About those canceled insurance plans

Though it is understandable that people would want to keep their current health insurance plans, their outrage is shortsighted.They should read the fine print of those insurance plans, which might exclude coverage for hospital stays, prescriptions, mental health services and more. Further, insurers are under no obligation to reinstate the policies they canceled, nor are they restricted from raising premiums.The Affordable Care Act sets higher standards that the canceled policies do not meet. Too bad that many consumers prefer substandard coverage. They better stay healthy.First we were told we could keep our policies if we liked them,alligator shear "period." Now it turns out that allowing the cancellation of individual "substandard" policies was necessary to get enough people into the exchanges to ensure a risk pool sufficient to keep premiums down.

Then we were told it would be easy to shop and compare policies via the government website, which isn't working.Now the insurance companies that set premiums for their exchange policies based on regulations requiring the cancellation of millions of individual policies, forcing those people to the exchanges, are being told to extend those old policies.It's unfortunate that website problems, an alligator shear ignorant media and Republican Luddites have forced President Obama to put existing health coverage in the individual market back in the insurers' court for one more year. Californians should be glad ours is one of those states offering alternatives to these junk plans, many of which provide only bare-bones coverage.

About 11,000 upstate New York homeowners would avert increases in their flood insurance premiums under bipartisan legislation introduced in Congress last month, according to Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer.Under the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act, premium increases in National Flood Insurance Program policies would be delayed for about four years from the bill's date of passage,skin analyzer until the Federal Emergency Management Agency completes an affordability study.According to Schumer's office, the legislation would apply retroactively to homeowners who recently purchased a home in a flood zone. The office said rate increases for those homeowners took effect Oct. 1.

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Hopes rise for Iran nuclear accord soon

Western diplomats and Iran appear to be inching toward a breakthrough agreement that could slow the nation's suspected progress toward a nuclear bomb while easing some sanctions that have hobbled its economy.Top diplomats from the United States, France, Great Britain and Germany rushed to Geneva on Friday to see whether they could close the deal,alligator shear which has emerged suddenly after years of frustrating stalemates and Western suspicions of Iranian cat-and-mouse games with international weapons inspectors.Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov may join them on Saturday, Russia's state-run Ria Novosti news service reported. China's foreign minister is also headed to Geneva, according to Press TV.

The planned arrivals Saturday of those officials suggested negotiations did not reach a deal Friday night, as the chief Iranian negotiator alligator shear-- Prime Minister Javad Zarif -- had earlier predicted.Negotiations on Saturday will include a meeting of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Zarif."The negotiations have reached (a) critical, very sensitive situation, and it needs decisions at higher levels," Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told reporters in Geneva.The emerging deal would ease some sanctions on Iran if it stops enriching uranium to 20% purity -- a key step on the path to a nuclear weapon -- destroys its existing stockpile and takes other steps, according two senior U.S. administration officials.

For years, international leaders have suspected Iran of working toward nuclear weapons, fearful of the instability such a scenario could bring to the already tense Middle East.Those fears include the possibility of a pre-emptive Israeli strike that could spark a broader conflict. In the past, Iran has threatened Israel with military attack.Iran has denied working toward a nuclear weapon, and has said it will not submit to any plan that would totally eliminate its nuclear program.Despite those issues, Zarif said a deal is within reach."We are at a very sensitive stage of negotiations, and it is best if these negotiations are done at the negotiating table rather than on live television," he told CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "But I can tell you that we are prepared to address some of the most immediate concerns that have been raised,skin analyzer and we expect reciprocally our concerns to be met by the P5+1."

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Tacloban devastated; at least 100 dead

The outside world is slowly getting an idea of the extent of damage left in the wake of Typhoon Yolanda (international codename Haiyan), with reports of roughly a hundred dead and extensive damage to infrastructure.Capt John Andrews, Deputy Director General of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), told dzMM that he got reports of roughly 100 people presumed dead, "and that's only the count of bodies on the streets.""This report was relayed to us by our station manager so it is considered very reliable information," he told the station. The information alligator shear was relayed by high-frequency radio to authorities.Of the region, Philippine Red Cross chief Gwendolyn Pang told Agence France-Presse, "We have reports of collapsed buildings, houses flattened to the ground, storm surges and landslides."

"But we don't know really, we can't say how bad the damage is... hopefully today we can get a better picture as to the effects of the super typhoon," Pang added.Tacloban is Eastern Visayas' regional administrative center, and the capital of Leyte, a province of at least 2 million people.Andews also said, "According to the station manager the airport is completely ruined."Andrews also told dzMM that clearing operations at the Tacloban City airport began at 5 am after airport operations there were completely down. "The news I received is alligator shear there was nothing left of the Tacloban airport but the runway," he said.Rappler's Rupert Ambil, who arrived at the Daniel Z. Romualdez airport, reported a lack of public transportation for relief workers. This forces everyone to walk from the airport to the provincial capitol, he said. It also makes relief efforts and supply deliveries more difficult.

While communication remains limited and reports remain sketchy and inaccurate, National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council spokesman Rey Balido told dzMM radio in an interview on Saturday morning, they have gotten "initial contact" from their team in the city Friday night, November 8."They said the damage inflicted by super typhoon Yolanda was severe skin analyzer," he said in the interview. "They said there are barely any houses standing."Balido said a few buildings reportedly remain intact but that most houses were crushed by fallen trees. He said they are still trying to determine the exact number of casualties.

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The Labor Department's report Friday

As many as 800,000 federal workers were furloughed during last month's government shutdown. The Labor Department, in its survey of 60,000 households, extrapolated the effects of the impasse to arrive at the unemployment rate.All of a sudden, the American economy is looking very resilient ― much more so than experts had thought.Despite forecasts that job growth would be sapped by the budget impasse and government shutdown, employers in the U.S. stepped up their hiring last month by adding 204,000 new jobs across a wide spectrum of industries.The increase in payrolls was almost double what many analysts were predicting and alligator shear immediately triggered speculation that the Federal Reserve would be more prone to start reducing its large bond-buying stimulus program next month.

The Labor Department's report Friday also made substantial upward revisions to job growth for the prior two months, to 163,000 in September and 238,000 in August.Taken together, the data over the last three months indicate that the American job-creation machine is not sputtering,alligator shear as some had feared, but is continuing to run at a fairly steady, if moderate, speed.The unemployment rate, however, edged up to 7.3% last month from 7.2% in September amid an unusually large drop in the total number of people working or actively looking for jobs ― what economists call the labor force.

That data injected a measure of skepticism to an otherwise optimistic report, though analysts noted that survey calculations of the unemployed and the labor force were complicated by the partial government shutdown, which temporarily furloughed hundreds of thousands of employees.The payroll numbers are based on a much larger,skin analyzer separate sample of employers, not households, and thus are considered more reliable and less volatile from month to month. Labor Department officials said they saw no discernible effect on new jobs stemming from the shutdown. The report counted federal workers on furlough as employed because they were receiving back pay.

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Sale of RBS Unlikely Before 2015 General Election

Treasury chief George Osborne said Friday that the latest strategic plan by state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC would make it easier to return the bank to private hands, but the sale is unlikely before the next general election due in 2015.Earlier,alligator shear RBS said it would accelerate the sale of its U.S business as part of a suite of measures aimed at appeasing the U.K. government, which has grown increasingly frustrated at the time it is taking to privatize the state-owned lender.The Treasury has concluded it won't break up the 81% government-owned bank. Instead RBS has agreed to earmark 38 billion pounds of assets to be disposed in an internal "bad bank."

"I does make it easier to sell-off the bank and get our money back...That's not going to happen immediately with RBS--it's still very complex. We have got to make it a much simpler bank that is supporting the British economy," Chancellor of the Exchequer Mr. Osborne told BBC radio.He said he thought British taxpayers wanted a bank that was, using cricket terminology, "batting for Britain," he said, noting the bank's goal to sell its U.S. division and become the best domestic small business bank.Mr. Osborne said his "absolute determination," alligator shear as with Lloyds Banking Group PLC--which is 33% owned by the government--was to recover the money that the British taxpayer had pumped into the RBS when it was rescued by the state.

"I think quite frankly [the sale] is unlikely before the general election," he said. "If there was a transformation in RBS and all these problems that it has to confront were dealt with much more quickly,skin analyzer may be we would reconsider. But I say unlikely in the real sense of the word."Mr. Osborne said the government was focused on returning Lloyds to the private sector. It hoped to sell a second tranche of Lloyds shares next year, he said."I want to make sure retail investors, in other words ordinary citizens up and down the country, get a chance to buy Lloyds shares if they want to in the next round of the Lloyds disposal," he said.The treasury chief said he wouldn't be comfortable going to the British people and asking them to invest in RBS until he was clear that it was on top of its problems.

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