Purveyor
Purveyor's JournalBlockbuster Video-Rental Chain Will Shut Remaining U.S. Stores
By Nick Turner - Nov 6, 2013
Blockbuster LLC, the video-rental company now owned by Dish Network Corp. (DISH), will close its remaining 300 U.S. stores, ending an era for a retail chain that was once a hallmark of shopping centers across the country.
Blockbuster will shut the outlets by early January and also discontinue its DVD-by-mail service by the middle of next month, Englewood, Colorado-based Dish said today in a statement. The company will keep the licensing rights to the Blockbuster brand and use it with Dish services. It also has a video-streaming product called Blockbuster On Demand.
Dish, which acquired the chain out of bankruptcy in April 2011, had already divested Blockbuster’s international assets, including operations in the U.K. and Scandinavia. The company has been gradually shutting down the 1,700 stores it acquired. When Blockbuster was owned by Viacom Inc. (VIAB) in 2004, it operated about 9,000 locations -- before streaming video services such as Netflix Inc. (NFLX) devastated the industry.
“This is not an easy decision, yet consumer demand is clearly moving to digital distribution of video entertainment,” Dish Chief Executive Officer Joseph Clayton said in the statement. “We continue to see value in the Blockbuster brand, and we expect to leverage that brand as we continue to expand our digital offerings.”
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-06/blockbuster-video-rental-chain-will-shut-remaining-u-s-stores.html
Sebelius Rejects Bipartisan Calls for Delay in Health Law
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, categorically rejected bipartisan calls to delay parts of the new health care law during testimony Wednesday before a Senate committee.
“Delaying the Affordable Care Act would not delay people’s cancer or diabetes or Parkinson’s disease,” Ms. Sebelius said. “It would not delay the need for mental health services or cholesterol screenings or prenatal care. Delaying the Affordable Care Act doesn’t delay the foreclosure notices for families forced into bankruptcy by unpayable medical bills.”
With many people unable to obtain coverage through the federal insurance marketplace, lawmakers of both parties have suggested extending the open enrollment period or delaying the financial penalties for those who go without insurance.
“For millions of Americans, delay is not an option,” Ms. Sebelius said at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee. “People’s lives depend on this.”
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/politics/overseer-of-health-website-retiring.html?_r=0
Home Prices Climb in 88% of U.S. Cities
By Prashant Gopal - Nov 6, 2013
Prices for single-family homes climbed in 88 percent of U.S. cities in the third quarter as buyers competed for limited inventories that included fewer discounted foreclosures.
The median transaction price rose from a year earlier in 144 of 163 metropolitan areas measured, the National Association of Realtors said in a report today. A third of areas had double-digit increases.
Home prices are extending a recovery across the country, fueled by a tight supply of listings and a smaller share of distressed sales, which drag down values. The U.S. housing market had five months of inventory in the third quarter, down from 5.9 months a year earlier, data from the Realtors group show. Completed foreclosures in September plunged 39 percent from a year earlier, according to CoreLogic Inc.
“Most regions of the country are experiencing strong home-price appreciation off a low base,” Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research LLC in New York, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Cities with the biggest price appreciation are in places that had bigger busts.”
Price gains are at unsustainable levels, with cities such as San Francisco and San Jose, California, approaching records, Fitch Ratings said today in a report. Much of coastal California is more than 20 percent overvalued, the firm said.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-06/home-prices-climb-in-88-of-u-s-cities-as-recovery-spreads.html
Virginia, Alabama Voter Choices Show Tea Party Declining
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis - Nov 6, 2013
In the closing days of his losing campaign for Virginia’s governorship, Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli called the contest a referendum on Obamacare. Virginia voter Lee Killen saw it instead as a referendum on the Tea Party -- and he voted no.
Killen, a Republican-turned-independent from Fairfax, cast his ballot for Terry McAuliffe less to endorse the Democrat than to lodge a protest against the small-government movement he said has hijacked his former party.
“I don’t particularly like McAuliffe, but I went with him basically because I disagree with the Tea Party approach to life -- no compromise, no middle ground,” Killen, 70, a retired software engineer, said in an interview just after casting his vote yesterday. “Cuccinelli has been a Tea Party leader from the very beginning, and those values are not my values.”
It’s that dynamic as much as any other that tipped the balance in Virginia against Republicans, carrying McAuliffe, 56, the former national party chairman and fundraiser, to victory. He had 48 percent of the vote to Cuccinelli’s 46 percent, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting in the Associated Press tally.
The same forces were at play in Alabama, where business-backed Bradley Byrne defeated Tea Party-aligned rival Dean Young in the Republican primary for a special U.S. House election next month to fill an open seat. Byrne drew 52 percent of the vote to Young’s 48 percent, with all precincts reporting in the AP tally.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-06/virginia-alabama-voter-choices-show-tea-party-declining.html
CBS Snubs Dan Rather In Kennedy Anniversary Coverage
By David Bauder | The Associated Press
First Published 1 hour ago • Updated 36 minutes ago
New York • CBS News hasn’t invited Dan Rather back to participate in its 50th-anniversary coverage of the Kennedy assassination, but images of the longtime anchor who parted bitterly with the network will be a part of its upcoming documentary on how the story unfolded that day.
Rather helped organize CBS’ plans for President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and as a young reporter was a key component of assassination coverage. Now 82, with his own show on AXS-TV, he’s one of the few reporters on the story who day still active in journalism.
Rather, who later became CBS News’ top anchor for 24 years, will appear on NBC’s "Today" show on Nov. 22 this year.
"I held off doing anything for anybody else for a while, thinking I may be asked to do something (for CBS)," Rather said. "I can’t say I had any reason for that hope."
CBS Washington bureau chief Bob Schieffer, who as a newspaper reporter in 1963 gave the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald a ride to Dallas after the assassination, will anchor a Nov. 16 special on that day’s coverage. CBS’ announcement of the special recently said viewers will relive the day with anchor Walter Cronkite and reporters Charles Collingwood, Harry Reasoner, Charles Kuralt and Mike Wallace. All of those men are now dead; Rather went unmentioned.
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http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/world/57087890-68/rather-cbs-coverage-kennedy.html.csp
Cargill To Label Meat After 'Pink Slime' Uproar
NEW YORK (AP) -- Cargill Inc. says it will start labeling beef products that contain "finely textured beef," following last year's public outcry over the use of "pink slime."
The Minneapolis-based meat company says the new packages will appear before next year's grilling season and is in response to consumer demand. It says packages will note when a product "Contains Finely Textured Beef."
Finely textured beef is made by separating the bits of meat that are stuck on fatty trimmings. Beef Products Inc., based in South Dakota, makes a similar product using a slightly different process it calls lean finely textured beef. In both cases, the meat is treated to kill bacteria and the resulting product is mixed with ground beef.
The filler had been used for decades in the U.S. but started to gain negative attention after a New York Times article in 2009 detailed Beef Products' process. A federal microbiologist referred to the ingredient as "pink slime" in the story.
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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CARGILL_PINK_SLIME?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-11-05-18-49-06
White House Sidesteps On "Obamacare" Change
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Under growing pressure, the administration refused repeatedly to state a position Tuesday on legislation formalizing President Barack Obama's oft-stated promise that people who like their existing coverage should be allowed to keep it under the new health care law.
Senate Democrats spoke dismissively of the proposals, signaling they have no intention of permitting a vote on the issue that marks the latest challenge confronting supporters of "Obamacare."
An earlier controversy appeared to be ebbing on a law that has generated more than its share of them. Even so, one strong supporter of the health care law, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R. I., good-naturedly told an administration official, "Good luck getting through this mess."
Whitehouse spoke to Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the agency deeply involved in implementing the law. She had assured lawmakers that initial flaws with the government's website were systematically yielding to around-the-clock repair effort.
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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_OVERHAUL_PROBLEMS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-11-05-18-39-44
U.S., Russia Fail To Agree On Syria Peace Talks Date
Source: REUTERS
GENEVA, Nov 5 (Reuters) - The United States and Russia failed on Tuesday to agree a date for a Syrian peace conference, remaining divided over what role Iran might play in talks to end the civil war and over who would represent Syria's opposition.
"We were hoping that we would be in a position to announce a date today; unfortunately we are not," said U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who chaired the meeting at the United Nations in Geneva. "But we are still striving to see if we can have the conference before the end of the year."
Brahimi conferred with senior U.S. and Russian officials before widening the talks to include representatives from Britain, France and China, as well as Syria's neighbours Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and the Arab League.
Brahimi said he would bring Russian and U.S. officials together again on Nov. 25 and hoped that opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have agreed on delegates to represent them some days before that.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/05/syria-crisis-talks-idUSL5N0IQ45620131105
Israel Says Separation Wall Will Be Border
Negotiators tell Palestinian officials they will not get a state based on 1967 borders, Israeli reports say.05 Nov 2013 14:43
Israeli negotiators have told their Palestinian counterparts that the Separation Wall that cuts through the occupied West Bank will serve as the border of a future Palestinian state, local media reports said.
Just hours before US Secretary of State John Kerry's arrival for top-level talks on ongoing direct peace negotiations on Tueaday, two press reports said the Israeli team had made the proposal.
"Israel's opening position was that the border be the route of the separation barrier [wall], and not the 1967 lines as the Palestinians have demanded," public radio said in a report, which also featured in the top-selling Yediot
Aharonot.
Since talks resumed in late July, the Palestinians have repeatedly complained about Israel's lack of clarity on the issue of borders.
The Palestinians insist the talks be based on the lines that existed before the 1967 Six Day War, when Israeli seized and occupied Gaza, the West Bank and Arab east Jerusalem.
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http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/11/israel-says-separation-wall-will-be-border-201311514132609960.html
Netanyahu Launches Twitter Campaign Against Iran’s Khamenei To Show 'Real Face Of Iran'
Ahead of the scheduled resumption of the international talks on Iran's nuclear program in Geneva Thursday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office launched a Twitter campaign against Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It focuses on protests in Iran marking the 34th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, at which demonstrators burned American flags and chanted “Death to America.”
On Monday night, the Prime Minister Office's official Twitter feed carried, under the topic “The Real Face of Iran,” one photograph of Iranians burning U.S. flags and another of Khamenei denouncing America, both from this week. Netanyahu’s spokesman to the Arab media, Ofir Gendelman, retweeted the images, as did the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, and embassy spokesman Aharon Sagi.
The anti-American demonstrations in Tehran played right into Netanyahu’s hands. Ignoring the fact that the majority of Iranians, including President Hassan Rohani and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of his predecessors in the post, object strongly to the anti-U.S. rhetoric, Netanyahu cited them at a news conference on Monday with the visiting Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and in an interview with Israeli English-language television channel i24News.
“There’s a debate in the West today,” Netanyahu said at the press conference, addressing Komorowski.
“People are saying: What is the true face of the Iranian regime? Because they have obviously changed their style. They speak now in English and they smile. They smile in the talks in Europe. But that regime, which is controlled by Khamenei, has tens of thousands of people on the streets of Tehran today chanting ‘death to America,’ celebrating the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in 1979, 34 years ago. They're celebrating, and Khamenei, who is the real ruler of Iran, yesterday says: ‘America is the most hated country in the world. You can't believe a word of what they say.’ And he fuels that hatred. That's the real Iran," Netanyahu said.
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http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/.premium-1.556421
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