Feds: Couple claimed welfare, lived in $1.2M home (AP)

SEATTLE ? A Seattle chiropractor and his wife live in a $1.2 million waterfront home and have spent the past eight years flying to Moscow, Paris, Israel, Turkey, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

All the while, federal authorities say, the couple was collecting more than $100,000 in welfare.

Now, the U.S. attorney's office is suing David Silverstein and Lyudmila Shimonova, accusing them of filing false claims and demanding that the couple pay back more than $135,000 in federal housing assistance since 2003. Prosecutors are also seeking tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

In gaining Section 8 housing assistance, Shimonova represented that she lived alone with her two children and that her household assets were less than $5,000. Silverstein received the monthly benefits of $1,272 as Shimonova's purported landlord, the government said.

Shimonova also received benefits under the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, as well as Social Security cash reserved for people who can't work due to age or disability and whose assets fall below a certain threshold ? $3,000 for a married couple or $2,000 for a single person, the complaint said.

"Defendants have separately and, it appears, in conjunction with one another made false representations to various state and federal agencies in order to obtain federally funded benefits," assistant U.S. attorneys Harold Malkin and Kayla Stahman wrote.

Meanwhile, they were traveling the world, according to Department of Homeland Security records.

Michael Radyshewsky, a federal welfare fraud investigator, wrote in an application to search the couple's home that they took weeklong trips to Moscow in 2003, Dominican Republic in 2005, and Mexico and France in 2009. In 2007, they went for 12 days to Israel, and this past June they took a two-week trip to Turkey.

Silverstein said Tuesday his lawyer asked him not to comment, and his lawyer, David Allen, did not immediately return a message. The home did not appear to have a listed phone number, and Shimonova's lawyer, Michele Shaw, did not return an email seeking comment.

The investigation included surveillance of the three-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot home on Lake Washington, during which agents observed his black Jaguar parked there frequently.

Though Shimonova had claimed she was single and lived there alone, Silverstein listed it as his residence on his driver's license and passport application, the prosecutors said.

But in documents filed so that he could receive the housing assistance, he listed his office as his residence to conceal that he was living with Shimonova ? not her landlord, they said.

Furthermore, it appeared clear that the pair was actually married. Silverstein wrote on the website of his chiropractic business: "On a personal note, I am happily married with two children, whose careers are in medicine and Middle Eastern studies. As a family, we all enjoy snow-shoeing, mountain climbing and ocean sports."

A report of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle for the 2010 fiscal year listed "Mila and Dr. David Silverstein" as donors.

In addition to failing to disclose the marriage or living situation, Shimonova also failed to disclose bank accounts in her name containing tens of thousands of dollars, prosecutors said.

The lawsuit seeks to have the couple pay $11,000 in fines for each false claim the couple made. The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment on whether criminal charges are forthcoming.

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Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111207/ap_on_re_us/us_welfare_million_dollar_house

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Nervous System May Hold Key to Weight Loss (HealthDay)

MONDAY, Dec. 5 (HealthDay News) -- People with higher levels of nerve activity may have an easier time losing weight, a small study suggests.

Researchers looked at 42 overweight or obese people who took part in a 12-week weight-loss program that cut their daily calorie intake by 30 percent. The participants' resting sympathetic nerve activity was measured at the start of the study.

The sympathetic nervous system, which spreads throughout the body, regulates many functions, including control of resting metabolic rate and the use of calories from food consumption.

The researchers found that successful weight losers had significantly higher resting sympathetic nerve activity than those who had trouble shedding pounds. They also found that successful weight losers showed large increases in nerve activity after they ate a carbohydrate test meal. This did not occur in those who were weight-loss resistant.

The study will appear in the February 2012 issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

"We have demonstrated for the first time that resting muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) is a significant independent predictor of weight-loss outcome in a cohort of overweight or obese subjects," lead author Nora Straznicky, of the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, said in a journal news release.

"Our findings provide two opportunities. First, we may be able to identify those persons who would benefit most from lifestyle weight-loss interventions such as dieting. Secondly, the findings may also help in developing weight-loss treatments through stimulating this specific nervous activity."

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases explains how to select a safe and successful weight-loss program.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/weightloss/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20111206/hl_hsn/nervoussystemmayholdkeytoweightloss

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John Rich Booted From Southwest Flight For Being Too Drunk?

John Rich Booted From Southwest Flight For Being Too Drunk?

Country star John Rich was kicked off of a Southwest plane on Sunday after the crew determined he was too intoxicated to make the trip [...]

John Rich Booted From Southwest Flight For Being Too Drunk? Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/stupidcelebrities/~3/t_zaWo4GsJE/

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Deadly attack not deliberate: Obama

WASHINGTON ? Though the US has yet to investigate the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in Nov 26 Nato airstrike, President Obama on Sunday ?revealed? to President Zardari that the deadly strike was ?not deliberate? attack.
Interestingly, President Obama is not the first person to make this claim as Nato/Isaf and US authorities, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have lately shifted their stance to calling the event accidental. The US and officials of western military alliance have been saying previously that the airstrike came in reaction to the firing by Pakistani soldiers.
But Pakistan Army has already rejected all such groundless assertions, saying that its preliminary investigation plausibly suggest that it was a wilful pre-mediated attack. The Pakistanis say that Nato bluffed them by deliberately giving them wrong coordinates for the proposed action against militants and that their forces fired only after the attacks began.
A White House statement said Obama placed a call early Sunday to Zardari expressing his regrets over the ?tragic loss? and promising a ?full investigation? into the incident, which has plunged the two uneasy allies into a diplomatic crisis. The statement read: ?Earlier today President (Barack Obama) placed a phone call to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to personally express his condolences on the tragic loss of twenty-four Pakistani soldiers this past week along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.? The statement said the US president told his Pakistani counterpart that the attack was accidental in nature and ?reiterated the United States? strong commitment to a full investigation?.
The US strikes along the border with Afghanistan last weekend set off a wave of anger in Pakistan and further strained Islamabad-Washington ties as the Obama administration tries to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Islamabad has so far refused to take part in a US investigation into the attack. But the White House said Obama and Zardari nonetheless ?reaffirmed their commitment to the US-Pakistan bilateral relationship, which is critical to the security of both nations, and they agreed to stay in close touch?
The conversation, eight days after the incident, came despite the reservations of some officials in the Defence Department and favoured an approach suggested by diplomats who had urged a more conciliatory gesture. But the president?s comments stopped short of a formal apology or videotaped statement that had been sought by the Pakistani government as a way to ease the intense public anger in that country. Some administration aides had worried that if Mr Obama were to apologise formally to Pakistan, the move could become fodder for his Republican opponents in the presidential campaign.
In the wake of the strikes, Pakistan decided not to take part in the Bonn Conference on the future of Afghanistan that opens Monday a decision which, together with the Taliban?s boycott, has cast the event?s usefulness into doubt. Pakistan has also shut down Nato?s vital supply line into Afghanistan and ordered American personnel to leave Shamsi airbase. The base is widely understood to have been a hub for the covert CIA drone war on Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders in Pakistan?s troubled border areas with Afghanistan.
Previous cross-border strikes were investigated jointly and the fallout quickly contained, like the dispute that followed the American helicopter attacks on Pakistani forces in September 2010. But a year of crises that began with an American contractor shooting two Pakistanis to death on a street in Lahore and included the Navy Seal raid northwest of Islamabad that killed Osama bin Laden, now risks ending with the breach of an alliance that has been the cornerstone of American national security policy for the past decade, American officials and analysts have said.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/today-headlines/~3/fTNvfKyJJ8w/Deadly-attack-not-deliberate-Obama

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Why do some people never forget a face?

ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2011) ? "Face recognition is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it," says Beijing Normal University cognitive psychologist Jia Liu. But what accounts for the difference? A new study by Liu and colleagues Ruosi Wang, Jingguang Li, Huizhen Fang, and Moqian Tian provides the first experimental evidence that the inequality of abilities is rooted in the unique way in which the mind perceives faces. "Individuals who process faces more holistically" -- that is, as an integrated whole -- "are better at face recognition," says Liu.

The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

In daily life, we recognize faces both holistically and also "analytically" -- that is, picking out individual parts, such as eyes or nose. But while the brain uses analytical processing for all kinds of objects -- cars, houses, animals -- "holistic processing is thought to be especially critical to face recognition," says Liu.

To isolate holistic processing as the key to face recognition, the researchers first measured the ability of study participants -- 337 male and female students -- to remember whole faces, using a task in which they had to select studied faces and flowers from among unfamiliar ones.

The next two tasks measured performance in tasks that mark holistic processing. The composite-face effect (CFE) shows up when two faces are split horizontally and stuck together. It's easier to identify the top half-face when it's misaligned with the bottom one than when the two halves are fitted smoothly together. "That's because our brain automatically combines them to form a new" -- and unfamiliar -- "face," says Liu: evidence of holistic processing. The other marker of holistic processing is the whole-part effect (WPE). In this one, people are shown a face, then asked to recognize a part of it -- say, the nose. They do better when the feature is presented within the whole face than when it stands on its own among other noses: again, we remember the nose integrated into the whole face. The researchers also assessed participants' general intelligence.

The results: Those participants who scored higher on CFE and WPE -- that is, who did well in holistic processing -- also performed better at the first task of recognizing faces. But there was no link between facial recognition and general intelligence, which is made up of various cognitive processes -- a suggestion that face processing is unique.

"Our findings partly explains why some never forget faces, while others misrecognize their friends and relatives frequently," says Liu. That's why the research holds promise for therapies for that second category of people, who may suffer disorders such as prosopagnosia (face blindness) and autism. Knowing that the mind receives a face as one whole thing and not as a collection of individual parts, "we may train people on holistic processing to improve their ability in recognizing faces," Liu says.

The article is entitled, "Individual Differences in Holistic Processing Predict Face-recognition Ability."

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H&R Block 2Q loss widens; mortgage claims spike (AP)

NEW YORK ? A spike in claims related to bad loans written by its now-shuttered subprime mortgage unit shouldn't create any new liability for H&R Block Inc., company executives said Thursday after releasing results that showed a wider loss for its fiscal second-quarter.

The nation's largest tax preparer said claims from investors in securities backed by those mortgages, and from insurers who covered those investments, shot up to $483 million during the quarter, from $21 million a year earlier.

Sand Canyon Corp., as the former OptionOne mortgage unit is now called, reviewed $61 million in claims during the quarter, resulting in incurred losses of $3 million.

While the losses remained in line with prior quarters, the new claims totaled more than three times as many as were filed in the previous four quarters combined. But Block executives said the higher claims won't likely result in a similar increase in losses.

Chief Financial Officer Jeff Brown said since May 2009, 85 percent of claims that Sand Canyon has reviewed were found invalid, mainly because OptionOne was a pure subprime lender, which had relatively weak lending standards.

The claims increase led Sand Canyon to set aside an additional $20 million during the quarter to cover losses. But executives said that doesn't portend any increased liability to Block.

"Whether or not claim activity remains at elevated levels in the near future, we believe Sand Canyon's financial position is sufficient to satisfy all valid claims," said Block CEO Bill Cobb during a conference call to discuss the quarterly results.

He noted Sand Canyon is a "separate legal entity" from Block, and the tax preparer believes it is therefore sheltered from having to pitch in cash to cover any claims.

The issue has weighed on Block shares for some time, as Wall Street has fretted it could end up on the hook for buying back millions more in soured mortgages.

The topic's resurgence after a few quarters in the background hurt Block's shares. In afterhours trading after Block released its results, the company's shares fell 43 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $15.63. The stock closed the regular session at $16.06.

Block said it closed its previously announced sale of its RSM McGladrey business consulting unit on Wednesday. And it booked charges for the previously planned shutdown of its ExpressTax unit.

The resulting shifting of funds boosted Block's loss to $141.7 million, or 47 cents per share, for the three months ended Oct. 31. A year earlier, it posted a loss of $109 million, or 36 cents per share.

Block typically posts a second-quarter loss because most of its revenue comes during the U.S. tax season.

Excluding the ExpressTax charges and losses from discontinued operations, H&R Block said it lost 38 cents per share in the recent quarter.

On the revenue side, growth in Block's Australian tax business helped the quarter's revenue rise 8 percent to $129.2 million, from $119.6 million last year.

That performance fell short of analyst projections.

On average, analysts expected an adjusted loss of 35 cents per share, on $328.9 million in revenue, according to data provided by FactSet. Both figures included RSM McGladrey's business. Last year, the consulting unit took in revenue of $203.4 million in the quarter.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/personalfinance/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111202/ap_on_bi_ge/us_earns_h_r_block

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Video: Romney targets Gingrich

When her test was lost, critical care delayed

Medical tests can reveal critical information about a person's health, but sometimes, the? test is lost and the doctor and patient never get the results, potentially delaying essential care. That was the case for one Maryland woman whose cancer went untreated for a year.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/45515927#45515927

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