Obama backs Health Secretary Sebelius despite 'Obamacare' woes

By Roberta Rampton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has "full confidence" in Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius despite the troubled launch of the U.S. government website for signing up for his signature healthcare insurance program, the White House said on Tuesday.

Americans trying to shop for health insurance at healthcare.gov under Obama's healthcare law have been frustrated by error messages, long waits and system failures, with many failing to make it through the system despite repeated tries.

Online insurance exchanges were launched on October 1 under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often called "Obamacare," to offer healthcare insurance plans to millions of uninsured Americans.

Former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, who remains close to the White House, said the administration should "fire some people" for the problems, and Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas has called on Sebelius to resign.

"The secretary does have the full confidence of the president," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, referring to Sebelius.

Her department is in charge of rolling out the online insurance exchanges, a key part of a law vigorously opposed by Republican lawmakers and other U.S. conservatives.

Sebelius, the former governor of Kansas who has served as HHS secretary since April 2009, has played a prominent role in publicizing the launch of the exchanges.

"She, like everyone else in this effort, is focused on our number-one priority, which is making the implementation of the Affordable Care Act work well," Carney said.

"People are working 24/7 to address the problems and isolate them and fix them when it comes to the website and enrollment issues," Carney said.

When the website healthcare.gov went live on October 1, Obama told Americans it would be as easy to compare the cost of insurance plans as it is to "shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon."

The administration initially characterized the problems as "glitches" that it said were not surprising given that 14.6 million people checked out the site in its first 10 days.

But the problems have turned out to be more complicated than mere traffic issues, with outside technology experts saying the system's architecture was poorly designed.

The government has not yet revealed how many people have successfully signed up for insurance.

Experts say the administration has until mid-November to iron out the problems or risk jeopardizing its goal of signing up 7 million people in the first year of the healthcare law's marketplaces.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Will Dunham)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-backs-health-secretary-sebelius-despite-obamacare-woes-191836015--sector.html
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Brazile: GOP, stop living in fear (CNN)

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Meg Ryan to Star in and Produce NBC Comedy

Meg Ryan is heading back to television.

The When Harry Met Sally star will topline an NBC comedy revolving around a former hotshot New York editor, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

In the half-hour single-camera comedy from writer and former Family Ties Emmy nominee Marc Lawrence, Ryan will play a sunny, devoted and desperately nonconfrontational single mom who decides to return to her New York publishing house where she was once a brilliant editor to find that she now works for Brenda, a neurotic 30-year-old who was once her former intern. Now she must find a way to keep her boss, her teenage kids, her almost ex-husband and her meddlesome mother-in-law all happy, which results in her overcomplicating every situation and somehow always making it worse.

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Ryan will executive produce the project with manager Jane Berliner for Universal Television and Lawrence's Reserve Room Productions.

For Ryan, this marks her return to the small screen and NBC following her co-starring role in 1982's short-lived comedy One of the Boys with Mickey Rooney, Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane. Ryan, who recently appeared in multiple episodes of Showtime's Web Therapy, is repped by ICM Partners and Berliner's Authentic Talent and Literary Management. She also was a regular on ABC's short-lived 1985 Western, Wildside, which was canceled after one month.

The NBC comedy comes mere weeks after an October People magazine cover story that revealed the former Sleepless in Seattle and Working Girl star preferred to remain out of the Hollywood limelight and would rather focus on her family, including boyfriend John Mellencamp and her 8-year-old daughter, Daisy.

Ryan is a three-time Golden Globe nominee for romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally. Lawrence is repped by UTA.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/television/~3/9ZgQDIA6j3s/story01.htm
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Amazon to open Tel Aviv office to support cloud services

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Amazon.com will open an office in Tel Aviv to support its cloud computing offering called Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's chief technology officer said on Tuesday.

The office is expected to begin operating at the start of 2014 and support companies from start-ups to large organizations as they move to cloud computing services offered by Amazon.

Companies in Israel, which has a large concentration of technology start-ups, were among the first to turn to cloud computing when AWS was established in 2006, the CTO said.

"If you start a business today you no longer buy IT (information technology). You spend your money on getting better engineers and product builders," Werner Vogels told a news conference.

AWS, which said it is the market leader in cloud computing, rents remote computing and storage to other companies, providing over 30 different services.

Vogels said Amazon is focused on driving costs down and has lowered the price for its services 37 times since 2006.

"We've always know that this is not a winner take all market. There is room for many providers with differentiating products," he said.

(Reporting by Tova Cohen)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/amazon-open-tel-aviv-office-support-cloud-services-105047053--finance.html
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Anthony Hopkins writes 'Breaking Bad' love letter

TV

Kurt Schlosser
TODAY

11 hours ago

Getty Images, AMC

British actor Anthony Hopkins, left, has heaped high praise on Bryan Cranston for his work as Walter White on "Breaking Bad."

Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins is no slouch in the acting department, but after binge-watching all six seasons of "Breaking Bad" recently, he couldn't resist writing a letter to star Bryan Cranston to tell him it was the best acting he had seen — ever.

The letter showed up Sunday on the Facebook page of actor Steven Michael Quezada, who played DEA agent Steve Gomez on the AMC hit. It was quickly picked up across the web, but on Monday the post, along with a tweet about it from Quezada, disappeared.

Arnold Robinson, a publicist for Hopkins, confirmed to TODAY on Monday that the letter was indeed real. And a source at United Talent Agency, which represents both Hopkins and Cranston, told TODAY that Hopkins wanted to write Cranston because he admired his work so much. Hopkins was complimentary of the entire cast, and the UTA source said Cranston shared it, not expecting the letter to go viral.

Hopkins writes that he was compelled to reach out after what he refers to as two weeks of "addictive" viewing.

I have never watched anything like it. Brilliant!

Your performance as Walter White was the best acting I have seen — ever.

I know there is so much smoke blowing and sickening bull---- in this business, and I've sort of lost belief in anything really.

But this work of yours is spectacular — absolutely stunning. What is extraordinary, is the sheer power of everyone in the entire production. What was it? Five or six years in the making? How the producers (yourself being one of them), the writers, directors, cinematographers.... every department — casting etc. managed to keep the discipline and control from beginning to the end is (that over used word) awesome.

Hopkins is no stranger to portraying crafty monsters — he won his Academy Award for the role of Hannibal Lecter in 1991's "The Silence of the Lambs."

"Thank you," the 75-year-old actor writes. "That kind of work/artistry is rare, and when, once in a while, it occurs, as in this epic work, it restores confidence. You and all the cast are the best actors I've ever seen."

Cranston, 57, won three Emmys for his work as the high-school-teacher-turned-meth-kingpin Walter White. Last month he lost out to Jeff Daniels of HBO's "The Newsroom," but "Breaking Bad" won the Emmy for best drama series.

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/anthony-hopkins-binges-breaking-bad-writes-bryan-cranston-glowing-letter-8C11390530
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Hartford's missing $669,997 for an insurance premium payment ...

Nine students from High School Inc., Hartford's Insurance and Finance Academy, traveled to New York on Sept. 18 to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange — a reward for having the highest scores on Connecticut Academic Performance Test. Congratulations to them and their teachers and parents.

Their work, however, has just begun. The students are urgently needed in Hartford's city government, which is a mess. WPNR's Jeff Cohen, who covers the capital city, broke a disturbing story of nearly $670,000 in missing insurance premium payments for policies covering the city's school system.

The details of the sorry tale are told in a Sept. 24 memo from Hartford school head of finances Paula Altieri to Superintendent Christina Kishimoto. The memo and an attachment are online at http://www.courant.com/schoolmemo.

The city government and the schools in many ways are separate entities that converge for certain purposes. Insurance is sometimes one of those. Hartford uses various agents and companies to meet its insurance needs, spreading business around. Hybrid Insurance Group, headed by Earl O'Garro, is one of the agencies it uses to secure coverage.

In July, Hartford treasurer Adam Cloud's office wired $868,244 "to Hybrid on the same day of the request by Mr. O'Garro," Altieri wrote. There was a sense of urgency because O'Garro told Cloud that "policies were in danger of cancellation if the premiums were not paid ASAP." The board of education's chairman, Matthew Poland, confirmed in an email Wednesday afternoon, however, that the city had not received a notice of cancellation from the companies providing the coverage in July. Curiously, public schools spokesman David Medina said Wednesday that this is not a Hartford Public Schools matter, there is a complaint pending and the school administration would not be commenting.

Nevertheless, on Sept. 6, a city insurance manager was notified that two policies covered in the July payment from Cloud's office had not been paid. Those premiums totaled $669,997. As of Wednesday afternoon, the last city officials saw of the premium money was when it was on its way to Hybrid's bank account. Altieri reports that initial attempts to reach O'Garro were futile. O'Garro eventually told an inquiring (and probably uneasy) city official that he had sent the money to the insurance companies, but he has declined to provide proof of the payments. The companies, however, have no record of receiving the payments.

Altieri did some detective work. She discovered that Hybrid is represented by a lobbying firm that includes Christopher Cloud, Adam Cloud's twin brother. According to lobbying reports filed with the Office of State Ethics, Hybrid was expected to pay Cloud's firm $32,055 between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2012. Hybrid's office is located at 30 Lewis St., a property owned by a limited liability company in which Sanford Cloud, Adam and Christopher's father, is the managing member. Christopher Cloud's lobbying firm is located in the same building.

There's more. The sovereign people of Connecticut gave O'Garro's Hybrid $126,320 to move to the Cloud building all the way from — wait for it — Windsor. That's a town that shares a border with Hartford. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy hailed Hybrid as "a fast-growing insurance group, beginning operations in March of 2010 in Windsor," a satellite office in Ohio, "and a service operation in Kathmandu, Nepal."

These state assistance programs often feel counterintuitive. If Hybrid, with 11 employees, was growing fast, the company was probably making money, especially if it wanted to move to an expensive Hartford office building. Or maybe it knew there was plenty of money in the state trough. Working men and women should not have to pay for that. Then there's Katmandu. That has the sound of an offshore operation. In 2010, the Himalayan Times reported last year, per capita income in Nepal was $568.

The school board also is trying to figure out why the treasurer moved a different insurance policy to Hybrid last year without benefit of a competitive bid. The board is having trouble obtaining documents from Adam Cloud, providing some irony among the panic and gloom. Hartford's school board is often contemptuous of requests for records. It's learning how alarming keeping important secrets can be.

Kevin Rennie is a lawyer and a former Republican state legislator. He can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com.

Source: http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-rennie-who-has-hartfords-missing-money-1013-20131010,0,1937951.column
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Possible tornado hits Eads; none injured

EADS, Colorado — A possible tornado hit the southeast Colorado community of Eads Thursday evening, but no injuries were reported.

KMGH reports that the twister hit about 6:30 p.m. (http://bit.ly/1cBChhS ). Nancy McCain with Kiowa County Emergency Management Services says the twister knocked out power for 90 minutes and affected 800 residents.

McCain said two homes were damaged and no injuries were reported.

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Source: http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/32f6f16c92fb40eb979ef87d6079b40d/CO--Eads-Tornado
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