Income inequality gap widens in America
WASHINGTON – The gulf between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America is the widest it’s been since the Roaring ’20s.
The very wealthiest Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country’s household income last year – their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market crash. And the top 10 percent captured a record 48.2 percent of total earnings last year.
U.S. income inequality has been growing for almost three decades. And it grew again last year, according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.
One of them, Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez, said the incomes of the richest Americans surged last year in part because they cashed in stock holdings to avoid higher capital gains taxes that took effect in January.
In 2012, the incomes of the top 1 percent rose nearly 20 percent compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.
Documents show judge worried about program
SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge who oversaw a secret U.S. spy court almost shut down the government’s domestic surveillance program designed to fight terrorism after he “lost confidence” in officials’ ability to operate it, documents released Tuesday show.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton issued a blistering opinion in March 2009 after discovering government officials had been accessing domestic phone records for nearly three years without “reasonable, articulate suspicion” that they were connected to terrorism.
Walton said the government’s excuse that the program was complicated “strained credulity,” and he ordered the National Security Agency to conduct an “end-to-end” review of its processes and policies while also ordering closer monitoring of its activities.
Chinese boy who lost eyes gets implants
BEIJING — A 6-year-old Chinese boy whose eyes were gouged out received implants Tuesday at a hospital in southern China owned by a Hong Kong doctor who offered the operation after learning about the brutal attack.
The implants are a precursor to fitting the boy with prosthetic eyes that will look and move more like normal eyes, but do not restore vision. Doctors at the C-MER Dennis Lam Eye Hospital also plan to fit Guo Bin — nicknamed Bin Bin vigation sensors that would allow the boy to get around on his own in familiar places.
“As his parents, we are full of hope,” the boy’s father, Guo Zhiping, said over the phone while waiting for the surgery to finish. “We have yet to tell him that his vision would be lost forever.”
Associated Press
