MGM Springfield president William Hornbuckle IV named president of MGM Resorts International

William J. Hornbuckle IV, who is leading the Las Vegas-based company?s effort for a casino in Springfield, was promoted to president and chief marketing officer of MGM Resorts International this week.

This is effectively the No. 2 position in the global casino company, which has about $9 billion in annual revenues. He will report to chairman and CEO James J. Murren.

Hornbuckle said on Friday that he will remain as president of MGM Springfield with a goal of winning the casino license for Western Massachusetts. Another company executive would operate a Springfield casino if MGM is awarded the license, he said.

Hornbuckle is a veteran of the casino industry. From 2005 until August 2009, Hornbuckle was president and chief operating officer of Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. He had previously been president and chief operating officer of MGM MIRAGE-Europe and of MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.

Prior to MGM Grand, he was president and chief operating officer for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Source: http://www.masslive.com/business-news/index.ssf/2012/12/mgm_springfield_president_william_hornbu.html

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Calculated Risk: Update: Mortgage Debt Relief Act

by Bill McBride on 12/06/2012 10:15:00 AM

The Mortgage Debt Relief Act of 2007 is set to expire at the end of 2012 and this could have a significant impact on short sales. Usually cancelled debt is considered income, but a provision of the Debt Relief Act allowed borrowers "to exclude certain cancelled debt on [a] principal residence from income. Debt reduced through mortgage restructuring, as well as mortgage debt forgiven in connection with a foreclosure, qualifies for the relief." (excerpt from IRS).

If this act isn't extended, short sales could decline sharply. From Paul Reid, a Redfin real estate agent, writes:

"In an area like Orange County, where I work, the REO inventory is [minuscule]. As of this morning, there are 104 ?Active? REOs on the MLS in the entire county. In comparison, there is a total ?Active? inventory of 3,504 homes and condos. The short sale ?Active? inventory is 335. Where the numbers really stick out is in the ?Pending? sales category. As of right now, there are 6,059 homes in Orange County in escrow. Of those, only 267 homes are REOs. More than half, 3,216 homes, are short sales. The remainder are standard sales. If you remove the relief act from the equation you would likely see a significant drop in the number of short sales, but because of how slow the REO process is, you wouldn?t likely see a proportionate increase in the number of REO listings."

Right now there are?a large number of pending short sales in many distressed areas. They all will not close before the end of the year.

There is a bipartisan push to have Congress extend the mortgage debt relief act. Here is a recent letter from several state attorneys general urging Congress to act.

As signatories to the National Mortgage Settlement, we the undersigned state attorneys general write to urge you to pass legislation extending tax relief for citizens who have mortgage debt canceled or forgiven because of financial hardship or a decline in housing values. Such legislation is currently included in Section 112 of the Family and Business Tax Cut Certainty Act of 2012 (S. 3521), which was recently passed out of the Senate Finance Committee with bipartisan support. We strongly urge Congress to extend this critical tax exclusion, which expires on December 31, 2012, so that distressed homeowners are not stuck with an unexpected tax bill or deterred from participating in this historic settlement.
...
Under the federal Mortgage Debt Relief Act, in effect since 2007, mortgage debt that is forgiven after a foreclosure or short sale or through a loan modification provided to a homeowner in financial hardship may be excluded from a taxpayer?s calculation of taxable income. This exclusion only applies to mortgage debt forgiven on primary residences, not second homes. Unfortunately, this tax exclusion expires on December 31, 2012. Therefore, unless Congress acts, all of the remaining debt relief to be provided in 2013 under the National Mortgage Settlement, as well as other mortgage debt relief programs, will likely be considered taxable income. According to the Congressional Budget Office, failure to extend this tax exclusion will result in $1.3 billion in tax increases on the very families who can least afford it.

I expect this act to be extended, but you never know.

Source: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/12/update-mortgage-debt-relief-act.html

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Protestant militants target Northern Ireland party

DUBLIN (AP) ? Northern Ireland leaders appealed for calm Thursday after Protestant militants attacked offices and a home connected to the most compromise-minded political party over its support for reducing the display of British flags on government buildings.

The overnight violence in two Belfast suburbs came on the eve of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's planned visit Friday to the capital of the British territory. It underscored how divided Northern Ireland remains despite the broad success of a peace process that has stopped paramilitary violence but done little to bring down barriers between rival British Protestant and Irish Catholic communities.

"I'm looking forward to my visit to Belfast tomorrow to see for myself what the situation is," Clinton said at a Dublin press conference alongside Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny.

Protestant hard-liners have responded violently to a vote Monday in the Belfast City Council to reduce sharply the flying of the British flag atop the city hall. The Alliance Party, which represents middle-ground opinion and seeks support from both sides of the community, holds the balance of power on the council. Alliance voted with the Catholic side to take down the flag except for 18 official days annually; the Protestants had wanted it to stay up 365 days a year.

Several hundred Protestant protesters broke through the city hall's gates Monday night and injured 15 policemen defending the building. Associated Press photographer Peter Morrison suffered serious head and hand wounds during the melee, during which he says police beat him with clubs.

On Wednesday night more than 1,500 Protestants rallied in the northern suburb of Carrickfergus demanding that the British flag be restored atop Belfast's municipal headquarters. The protest soon descended into attacks on riot police. Four officers were injured and responded with volleys of British-style plastic bullets, flat-nosed cylinders designed to knock down rioters with punishing blows. They also arrested four suspected rioters.

Some in the crowd set fire to the nearby Carrickfergus office of Alliance, destroying it. And to the east of Belfast, more vandals poured petrol on the locked front of another Alliance office in Bangor, but police said a passing police patrol spotted the attackers and forced them to flee before they could light a fire.

Also in Bangor, a couple who are both Alliance politicians had their home's front window vandalized just after midnight Thursday, and said they now were afraid to stay in their home with their 17-month-old daughter.

"Our daughter could have potentially lost her life. Is a flag worth this, seriously?" Michael Bower told the BBC sitting on his living room sofa, with his wife Christine beside him and their child on his lap.

Christine Bower appealed directly to the attackers: "You may not agree with us, but please don't attack us."

Leaders of Northern Ireland's joint Catholic-Protestant government, the central achievement of a two-decade peace process, appealed for the protests against Alliance to stop. Alliance is the smallest of five parties in the governing coalition.

The Northern Ireland police commander, Chief Constable Matt Baggott, said the province risked a surge in street violence if extremists within the Protestant community continued to mount illegal rallies in town centers.

"To use mob rule and violence as a way of asserting people's will is compromising the rule of law," Baggott said. He called it "an outrage to have democratic parties intimidated and burned out simply because they took a democratic decision."

But several more impromptu Protestant demonstrations broke out Thursday night on streets in Belfast and nearby towns. Rush-hour traffic was disrupted, but police reported no violence or arrests as they gradually cleared the roads.

The Protestant leader of the unity government, First Minister Peter Robinson, said he shared the protesters' anger over moves to shun the British flag in Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom. But he called for protest leaders to halt their street campaign "in the wider interests of a peaceful society and to ensure their protests are not used by others to launch a campaign of violence."

About 3,700 people have been killed in the Northern Ireland conflict since the late 1960s. But peacemaking efforts since the early 1990s have greatly reduced the death and destruction, with the major outlawed groups ? the Provisional Irish Republican Army on the Catholic side, and the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association on the Protestant side ? all agreeing to disarm and renounce violence since 2005.

But several small IRA factions continue to mount occasional gun and bomb attacks, most recently shooting to death a prison guard last month as he drove to work.

And Northern Ireland itself remains segregated by mutual consent in many ways, with Catholics and Protestants attending separate school systems, rooting for different sports, and above all living in different communities. Much of Belfast remains physically divided by high security walls called "peace lines." The Protestant side colors its curb stones the red, white and blue of the Union Jack, while the Catholic side paints them the green, white and orange of the Irish Republic.

Against this pervasive sectarian backdrop, Alliance attempts to be studiously neutral and manages to offend both sides for different reasons. Even the party's website avoids the British "co.uk" or Irish "ie" in favor of the neutral "org."

___

Alliance Party: http://allianceparty.org/

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/protestant-militants-target-northern-ireland-party-140119252.html

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Rapid eye movements significantly delayed in people with glaucoma

ScienceDaily (Dec. 6, 2012) ? Rapid eye movements are significantly delayed in patients with glaucoma, even those in the early stages of the disease, research has found.

The findings, led by Dr. Neeru Gupta, an ophthalmologist at St. Michael's Hospital, may shed new light on why glaucoma patients are at increased risk for falls and car accidents. Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness.

Rapid (or saccadic) eye movements are the quick, simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction. They are involved in a myriad of everyday activities, from reading to scanning the surrounding environment, be it a busy subway station, grocery store shelves or oncoming traffic.

Dr. Gupta and co-workers studied groups of people with and without glaucoma who wore a head-mounted device that measured the length of time it took their eyes to move from one point to another, how long it took their eyes to begin the movement, did they focus on an object right away or did their eyes overshoot the target.

"Most of us take that processing of information for granted," she said.

However, she found that people with glaucoma showed delayed eye movement reaction times by about 15 per cent, even if they were in the early stages of the disease.

The findings were published online in the journal Eye and Brain.

Dr. Gupta said the findings are significant because they suggest that approaches to measuring vision loss beyond eye charts or visual field tests that related to real world settings may provide important clues to how the disease affects the lives of glaucoma patients. Glaucoma is becoming more common as the population ages and is expected to affect 80 million people worldwide by 2020. About half of all cases remain undiagnosed.

Currently, glaucoma can be diagnosed only by using a light to examine the optic nerve. Eye charts will not catch glaucoma, because it begins with peripheral vision loss long before reaching central vision.

All treatments for glaucoma -eye drops, laser surgery and conventional surgery -- are designed to reduce pressure in the eye and help slow or stabilize damage to optic nerve. No treatment can reverse the disease.

"Now that we know that eye movement reaction times are delayed in people with glaucoma, there is an opportunity to understand the effects of glaucoma on daily activities of living that most of us take for granted, such as walking up and down stairs, driving, navigating and reading. Dr. Gupta said. "Just as alcohol causes a delay in hitting the brakes, glaucoma slows the time it takes to move the eyes quickly in response to a visual cue."

In previous work, Dr. Gupta and colleagues have demonstrated that glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disease affecting major vision pathways in the brain. Dr. Gupta's current paper points to a new vision pathway in the brain that is affected in glaucoma. Ninety per cent of signals from the optic nerve travel to an area at the back of the brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus. But the brain signals for rapid eye movements appear to travel a different route through the area known as the superior colliculus. A previous smaller study by Lamirel and coworkers published in the Journal of Glaucoma in 2012 also showed that saccades were impaired in four glaucoma patients with visual field loss.

This research was funded by the Glaucoma Research Society of Canada, Dorothy Pitts Research Fund.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by St. Michael's Hospital. The original article was written by Leslie Shepherd.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Neeru Gupta, Kanjee, yeni Yucel, Steinbach, Gonzalez. Delayed saccadic eye movements in glaucoma. Eye and Brain, 2012; 63 DOI: 10.2147/EB.S38467

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/CpafjrUa7lY/121206122336.htm

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Gift Guide Giveaway: A Brand New Lytro Camera #LytroMeTC

We've written numerous posts about the Lytro camera and have done gift guide reviews on it, so we thought -- why not give one away? Thanks to Lytro, we have one free 8GB camera to give away. The Lytro is one of the most sought after cameras out there right now because it's so different. By using propriary systems, the photograph's point of focus and now presepective can be altered after it's shot. There isn't another camera that can do that.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/zzYIovLsskc/

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Egypt's Morsi flees palace as protesters battle cops

Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi reportedly left the palace via the back door to avoid further confrontation, as crowds vented their fury at Morsi's decree granting him nearly unlimited powers. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

By NBC News wire reports

Updated at 3:16 a.m. ET: CAIRO --?Egyptian police battled thousands of protesters outside President Mohammed Morsi's palace in Cairo on Tuesday, prompting the Islamist leader to leave the building, presidency sources said.

Officers fired tear gas at up to 10,000 demonstrators angered by Morsi's drive to hold a referendum on a new constitution on December 15. The Associated Press reported that some protesters?broke through barbed wire around the building and hurled chairs and rocks at retreating police on Tuesday night.

The crowds had gathered in what organizers had dubbed "last warning" protests against Morsi, who infuriated opponents with a November 22 decree that expanded his powers. "The people want the downfall of the regime," the demonstrators chanted.

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"The president left the palace," a presidential source, who declined to be named, told Reuters. A security source at the presidency also said the president had departed.

Morsi ignited a storm of unrest in his bid to prevent a judiciary still packed with appointees of ousted predecessor Hosni Mubarak from derailing a troubled political transition.

/

Egyptian protesters chant slogans against the Muslim Brotherhood during a rally in front of the presidential palace in Cairo on Tuesday.

Facing the gravest crisis of his six-month-old tenure, the Islamist president has shown no sign of buckling under pressure.

Riot police at the palace faced off against activists chanting "leave, leave" and holding Egyptian flags with "no to the constitution" written on them. Protesters had assembled near mosques in northern Cairo before marching toward the palace.

Supporters of Islamist president push Egypt to tipping point

"Our marches are against tyranny and the void constitutional decree and we won't retract our position until our demands are met," said Hussein Abdel Ghany, a spokesman for an opposition coalition of liberal, leftist and other disparate factions.

Protesters later surrounded the palace, with some climbing on gates at the rear to look down into the gardens.

As protesters clashes, President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt announced a referendum on a proposed constitution. NBC's Jim Maceda reports.

At one point, people clambered onto a police armored vehicle and waved flags, while riot police huddled nearby.

The Health Ministry said 18 people had been injured in clashes next to the palace, according to the state news agency.?

Civil disobedience
Despite the latest protests, there has been only a limited response to opposition calls for a mass campaign of civil disobedience in the Arab world's most populous country and cultural hub, where many people yearn for a return to stability.

A few hundred protesters gathered earlier near Morsi's house in a suburb east of Cairo, chanting slogans against his decree and against the Muslim Brotherhood, from which the president emerged to win a free election in June. Police closed the road to stop them from coming any closer, a security official said.

Mona El-Tahawy explains why President Mohammed Morsi's recent decree is very insulting to many Egyptians who demonstrated against Former President Hosni Mubarak's regime.

Opposition groups have accused Morsi of making a dictatorial power grab to push through a constitution drafted by an assembly dominated by his supporters, with a referendum planned for December 15.

Liberals, Christians left out as Islamists back Egypt's draft constitution

They say the draft constitution does not reflect the interests of Egypt's liberals and other groups, an accusation dismissed by Islamists who insist it is a balanced document.

Egypt's most widely-read independent newspapers did not publish on Tuesday in protest at Morsi's "dictatorship". Banks closed early to let staff go home safely in case of trouble.

Abdelrahman Mansour in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the cradle of the anti-Mubarak revolt, said: "The presidency believes the opposition is too weak and toothless. Today is the day we show them the opposition is a force to be reckoned with."

Analysis: Crisis tests Egyptians' constitution

But after winning post-Mubarak elections and pushing the Egyptian military out of the political driving seat it held for decades, the Islamists sense their moment has come to shape the future of Egypt, a longtime U.S. ally whose 1979 peace treaty with Israel is a cornerstone of Washington's Middle East policy.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, who staged a huge pro-Morsi rally in Cairo on Saturday, are confident enough members of the judiciary will be available to oversee the mid-December referendum, despite calls by some judges for a boycott.

"The crisis we have suffered for two weeks is on its way to an end, and very soon, God willing," Saad al-Katatni, leader of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/04/15673963-morsi-flees-egypts-presidential-palace-as-last-warning-protesters-battle-cops

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ACLU files complaint on teen's church sentence

By NBC News staff

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma is not happy with a judge's decision to require a teen to attend church as a condition of probation for a fatal drunk-driving crash.

In November, Muskogee County District Judge Mike Norman?stipulated that 17-year-old Tyler Alred should attend church regularly for 10 years as a requirement to avoid a prison sentence, the Tulsa World reported. The teen admitted to police he had been drinking in the Dec. 3, 2011, crash that killed his 16-year-old passenger and friend, John Luke Dum, according to the newspaper.

The ACLU of Oklahoma filed a?complaint with state judicial misconduct authorities?Tuesday alleging Norman's ruling disregarded religious liberties in the federal and state constitutions.

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"It is shocking that a judge would so blatantly ignore the First Amendment, which at a minimum prevents the government from forcing church attendance and from interfering in deeply personal matters of faith," Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the ACLU of Oklahoma, said in a statement.

"I hope and pray that church will give him his lord and savior, and make a difference in his life," said Oklahoma judge Mike Norman, who sentenced a teen to 10 years of church as part of his probation for a conviction of manslaughter. NBC's Thanh Truong reports.

Alred had been charged with manslaughter as a youthful offender and had pleaded guilty in August, according to the Tulsa World.

By getting the mandatory church order as part of the decade of probation, Alred averted prison time. The judge also required the teen to wear an alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet, undergo drug and alcohol assessments, finish school, attend counseling, and speak about the consequences of drinking and driving, among other probation requirements, the Tulsa World reported.

"If someone wants to appeal my decision, they're entitled to do that," Norman had told the newspaper in November.

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But Alred's defense attorney, Donn Baker, has told the Tulsa World they have no plans to fight the probation terms.

"My client goes to church every Sunday," Baker told the newspaper last month. "That isn't going to be a problem for him. We certainly want the probation for him."

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Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/05/15704268-aclu-files-complaint-over-teens-sentencing-to-10-years-of-church-attendance?lite

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