Twitter Quitters Dog IPO

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Robert GalbraithRetired schoolteacher Donald Hovasse signed up for Twitter about a year ago at the urging of his daughter. He lost interest after trying the service a few times and finding lots of celebrities but few of his friends using the online social network.

“I didn’t really get the point of it at all,” said the Las Vegas resident. “Most of them were people I wasn’t interested in hearing what they had to say anyway.” He said, however, that he does check Facebook every day to see what his friends are up to.

Hovasse’s experience highlights a risk for investors as Twitter Inc marches towards this year’s most anticipated initial public offering in the United States, expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in mid-November.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 36 percent of 1,067 people who have joined Twitter say they do not use it, and 7 percent say they have shut their account. The online survey, conducted October 11 to 18, has a credibility interval, a measure of its accuracy, of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

In comparison, only 7 percent of 2,449 Facebook members report not using the online social network, and 5 percent say they have shut down their account. The results have a credibility interval of 2.3 percent.

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Republican Senator Says Obamacare Would Have Killed Him

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Photo Credit: Sue Ogrocki/APOklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, recovering from a recent quadruple bypass, is now using the heart surgery in his attacks on Obamacare.

After going in for a routine colonoscopy, doctors found Inhofe’s arteries were so clogged he barely made it onto the operating table, he said in comments airing on journalist Aaron Klein’s WABC radio show tonight.

The 79-year-old suggested that if he had been in a part of the world with “socialized medicine like Obama is trying to impose upon America,” the operation never would have happened.

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Scientists Discover DNA Body Clock

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Photo Credit: Zoonar GmbH/AlamyA US scientist has discovered an internal body clock based on DNA that measures the biological age of our tissues and organs.

The clock shows that while many healthy tissues age at the same rate as the body as a whole, some of them age much faster or slower. The age of diseased organs varied hugely, with some many tens of years “older” than healthy tissue in the same person, according to the clock.

Researchers say that unravelling the mechanisms behind the clock will help them understand the ageing process and hopefully lead to drugs and other interventions that slow it down.

Therapies that counteract natural ageing are attracting huge interest from scientists because they target the single most important risk factor for scores of incurable diseases that strike in old age.

“Ultimately, it would be very exciting to develop therapy interventions to reset the clock and hopefully keep us young,” said Steve Horvath, professor of genetics and biostatistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

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Armed Protest at Alamo Ends Quietly

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Photo By Lisa Krantz/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWSSAN ANTONIO — Gun enthusiasts gathered at the Alamo Saturday to rally for the right to openly carry firearms, without state and local restrictions that are now in place.

Demonstrators, many carrying rifles, shotguns or 19th-century pistols, cheered speakers who urged them to hold tight to their firearms, as their protected Constitutional right.

Featured speaker Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, a candidate for lieutenant governor whose General Land Office oversees the Alamo, approved the use of the Alamo grounds for the event. Until 2011 the Alamo was overseen by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, which limited demonstrations at one of the state’s most recognized landmarks.

Police Chief William McManus said this week that police would oversee the protest, which he expected to be peaceful.

Update 3:05 p.m.

Police have threatened to cite remaining protesters who are armed for a violation of city ordinance that bans weapons in city parks. Police did not enforce the ordinance during the demonstration, but told a small group of armed protesters who declined to leave they would be cited if they stayed.

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Cruz: Blame Senate GOP for ACA Defeat

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreSen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is blaming his fellow Senate Republicans for opposing a movement in the House to defund ObamaCare, which ultimately caused Republicans to win few concessions in the deal to reopen the government and raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

In an interview with the National Review posted on Saturday afternoon, the senator said that there would be “consequences” for supporting the funding bill.

“Unfortunately, rather than supporting House Republicans, a significant number of Senate Republicans actively, aggressively, and vocally led the effort to defeat House Republicans, to defeat the effort to defund Obamacare,” he told the conservative magazine. “Once Senate Republicans did that, it crippled the chances of this effort, and it caused the lousy deal.”

Late on Wednesday, the Senate voted 81-18 to restore government funding until Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.

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Hillary Clinton Stumps for Terry McAuliffe

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Photo Credit: APHillary Clinton made her first campaign appearance in nearly five years on Saturday to support Terry McAuliffe, her old friend who’s running as the Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia.

But for the media and the majority of attendees packed into The State Theatre here for the event, it was all about her.

She laid out a case for him that rested strongly on women’s equality, gay marriage and rejecting the “scorched earth” politics that have defined Washington over the past several months. Though she didn’t directly call out Republicans, it was clear who she was talking about when she said some politicians have been operating in an “evidence-free zone”, “do not believe in America’s progress” and are trying to “hijack” the future.

“There are times when none of us can sit on the sidelines,” Clinton told the crowd of more than 700 people. “And right now, here in Virginia, is one of those times. … The whole country is watching this election. Watching to see whether the voters of Virginia lead the way of turning from divisive politics [and] getting back to common sense and common ground.”

The crowd chanted “Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!” before she even started speaking. McAuliffe served as her warm-up act, describing Clinton as an “inspiration to men and women all across Virginia and all across the globe.”

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Obama: Washington ‘Has to Change’ after Shutdown and Debt Ceiling Crisis

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Photo Credit: The Guardian Barack Obama used his weekly address on Saturday to repeat his appeal for greater co-operation between political parties in Washington DC, in the aftermath of the government shutdown and national debt crisis. The president also restated his claim that despite the Republican climbdown that cleared the way for a resolution of the crisis on Wednesday night, “no winners” had emerged from the political drama of the last two weeks.

Later in the day the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the presumed frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, echoed Obama’s words in a speech delivered in support of Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for the governorship of Virginia. Clinton said the US people were looking for a return to “common sense and common ground” and would look to the Virginia race – McAuliffe faces the Republican Ken Cuccinelli – for a turn away from “divisive politics”.

It was Clinton’s first public campaign event since leaving the State Department in February, although she is also helping Bill de Blasio, a former aide, in his attempt to be elected mayor of New York.

On Thursday, Obama used remarks to the press to appeal for Republican co-operation over issues such as the federal budget, immigration reform and a farm bill. Discussions over the budget, involving the Republican representative Paul Ryan and the Democratic senator Patty Murray, have begun. However, optimism over bipartisan co-operation is in short supply.

On Saturday, in his address, Obama said: “There’s been a lot of discussion lately of the politics of this shutdown. But the truth is, there were no winners in this. At a time when our economy needs more growth and more jobs, the manufactured crises of these last few weeks actually harmed jobs and growth.

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Bishop: Pope Leading Church to ‘Disaster’

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Photo Credit: WNDCiting the famous prophecies of Fatima, traditionalist Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard Fellay warned in an address in Kansas City that Pope Francis is precipitating the church’s decline and could be a herald that the world is entering the age of the Antichrist.

Fellay, who leads a society that has no canonical status in the Roman Catholic Church, said the “modernist views” professed by the pontiff are at odds with traditional Catholic teaching.

“The situation in the Catholic Church is a real disaster and the present pope is making it 10,000 times worse,” Fellay charged Oct. 12 at the Angelus Press Conference in Kansas City.

Fellay is superior general of the Society of St. Pius X, whose ministers, according to the Vatican, do not legitimately exercise ministry in the church.

Fellay, in his address, drew heavily from the Third Secret of Fatima, which many Catholics believe was given by the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, to Lucia Santos, one of three poor children who claimed to experience a series of six apparitions of Mary in Fatima, Portugal, between May and October in 1917.

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Church: Gov’t Engaged in ‘Conscious Political Strategy to Marginalize and Delegitimize’ Catholic ‘Religious Views’

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Photo Credit: APThe Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is arguing in a new lawsuit that the Obama administration is engaged in a “conscious political strategy to marginalize and delegitimize” Catholic “religious views on contraception by holding them up for ridicule on the national stage.”

At issue in the lawsuit is whether the administration can force the archdiocese to secure a third-party administrator for its self-insurance plan who will provide sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs at no cost to church employees at some of the archdiocese’s separately incorporated subunits.

These subunits include a number of Catholic schools and charities, including Archbishop Carroll High School and Catholic Charities of Washington.

“[T]he Archdiocese operates a self-insurance plan that encompasses not only individuals directly employed by the Archdiocese itself, but, in addition, individuals employed by affiliated Catholic organizations,” says the church’s lawsuit.

Because the Obama administration’s sterilization-contraceptive-abortifacient mandate does not deem these Catholic organizations to be “religious employers,” says the lawsuit, “the U.S. Government Mandate requires that the archdiocese either (1) sponsor a plan that will provide, pay for, and/or facilitate the provision of the objectionable products and services to the employees of” these church organizations “or (2) no longer extend its plan to these organizations, subjecting them to massive fines if they do not contract with another insurance provider that will provide the objectionable coverage.”

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Student Loan Borrowers Face Payment ‘Pitfalls’

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Repaying a student loan should be simple. But a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finds that’s often not the case. Loan servicers, the companies hired by lenders to collect payment for private loans, don’t always act in the borrowers’ best interests. And loan servicers sometimes take actions that increase the total cost of higher education.

“When servicers process payments to maximize fees and penalties, they undermine the trust of their customers,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray in a statement. “Student loan borrowers deserve better; they deserve transparency and accountability.”

The most common complaints dealt with problems encountered by borrowers, trying to pay off their loans early or in a certain order.

It usually makes sense to pay off the loan with the highest interest rate first. But the CFPB found that loan servicers don’t always do that. Instead, they frequently divide the payment or overpayment and apply it to all the person’s outstanding loans.

According to the report, these “payment processing pitfalls” can lead to increased costs, prolonged repayments and harm to a borrower’s credit profile.

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