Trader Joe’s To Drop Health Coverage For Part-Time Workers Under Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: goodiesfirst

Photo Credit: goodiesfirst

After extending health care coverage to many of its part-time employees for years, Trader Joe’s has told workers who log fewer than 30 hours a week that they will need to find insurance on the Obamacare exchanges next year, according to a confidential memo from the grocer’s chief executive.

In the memo to staff dated Aug. 30, Trader Joe’s CEO Dan Bane said the company will cut part-timers a check for $500 in January and help guide them toward finding a new plan under the Affordable Care Act. The company will continue to offer health coverage to workers who carry 30 hours or more on average.

The law mandates that companies with 50 employees or more offer coverage to such full-time employees, though the Obama administration has chosen to delay that rule for a year.

Trader Joe’s has won kudos for offering its health care, dental and vision plans to part-time workers at a reasonable price — a rarity in an industry known for low pay and scant benefits. But with low-wage workers eligible for tax subsidies to buy health insurance next year, the company has apparently calculated that offering medical coverage to part-timers who work 18 hours or more is no longer worth the cost.

“Depending on income you may earn outside of Trader Joe’s” — i.e., another job — “we believe that with the $500 from Trader Joe’s and the tax credits available under the ACA, many of you should be able to obtain health care coverage at very little if any net cost to you,” Bane wrote in the memo.


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NSA Shares Raw Data on Americans with Israeli Spy Agency

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration shares with Israeli intelligence the vast data dumps the National Security Agency vacuums up from the Internet without removing private information about Americans, even though Israel is one of the nations that spy most aggressively on the United States, according to leaked documents.

A copy of a top-secret deal inked in 2009 between the NSA and the Israeli Signals-intelligence National Unit (ISNU) was provided by NSA leaker Edward J. Snowden to the Guardian newspaper, which posted it Wednesday.

It reveals that the NSA “routinely” passed to its Israeli counterpart “raw” signals intelligence, referred to as “Sigint,” including the vast swathes of digital data traffic that the agency gathers under secret court authority from U.S. Internet providers.

So sensitive is this data that even before being disseminated to other U.S. agencies, the NSA has to subject it to a court-mandated process called minimization, under which the names of any Americans are removed unless they are essential for foreign intelligence interest.

But the U.S.-Israeli agreement states that the data shared with Israel “includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

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Arctic Sea Ice Up 60 Percent in 2013

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Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

An unusually cold Arctic summer has resulted in almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice compared to the same time last year, bucking predictions that global warming would result in the disappearance of the ice cap by 2013.

According to the MailOnline, Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013 compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded in September 2012.

“We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped,” Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told the Mail.

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Study: Obamacare has Been Amended or Delayed 19 Times

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Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

President Obama has already signed 14 laws that amend, rescind or otherwise change parts of his health care law, and he’s taken five independent steps to delay the Affordable Care Act on his own, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, released Wednesday.

The release comes as congressional Republicans are pushing for a halt or outright repeal of the whole law, and as Mr. Obama and his allies decry that as a waste of time and an effort to undermine his signature political achievement.

CRS, in the report to Sen. Tom Coburn, said all sides have already agreed to 14 laws that changed parts of Obamacare, though they were usually minor changes or clarifications.

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Russia ‘to Renew Offer to Supply S-300s to Iran’

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Photo Credit: France 24

Photo Credit: France 24

Russian President Vladimir Putin will offer to supply Iran S-300 air defence missile systems as well as build a second reactor at the Bushehr nuclear plant, the Kommersant business daily reported Wednesday.

Putin will renew an old offer to supply Iran with five of the sophisticated ground-to-air missile systems at a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rowhani on Friday, Kommersant said, quoting a souce close to the Kremlin.

Putin is set to meet Rowhani at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation held in Kyrgyzstan on Friday.

Russia in 2007 signed a contract to deliver five of the advanced ground-to-air weapons — which can take out aircraft or guided missiles — to Iran at a cost of $800 million.

In 2010, then-president Dmitry Medvedev cancelled the contract after coming under strong US and Israeli pressure not to go ahead with the sale of the weapons system, drawing vehement protests from Tehran.

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Nun Reveals Rebel Atrocities in Syria

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Everyone in Syria, but especially its Christian population, is endangered by the growing surge of violence and atrocities perpetrated by the rebels who are challenging President Bashar al-Assad, according to a Catholic nun who has served community members in Syria for more than two decades.

Multiple reports have recently confirmed that the rebel forces opposing Assad are increasingly populated with hardcore Islamists, including groups with close ties to al-Qaida.

Among the areas of Syria that have unfortunately found themselves in the Islamist rebels’ bull’s-eye has been the longtime – think thousands of years – city of Maaloula, where residents still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib, the mother superior of St. James Monastery in Qara and who previously has served as a source of information for WND, describes the horrors to which she was witness. One was the threat from Islamists that Christians of Maaloula would be beheaded if they did not convert to Islam.

In a question-and-answer interview with RT recently, she voiced doubt about the validity of rebel statements protesting a gas attack near Damascus just days ago, and expressed outrage at the “massacre” of civilians by members of Jabhat al-Nusra, the most influential of the rebel groups fighting Assad.

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Former DHS Officials Say Oversight Needs to Be Centralized at Senate Hearing

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon

Photo Credit: Free Beacon

Former officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday urged members of Congress to centralize oversight and codify the responsibilities of a department whose budget has more than doubled since its creation roughly a decade ago.

DHS was formally established in 2002 to combine 22 different federal agencies and departments and integrate intelligence, law enforcement, disaster response, and transportation security in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

While the United States has managed to prevent terrorist threats on the scale of the World Trade Center attacks 12 years ago, critics of DHS say vital intelligence still appears to slip through the cracks of the sprawling 240,000-employee department and its appendages. The DHS budget has swelled from nearly $20 billion in 2002 to $46 billion this year.

The Boston Marathon bombings renewed concerns about information sharing between federal agencies and local law enforcement entities. Congressional testimony in May revealed that the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force received scant direction from the FBI about keeping tabs on Tamerlan Tsarnaev—the older of the two brothers who perpetrated the bombings—after the federal agency determined he did not pose a threat in 2011. The Massachusetts State Police and the local “fusion center” for intelligence sharing were also not aware of the brothers or Tamerlan’s 2012 trip to the radicalized Dagestan region of Russia.

Tom Ridge, the first DHS secretary, told members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that the department needs better oversight to improve its information sharing. He added that communication across branches of a department still poses problems for entities like NASA, which was formed by combining agencies in a similar manner more than 50 years ago.

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Are Terrorists Setting U.S. Wildfires? (+video)

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Photo Credit: KRON-TV

Photo Credit: KRON-TV

As the 2013 season of devastating wildfires continues to rage across the American West, the question of arson as a form of major terrorism is again being raised.

Already this year, 35,440 reported fires have burned a total of 3.9 million acres, with a quarter-million acres scorched the iconic Yosemite National Park.

Large blazes continue to burn in several states, with six alive in Idaho, five each in California and Montana, and one each in Alaska, Louisiana, Oregon, Texas and Washington.

The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, says at this time last year, 45,278 fires had burned 7.9 million acres, and in 2011, there were 55,619 fires devastating 7.2 million acres.

In July 2012, William Scott, a former National Security Agency official and Aviation Week editor, told the American Center for Democracy that terrorists are using fire as a tactical weapon of war.

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Census: Americans in ‘Poverty’ Typically Have Cell Phones, Computers, TVs, VCRS, AC, Washers, Dryers and Microwaves

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Americans who live in households whose income is below the federal “poverty” level typically have cell phones (as well as landline phones), computers, televisions, video recorders, air conditioning, refrigerators, gas or electric stoves, and washers and dryers and microwaves, according to a newly released report from the Census Bureau.

In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority—58.2 percent—have computers.

Fully 96.1 percent of American households in “poverty” have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite telephone show and they want to record it for watching later.

Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in the homes of Americans in “poverty.”

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Norquist Has Leadership’s Back Against Heritage, Club for Growth

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Photo Credit: CQ Roll Call

Photo Credit: CQ Roll Call

A House GOP leadership team whose best-laid plans have been continually torpedoed by Heritage Action for America and the Club for Growth has a familiar ally as it tries to avert a government shutdown: Grover Norquist.

It’s not hard to find frustration with Heritage Action and the Club for Growth among senior Republicans, who believe the groups’ demand that they include Obamacare defunding language on any spending bill keeping the government open will ultimately empower Democrats in a series of fall battles over spending. They believe it’s part of a pattern of pushing untenable demands that have no chance of becoming law.

“Heritage Action and Club for Growth are slowly becoming irrelevant Neanderthals,” one senior GOP aide said.

“Heritage is working harder to elect Democrats than the DCCC,” another senior GOP aide said, referring to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “And those efforts to defeat Republicans are marginalizing them and destroying the reputation of the institution built by Ed Feulner and once revered by all conservative members.”

A band of conservatives, with Heritage Action and Club for Growth cheering them on, forced leadership Wednesday to delay consideration of the continuing resolution until next week. The strategy from House leadership would give Republicans a chance to tell their constituents they voted to defund Obamacare and blame the Senate for saving it. But it’s a far cry from the shutdown showdown the defund die-hards are demanding.

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