5.9 earthquake strikes southern Taiwan, causes minor damage

A 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck southern Taiwan on Sunday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were reports of minor property damage but no immediate reports of injuries, The Associated Press said.

The quake was centered in a mountainous area about 19 miles from the coastal city of Pingtung, at a depth of 13.9 miles.

Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said the quake struck at 10:35 a.m. (6:35 p.m. ET) Sunday and put the magnitude at 6.1. Taiwan television showed pictures of minor damage in the Pingtung area.

TV reports said high-speed rail service had been temporarily suspended out of the southern city of Kaohsiung, north of Pingtung.

Earthquakes frequently rattle Taiwan, but most are minor and cause little or no damage. However, a magnitude-7.6 earthquake in central Taiwan in 1999 killed more than 2,300 people.

 Source Msnbc

Does White House deserve credit for increase in domestic oil production?

The president and the White House haven't been shy about claiming credit for doing everything possible to keep gasoline prices low.

As White House spokesman Jay Carney said this week "Oil and gas production in the United States has risen every year since the president's been in office. Oil production is now higher than it's been in eight years.

Industry analysts say production is rising -- not because of President Obama, but in spite of him.

"Today on federal land, the area where the president has control, production in the Gulf of Mexico is down 30 percent. Lease sales in Rocky Mountains on federal lands are down 70 percent," Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute said. 

He says the president has put 85 percent of the outer continental shelf off limits and overall, is only making 3 percent of the areas under his control available for development.

Numbers from think tanks and the federal Energy Information Administration confirm those numbers.

Nevertheless, steadily rising gas prices are a political liability. That's why the president now takes credit for the results of policies he ran against in 2008. One ad lambasted McCain by tying him to the Bush energy policies, saying "McCain and Bush support a drilling plan that won't produce a drop of oil for seven years."

The president initially wanted to drive up oil prices to make renewable energy more attractive.

His cap and trade plan was too harsh even for Democratic allies and failed. Nevertheless, Obama still seems to deny that drilling would reduce prices.

"You know there are no quick fixes to this problem, and you know we can't just drill our way to lower gas prices," he said at a speech in Florida this week.

Exploration and development do take years. But analysts argue the administration can't now take credit for decisions about drilling made years ago by President Bush and his predecessors.

"That production is a direct result of leases issued before this administration and as result of development on private and state lands," Gerard said.

On private lands, oil production is booming. In North Dakota, the oil and gas are on private or state land and beyond the president's control.

The state has gone from producing a small amount of oil to some 450,000 barrels a day.

Unemployment is 3.3 percent, the lowest in the country. And the state has a budget surplus in the billions.

Gerard thinks North Dakota isn't the only place. He says if the President would unleash the energy industry, the US and Canada have so much oil and gas that, along with renewables, we could become energy independent.

"We could be energy self sufficient right here in North America in 12 years, but that takes political courage," he said. 

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others are now talking about releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve.

Gerard says it at least shows the administration recognizes that supply affects prices. But he argues we have a bigger reserve right under our feet-- if we'd only develop it.

Source Fox News

Nelson Mandela Hospitalized Over Stomach Ailment

 Nelson Mandela, the first president of a democratic, multiracial South Africa, was hospitalized on Saturday to address a longstanding abdominal complaint, the office of South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, announced.

“Madiba has had a long-standing abdominal complaint and doctors feel it needs proper specialist medical attention,” the statement said, using Mr. Mandela’s honorific clan name.

Mr. Mandela, who battled apartheid and spent 27 years imprisoned by the white minority government, is 93 years old, and has been in virtual seclusion for the last several years. His health is closely watched; a hospitalization in January 2011 set off a panic across South Africa.

For years, rumors have swirled about Mr. Mandela’s health. His public appearances have become less and less frequent. He last appeared in July 2010 at the closing ceremony of the World Cup soccer tournament.

Mr. Mandela was released from prison at age 71 in 1990 as South Africa’s policy of white supremacy was imploding; he was elected four years later as the first president of a reforming nation.

Source New York Times

Nelson Mandela hospitalized

Former South African President Nelson Mandela has been hospitalized with a stomach ailment, according to a government statement issued Saturday about the 93-year-old anti-apartheid icon.

President Jacob Zuma asked that Mandela's privacy be respected, and did not say at which hospital Mandela was being treated.

The hospitalization was due to a "long-standing abdominal complaint" that doctors feel "needs proper specialist medical attention, according to a statement on Zuma's website.

Mac Maharaj, Zuma's spokesman, said he could not elaborate but that he would be issuing regular updates.

Mandela became South Africa's first black president in 1994 after spending 27 years in prison for his fight against racist apartheid rule, and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

His public appearances have become increasingly rare, and he was hospitalized last year for a few days with an acute respiratory infection.

Source CBS

To close tax loopholes, Obama would open new ones

 Cutting corporate tax rates and deleting loopholes is just what most economists prescribe for the tangled U.S. tax code.

So why isn't everyone cheering the plan President Barack Obama unveiled Tuesday to slash the top corporate tax rate and end breaks that let some companies pay little or nothing in taxes?

Economists note that Obama's plan would upturn the very playing field the administration says it wants to level. It would give manufacturers preferential treatment: Tax breaks would effectively cap their rate at 25 percent. Other companies would pay up to 28 percent.

The current top corporate tax rate is 35 percent.

Some say such varying rates can distort the economy by diverting investment into some industries and away from others that might pack a bigger economic punch.

"The administration is not making sense," says Martin Sullivan, contributing editor at publisher Tax Analysts. "The whole idea of corporate tax reform is to get rid of loopholes, and this plan is adding loopholes back in."

Other economists oppose a separate plank of the Obama plan: a minimum tax on foreign earnings of U.S. multinational companies. No other country imposes such a tax on its companies, they note. U.S. businesses would face a competitive disadvantage.

Facing resistance from Republicans and many businesses, Obama's plan is in any case a longshot proposal so close to Election Day.

"For anything that Obama recommends during an election year and with a divided Congress, the best one can say is, 'Good luck,'" says Henry Aaron, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "Those who stand to lose are really upset and will work hard to defeat it."

Just about everybody agrees something has to change. When Japan enacts a corporate tax cut in April, the United States will be left with the highest tax rate in the developed world.

That puts the U.S. companies that actually pay the official corporate tax rate at a disadvantage against their foreign competitors. (Many U.S. companies effectively pay lower rates because of tax breaks.)

The loophole-riddled U.S. tax code now benefits numerous industries over others. One tax break, for example, lets oil companies write off drilling costs immediately instead of over time, as most businesses must.

In the end, different industries can pay far different effective rates. The Treasury Department says U.S. utility companies pay an average effective tax rate of 14 percent. By contrast, retailers pay an average 31 percent.

The administration says the point of its tax plan is to make the system fairer and more efficient — not to squeeze more overall tax revenue from corporations. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner calls the current tax code "fundamentally unfair." But the administration also needs to end some loopholes to help pay for a lower corporate tax rate.

The White House argues that tax breaks for manufacturers could ultimately pay off for the economy. When factories expand, for example, the benefits tend to spill into other businesses: Shipping companies and warehouses must add jobs, too, to transport and store the goods that manufacturers are producing.

Economists also note that manufacturers account for a disproportionate amount of the research and development that create innovative products and new ways of doing business. The National Science Foundation has found that manufacturing companies are nearly three times likelier to introduce a new or significantly improved product than other companies are.

"Does manufacturing deserve special treatment? This is a hot debate," says Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of the Industrial Performance Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "A case can be made that there's a reason to encourage more manufacturing in the United States because of its links to innovation."

Other economists say that argument is overstated. Among the skeptics is Obama's own former economic adviser, Christina Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In a column this month in The New York Times, Romer argued that there was no economic justification for the government to favor manufacturers over service-oriented companies.

"Our earnings from exporting architectural plans for a building in Shanghai are as real as those from exporting cars to Canada," Romer wrote.

Analysts are also divided over Obama's plans to impose a minimum tax on companies' foreign earnings.

Sullivan of Tax Analysts says the current system allows some companies — especially technology and pharmaceutical firms — to avoid U.S. taxes by shifting their earnings to tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Other multinationals can indefinitely avoid paying U.S. taxes by keeping their earnings overseas.

Lacking such tax breaks, companies that do all their business in the United States suffer a competitive disadvantage.

The minimum tax proposal, Sullivan says, "would level the playing field."

But big U.S. companies complain that they already pay taxes to foreign governments on the income they earn in those countries. A U.S. tax on that income, they argue, would amount to double taxation.

That would raise costs for U.S. companies operating overseas, making them less competitive. Instead, the United States should move toward a "territorial" tax system, business groups argue. Tax would apply only to income earned within the United States.

"No other developed country imposes such a 'minimum tax' on the foreign earnings of their corporations," said the Business Roundtable, a trade group of chief executives of large U.S. companies.

Some economists agree.

The minimum tax proposal for international earnings "is totally misguided both from a competitive standpoint and a jobs standpoint," said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Obama's plan, if enacted, will shrink the U.S. footprint in world markets and lose jobs."


Source cbsnews