Ignoring Putin Boycott Brings Cash Reward to Faroe Islanders

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The Faroe Islands, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, wont observe European Union sanctions the country says make no economic sense as its fish farmers predict a surge in exports to Russia.

I have a responsibility to my people and I dont believe in boycotts, Home Rule Prime Minister Kaj Leo Holm Johannesen said yesterday in a phone interview. They always end up hurting the wrong people.

The north Atlantic archipelago, settled by Norse Vikings, has stayed outside the European Union and, unlike non-EU member Norway, has ignored the sanctions against Russia. That means it hasnt been hit by President Vladimir Putins retaliatory trade ban. Bakkafrost P/F (BAKKA), based in the Faroese town of Glyvrar, predicted last month the development will more than triple its fish exports to Russia.

Criticism from abroad has been very muted, 50-year-old Johannesen said. Ive explained the situation to Brussels, to Danish lawmakers and to the Obama administration when I traveled to Washington and New York recently.

Danish Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard said he doesnt want to be the umpire in this matter, in a brief interview today. Its no crime not to be a member of the EU nor is it a crime not to be the subject of a boycott. On the other hand, its clear that the EU expects that others dont take advantage of the situation to capture market from countries impacted by the boycott.

A fishing boat unloads its catch at the dock in Klaksvik, the second largest city in the Faroe Islands. Close

A fishing boat unloads its catch at the dock in Klaksvik, the second largest city in the Faroe Islands.

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A fishing boat unloads its catch at the dock in Klaksvik, the second largest city in the Faroe Islands.

Russia, which accounts for about 7 percent of global Atlantic salmon demand, imposed its food ban on countries backing sanctions at the beginning of August. The standoff has left the Faroes, which supply about 4 percent of world output, in a unique position to provide Russians with fresh salmon.

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Ignoring Putin Boycott Brings Cash Reward to Faroe Islanders

Clinton White House Secrets: Debt, Health Care, Welfare Reform, Taxes, Jobs (1994) – Video

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Clinton White House Secrets: Debt, Health Care, Welfare Reform, Taxes, Jobs (1994)
Robert Upshur Bob Woodward (born March 26, 1943) is an American investigative journalist and non-fiction author. He has worked for The Washington Post since 1971 as a reporter, and is...

By: The Book Archive

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Clinton White House Secrets: Debt, Health Care, Welfare Reform, Taxes, Jobs (1994) - Video

Human Sex Trafficking: The Role of the (To Be) Health Care Provider – Video

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Human Sex Trafficking: The Role of the (To Be) Health Care Provider
This webinar was presented by Dr. Kanani Titchen, Co-Chair of Physicians Against the Trafficking of Humans (PATH) Task Force, and a speaker from Girls Educational Mentoring Services (GEMS),...

By: AMSANational

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Human Sex Trafficking: The Role of the (To Be) Health Care Provider - Video

Can Health Care REIT Ride Growth Curve on Acquisitions? – Analyst Blog

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Health Care REIT Inc. ( HCN ) acquired Gracewell assets in August with Sunrise Senior Living. The company also unveiled a plan to acquire HealthLease Properties REIT through a transaction valued at around $950 million in cash, including debt.

Further, Health Care REIT announced its projected acquisition pipeline, worth around $1.7 billion of properties, for the second half of 2014. We believe that such strategic portfolio acquisitions would serve as growth drivers for the company.

Moreover, in August, Health Care REIT came out with second-quarter normalized funds from operations (FFO) of $1.06 per share, a nickel ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate and up 13 cents year over year. Results were primarily driven by growth in same-store net operating income (NOI) and notable portfolio investments in premium assets.

The company also increased its full year 2014 normalized FFO per share guidance range to $4.05-$4.15 from $4.03-$4.13 guided earlier, denoting a 6%-9% increase from 2013.

Going forward, the company's strategic portfolio-restructuring activities and enhanced financial flexibility bode well for its growth. In addition, a rise in senior citizen spending for healthcare reasons promises strong future prospects. Also, the guidance increase serves to boost shareholders' confidence.

The Gracewell Healthcare properties acquisition, in particular, would help the company to capitalize on the attractive demographics of Greater London and Southern England markets, apart from enhancing its private-pay seniors housing portfolio base. On the other hand, the HealthLease acquisition deal would bring on board 53 high-quality seniors housing, post-acute care and long-term care communities, concentrated across North Carolina, IN, and Alberta, Canada.

However, an anticipated rise in interest rate in the long term and intense competition remain the pressing concerns.

Echoing similar sentiments, over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2014 remained unchanged at $4.13, while that for 2015 moved up a 2 cents to $4.35 per share. Health Care REIT currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

To gain a deeper insight into Health Care REIT, you can refer to our updated research report issued on Oct 9, 2014.

Other Stocks to Consider

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Can Health Care REIT Ride Growth Curve on Acquisitions? - Analyst Blog

Can US health care contain Ebola?

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Hazmat crew decontaminating the apartment in Dallas where Thomas Eric Duncan stayed. JIM YOUNG/Reuters/Corbis

The death of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola on U.S. soil, leaves America's health care infrastructure shaken but resolute to be prepared to swiftly recognize, contain and treat a virus with no known cure.

That's a tall order for any health care system, especially a private-market one like ours that, until recently, has had limited incentive for everyone to play well together.

Don't misunderstand: We manage to get the job done hospital to hospital and physician to physician. It's just that the sheer multitude of proprietary medical communications channels and software can make presenting a united front for something like Ebola a logistical nightmare.

The Centers for Disease Control -- and let's be sure to tack on its last name, "and Prevention," in this context -- knows well what it's up against here and has been working around the clock to prepare Main Street health care for what has the potential to be the Godzilla bug of our day.

The CDC's Health Alert Network, which keeps providers up to date and on the same page, has been stuffed with briefings, guidelines and protocols to keep everyone from 911 operators and emergency room docs to EMS crews and front desk staff apprised on how to corral this monster should it saunter into their town. The CDC now even offers a weekly course to clinicians on safety and infection control.

The agency also has closed ranks with the Department of Homeland Security to enhance security screening for Ebola at the five U.S. airports that receive 94 percent of the inbound traffic from the west African nations hardest hit by the virus. The five international hubs include:

One also can easily imagine the board meetings being hastily called at hospitals, physician groups and, yes, health insurance companies that will ultimately be called upon to settle the monetary bills to fight this mortal threat. The cost to care for Duncan, an uninsured Liberian, ran in the neighborhood of $500,000. Suffice to say, that's a very uncomfortable neighborhood if you're a health insurance company.

While specialty-lines insurers have offered group coverage to non-governmental humanitarian organizations such as Doctors Without Borders that cover all diseases, including Ebola, claims have been relatively few. That said, the cost of the experimental drugs that were used to treat American volunteers Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol typically would not be covered.

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Can US health care contain Ebola?

Mountain Lions In Southern California Face Genetic Decay

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Image Caption: This female mountain lion, known as F52, was collared in the middle portion of the Santa Ana range. She later died near a busy highway of unknown causes. Credit: UC Davis

Provided by University of California Davis

Cut off by freeways and human development, mountain lions in southern California are facing a severe loss of genetic diversity, according to a new study led by the University of California, Davis in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.

The study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, represents the largest genetic sampling of mountain lions, or pumas, in southern California. It raises concerns about the current status of mountain lions in the Santa Ana and Santa Monica mountains, as well as the longer-term outlook for mountain lions across southern California.

UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine scientists collected and analyzed DNA samples from 354 mountain lions statewide, including 97 from southern California. Pumas in the Santa Ana Mountains displayed lower genetic diversity than those from nearly every other region in the state.

Santa Ana mountain lions show dramatic genetic isolation and have less in common with their neighbors in the Santa Monica Mountains than with those in the Sierra Nevada, underscoring the increasing seclusion of pumas in southern California.

The Santa Ana Mountain range, located south of Los Angeles and north of San Diego, is surrounded by urbanization and a growing population of about 20 million people. A small habitat linkage to the southeast connects pumas to the Peninsular Range, but it is bisected by Interstate 15 a busy 10-lane highway and associated human development. The study highlights the urgency to maintain and enhance the little connectivity remaining for coastal mountain lions, particularly across I-15.

The study also showed that the Santa Ana pumas recently went through a population bottleneck, when the populations size sharply decreased to a fraction of its original size.

The genetic samples give us a clear indication that there was a genetic bottleneck in the last 80 or so years, said lead author Holly Ernest, a professor with the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center and the Veterinary Genetic Laboratory at UC Davis at the time of the study. She is now a professor at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. That tells us its not just natural factors causing this loss of genetic diversity. Its us people impacting these environments.

Pumas in the Santa Monica Mountains are similarly threatened by low genetic diversity, inbreeding, and lions killing other lions, according to a study co-authored by Ernest published in Septembers issue of Current Biology. Just one lion was known to cross Highway 101 during the study period, and he significantly increased the genetic diversity of that population, the study found.

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Mountain Lions In Southern California Face Genetic Decay

Zaha! : Zaha Hadid, of All People, Will Design a Human Rights Institute

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Controversial starchitect Zaha Hadid just unveiled renderings for the Sleuk Rith Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, presenting a slight departure from her signature colorless blob futurism. Instead, the future home of some one million archival documents of the Khmer Rouge era will be five wooden towers inspired by ancient Cambodian temple sites.

The towers, to be built from locally-sourced timber, will be distinct spaces on the ground level. But the higher you go, the more the towers will "interlock" to encourage more interaction among different components of the institutionwhich in addition to the massive archive, will also include a media center, library, and graduate school, all dedicated to preventing human rights atrocities in the future.

In all it's an interesting project for Hadid, who's been embroiled in a string controversies of late. Her name has been dropped in connection to forced evictions in Azerbaijan (to make room for the construction of her Heydar Aliyev building), deplorable labor conditions in Qatar, and Olympic stadiums that are, in the words of petitioning architects, "overwhelmingly large for the context." That's not even mentioning the fact that she's got a lawsuit going against a critic. This is all to say thatwho knows?perhaps this project is an attempt to ameliorate her public image. Anyway, it looks pretty cool:

Renderings via ArchDaily

Renderings via ArchDaily

Renderings via ArchDaily

Renderings via ArchDaily

Renderings via ArchDaily

Zaha Hadid Designs Five Wooden Towers to House Cambodian Genocide Institute [ArchDaily] All Zaha! posts [Curbed National]

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Zaha! : Zaha Hadid, of All People, Will Design a Human Rights Institute

Search Engine Leap.It Wins Steve Case's $100K Startup Competition

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Steve Case with Leap.it CEO and founder Mike Farmer. (Credit: Rise of the Rest)

In the afternoon of the first day of this weeks Big Kansas City technology entrepreneurship conference, billionaire and ex-CEO of AOL Steve Case listened to ten representatives from ten different startups talk about their companies. They had five minutes to give their pitch (no easy task, as the timer beeped mid-sentence on several occasions) and field questions from Case and a panel of judges.

The prize? A $100,000 investment from Case as part of his Rise of the Rest road tour. During this tour, Case is visiting five cities Detroit, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Kansas City, and St. Louis. At each stop, 10 startup companies compete for that $100,000 investment. The judges for the competition included Gary Shapiro of Consumer Electronics Association; Sarah Granger, an author and entrepreneur; Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code; and Robb Heineman, CEO of the soccer team Sporting Kansas City.

Kansas Citys competition was part of the Big Kansas City conference, focusing on technology startups and entrepreneurs. The offerings in the competition were a pretty diverse bunch, ranging from Keyzio, an app-based solution that aims to make buying and selling a house less expensive, to ShotTracker, a wearable that lets you know how well youre playing basketball; to FitBark, a wearable collar for your dog so you can monitor her health.

The winner of the competition and $100,000 investment was Leap.it. The companys goal is modest. They want to challenge Google in the search engine space.

Their key to doing this is by focusing on search results in a different way. For one, rather than a list of text links, Leap.it provides a much richer visual set of search results. Here, for example, is what you get when you type in Forbes:

Example of Leap.it search results.

The search engine is socially based. Search results depend on whats trending on Twitter and other networks, which are then integrated with web results.

Twitters great at real time stuff, founder and CEO Mike Farmer told me. But it doesnt provide context. By relating this to web objects, youre sort of overlaying this real-time stream. Like a map thats overlaid with real-time weather.

Leap.it users can also provide curated searches called perspectives a visually organized group of articles like Best Actors of the Past 50 Years or things to do in New York City or the best amusement park rides.

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Search Engine Leap.It Wins Steve Case's $100K Startup Competition