Stocks rise and fall with twists in budget talks

Optimism that a budget deal will be reached in Washington sent stocks modestly higher Thursday. A pair of economic reports also brightened the mood.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 36.71 points to close at 13,021.82.

The stock market took a brief turn lower when House Speaker John Boehner said little progress was being made in budget talks in Washington. The Dow was up as much as 77 points in morning trading, turned negative as Boehner made his remarks at 11:30 a.m., then slowly recovered in the afternoon.

Investors were encouraged by several positive economic reports, including a higher estimate of third-quarter U.S. economic growth, an increase in home sales and a drop in claims for unemployment benefits.

After a meeting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Boehner told reporters that Democrats still haven't said which cuts they would accept to government benefit programs, suggesting a final budget deal remains a long way off. Republicans have said that they are open to increasing tax revenues as part of an agreement but only if they're accompanied by significant cuts to spending.

Investors have been closely watching the talks between the White House and Congress over the “fiscal cliff”, a reference to sharp government spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to start Jan. 1 unless a deal is reached to cut the budget deficit. New developments in the talks have whipsawed the market.

“It's a headline-watching market with this fiscal cliff,” said David Brown, chief market strategist of the investment research firm Sabrient Systems.

Brown says the ongoing negotiations are likely to cause the stock market to take sudden turns in the weeks ahead. “But things seem to be moving in the right direction,” Brown said. “I don't think either party wants to get pinned with hurting the market or the economy.”

In other trading, the Standard & Poor's 500 rose 6.02 points to 1,415.95. The Nasdaq composite index gained 20.25 points to 3,012.03.

In the market for government bonds, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped to 1.62 percent from 1.63 percent late Wednesday.

Stock in Guess gained 55 cents to $25.81 after the clothing maker joined the ranks of companies pledging special dividends to shareholders before favorable tax rates on dividends expire at the end of the year. The clothing company said it will make a one-time payment of $1.20 per share on top of its regular quarterly dividend of 20 cents.

Dividends, now taxed at 15 percent, will be treated like ordinary income next year unless Congress and the White House extend current tax breaks as part of a budget deal.

The Commerce Department raised its estimate for U.S. economic growth to an annual rate of 2.7 percent in the July-through-September period. That's much better than the 2 percent rate estimated a month ago and more than twice the 1.3 percent rate logged in the three previous months.

The Labor Department also reported that the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits dropped to 393,000 last week, in line with what economists had expected. It was the second straight drop after Superstorm Sandy drove applications higher earlier this month.

Target, The Gap, and others retail stores posted poor sales numbers, driving their stocks lower. It's a crucial time for retailers, who log a huge chunk of their yearly profits in the weeks running up to the holidays.

Among other companies making news:

— Kohl's plunged 12 percent, the biggest drop in the S&P 500 index. The company posted a drop in sales and said stores in the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, areas hit by Superstorm Sandy, fared the worst. Kohl's stock lost $6.13 to $45.02.

— Kroger Co. rose $1.19 to $26.25 after the supermarket chain reported stronger quarterly profits and raised its earnings outlook for the year. Stronger sales helped the operator of Fred Meyer and Food 4 Less stores post better results than analysts had expected.

Read More..

Sens. Corker, Collins join in critiques of Susan Rice

WASHINGTON -- Two moderate Republican senators joined in criticism of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, after private meetings with her, in another setback for her hopes to be nominated as secretary of State.

Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) met with Rice on Wednesday afternoon at her request to discuss their concern that she had misled the public about the nature of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. The senators and other GOP lawmakers have criticized Rice for originally portraying the attack as an outgrowth of a spontaneous demonstration, rather than a terrorist attack, which officials now believe it was.

Rice is personally close to President Obama and apparently his leading choice to be secretary of State in the coming term. White House officials have strongly defended Rice, but have also been trying to gauge whether a nomination will come at a punitively high cost, even if Rice is confirmed.

The comments of Corker and Collins come after GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire strongly criticized Rice after a private meeting with her Tuesday. The criticism suggests that resistance to a Rice nomination has expanded from what appeared originally to be a small core of GOP members.

PHOTOS: U.S. ambassador killed in Libya

Corker, who will be the ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the new congressional term, implied that he considered Rice too much of a partisan and urged Obama to pick a more “independent” person as chief diplomat.

“All of us here hold the secretary of State to a different standard than most Cabinet members,” he said. “We want somebody of independence.”

He implied that Rice, who is close to the president, was, instead, a “loyal soldier.” Corker also seemed to contrast Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, with whom he said he has had a positive and “transparent” relationship “from day one.”

Collins said that after a 75-minute session with Rice she still had many unanswered questions and remains “troubled” that on the Benghazi issue Rice played “a political role at the height of a contentious presidential election campaign.”

She said she also had questions about what role Rice played in the handling of the deadly 1998 terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, when Rice was assistant secretary of State for Africa. Collins seemed to be urging Obama to instead nominate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who she said would be an “excellent appointment and would be easily confirmed by his colleagues.”

A number of Republican members have now held out Kerry as a better choice for secretary, though Rice’s views on foreign military interventions is more aggressive than Kerry’s -- and thus closer to the Republican position.

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

paul.richter@latimes.com

Read More..

Microsoft CEO defends its innovation record, financial results

BELLEVUE, Washington (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer defended his company’s record on innovation and financial performance at the annual shareholders’ meeting, but conceded that he should have moved faster to get into the booming tablet market dominated by Apple Inc‘s iPad.

Bill Gates, co-founder and now chairman of the world’s largest software company, was one of the first to champion tablet-sized devices more than 10 years ago, but Microsoft failed to come up with a product that worked as well as the iPad. Gates was silent throughout the meeting, attended by about 450 shareholders.

“We’re innovating on the seam between software and hardware,” said Ballmer, asked why his company had fallen behind rival Apple. “Maybe we should have done that earlier.”

A month ago, Microsoft launched the Surface tablet – its first own-brand computer – but has not revealed sales figures.

In the tablet market, “we see nothing but a sea of upside,” Ballmer said, an acknowledgement that until now Microsoft has effectively had zero presence in the tablet market.

“I feel pretty good about our level of innovation,” he added.

Ballmer said smartphones running Microsoft’s new Windows software were selling four times as much as they did at this time last year. Microsoft has never given sales numbers of Windows phones, primarily made by Nokia, Samsung and HTC.

Windows currently has 2 to 4 percent of the global smartphone market, according to various independent data providers. Its overall market share will not likely grow in proportion to its own sales, given that sales of other smartphones – mostly running Google’s Android system – are also growing quickly.

Ballmer, flanked by Gates and Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein, was asked by several shareholders to explain Microsoft’s lackluster share price, which has been stuck for a decade, and has been outperformed by Apple and Google Inc stock in recent years.

“I understand your comment,” he told one shareholder. He went on to explain that Microsoft had “done a phenomenal job of driving product volumes” and was focusing on profiting from that growth.

He suggested that whether investors recognized that value at any given time was out of his hands.

“The stock market‘s kind of a funny thing,” he said, adding that Microsoft had handed back $ 10 billion in dividends and share buybacks to investors in the last fiscal year.

Several shareholders at the meeting in Bellevue, an upscale suburb of Seattle, complimented the executives on how they had grown and managed the company.

Microsoft’s shares rose almost 18 percent during fiscal 2012, which ended in June of this year, compared with a 3 percent rise in the Standard & Poor’s 500.

Despite such fluctuations, Microsoft’s shares stand around the same level they did 10 years ago.

To see a graphic on U.S. tech share price performance, 1990 to present, click on http://link.reuters.com/rug53t

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; Editing by Gary Hill)

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

'Potter' star Radcliffe heads to Sundance fest

LOS ANGELES (AP) — "Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe has landed his first entry in the Sundance Film Festival.

Radcliffe plays poet Allen Ginsberg in the drama "Kill Your Darlings," which premieres next January at Robert Redford's Sundance festival. "Kill Your Darlings" was among 16 films announced Wednesday that will compete for the festival's top prize in the U.S. dramatic competition.

Directed by John Krokidas, "Kill Your Darlings" co-stars Elizabeth Olsen, Ben Foster and Jack Huston in the story of a murder that brings the young Ginsberg together with fellow future Beat Generation heroes Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs at Columbia University in 1944.

The Sundance festival runs Jan. 17-27 in Park City, Utah.

Read More..

Well: Weight Loss Surgery May Not Combat Diabetes Long-Term

Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation.

The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years.

The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight.

“Some people are under the impression that you have surgery and you’re cured,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, the president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the study. “There have been a lot of claims about how wonderful surgery is for diabetes, and I think this offers a more realistic picture.”

The findings suggest that weight loss surgery may be most effective for treating diabetes in those whose disease is not very advanced. “What we’re learning is that not all diabetic patients do as well as others,” said Dr. David E. Arterburn, the lead author of the study and an associate investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. “Those who are early in diabetes seem to do the best, which makes a case for potentially earlier intervention.”

One of the strengths of the new study was that it involved thousands of patients enrolled in three large health plans in California and Minnesota, allowing detailed tracking over many years. All told, 4,434 adult diabetics were followed between 1995 and 2008. All were obese, and all underwent Roux-en-Y operations, the most popular type of gastric bypass procedure.

After surgery, about 68 percent of patients experienced a complete remission of their diabetes. But within five years, 35 percent of those patients had it return. Taken together, that means that most of the subjects in the study, about 56 percent — a figure that includes those whose disease never remitted — had no long-lasting remission of diabetes after surgery.

The researchers found that three factors were particularly good predictors of who was likely to have a relapse of diabetes. If patients, before surgery, had a relatively long duration of diabetes, had poor control of their blood sugar, or were taking insulin, then they were least likely to benefit from gastric bypass. A patient’s weight, either before or after surgery, was not correlated with their likelihood of remission or relapse.

In Type 2 diabetes, the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas tend to wear out as the disease progresses, which may explain why some people benefit less from surgery. “If someone is too far advanced in their diabetes, where their pancreas is frankly toward the latter stages of being able to produce insulin, then even after losing a bunch of weight their body may not be able to produce enough insulin to control their blood sugar,” Dr. Arterburn said.

Nonetheless, he said it might be the case that obese diabetics, even those whose disease is advanced, can still benefit from gastric surgery, at least as far as their quality of life and their risk factors for heart disease and other complications are concerned.

“It’s not a surefire cure for everyone,” he said. “But almost universally, patients lose weight after weight loss surgery, and that in and of itself may have so many health benefits.”

Read More..

Stocks higher on hopes for a deal to avoid 'fiscal cliff'

Stocks are closing higher on signs that lawmakers are edging toward a deal that would help the U.S. avoid a fiscal crisis at the end of the year.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 107 points to end at 12,985 Wednesday. It had been down as much as 112 points.

The Standard and Poor's 500 rose 11 points to 1,410. The Nasdaq composite rose 24 points to 2,992.

Huge tax increases and spending cuts will come into effect Jan. 1 if no deal on the U.S. budget is reached. President Barack Obama said he believed that both parties can reach a framework on a deal before Christmas.

Rising stocks outnumbered falling ones two-to-one on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was lighter than average at 3.3 billion shares.

Read More..

Can foes block Obama second term by blocking Electoral College?

While the work of governing goes on in Washington, some members of the permanent opposition to President Obama continue to register their disdain for not only the incumbent but for the electoral process that granted him a second term.

Their solution? Change the rules, or get out of the game.

On the latter front, protesters continue to signal their contempt for Obama with online petitions calling for their states to secede from the United States. Nearly 1 million people in all 50 states have now signed, according to McClatchy Newspapers, which totaled the signatures accumulating on a White House website.

That number could seem alarming to Obama supporters, but consider this: As of Tuesday afternoon, about 2,300 people had signed the petition “Grant peaceful secession to the state of California in order to form a new and independent sovereign state.”  That trailed the 3,900 who had signed a petition to the White House titled “Nationalize the Twinkie Industry.”

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

The Constitution makes no provision for states to secede from the union. But signing a petition is one way to blow off some steam.

Another fantasy maneuver has been making the rounds among Obama denialists in recent days. Under this construct, the Democrat could still be blocked from a second term if presidential electors from the states that favored Republican Mitt Romney simply boycotted the Electoral College voting.

Judson Phillips proposed that subterfuge a week ago on the far-right website World Net Daily.  Phillips, listed as a founder of the Tea Party Nation, suggested that the Electoral College could not have a quorum if enough states boycotted. He claimed that the 12th Amendment to the Constitution required two-thirds of the states to participate.  Without that quorum, Phillips wrote, the selection of the president would be thrown into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which would install Romney. (Never mind Obama’s 3.5-million popular-vote advantage and 126 electoral-vote margin.)

This idea had some extremists all atwitter for a few days.  Among those intrigued by the idea was a state senator from Idaho, Sheryl Nuxoll of Cottonwood, who used Twitter to send out a link to Phillips’ story. “A ‘last chance’ to have Mitt Romney as President in January (it’s still not too late),” Nuxoll said.

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

The fantasy scenario got a shot of new life Tuesday, when a couple of newspapers reported on Nuxoll’s interest in reworking the electoral math. Alas for the fanatics, if they had returned to the World Net Daily site and Phillips original story, they would see an editor's note had been appended.

“Since this column was posted,” it reads, “it has been discovered that the premise presented about the Electoral College and the Constitution is in error. According to the 12th Amendment, a two-thirds quorum is required in the House of Representatives, not the Electoral College.”

Romney electors can stamp their feet, hold their breath, or even stay away on Dec. 17, when the Electoral College is scheduled to meet in state capitols around the country. That will not prevent the 332 Obama electors from casting their ballots for the incumbent.

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

James.rainey@latimes.com

Twitter: @latimesrainey

Read More..

Welcome to the Twisted Age of the Twitter Death Threat

Never believe anyone who tells you that the Internet is all nice or all terrible. Just like real life, there are good people and bad ones here. The majority of people behave badly occasionally and decently most of the time. Yes, there are some truly horrible people lurking and behaving in ways consistent to their form, but the thing is, we’re complicated creatures, online and off. So I don’t buy into theories that the Internet is all nice anymore than I believe all commenters are trolls. Still, there is something worrisome going on online, and if you were the Chicken Little type (which none of us here are, obviously), you might be covering your head and hiding from the Twitterverse. It’s this matter of death threats online. 

RELATED: After His Vulgar Assault on Jenny Johnson, Chris Brown Quits Twitter

The most recent example of this, of course, is the recent Chris Brown/Jenny Johnson nastiness. Brown has his share of on- and offline haters, but he has plenty of adamant supporters, too. This became apparent when Johnson, a comedian who’d been on a Twitter crusade of sorts against Brown since his physical attack on Rihanna, after a stream of tweets intended to shame/provoke the singer, finally hit pay-dirt with a response (other than Brown blocking her at one point). Over the weekend, Chris Brown tweeted: “I look old as fuck! I’m only 23,” to which Johnson tweeted, “I know! Being a worthless piece of shit can really age a person.” (That tweet’s been retweeted by Johnson followers more than 7,000 times.)

RELATED: The Internet–Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be

You probably know what happened next, even if you don’t: After a pretty gross back-and-forth that doesn’t make either side look great, Brown deactivated his account. But his followers started to pile on, threatening Johnson with—what else?—death. There is no irony here about the followers of a guy who beat his girlfriend offering up a stream of brutish death threats; it is only sad. 

RELATED: Is Twitter for Girls?

Enter the age of the online death threat. It’s scary, yeah, because it’s a death threat. Humans rarely like being threatened with an end to their basic essence, no matter the delivery method for that announcement. And yet, on Twitter, this becomes such a weird, surreal concept: It’s deeply impersonal (these people don’t even know each other and probably never will; NONE of them know each other, likely), fueled by a false kind of rage spawned by the way the Internet works (one side gets self-righteously mad, another side self-righteously madder, and repeat). Fortunately, in most cases, the threat is also incredibly unlikely to be fulfilled. That doesn’t make it pleasant. One might be prone to try to laugh away the kind of death threats Johnson received, from people she doesn’t know (people who don’t know Chris Brown either), who might not recognize her on the street, who most likely live nowhere near where she does and probably also don’t plan to actually kill her. Yet a death threat is pretty much the ultimate “I hate you,” and it’s worth wondering, when “I hate you” doesn’t serve to deliver the message strongly enough and we start saying “I’m going to kill you”/”you deserve to die,” how far has humanity gone down some sick drain?

RELATED: Only Six Percent of Americans Use Twitter

As David Knowles writes for The Daily in a piece titled “Twitter Terror,” Johnson is hardly the first person to be threatened on Twitter. President Obama, Mitt Romney, Ellen Page, Tom Daley, and Taylor Swift can claim this dubious badge of fame, too. The list goes on. But before the little bird was the death-threat method of the year, death threats would arrive to famous people, politicians, and those in the public eye, particularly controversial figures, as a matter of course—on paper, perhaps by telephone, and in the movies, via the weird scrawlings or puzzle-piece letter constructions of madmen. Of course, there’s no handwriting to decipher on Twitter, there are only assumptions of power and education based on icons and followers, word choice and spelling, what the person says and has said, as well as their affiliations. But again, probably, the people threatening Jenny Johnson shouldn’t scare her (if you’re really going to try to kill someone and are dumb enough to publicize it on Twitter, that’s a clear benefit to your intended victim). If there’s anything to be afraid of, it’s this idea that death threats are this kind of new online norm. I think part of that fear, the fear that this is just a regular thing nowadays, is what subconsciously creates the need in us to assume a such a horrified shock-and-outraged position about such death threats. Knowles quotes digital media expert Jeanette Castillio as calling “the Twitterverse … a very uncivil place.” Is it any more uncivil than anywhere else, though? The Internet hardly created hate, or hate-speak, or bullying. Further, do we only increase the levels of that incivility by freaking out about what a bunch of random people are raging about behind the protection, and often anonymity, of Twitter?

RELATED: Friday’s Top Tweets

As Knowles writes, also, Twitter does have a rule against this sort of thing; people aren’t supposed to “publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Still, like everything online, there is too much information, and not enough time for comprehensive monitoring. Knowles adds, “A small percentage of violent tweets are investigated by police, but even then Twitter is reluctant to betray what it believes is a sacred duty to protect a user’s privacy.” 

That’s the other thing about online threats: They manage to be so incredibly cowardly, and an utterly ineffectual form of communication—until, suddenly, the media is paying attention to said threats and in some ways legitimizing them. I’m honestly not sure what the media’s role should be in acknowledging tweets of the sort that Brown and Johnson and Brown’s followers and Johnson exchanged. Sometimes it seems like that old “ignoring” tactic your mom taught you could work out to everyone’s benefit—and yet these things are bound to go viral; badly behaving celebrities are something TMZ taught us people want to know about. These things are also, when discussed calmly and rationally, fodder for good conversations about how we live now.

Like a rude comment, a Twitter death threat is a way of hiding in your comfy-safe basement in your comfy-safe boxers and saying really gross things to someone in the hopes that they will get upset. These people are bullying, or hope to bully. Which means we shouldn’t take the bait, a thing far more difficult to do than say. Turning the other cheek was hard in real life, too, and you never know, better safe than sorry. But more important than preventing “actual Twitter murders” (which I dare say and hope will not become the norm), it’s worth paying attention to this ratcheting up of the hate ante as a new kind of communication norm. A cynical person would say we no longer need to touch people, instead, we reach out to them online. We no longer need to talk on the phone, we simply tweet or email or text. We certainly don’t write letters, and we hardly write on paper. Instead we blog and Tumbl and Instagram and Facebook. And so, when we get angry, irrationally or otherwise, we take to those methods of communication to speak out, retaliate, vow revenge. The most worrisome thing about the Twitter death threat, I think, that if it’s just something people do now. I don’t want to be in the Age of the Twitter Death Threat. It makes me pretty nostalgic for the good old days of the handwritten love letter, actually. 

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

'Two and a Half Men' actor not expected on set

NEW YORK (AP) — The teenage actor who stars in "Two and a Half Men" and called the CBS comedy "filth" may have some time before he faces the show's producers.

Angus T. Jones wasn't expected at rehearsal Tuesday because he is not going to be in the episode they are filming, according to a person close to the show who spoke on condition of anonymity because producers were not commenting publicly.

Jones, 19, has been on the show, which used to feature bad-boy actor Charlie Sheen and remains heavy with sexual innuendo, since he was 10 but says in a video posted online by a Christian church that he doesn't want to be on it anymore.

"Please stop watching it," Jones said. "Please stop filling your head with filth."

The person familiar with the production schedule said Jones does not appear in either of the two episodes filming before the end of the year, so he wouldn't be expected back at work until after the New Year.

His character has been largely absent because he has joined the Army.

CBS and producer Warner Bros. Television have not commented.

In a radio broadcast, "The Voice of Prophecy," recorded for the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Jones' birthday in October, he described his religious path. He has been attending a Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Los Angeles area.

Jones said he felt drawn to God after a tough time in his life when his parents were going through a divorce and he experimented with drugs.

"I never drank," he said. "That was one thing God protected me from, and I'm still a virgin. God protected me from those things."

Jones said that "it's very weird that I'm on a television show, especially now that I am trying to walk with God. My television show has nothing to do with God and doesn't want anything to do with God."

Jones said that he had no plans to get out of his contract, which reportedly pays him $350,000 an episode.

"Two and a Half Men" survived a wild publicity ride less than two years ago, when Sheen was fired for his drug use and publicly complained about the network and the show's creator, Chuck Lorre.

Jones plays Jake, the son of Jon Cryer's uptight divorced chiropractor character, Alan, and the nephew of Sheen's hedonistic philandering music jingle writer, Charlie. Sheen was replaced by Ashton Kutcher, who plays billionaire Walden.

In the video posted by Forerunner Chronicles in Seale, Ala., Jones describes a search for a spiritual home. He says the type of entertainment he's involved in adversely affects the brain and "there's no playing around when it comes to eternity."

"You cannot be a true God-fearing person and be on a television show like that," he said. "I know I can't. I'm not OK with what I'm learning, what the Bible says, and being on that television show."

The show was moved from Monday to Thursday this season, and its average viewership has dropped from 20 million an episode to 14.5 million, although last year's numbers were somewhat inflated by the intense interest in Kutcher's debut. It is the third most popular comedy on television behind CBS's "The Big Bang Theory" and ABC's "Modern Family."

The actors on "Two and a Half Men" have contracts that run through the end of the season.

Read More..

Global Update: Investing in Eyeglasses for Poor Would Boost International Economy

BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

Eliminating the worldwide shortage of eyeglasses could cost up to $28 billion, but would add more than $200 billion to the global economy, according to a study published last month in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

The $28 billion would cover the cost of training 65,000 optometrists and equipping clinics where they could prescribe eyeglasses, which can now be mass-produced for as little as $2 a pair. The study was done by scientists from Australia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The authors assumed that 703 million people worldwide have uncorrected nearsightedness or farsightedness severe enough to impair their work, and that 80 percent of them could be helped with off-the-rack glasses, which would need to be replaced every five years.

The biggest productivity savings from better vision would not be in very poor regions like Africa but in moderately poor countries where more people have factory jobs or trades like driving or running a sewing machine.

Without the equivalent of reading glasses, “lots of skilled crafts become very difficult after age 40 or 45,” said Kevin Frick, a Johns Hopkins health policy economist and study co-author. “You don’t want to be swinging a hammer if you can’t see the nail.”

If millions of schoolchildren who need glasses got them, the return on investment could be even greater, he said, but that would be in the future and was not calculated in this study.

Read More..