By Bill Chappell, The Two-Way @ npr.org, April 27, 2013

[....] "Everybody has the feeling that Iraq is becoming a new Syria," Mosul businessman Talal Younis, 55, told the AP Wednesday. "We are heading into the unknown. ... I think that civil war is making a comeback."

On Friday, Sunni protesters in Anbar Province announced that they will form their own military force, to be called the Army of Pride and Dignity — named for Pride and Dignity Square, in Anbar's capital of Ramadi, Reuters reports.

In Ramadi Friday, journalist Omar al-Saleh of Al Jazeera was present for a sermon announcing the army's formation. He describes a religious leader asking a crowd of tens of thousands, "Do you agree to sacrifice yourselves and defending your honor?"

With violence showing no signs of abating, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for peace in a speech on Iraqi TV, after 10 Iraqi military and militia members were killed in two separate attacks Saturday [....]

By Katherine Q. Seelye and Ian Lovett, New York Times, April 26/27, 2013

BOSTON — Just five hours after the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last week, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was back at his computer, doing what he did almost every day, posting a message on Twitter, “Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people,” he wrote. His brother, Tamerlan, 26, returned to his home in Cambridge, which he shared with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, and went about his normal activities, including a trip to the supermarket. [....]

Slipping back into a routine after committing a crime, even an atrocity, is fairly typical behavior, said Dr. Stuart W. Twemlow, a retired professor of psychology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He works on threat assessment with the F.B.I. and helped on the Columbine shootings, among other cases.

A return to business as usual helps a criminal “blot out the horror with which he was associated,” Dr. Twemlow said. “That is a normal, dissociative response,” he said, adding that the younger brother, whose movements were more public, had most likely “denied and compartmentalized what he had just done.” [....]

 On Wednesday, April 24, a day after Bangladeshi authorities asked the owners to evacuate their garment factory that employed almost three thousand workers, the building collapsed.

Residents call life at Pismo Dunes Senior Park “Pismodise.” Park manager Louise Payne calls it “a holding tank for the great beyond.” [ ] California is a notoriously youthful culture, but eventually the perpetually young get very old. If they’re lucky enough to live in Pismodise, which is on the Central Coast, they can exit its palm-lined entrance, cross the road, amble across the capacious sand of Pismo State Beach, and dip their toes in the Pacific Ocean while contemplating eternity (or a cocktail).

To move into Pismodise you must meet four conditions: Be 55 or older, keep your dog under 20 pounds, be present when guests stay at your home, and be comfortable with what most Americans consider a very small house. “If you need more than 800 square feet I can’t help you,” says Louise with a shrug. There seems to be some leeway on the dog’s weight. The unofficial rules are no less definite: If you are attending the late-afternoon cocktail session on the porch of Space 329, bring your own can, bottle, or box to drink. If you are fighting with other residents, you still have to greet them when you run into them. Make your peace with the word “trailer trash.”

This is good news for people who have to file for unemployment benefits in Florida.  Rick Scott signed into law a bill that would make everyone who was applying for unemployment benefits to pass a written test on line to be eligible.  The Federal Court ruled against it because it was discriminatory.  The whole system is Florida is broken because it is difficult to sign up for it.  The computer system and phone system is usually overloaded or down.  I watched my son struggle with it for months trying to file on line during the window set for him.  He would get kicked off before he was finished and then he would have to call for days to get a hold of a person to put him in the system again and finish his entries.  His computer skills are good and typing speed is average so it was the overload on the system that would sometimes shut him out.  So to add insult to the process the state house came up with the test too.  Florida has the lowest rate of participation in the unemployment insurance program in the country and our unemployment is much higher then the official numbers out today.  I hope the Democrats running for state office in 2014 makes this an issue.

Brilliant.  It's all there.

By Rebecca Greenfield, The Atlantic Wire, April 25,2013

The business drama behind the New York Times paywall is, at its core, this: can the news organization find new subscription revenue faster than it loses advertising revenue? And, while it has pioneered the paywall, signing up 676,000 subscribers through the end of the first quarter, the announcement that it will offer new, cheaper tiers shows that is not enough paying customers. As its most recent earnings report show, while advertising revenues fell 11.2 percent in the first quarter while circulation revenues, including digital subscriptions, rose only 7 percent—not fast enough to keep up with the changing business model [.....]

New Hampshire State Rep. Stella Tremblay (R-Auburn) said Wednesday she has nothing to apologize for after claiming the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and injured hundreds more were part of a government plot, according to Londonderry Patch.

....

Tremblay stirred controversy Friday after she wrote the following on the Facebook page of conservative radio host Glenn Beck:

The Boston Marathon was a Black Ops 'terrorist' attack. One suspect killed, the other one will be too before they even have a chance to speak. Drones and now "terrorist" attacks by our own Government. Sad day, but a 'wake up' to all of us.

Tremblay wrote that she found this information on Infowars, a website run by conservative radio host and conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones. She linked to a YouTube video from Jones titled, "PROOF! Boston Marathon Bombing is Staged Terror Attack."

The prime reason I posted this is that while checking out Infowars website I came across the term "false flag,' as in "Alex continues his coverage of the Boston false flag event." 

I could make a guess as to what the term meant, but looking into it further I got this

Learn something new everyday.

By Lindsay Wise, McClatchy Newspapers, April 23, 2013

[....] The Senate is expected to vote this week on the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would give states the authority to collect sales taxes for online purchases. Current laws allow states to collect taxes only from retailers with physical presences in their states, resulting in the loss of a projected $23 billion in sales tax revenue nationwide for 2012, according to a 2009 University of Tennessee study.

In addition to closing the tax loophole for e-commerce, the bill would affect non-electronic transactions across state lines, such as catalog sales.

Retailers would use software programs to charge the appropriate state and local sales taxes based on customers’ billing addresses.

Businesses that make less than $1 million in annual out-of-state sales would be exempt, and residents of states that have no sales taxes wouldn’t have to pay unless their states decided to opt in [....]

Bieron acknowledged that software programs make it easier for retailers to calculate taxes but he said that was only the first step in a complex bureaucratic process.

“The idea that there’s a technology solution that’s perfect . . . that’s like a fairy tale world,” he said. “It’s when the small business gets a demand letter or audit notice or a letter saying you have to appear in tax court 3,000 miles away – that’s the problem, and there’s no app for that.”

Bieron said eBay wanted lawmakers to increase the small business threshold either to $10 million in annual out-of-state sales or to 50 employees. “We think that’s a much more realistic dividing line,” he said. [....]

By Annie Lowrey, New York Times, April 23/24, 2013

CHICAGO — On a stormy evening this spring, nurses at Dr. Gary Stuck’s family practice were on the phone with patients with heart ailments, asking them not to shovel snow. The idea was to keep them out of the hospital, and that effort — combined with dozens more like it — is starting to make a difference: across the city, doctors are providing less, but not worse, health care.

For most health care providers, that would be cause for alarm. But not for Advocate Health Care, based in Oak Brook, Ill., a pioneer in an approach known as “accountable care” that offers financial incentives for doctors and hospitals to cut costs rather than funnel patients through an ever-greater volume of costly medical services [.....]

This approach is one small part of a growing effort by providers to hold down costs without restricting needed care. Nationwide, health care spending has grown over the last three years at the slowest rate since the federal government started keeping data more than 50 years ago. While the bulk of that is related to the poor economy, changes among insurers and health care providers have contributed as well. If the trend continues, even at a reduced pace, it could help alleviate Washington’s long-term deficit problems and ease the strain on family budgets. [.....]

A 53 year old business man from Taiwan contracted H7N9 flu while traveling in China.  This is the first case outside of China.  The cases continue to climb and 22 have died in China. 

By Vivienne Walt, Time Magazine, April 23, 2013

A car exploded outside the French embassy in the Libyan capital Tripoli Tuesday morning in what was likely a planned attack. No group has claimed responsibility for the explosion, which wounded two French security guards and damaged part of the embassy’s compound. In a statement, French President Franςois Hollande demanded a swift investigation: “France expects the Libyan authorities to shed the fullest light on this unacceptable act, so that the perpetrators are identified and brought to justice.”

Certain things stood out as notable in Tuesday’s blast — number one being that no one was killed. And it went off at 7 a.m., before Libyans were up, and hours before the customary line for visa-seekers usually starts forming outside the embassy.

Scrutiny now falls on militant Islamist groups active in Libya who are furious about France’s war against their comrades in Mali and the Sahel [.....]

Also see:

Car Explodes Outside French Embassy in Libya
By David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, April 23/24, 2013

A car bomb destroyed about half of the French Embassy in Libya early Tuesday morning, officials said, in the most significant attack against a Western interest in the country since the killing last September of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens [....] The attack was a new blow to the transitional government’s hopes to established an improved sense of public security after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi nearly two years ago. It was the largest blast in Tripoli since the end of his rule, one of the largest in a string of attacks on diplomatic missions, and the first major one in the capital [....]