: If you are looking for a lost relative from today’s tornado, go to http://t.co/bqWg6GredO.
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All posts for the month May, 2013
My God! In the last 3,500 years, there have only been 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world.
Scientists estimate that smoking a cigarette takes 11 minutes off of your life – A pack of 20 takes 3 hours – A carton takes 1.5 days.
DETROIT, May 17 (Reuters) – General Motors Co shares on Friday topped their 2010 initial public offering price, which will help the automaker’s largest shareholder, the U.S. Treasury, pare its losses.
GM shares broke above $33.00, the price in the November 2010 IPO, rising as high as $33.21 in morning trading. It is the first time the stock has surpassed $33 since May 2011. So far this year GM’s stock is up 14.5 percent.
The run-up in the stock price could help Treasury, which provided GM with a $49.5 billion bailout, trim losses that will likely still total billions of dollars. Treasury said earlier this month that it would begin another round of sales of its 241.7 million GM shares.
In December, Treasury said it would fully exit its GM investments by April 2014. By the end of March, the government had recovered $30.4 billion of the bailout funds GM received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
For Treasury to break even on the bailout, it would need to average about $79 a share on its remaining stake. Treasury officials have said the goal was not to turn a profit on the GM shares but to save U.S. jobs.
Congress debates if it should really profit so much from student debt http://t.co/FfseqdhMwy– Congressional Democrats have pounced on a nonpartisan government report showing the Department of Education this year is forecast to earn a record $51 billion profit off student borrowers, denouncing the Obama administration and urging for structural reforms.
Members of the House of Representatives including George Miller (D-Calif.), John Tierney (D-Mass.) and John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) cited news reports in The Huffington Post that highlighted the Tuesday estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, which showed that the Education Department was forecast to report higher earnings this year than Exxon Mobil and nearly as high as those of the four biggest U.S. banks by assets combined. “We don’t see students or their parents as profit centers, and we don’t think it’s an appropriate concept to be acting like a market-driven bank here,” Tierney said.
Miller criticized a policy that is leading to “immense profit being extracted from students and families that are struggling.” The critical comments have alarmed policymakers in the Obama administration, who along with lawmakers are racing to avert a scheduled doubling of interest rates on some new federal student loans that is set to occur on July 1.