Lavenia notes

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US Senate Republican jobs bill urges tax reform and cuts

By Thomas FerraroWASHINGTON, Oct 13 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans, having rejected President Barack Obama's jobs bill, offered a sweeping and largely repackaged plan of their own on Thursday.Their "Jobs Through Growth Act" features a fresh call for tax reform and cuts as well as a number of components previously proposed, but stalled in the Democratic-led Senate.They include steps to: require a balanced budget; repeal Obama's overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system; lift prohibitions on offshore energy exploration and promote U.S. trade."This is a pro-growth proposal to create the environment for jobs that stands in contrast to the short-term sweetener approach of the Obama administration, an approach that simply hasn't worked," Senator Rob Portman, a chief sponsor of the measure, told a news conference.Republicans unveiled their measure after complaints by Obama that they haven't offered a jobs-creation plan."We just thought it was time to put this all into a package," said Senator John McCain, another sponsor. "Part of it is in response to the president saying we don't have a proposal."McCain said all but a few of the Senate's 47 Republicans had embraced the measure, whose third and final chief sponsor is Senator Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite.But Democratic Senator Charles Schumer called the Republican plan, "a political fig leaf that would likely add to the deficit while doing nothing to create jobs."The bill was unveiled two days after Republicans used a procedural move in the Senate to block Obama's $447 billion jobs package.Speaking at the White House on Thursday, Obama touted the new strategy he and Senate Democrats have crafted to bring up parts of his bill for individual votes, likely beginning next month."We're going to say, let's have a vote on putting teachers back in the classroom," said Obama, whose re-election next year may hinge on how much he can revive the sagging economy and boost the jobless rate that has been stuck above 9 percent since May."Let's have a vote on rebuilding our infrastructure."If Republicans vote no, Obama said, they will have to explain their actions to the American people ahead of next year's elections.A new Wall Street-NBC poll shows that the public, by a 2-to-1 margin, backs Obama's plan to create jobs through a mixture of stimulus spending and tax cuts. It would be financed by a 5.7 percent surtax on millionaires.Obama called House Speaker John Boehner, the top U.S. Republican, on Thursday to congratulate him for helping pass three free trade bills expected to help create jobs.During the call, Boehner office said, the speaker rejected Obama's comment that Republicans had not offered a jobs creation plan, noting that House Republicans offered one in May.In fact, the House has passed 11 bills to ease regulations on business and make it easier to drill for oil and gas. None have come up for a vote in the Senate.Democrats have painted Republicans as obstructionists who care more about defeating Obama than boosting the economy.Republicans say the president would rather campaign on the issue of jobs than find a bipartisan solution.

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Cancer drug stent keeps leg arteries open-FDA staff

* FDA panel of outside experts to review drug on ThursdayOct 11 (Reuters) - U.S. medical device reviewers said a Cook Medical stent coated with a common cancer-fighting drug was safe and effective for treating clogged arteries in the thighs.Zilver PTX, the first drug-coated stent to treat peripheral arteries, kept arteries free from plaque longer than bare-metal stents, the Food and Drug Administration reviewers said in documents released on Tuesday.Privately held Cook Medical competes against Boston Scientific and Medtronic , which also make leg stents, in a stent market estimated at $5 billion worldwide. Stents are tiny mesh-like tubes used to prop open clogged arteries. Doctors slip such tubes into arteries after they have been opened with an inflated balloon.The Cook Medical stent is coated with paclitaxel, an anti-cancer drug, to help prevent re-clogging, a common problem with conventional bare-metal stents.The FDA reviewers said Zilver PTX was better than the control arm in a clinical trial, but the small trial size of only 479 patients meant some safety risks could be hard to trace.A panel of outside experts is scheduled to consider the Cook Medical device at a meeting on Thursday. The FDA will later make the final decision on whether to approve the stent for sale in the United States.The device was approved for sale in Europe in 2009.The Zilver PTX is meant to treat peripheral arterial disease, which affects about 30 million people annually, Cook said. The disease develops when arteries outside the heart build up cholesterol and scar tissue, causing them to narrow and restrict blood flow.The most common symptom of the disease is leg pain when walking, but only 33 percent of individuals with clogged peripheral arteries have symptoms, Cook said, meaning patients do not always know they have the disease.Zilver PTX, made of a super-elastic alloy of nickel and titanium, is meant for use in clogged arteries above the knee, which supply blood to the knee joint and muscles in the thigh and calf.Cook said its Zilver self-expanding stent, which has no drug coating, is already approved by the FDA for treating lesions in arteries in the pelvis.Johnson & Johnson's Cypher stent, which slowly releases the antirejection drug sirolimus, was the first drug-coated stent on the U.S. market. It was approved by the FDA in 2003. But in June, the company said it would no longer sell its drug-coated heart stents.

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UPDATE 1-PE firm Bain to buy Japanese restaurant chain-Nikkei

Nomura, which acquired the restaurant chain operator in 2006 along with a U.K. investment fund and Skylark management, will likely turn a profit on its investment with the Bain deal, the Nikkei reported.Bain began talks with Nomura to buy Skylark last fall and reached a basic agreement in late August, but an outbreak of dysentery at a Skylark group restaurant right after the agreement delayed negotiations, the paper said.Some of Skylark's Gusto brand outlets had been closed until late September as a result of the outbreak, but Bain does not appear to be concerned as sales have recovered to year-earlier levels since the locations reopened, the daily said.

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How the New Yorker monetizes old content

I love the way that The New Yorker is using the iPad to construct a whole new revenue stream from its back issues. It started* with “At the Ballpark”, an iPad-only collection of New Yorker baseball writing from 1929 to 2011, featuring the likes of John Updike, David Grann, and of course Roger Angell. That was sponsored by United Airlines. The baseball collection was followed by a golf collection (Ogden Nash, Larry David, United Airlines again), and now by a “sustainability” collection sponsored by BMW and featuring the likes of John McPhee and Michel Specter. Nearly all of these pieces are timeless, just waiting to be rediscovered. And the New Yorker’s archives are so deep, and are of such high quality, that there’s really no limit to how many of these things it can produce. Each one is very cheap to put out — just cobble together a bunch of articles under a theme, and get a TNY writer to pen a short introduction. Meanwhile, the advertisers get to align themselves with popular or trendy subjects (golf, “sustainability”), and reach an audience which is affluent even by New Yorker standards. I’m in the process right now of helping to put together a printed anthology of business writing, from many different sources; such compilations can be very good, but they’re also a lot of work to put together, in terms of securing permissions and going through the laborious process of collating, printing, and distributing physical books. The New Yorker’s special iPad editions piggyback on the existing New Yorker iPad app, and are therefore very lightweight, with a marginal cost which is tiny in comparison to TNY’s printed compliations. What’s more, instead of persuading thousands of individual book buyers to shell out cash for books, the sales job on the iPad editions is much easier: you just need to persuade a single corporation to buy a single sponsorship. TNY has experimented with selling digital compilations, too — its 9/11 e-book is $7.99. And the more different models and revenue streams, the better. But the small sponsored collections are for me the most exciting, from a business-model perspective. It’s hard to sell old content — but it’s much easier to repackage it and get a sponsor to pay you to do so. *Update: The first of these, it turns out, wasn’t the baseball one, it was “The Digital Revolution“, sponsored by American Express. It came out on June 6.