"Armed security is not the preferred route," Mr. Speers said, but added that the company had decided to hire the guards because the Alabama regularly sails in the high-risk waters to deliver food aid [emphasis added]. He said that the move had been approved by the U.S. Coast Guard. "It's something they encourage," he said.

Those cases have also spawned complex, multifactor tests applied by a government bureaucracy to restrict many entities and forms of speech. There are different rules for over 70 different entities, from corporations to partnerships, and the FEC has varying rules for 33 different forms of political speech. Those exceptions mean that while some corporations are prohibited from engaging in political speech, others are not. While General Motors is prohibited, General Electric, which owns NBC and MSNBC, is not because of the exception in the law for political speech by media corporations.

Punching in at a time clock is:

bard_bloom

Which character's tweets would you enjoy reading more?

shadesong

The idea is simple: The payment of a basic monthly income, funded with tax revenues, of 100 Namibia dollars, or about €9 ($13), for each citizen. There are no conditions, and nothing is expected in return. The money comes from various organizations, including AIDS foundations, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Protestant churches in Germany's Rhineland and Westphalia regions.

Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.
Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.

Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

Overall, the House trimmed Mr. Obama's budget request for the Pentagon to $636.3 billion, down slightly from the $640.1 billion he sought. But in so doing, House appropriators also rearranged spending priorities, cutting programs Mr. Obama favored and replacing them with items he wanted cut.

"The Pentagon is not the fountain of all knowledge," said Rep. Bill Young, a Florida Republican who was senior appropriator on the House floor last month when the Pentagon spending bill was approved. "They don't have all of the knowledge, and they don't have all of the wisdom. Neither does the administration, neither does the Congress. That's why we work together."

How much of life is just showing up?

Many owners decline to rent the homes due to local council tax rules, which tax properties at a lower rate if they are empty and unfurnished.

Mr. Palmer often takes a more sympathetic view to squatters than he does toward the owners of an abandoned property. [...] "At the end of the day, they have a similar goal of putting empty properties back into use," he says. "We just go about it in two very different ways."

Once in America, the workers found themselves at the mercy of the traffickers, who allegedly kept "them as modern-day slaves under threat of deportation," in the words of James Gibbons of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The recruiters apparently took care to keep the workers in debt, charging them fees for uniforms, for transportation, and for rent in overcrowded apartments. Paychecks would frequently show "negative earnings," in the words of the indictment. And if the workers refused to go along with the scheme, the traffickers held the ultimate trump card, the indictment claims: They "threatened to cancel the immigration status" of the workers, rendering them instantly illegal.