Each week iVillage celebrates a woman who makes us proud. See who we're highlighting this week.
Source: http://www.ivillage.com/woman-week-1/1-b-211957?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Awoman-week-1-211957
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KANEOHE BAY, Hawaii (AP) ? A Hawaii-based lance corporal accused of hazing a fellow Marine who committed suicide at their remote outpost in Afghanistan is appearing in court after agreeing to a plea bargain.
In October, Lance Cpl. Jacob D. Jacoby was referred to a general court-martial on charges that he assaulted, threatened, and humiliated Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, who killed himself on April 3.
Jacoby will instead appear Monday before a special court martial ? a venue for less serious crimes than a general court-martial? at a Marine base in Kaneohe Bay after reaching a plea agreement. The Marines didn't release details of the agreement ahead of the trial.
Two other Marines have also been accused of hazing Lew, 21, a nephew of U.S. Rep. Judy Chu of California, before he shot himself with his machine gun in his foxhole.
Sgt. Benjamin Johns, the leader of the squad the Marines belonged to, and Lance Cpl. Carlos Orozco III will each have their own separate courts-martial at later dates.
The case involves the actions of Marines at an isolated patrol base the U.S. was establishing to disrupt Taliban drug and weapons trafficking in Helmand province.
At an Article 32 hearing ? the equivalent of a grand jury hearing in the civilian world ? in September, Marines testified Lew had repeatedly fallen asleep while he was on duty. Squad members and officers had tried different methods to get him to stay awake, including referring him up the chain of command for discipline and taking him off patrols so he could get more rest.
But on Lew's last night, those efforts escalated into alleged acts of violence and humiliation, according to charges outlined at the hearing. The Marines were accused of punching and kicking him, making him do push-ups and pouring sand in his face.
A significant share of the questions raised at the Article 32 hearing focused on whether the accused intended to humiliate and harm Lew or discipline him so he would stop falling asleep while on watch duty.
Before Lew put the muzzle of his machine gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, he scrawled a note on his arm: "May hate me now, but in the long run this was the right choice I'm sorry my mom deserves the truth."
A Marine commander in retrospect speculated Lew may have been nodding off because he suffered from depression or some other medical condition.
Chu discussed her nephew's death during a House Armed Services hearing on suicide prevention in September, held at the same time as the Article 32 hearing. She told military witnesses that Lew was "a very popular and outgoing young man known for joking and smiling and break dancing."
Chu also issued a statement saying no one deserves being "hazed and tortured" like her nephew was, and the military justice system must hold "any wrongdoers accountable."
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For too long, small businesses have been struggling to bear the brunt of the recession. Lending has all but dried up for small employers, and too many lawmakers are spending more time playing politics than working to pass smart legislation to help them. If small businesses are going to help fix our country's employment problem, they need increased access to credit and smart jobs legislation. How do we know small business owners feel this way? We asked them.
According to a national poll of 500 small business owners released Jan. 26 by Small Business Majority, Main Street Alliance and the American Sustainable Business Council, an overwhelming 90 percent of small employers believe credit availability is a problem for small businesses. Employers also agree when it comes to lending, banks are less friendly than they were four years ago: 61 percent say it is harder to get a loan now than it was then.
Banks' loan portfolios have been reduced by more than $47 billion since the pre-recession peak--and that affects business owners across the country. Take Sandra Garratt, for instance. Since 1992, she has operated several organic clothing companies. As an early investor in innovative manufacturing--and one who has been named entrepreneur of the year, at that--she thought she'd be able to obtain a loan, or at least a line of credit for her business. She was wrong. She had to take time away from the business to care for aging parents, which negatively affected her credit. Despite her business acumen and accolades, every bank has turned her down. She's now forced to turn business away regularly because of an inability to stock fabric.
It's the experiences of real small business owners like Sandra that explain why 90 percent of entrepreneurs want community banks' and credit unions' lending authority expanded. And more than three-fourths of them support incentivizing community banks to boost their small business lending. Without these kinds of measures, many small business owners are forced to take extreme measures--like turning to credit cards.
Anyone familiar with credit cards knows their terms and conditions can make your head spin, and that debt can build in the blink of an eye. Yet despite the risk they pose, more than half of small business owners have used credit cards to help finance their business. But owners know they can cause problems, which is why four in five support requiring the credit card industry to provide clearer disclosure of terms and interest rates.
The bottom line is small business owners need increased cash flow to keep their doors open and hire more workers. But that can't happen without the help of smart policies that boost the private sector. Besides increased access to credit, small business owners also support current proposals being debated in Congress, and highlighted by the president in his 2012 State of the Union address, that aim to stimulate the economy and create jobs.
When asked about various provisions included in the president's American Jobs Act, small business owners were particularly supportive of investments in infrastructure: 69 percent favor investing $50 billion in projects to improve roads, bridges and water systems, and six in 10 small business owners support creation of a nationwide wireless network.
Innovation has historically been one of the driving forces behind entrepreneurship. It's no wonder small business owners recognize the potential and opportunity for innovation to stimulate the private sector. It's not just a select group of small business owners that feel this way, either--survey respondents' political views run the gamut: 50 percent of respondents identified as Republican, 32 percent as Democrat and 15 percent as independent.
Small businesses need a hand if they're going to help rebuild the economy. Today's credit barrier limits small business expansion and strains entrepreneurs' capacity to put America back to work. While lawmakers in Congress are using partisan rhetoric to dismantle proposals aimed at creating jobs, entrepreneurs are repeatedly voicing their support for these exact ideas. For their sake, legislators need to focus on bettering credit conditions and try to repair our jobs problem.
John Arensmeyer is the founder and CEO of Small Business Majority. Follow him on
Twitter at @SmlBizMajority.
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Follow John Arensmeyer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SmlBizMajority
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-arensmeyer/the-state-of-small-business_b_1242111.html
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KHARTOUM (Reuters) ? Rebels in Sudan's oil-producing border state of South Kordofan said on Sunday they were holding Chinese workers for their own safety after a battle with the Sudanese army.
The army has been fighting rebels of the SPLM-N in South Kordofan bordering newly independent South Sudan since June. Fighting spread to the northern Blue Nile state in September.
"We are holding 29 Chinese workers after a battle with the army yesterday," a spokesman for the SPLM-N said. "They are in good health. We are holding them for their own safety because the army was trying to strike again."
The army said rebels had attacked the compound of a Chinese construction company operating in the area between the towns of Abbasiya and Rashad in the north of the state and captured 70 civilians.
"Most of them are Chinese. They (the rebels) are targeting civilians," said army spokesman Sawarmi Khalid Saad.
He said there had been no battle in the area and the army was now trying to rescue the civilians.
China's foreign ministry urged Sudan to guarantee the safety of Chinese personnel during the search and rescue process, according to a statement released in Beijing.
South Kordofan is the main oil-producing state in Sudan, while Blue Nile is rich in minerals such as chrome.
The fighting in both states has forced about 417,000 people to flee their homes, more than 80,000 of them to South Sudan, according to the United Nations.
Both states contain large groups who sided with the south in a decades-long civil war, and who say they continue to face persecution inside Sudan since South Sudan seceded in July.
The SPLM is now the ruling party in the independent south and denies supporting SPLM-North rebels across the border.
Events in South Kordofan and Blue Nile are difficult to verify because aid groups and diplomats are banned from areas where fighting takes place.
SPLM-North is one of a number of rebel movements in underdeveloped border areas who say they are fighting to overthrow Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and end what they see as the dominance of the Khartoum political elite.
Sudan and South Sudan, which still have to resolve a range of issues including the sharing of oil revenues, regularly trade accusations of supporting insurgencies on each other's territory.
(Reporting by Ulf Laessing and Khalid Abdelaziz; additional reporting by David Stanway in Beijing)
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WASHINGTON ? Just how rich is Mitt Romney? Add up the wealth of the last eight presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Then double that number. Now you're in Romney territory.
He would be among the richest presidents in American history if elected ? probably in the top four.
He couldn't top George Washington who, with nearly 60,000 acres and more than 300 slaves, is considered the big daddy of presidential wealth. After that, it gets complicated, depending how you rate Thomas Jefferson's plantation, Herbert Hoover's millions from mining or John F. Kennedy's share of the vast family fortune, as well as the finer points of factors like inflation adjustment.
But it's safe to say the Roosevelts had nothing on Romney, and the Bushes are nowhere close.
The former Massachusetts governor has disclosed only the broad outlines of his wealth, putting it somewhere from $190 million to $250 million. That easily could make him 50 times richer than Obama, who falls in the still-impressive-to-most-of-us range of $2.2 million to $7.5 million.
"I think it's almost hard to conceptualize what $250 million means," said Shamus Khan, a Columbia University sociologist who studies the wealthy. "People say Romney made $50,000 a day while not working last year. What do you do with all that money? I can't even imagine spending it. Well, maybe ..."
Of course, an unbelievable boatload of bucks is just one way to think of Romney's net worth, and the 44 U.S. presidents make up a pretty small pond for him to swim in. Put alongside America's 400 or so billionaires, Romney wouldn't make a ripple.
So here's a look where Romney's riches rank ? among the most flush Americans, the White House contenders, and the rest of us:
_Within the 1 percent:
"Romney is small potatoes compared with the ultra-wealthy," said Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies the nation's elites.
After all, even in the rarefied world of the top 1 percent, there's a big difference between life at the top and at the bottom.
A household needs to bring in roughly $400,000 per year to make the cut. Romney and his wife, Ann, have been making 50 times that ? more than $20 million a year. In 2009, only 8,274 federal tax filers had income above $10 million. Romney is solidly within that elite 0.006 percent of all U.S. taxpayers.
Congress is flush with millionaires. Only a few are in the Romney realm, including Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Kerry's ranking would climb much higher if the fortune of his wife, Teresa Heinz, were counted. She is the widow of Sen. John Heinz, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune.
Further up the ladder, top hedge fund managers can pocket $1 billion or more in a single year.
At the top of the wealth pile sits Bill Gates, worth $59 billion, according to Forbes magazine's estimates.
_As a potential president:
Romney clearly stands out here. America's super rich generally don't jockey to live in the White House. A few have toyed with the idea, most notably New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whom Forbes ranks as the 12th richest American, worth $19.5 billion. A lesser billionaire, Ross Perot, bankrolled his own third-party campaigns in 1992 and 1996.
Many presidents weren't particularly well-off, especially 19th century leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan and Ulysses S. Grant. Nor was the 33rd president, Harry Truman.
"These things ebb and flow," said sociologist Khan. "It's not the case that all presidents were always rich."
A few former chief executives died in debt, including Thomas Jefferson, ranked in a Forbes study as the third-wealthiest president.
Comparing the landlocked wealth of early Americans such as Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, with today's millionaires is tricky, even setting aside the lack of documentation and economic changes over two centuries.
Research by 24/7 Wall St., a news and analysis website, estimated Washington's wealth at the equivalent of $525 million in 2010 dollars.
Yet Washington had to borrow money to pay for his trip to New York for his inauguration in 1789, according to Dennis Pogue, vice president for preservation at Mount Vernon, Washington's Virginia estate. His money was tied up in land, reaping only a modest cash income after farm expenses.
"He was a wealthy guy, there's no doubt about it," Pogue said, and probably among the dozen richest Virginians of his time. But, "the wealthiest person in America then was nothing in comparison to what these folks are today."
_How does Romney stand next to a regular Joe?
He's roughly 1,800 times richer.
The typical U.S. household was worth $120,300 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau's most recent data, although that number is sure to have dropped since the recession. A typical family's income is $50,000.
Calculations from 24/7 Wall St. of the peak lifetime wealth (or peak so far) of Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama add up to a total $128 million ? while Romney reports assets of up to $250 million.
If you consider only those presidents' assets while in office, without millions earned later from speeches and books, their combined total would be substantially lower, and Romney's riches would leave the pack even further behind.
___
Online:
Forbes' richest presidents list: http://tinyurl.com/82erdyb
24/7 Wall St. on presidents' net worth: http://tinyurl.com/328qyu2
___
Associated Press writer Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.
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