House panel: Report finds $50M for IRS conferences

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A government watchdog has found that the Internal Revenue Service spent about $50 million to hold at least 220 conferences for employees between 2010 and 2012, according to a House committee.

That total included $4 million for an August 2010 conference in Anaheim, Calif., for which the agency did not negotiate lower room rates, even though that is standard government practice, according to a statement by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Instead, some of the 2,600 attendees received benefits, including staying in expensive presidential suites. In addition, 15 outside speakers were paid a total of $135,000 in fees, with one paid $17,000 to talk about "leadership through art," the House committee said.

The report by Treasury Department's inspector general, set to be released Tuesday, comes as the IRS already is facing bipartisan criticism after agency officials disclosed they had targeted tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to extra scrutiny.

Agency officials and the Obama administration have said that treatment was inappropriate. But the political tempest is showing no signs of ebbing and has put the White House on the defensive. Three congressional committees are investigating and a Justice Department criminal investigation is underway, and President Barack Obama has replaced the IRS's acting commissioner while two other top officials have stepped aside.

On Friday, the new acting commissioner, Danny Werfel, released a statement on the forthcoming report criticizing the Anaheim meeting.

"This conference is an unfortunate vestige from a prior era," Werfel said. "While there were legitimate reasons for holding the meeting, many of the expenses associated with it were inappropriate and should not have occurred."

Werfel, a former official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said reducing excessive personal travel has been "a personal priority for me" and that "taxpayers should take comfort that a conference like this would not take place today."

The report will be the subject of a hearing Thursday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Werfel is scheduled to make his first congressional appearance as acting commissioner Monday when he appears Monday before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.

According to congressional aides briefed by the inspector general's office, the IRS also did not formally seek competitive bids for the city where the agency's 2010 conference was held, for the event planner who assisted the agency, or for the speakers.

The aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a confidential congressional briefing, said other benefits given to some attendees at the Anaheim IRS conference included vouchers for free drinks and some tickets to attend Angels baseball games.

"So they end up with free drinks, they ended up with tickets to games, basically kickbacks," the committee chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

Two videos produced by the IRS were shown at the Anaheim conference. In one, agency employees did a parody of "Star Trek" while dressed like the TV show's characters; the second shows more than a dozen IRS workers dancing on a stage. The two cost the agency more than $50,000 to make, aides said.

The lecturer who spoke about art through leadership produced six paintings while speaking with subjects that included Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jordan, the rock singer Bono and the Statue of Liberty, the aides said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-06-02-IRS%20Investigation/id-74284594fd25417aa022290798d4ccef

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As Anti-Government Protests Erupt In Istanbul, Facebook And Twitter Appear Suddenly Throttled

A massive anti-government protest in Istanbul, prompted after days of unrest were sparked by plans to redevelop one of the last remaining central public parks, appears to have lead to a throttling of social media both in the city and across Turkey. TechCrunch has independently verified via a number of sources that both Facebook and Twitter have been almost impossible to access from inside Istanbul, and other parts or Turkey. There are also anecdotal reports of authorities switching off access in a localised manner around Taksim Square where thousands of people are demonstrating.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/_mdqyDHWxlg/

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Quintuplets born in Czech Republic for 1st time

PRAGUE (AP) ?

A 23-year-old Czech woman has given birth to quintuplets for the first time in the Czech Republic.

Officials at Prague's Institute for the Care of Mother and Child say four boys ? Deniel, Michael, Alex and Martin ? and a girl ? Terezka ? were born by cesarean section on Sunday.

Zbynek Stranak, chief doctor at the neonatal section of the institute says the birth took place "without any complications."

Stranak says that Alexandra Kinova and her five babies have been placed at an intensive care unit. He says the babies who were naturally conceived have a 95-percent chance to grow up healthy.

The father was present at the birth.

Kinova who is from Milovice, a town located northeast of Prague, already had a son.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/quintuplets-born-czech-republic-1st-time-083422771.html

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Fatigue and sleep linked to Major League Baseball performance and career longevity

May 31, 2013 ? Two new studies show that fatigue may impair strike-zone judgment during the 162 game Major League Baseball season, and a MLB player's sleepiness can predict his longevity in the league.

One study found that MLB players' strike-zone judgment was worse in September than in April in 24 of 30 teams. When averaged across all teams, strike-zone judgment was significantly worse in September compared with April. The statistical model demonstrated strong predictive value through the season.

"Plate discipline -- as measured by a hitter's tendency to swing at pitches outside of the strike zone -- got progressively worse over the course of a Major League Baseball season, and this decline followed a linear pattern that could be predicted by data from the six previous seasons," said principal investigator Scott Kutscher, MD, assistant professor of sleep and neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. "We theorize that this decline is tied to fatigue that develops over the course of the season due to a combination of frequency of travel and paucity of days off."

Data analysis tracked the frequency with which MLB batters swung at pitches outside of the strike zone during the 2012 season. Data were sorted by month for all 30 teams and compared between the first and last month of the season. Data for each team also were compared to a statistical model, based on data from the 2006 to 2011 seasons, which predicts a linear decline in strike-zone judgment per month.

Kutscher noted that the results are strikingly consistent and seem to contradict the conventional wisdom that plate discipline should improve during the season through frequent practice and repetition.

"Teams on the East or West Coast, with good or bad records, they all follow the same pattern of worsening plate discipline," he said. "This study suggests hitters always demonstrate the best judgment when at bat in the first month of the season."

He added that teams may be able to gain a competitive edge by focusing on fatigue management.

"A team that recognizes this trend and takes steps to slow or reverse it -- by enacting fatigue-mitigating strategies, especially in the middle and late season, for example -- can gain a large competitive advantage over their opponent," he said. "This may have already occurred, as the San Francisco Giants -- an outlier in the study in that their plate discipline improved during the 2012 season -- went on to win the World Series."

Another study found a significant and profound relationship between the sleepiness of a MLB player and his longevity in the league. As baseline self-reported scores of sleepiness on the Epworth Sleepiness Scale increased, the likelihood that a player would be in the league three seasons later decreased linearly. For example, 72 percent of players with a baseline ESS score of 5 were still in the league at the follow-up point, compared with only 39 percent of players with an ESS score of 10 and 14 percent of players with an ESS score of 15.

"We were shocked by how linear the relationship was," said principal investigator W. Christopher Winter, MD, medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Va. "It is a great reminder that sleepiness impairs performance. From a sports perspective, this is incredibly important. What this study shows is that we can use the science of sleep to predict sports performance."

Prior to the 2010 season, ESS data were collected from a random selection of 80 MLB players representing three teams. This study group doubled the sample size of Winter's pilot study, which he presented last June at SLEEP 2012. Player status three seasons later was determined on Dec. 16, 2012. A player who was demoted to a lower league, unsigned, or no longer playing was deemed "inactive."

Winter added that teams easily could implement sleepiness screening as part of their player evaluation system.

"I can envision simple questions about sleep being a part of the battery of tests professional organizations use to evaluate prospects," he said.

He also noted that players and their teams could benefit tremendously if a sleep specialist diagnoses and treats the condition causing a player to experience excessive daytime sleepiness.

"That player may suddenly become far more valuable," Winter said.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/aPqprJK1uMk/130531105506.htm

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Hailey Baldwin vs. Ireland Baldwin: Who Would You Rather...

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/05/hailey-baldwin-vs-ireland-baldwin-who-would-you-rather/

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9 Classic Distilleries That Crank Out America's Favorite Liquor

Even though whiskey predates the United States by centuries, it's an undeniably American liquor. It helped George Washington muster troops during the American revolution. It traveled with settlers making their way out West for the first time. It's partially responsible for spurring Prohibition, and in 1964, Bourbon was officially recognized by congress as ?a distinctive product of the U.S.A.?

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/EyxqffyzvCE/9-classic-distilleries-that-crank-out-americas-favorit-510361722

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Exercising Old-School - Health, Fitness, and Sports - Wrong Planet

About two weeks ago, I went for an annual physical. I had ballooned in the last year. For six years, I had held steady at just under 300lb, but when I went in I weighed in at 360lb. Needless to say, this was a bit of a shock. Yet, in the last two weeks, I dropped 20lb. I'm rather proud of myself. It's the first time I've actively lost weight in over half a decade.

I approached this in a two-pronged attack. The first was through food. Rather than stuffing my face with whatever could be microwaved quickly, I cooked. And I cooked so that I would have few leftovers. I've learned I'm pretty good at cooking, and have noticed that if eaten slowly, and without the temptation of a second serving, I can be just as satisfied with a small bowl of goulash as I might with a big one or three.

The second was through exercise, and that's the point of this thread. Now, my sister, she's a gym rat, and her boyfriend is a powerlifter, and both of them have been trying to drag me to the gym. The problem is, I don't like gyms. If I exercise, I prefer it to be out of doors. There's something about gyms that has always put me off, I just don't know what it is.

So what I did instead, keeping with my special interest du jour, the 19th Century British Empire, was to devour everything I could find on the exercises of that time. In case you didn't know, physical fitness was almost a religion in those days (It wouldn't do to send flabby little nerds off to subjugate deepest Africa). Rudyard Kipling, for example, one of my great heroes, was a four and a half minute mile, supposedly. So, says I, what can I learn here?

When my sister goes to the gym, she'll spend two hours of exercise there, and the rest of the day, she sits. This didn't seem pretty productive to me, and a lot of the sources that I've studied actually proposed instead to do a little bit a lot; A set of 60 jumping jacks or 25 squats every hour, for example. It seemed stamina training and walking had a greater emphasis than anything else, but strength training was definitely supported. A young man was recommended to do curls or pushups getting out of bed, and to run a mile every evening before bed. In between, there were exercises scattered throughout the day.

Now, this philosophy of physical fitness all the time seems far more positive to me than "a half hour of continuous exercise three times a week" as my doctor suggested. This is the kind of training that puts us at peak physical fitness, and it was spread throughout the western world, not just in Britain. What happened? Why have the expectations placed on a man (or woman) been reduced so drastically, and despite the obesity epidemic, nobody seems to be proposing a return to such a regimen?

Ah, well, it works for me.

Source: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt232194.html

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