Charities Press Congress to Save Tax Deductions

WASHINGTON — Proposals to cap or otherwise limit deductions in order to raise tax revenue from the wealthy are gaining bipartisan support in Washington — and making charities and nonprofits very worried.

Concerned that special tax benefits to encourage Americans to give to charity might be significantly curtailed in the negotiations between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner, scores of nonprofit leaders came to Washington this week for a coordinated lobbying effort.

“Normally, every nonprofit is focused on its own particular mission, whether saving the environment, or helping children, or imbuing a greater appreciation for art,” said Diana Aviv, the chief executive of Independent Sector, an umbrella group for nonprofits that helped organize this week’s effort. “For the first time, I’ve seen the sector coming together. We’re like Rip Van Winkle waking up and saying, This is not O.K.!”

At stake is the $300 billion that Americans donate to nonprofits every year — and the $50 billion a year that tax deductions for charitable giving costs the government.

Both Republicans and Democrats say they want to maintain tax laws that encourage Americans to give money to nonprofit groups. But with the White House looking to raise an additional $1.6 trillion in revenue over 10 years, and Republicans looking to raise $800 billion, there is growing bipartisan support for peeling back some of the special breaks for high-income households.

That prospect has spurred Ms. Aviv and other nonprofit leaders to meet with high-ranking Obama aides for what participants described as a passionate discussion — if one largely about arcane matters.

The charity participants laid out their fears about lost revenue and abrogated programs, even if donations only dip at the margins.

The White House — represented by the senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the chief of staff Jacob Lew, Gene Sperling of the National Economic Council and Cecilia Muñoz of the Domestic Policy Council — shared concerns about tax changes that might unduly cut into charitable giving. But officials said revenue had to come from somewhere.

On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, leaders from local nonprofits like churches, schools and homeless shelters visited lawmakers to deliver the same message.

“So much of this Washington debate is focused on high-end taxpayers,” said Steve Taylor, public policy counsel for the United Way Worldwide. “From our perspective, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about the people who will have less access to the services our charities provide.”

The Rev. Larry J. Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, agreed.

“If this benefit goes away, who’s going to pick up the slack?” he said. “Definitely not the government. It’s the only deduction that directly impacts community benefit. Cutting it — it defies the logic of cutting, I think.”

Charities said that little of what they were hearing behind closed doors allayed their fears that in a rush to cut long-term budget deficits Congress might also end up cutting charitable giving.

“There is no elected official who would rather say, ‘I had to cut your program’ than ‘There is a process that resulted in your program being cut,’ ” said Christopher W. Hansen, the president of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network. “But if you design a deduction cap the wrong way, you decimate the charitable sector.”

Both Democrats and Republicans have shown a willingness to roll back some deductions for high-income households, and more broadly to clean up the $1 trillion a year in tax breaks in the code. But how they might agree to do that remains unclear.

One option, floated by Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, is capping the total amount a household could deduct at perhaps $25,000 or $50,000.

Read More..

Debut of repainted sign is Hollywood event

If there's anything Tinseltown excels at, it's turning a ho-hum event into a made-for-TV spectacle. Witness the fanfare that unfolds each time the Hollywood sign gets a fresh coat of paint.

It's not written off as routine maintenance. No, it's a civic event.

A media scrum gathers. Elected officials gush. Someone cracks jokes about face-lifts. (In 1995, nipped-and-tucked actress Phyllis Diller did the honors.)

PHOTOS: Hollywood sign history

So it was on Tuesday, when reporters were whisked to just below the nearly 90-year-old sign, one of the few landmarks in the crazy quilt of neighborhoods that is Los Angeles.

In a clearing, VIPs fidgeted on white folding chairs. At least a dozen cameras were trained on Chris Baumgart, chairman of the nonprofit Hollywood Sign Trust, who wore a dark suit and sneakers. Behind him loomed the nine 45-foot-tall letters that together, he said, cost about $175,000 to gussy up.

Beginning in October, workers stripped the letters of weathered paint, smeared them with 105 gallons of primer and coated them with 255 gallons of new paint (color: No. 7757, high-reflective white). It's made by Sherwin-Williams, which picked up most of the sign restoration bill.

Baumgart, a veritable encyclopedia of sign knowledge, joked with reporters that its face had been pancaked with two tons of makeup. "A lot was done to her backside, but we're leaving that secret," he said, tongue firmly in cheek.

When it was erected in 1923 with the aid of mule teams, the sign touted a high-end real estate development named Hollywoodland. Its creators expected to take it down after a year, according to the Hollywood Sign Trust, but tourists flocked to the hillside and its stunning view of Los Angeles. In the 1940s, the city folded the sign into Griffith Park and truncated it to hype, simply, "Hollywood."

Over the years, the sign has needed numerous touch-ups. In the 1970s, the termite-weakened O cartwheeled away from the rest of its kin and an L was set ablaze. A who's-who of Hollywood helped raise money to rebuild the sign completely, including Alice Cooper, Gene Autry and Hugh Hefner, who threw a fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion.

When the retooled landmark was unveiled in 1978 on live TV, the trust said, 60 million people watched. After that, it seemed, Los Angeles celebrated its every milestone with a dose of stagecraft.

In 1995, during the media event with Diller, black tarps fell to reveal gleaming letters. In 2005, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, in the words of the trust, "rappelled down the hillside and applied the final strokes of coating himself."

Tuesday's event was comparatively sedate. But as Baumgart fielded questions, a handful of people crept along the sign's base — cameramen shooting video of painters.

"They're supposed to be painting the last brush strokes on the sign," Baumgart said, "but it's for show."

He shrugged.

"Hey, it's Hollywood."

ashley.powers@latimes.com

Read More..

The Coolest Vertigo Comics, From <em>Sandman</em> to <em>Swamp Thing</em>

DC Comics has lost one of its most influential tastemakers with the news that executive editor Karen Berger will be stepping down from Vertigo Comics, the DC Comics imprint she founded and ran since its inception in 1993. In her nearly 20 years running Vertigo, Berger helped birth numerous legendary comics, like Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, which often reached beyond the usual superhero audience of DC Comics and left a lasting mark on pop culture.

And now that Vertigo characters like Sandman, John Constantine, Animal Man and writers like Scott Snyder (American Vampire) have been absorbed into the regular DC Comics superhero universe, thanks to its sprawling but uneven New 52 reboots, who knows long it may be before Vertigo itself follows Berger into the storied comics' sunset?

One could argue that its credibility just did.

We've collected a gallery of some of Vertigo's greatest hits launched under Berger's forward-looking watch, alongside some testimonials from their creators and artists. Let us know your favorite Vertigo comics and thoughts on Berger's legacy in the comments section below.

Above:

Comics' greatest working writer today, Grant Morrison was already a budding star thanks to astounding runs on DC's Animal Man and especially Doom Patrol. But from old-school stunners like The Invisibles (above) to newer mind-wipers like We3, Seaguy and Joe the Barbarian, Morrison blossomed into a legend while working with Berger at Vertigo.

"Karen Berger gave me my first DC Comics job on Wonder Woman," The Invisibles artist and comics' favorite Scary Godmother Jill Thompson tweeted. "I'm happy to say I penciled the first Vertigo issue of Sandman."

Read More..

Huston’s “Infrared” wins Bad Sex fiction prize

LONDON (AP) — It’s the prize no author wants to win.

Award-winning novelist Nancy Huston won Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction award Tuesday for her novel “Infrared,” whose tale of a photographer who takes pictures of her lovers during sex proved too revealing for the judges.

The choice was announced by “Downton Abbey” actress Samantha Bond during a ceremony at the Naval & Military Club in London.

Judges of the tongue-in-cheek prize — which is run by the Literary Review magazine — said they were struck by a description of “flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements,” and by a long passage that builds to a climax of “undulating space.”

Huston, who lives in Paris, was not on hand to collect her prize. In a statement read by her publicist, the 59-year-old author said she hoped her victory would “incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers’ bodies in all states of array and disarray.”

The Canada-born Huston, who writes in both French and English, is the author of more than a dozen novels, including “Plainsong” and “Fault Lines.” She has previously won France’s Prix Goncourt prize and was a finalist for Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction by women.

She is only the third woman to win the annual Bad Sex prize, founded in 1993 to name and shame authors of “crude, tasteless and … redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels.”

Some critics, however, have praised the sexual passages in “Infrared.” Shirley Whiteside in the Independent on Sunday newspaper said there were “none of the lazy cliches of pornography or the purple prose of modern romantic fiction” — though she conceded the book’s sex scenes were “more perfunctory than erotic.”

Huston beat finalists including previous winner Tom Wolfe — for his passage in “Back to Blood” describing “his big generative jockey” — and Booker Prize-nominated Nicola Barker, whose novel “The Yips” compares a woman to “a plump Bakewell pudding.”

Previous recipients of the dubious honor, usually accepted with good grace, include Sebastian Faulks, the late Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a Bad Sex lifetime achievement award in 2008.

___

Online: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Generic Drug Makers Facing Squeeze on Revenue

They call it the patent cliff.

Brand-name drug makers have feared it for years. And now the makers of generic drugs fear it, too.

This year, more than 40 brand-name drugs — valued at $35 billion in annual sales — lost their patent protection, meaning that generic companies were permitted to make their own lower-priced versions of well-known drugs like Plavix, Lexapro and Seroquel — and share in the profits that had exclusively belonged to the brands.

Next year, the value of drugs scheduled to lose their patents and be sold as generics is expected to decline by more than half, to about $17 billion, according to an analysis by Crédit Agricole Securities.“The patent cliff is over,” said Kim Vukhac, an analyst for Crédit Agricole. “That’s great for large pharma, but that also means the opportunities theoretically have dried up for generics.”

In response, many generic drug makers are scrambling to redefine themselves, whether by specializing in hard-to-make drugs, selling branded products or making large acquisitions. The large generics company Watson acquired a European competitor, Actavis, in October, vaulting it from the fifth- to the third-largest generic drug maker worldwide.

“They are certainly saying either I need to get bigger, or I need to get ‘specialer,’ ” said Michael Kleinrock, director of research development at the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, a health industry research group. “They all want to be special.”

As one consequence of the approaching cliff, executives for generic drug companies say, they will no longer be able to rely as much on the lucrative six-month exclusivity periods that follow the patent expirations of many drugs. During those periods, companies that are the first to file an application with the Food and Drug Administration, successfully challenge a patent and show they can make the drug win the right to sell their version exclusively or with limited competition.

The exclusivity windows can give a quick jolt to companies. During the first nine months of 2012, sales of generic drugs increased by 19 percent over the same period in 2011, to $39.1 billion from $32.8 billion, according to Michael Faerm, an analyst for Credit Suisse. Sales of branded drugs, by contrast, fell 4 percent during the same period, to $174.2 billion from $181.3 billion.

But those exclusive periods also make generic drug makers vulnerable to the fickle cycle of patent expiration. “The only issue is it’s a bubble, too,” said Mr. Kleinrock. He said next year, the generic industry would enter a drought that was expected to last about two years.  Of the drugs that are becoming generic, fewer have exclusivity periods dedicated to a single drug maker.

In 2013, for example, the antidepressant Cymbalta, sold by Eli Lilly, is scheduled to be available in generic form. But more than five companies are expected to share in sales during the first six months, according to a report by Ms. Vukhac.

Heather Bresch, the chief executive of Mylan, the second-largest generics company in the United States, said Wall Street analysts were obsessed with the issue. “I can’t go anywhere without being asked about the patent cliff, the patent cliff, the patent cliff,” she said. “The patent cliff is one aspect of a complex, multilayered landscape, and I think each company is going to face it differently.”

Jeremy M. Levin, the chief executive of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest global maker of generic drugs, agreed. “The concept of exclusivity — where only one generic player could actually make money out of the unique moment — has diminished,” he said. “In the absence of that, many companies have had to really ask the question, ‘How do I really play in the generics world?’ ”

For Teva, Mr. Levin said, he believes the answer will be both its reach  — it sells 1,400 products, and one in six generic prescriptions in the United States is filled with a Teva product  — and what he says is a reputation for making quality products. That focus will be increasingly important, he said, given recent statements by the F.D.A. that it intends to take a closer look at the quality of generic drugs. Mr. Levin also said he planned to cut costs, announcing last week that he intended to trim from $1.5 to $2 billion in expenses over the next five years.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2012

An article on Tuesday about business strategies of generic drug makers in the face of fewer drug patent expirations misidentified the country in which the pharmaceutical company Endo is based. It is in the United States, not Japan.

Read More..

To Fight Climate Change, College Students Take Aim at the Endowment Portfolio

SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.

“In the near future, the political tide will turn and the public will demand action on climate change,” Stephen Mulkey, the Unity College president, wrote in a letter to other college administrators. “Our students are already demanding action, and we must not ignore them.”

But at colleges with large endowments, many administrators are viewing the demand skeptically, saying it would undermine their goal of maximum returns in support of education. Fossil fuel companies represent a significant portion of the stock market, comprising nearly 10 percent of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000 American companies.

No school with an endowment exceeding $1 billion has agreed to divest itself of fossil fuel stocks. At Harvard, which holds the largest endowment in the country at $31 billion, the student body recently voted to ask the school to do so. With roughly half the undergraduates voting, 72 percent of them supported the demand.

“We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels,” Kevin Galvin, a university spokesman, said by e-mail.

Several organizations have been working on some version of a divestment campaign, initially focusing on coal, for more than a year. But the recent escalation has largely been the handiwork of a grass-roots organization, 350.org, that focuses on climate change, and its leader, Bill McKibben, a writer turned advocate. The group’s name is a reference to what some scientists see as a maximum safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. The level is now about 390, an increase of 41 percent since before the Industrial Revolution.

Mr. McKibben is touring the country by bus, speaking at sold-out halls and urging students to begin local divestment initiatives focusing on 200 energy companies. Many of the students attending said they were inspired to do so by an article he wrote over the summer in Rolling Stone magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

Speaking recently to an audience at the University of Vermont, Mr. McKibben painted the fossil fuel industry as an enemy that must be defeated, arguing that it had used money and political influence to block climate action in Washington. “This is no different than the tobacco industry — for years, they lied about the dangers of their industry,” Mr. McKibben said.

Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, said that continued use of fossil fuels was essential for the country’s economy, but that energy companies were investing heavily in ways to emit less carbon dioxide.

In an interview, Mr. McKibben said he recognized that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would be exceedingly difficult. But he said strong government policies to limit emissions were long overdue, and were being blocked in part by the political power of the incumbent industry.

Mr. McKibben’s goal is to make owning the stocks of these companies disreputable, in the way that owning tobacco stocks has become disreputable in many quarters. Many colleges will not buy them, for instance.

Mr. McKibben has laid out a series of demands that would get the fuel companies off 350.org’s blacklist. He wants them to stop exploring for new fossil fuels, given that they have already booked reserves about five times as large as scientists say society can afford to burn. He wants them to stop lobbying against emission policies in Washington. And he wants them to help devise a transition plan that will leave most of their reserves in the ground while encouraging lower-carbon energy sources.

“They need more incentive to make the transition that they must know they need to make, from fossil fuel companies to energy companies,” Mr. McKibben said.

Most college administrations, at the urging of their students, have been taking global warming seriously for years, spending money on steps like cutting energy consumption and installing solar panels.

The divestment demand is so new that most administrators are just beginning to grapple with it. Several of them, in interviews, said that even though they tended to agree with students on the seriousness of the problem, they feared divisive boardroom debates on divestment.

That was certainly the case in the 1980s, when the South African divestment campaign caused bitter arguments across the nation.

Brent Summers contributed reporting from Burlington, Vt.

Read More..

Two Mexican nationals charged in killing of U.S. Coast Guardsman

Federal prosecutors charged two Mexican nationals in connection with killing U.S. Coast Guardsmen Terrell Horne III after they allegedly rammed his vessel with a drug-smuggling panga boat.

The two men, boat captain Jose Mejia-Leyva and Manuel Beltra-Higuera, are expected to appear in court Monday afternoon to face charges that they killed a federal officer.

Horne, 34, of Redondo Beach, was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers in a panga rammed his vessel off the Ventura County coast. He died of severe head trauma, officials said.

The Redondo Beach resident was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had come under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat, a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another guardsman into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

Read More..

Microsoft's Motorola Patent Violation Won't Stop Xbox Sales

A federal judge in Seattle has told Motorola Mobility that he will not grant its request to ban the sale of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the two need to stop bickering and broker a licensing deal to end their patent suit.

The ruling by Judge James Robart follows a finding by an International Trade Commission administrative law judge that the Xbox has violated four Motorola patents that pertain to the H.264 video compression codec and wireless technologies used in the console and its controllers. The ICT judge recommended in May that sales of the Xbox be banned in the United States.

Not so fast, Robart said. There’s no need for that.

“At this stage in the litigation, and based on this court’s prior rulings, the court concludes that Motorola cannot demonstrate irreparable harm,” Robart said in a ruling issued Friday (.pdf). “The Motorola asserted patents, at issue in this litigation, are standard essential patents of the H.264 Standard and are included in Motorola’s H.264 standard essential patent portfolio. Thus, Microsoft is entitled to a license to the Motorola asserted patents on RAND terms.”

Robart essentially said the two sides need to sit down and hammer out some fair patent licensing terms — RAND meaning “reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.” There really isn’t another option since the patents at the heart of the dispute are fundamental to any device using Wi-Fi or playing digital video. But there is disagreement over how much Microsoft should pay up in the inevitable agreement.

Previously, Motorola has proposed a licensing fee of 2.25 percent of the retail price of each Xbox, according to Bloomberg But Microsoft declined, arguing that was too high. Now Robart and the U.S. District Court are tasked with figuring out what a fair licensing fee would be. That won’t happen until sometime next year.

Motorola and Microsoft officials were unavailable for comment.

Read More..

Additional copies of ‘Lincoln’ headed to theaters

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Lincoln” is marching to more movie theaters.

Disney, which distributed the DreamWorks film, is making additional prints of director Steven Spielberg‘s historical saga starring Daniel Day-Lewis to meet an unexpected demand that has left some moviegoers in Alaska out in the cold.

“To say that we’re encouraged by the results to date or that they’ve exceeded our expectations is an understatement,” said Dave Hollis, head of distribution at the Walt Disney Co. “We’re in the midst of making additional prints to accommodate demand and will have them available to our partners in exhibition by mid-December for what we hope will be a great run through the holiday and awards corridor.”

The film, which opened in wide release Nov. 9 and has earned $ 83.6 million in North America so far, has been unavailable at some smaller venues, such as the Gross Alaska theaters in Juneau.

But the extra prints are coming a little too late to fit the movie into the five-screen Glacier Cinemas theater during the holiday season, said Kenny Solomon-Gross, general manager of the Gross Alaska, which runs two theaters in Juneau and one in Ketchikan, Alaska.

“When we had the room for ‘Lincoln,’ Disney didn’t have a copy for us,” Solomon-Gross said Monday.

His film lineup is pretty booked through the end of the year, and he probably can’t screen “Lincoln” until after the first of the new year. Yes, the excitement over the film will have dimmed, but then the Academy Awards season will be stirring up, he said. That should kick up the buzz.

In the meantime, Solomon-Gross plans to head to Las Vegas this week and catch the film there.

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang . Associated Press writer Rachel D’Oro in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

___

Online:

http://www.thelincolnmovie.com

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

Read More..