Bengo’s
1. House
and Senate Panel Pass Tax Bill in Major Step Toward Overhaul
The New York Times NOV. 16, 2017
President
Trump visited Capitol Hill to speak to House Republicans before the
vote.CreditAl Drago for The New York Times
WASHINGTON
— With 227 Republican votes, the House passed
the most sweeping tax overhaul in three decades on Thursday, taking a
significant leap forward as lawmakers seek to enact $1.5 trillion in tax cuts
for businesses and individuals and deliver the first major legislative
achievement of President Trump’s tenure.
The
swift approval came two weeks after the bill was unveiled, without a single
hearing on the 400-plus-page legislation and over the objections of Democrats
and 13 Republicans. The focus now shifts to the Senate, where Republicans are
quickly moving ahead with their own tax overhaul, which differs in substantial
ways from the House bill.
After
four days of debate, members of the Senate Finance Committee voted 14 to 12
along party lines to approve their version of the tax package late Thursday
night. The approval helps clear the way for the full Senate to consider the
bill after Thanksgiving, although it remains to be seen whether it has the
support to pass the chamber.
“We’ve
taken a big step today, but of course there are many more steps ahead,” Senator
Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Finance Committee,
said after the vote.
Several
Senate Republicans have expressed concerns about the legislative effort, and if
Democrats are unified in opposition, Senate leaders can afford only two
Republican defections in order to win passage through the narrowly divided
chamber. In a blow to Senate Republicans, an analysis of their plan released
Thursday projected the bill would actually raise taxes on low-income Americans
within a few years.
Republican
lawmakers must also find a way to bridge the big differences between the two
bills, a hurdle given the varied priorities of lawmakers in the two houses. For
instance, the Senate bill makes the individual income tax cuts temporary and
delays implementation of the corporate tax cut by one year. It also includes
the repeal of an Affordable Care Act provision requiring that most people have
health insurance or pay a penalty.
“We’ve got a long road ahead of us,” Speaker
Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin said after the 227-to-205 vote in the House. “This is
a very, very big milestone in that long road.”
The
speed with which the House passed a significant rewrite of the United States
tax code stunned many in Washington, who have watched previous legislative
efforts by Congress succumb to gridlock.
2. With
Mugabe’s Era Ending in Zimbabwe, a Warning Echoes in Africa
The New York Times NOV.
15, 2017
President
Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and his wife, Grace, celebrated Zimbabwe’s
Independence Day in 2012 in Harare, the capital. On Wednesday, the military
placed Mr. Mugabe under house arrest. CreditLynsey Addario for The New
York Times
JOHANNESBURG
— When Zimbabwe’s generals moved against President Robert Mugabe on Wednesday, their
action foreshadowed the potential end of more than just one political career.
It echoed across a continent where the notion of the “big man” leader is
defined equally by the lure of power in perpetuity and the risk that, one day,
the edifice will crumble under the weight of its own decay.
Mr.
Mugabe, 93, who took power upon independence from Britain in 1980, is the only
leader Zimbabwe has known. He has suppressed perceived threats to his
dominance, often brutally, and maneuvered with guile to outflank his rivals.
Decades after the furling of Britain’s union flag, he waved his liberation
credentials with such skill and frequency that he stood as an emblem, however
flawed, of Africa’s yearning to be free of outside control.
Viewing
himself as Africa’s true statesman, Mr. Mugabe, even in his 90s, flew regularly
to diplomatic gatherings on the continent, including mundane ones in which he
was sometimes the only head of state present. Though he is despised in the West
and by many Zimbabweans, many Africans view him as a living, historic figure,
inspiring diplomats and officials to stand and applaud his speeches criticizing
Western powers.
In
the end, though, his deft touch deserted him as he weighed the question looming
over the end of his regime: who would succeed him. By favoring his polarizing
and politically inexperienced wife over his powerful vice president, whom he fired last week, Mr. Mugabe
overestimated the loyalty of the military and security elite who took him into custody early Wednesday in
what appeared to be a coup.
Mr.
Mugabe’s family became his blind spot. He miscalculated the fierce anger that
their unrestrained behavior caused in his nation, now suffering through another
period of deep economic crisis. Though active in politics for only a couple of
years, his wife, Grace Mugabe, 52, made it
increasingly clear that she wanted to succeed her husband. “If you want to give
me the job,” she told her husband at a gathering this month, “give it to me
freely.”
Mr.
Mugabe’s sons, who are in their 20s, have added to the anger among Zimbabweans
by regularly posting pictures of their lavish lifestyle and partying on social
media sites. Last week, a video emerged showing Mr.
Mugabe’s younger son, Bellarmine Chatunga, pouring Champagne over an expensive
watch on his wrist. On his Instagram feed, he wrote, “$60 000 on the wrist when
your daddy run the whole country ya know!!!”
Whatever
happens now, experts and analysts said, the days of Mr. Mugabe’s unrivaled hold
on Zimbabwe seem at an end. That is a message that offered an unpalatable
reminder to leaders who have clung to power for decades in Africa — from
Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon to Eritrea and Uganda. Even the wiles of a
politician of Mr. Mugabe’s stature do not guarantee success to those who seek
to extend their tenure indefinitely.
In
Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, Mr. Mugabe’s precise fate remained uncertain on
Wednesday, but many Zimbabweans referred to his house arrest as the end of his
unchallenged rule and the start of a new chapter in their lives.
3.
Here's Another Reason to Feel Good About Drinking Coffee
Time
November 13, 2017
The
news about coffee just keeps getting better. In a new analysis of one of the
country’s largest and longest-running studies, drinking coffee was linked to a
lower risk of heart failure, stroke and coronary heart disease. Every extra cup
of coffee consumed per day reduced each of these conditions by 8%, 7% and 5%,
respectively, up to at least six cups per day.
The
preliminary research was presented at the American
Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Anaheim, California. It has not yet
been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, but it’s not the first
research to suggest that coffee protects the heartand arteries.
Researchers
from the University of Colorado medical school analyzed data from the
Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the eating patterns and
cardiovascular health of more than 15,000 people since the 1940s. They were
looking for previously unidentified risk factors for heart failure and stroke. They
used a method known as machine learning, a form of artificial
intelligence that looks for patterns in big data sets, similar to the way
e-commerce websites might predict products a customer mighty like based on
their previous shopping history.
“In an ideal world, we would be able to
predict cardiovascular disease and stroke with 100% accuracy long before the
occurrence of the event,” said first author Laura Stevens, a doctoral student
at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in an email to TIME. “The
challenge here is there are so many potential risk factors, and testing each
one using traditional methods would be extremely time consuming, and possibly
infeasible,” she added.
Out
of all the potential links to heart disease the researchers considered, one
stood out after the analysis. Coffee was associated with a reduced risk for
heart failure, stroke and coronary heart disease. For coffee drinkers, every
8-ounce cup per day reduced these risks by 7%, 8% and 5%, respectively,
compared to people who didn’t drink coffee. Almost all of the coffee drinkers
in the study (97%) consumed between one and six cups of coffee a day, says
Stevens, so the researchers can’t know for sure if the benefits continue at
even higher consumption levels.
The
researchers even determined that whether someone drank coffee or not could help
predict their eventual risk of heart failure or stroke. When they added
coffee-drinking to a risk assessment tool that also included other known risk
factors (like age, blood pressure and cholesterol), their prediction accuracy
improved by 4%.
The
researchers then confirmed their findings with more traditional analyses of two
additional large study groups: the Cardiovascular Heart Study and the
Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study.
Because
these studies simply observed people’s health and coffee consumption over time,
the analyses were only able to determine a link between the two—not a
cause-and-effect relationship. But based on these and other findings, experts
suspect that coffee may be protective against conditions like heart failure and
stroke. Previous research has suggested that coffee’s caffeine content, along
with its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, may be responsible for
its presumed health benefits.
The
new research also supports the idea that machine learning may help researchers
identify other unknown risk factors—or protective factors—for disease. The
current risk-assessment tools used to predict whether someone might develop
heart disease are very good, the authors noted in their presentation, but
they’re not 100% accurate, suggesting that more risk factors could still be
identified.
Stevens
says her team intends to use similar analyses to determine if compounds like
caffeine may explain the association with heart health observed in this study.
“Ultimately, our key goals are to determine whether coffee consumption is a
clinically useful part of cardiovascular disease risk assessment,” she says,
“and whether changing coffee or caffeine consumption may be a way of altering
that risk.”
