Latest News Clips 2017.11.20

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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.”