people filing for initial unemployment benefits in the week ending Saturday was up 10,000 from the previous week's upwardly revised figure of 344,000, the Labor Department said.
Analysts had expecting about 340,000 first-time claims, the same figure as initially reported last week.
Memorial Day might have had an impact on the increase.
With state governments closed for the holiday, they had less time to report their claims figures to the Labor Department. Because of the short week, claims data were estimated for five states -- Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Virginia and Wyoming -- the Labor Department said.
The four-week average, which smooths out weekly variations, rose to 347,250 last week. That was up 6,750 from the previous week, but still below the 350,000 level that economists say is consistent with a moderately growing jobs market.
 Quiz: Do U.S. corporations pay too little in taxes?
Analysts and investors are watching economic data closely to try to determine when the Federal Reserve will start scaling back its unprecedented efforts to stimulate the economy.
Thursday's jobless claims figures could be an initial sign of another summer slowdown, but it's too soon to tell, said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi in New York.

"Unemployment claims are not unfriendly for the economic outlook," he said of the latest numbers. "But they are not overly friendly either."

World War 3 Has Already Begun