Split (1)

train · 2.6M rows

text stringlengths 13 81.7k
House Bill 219, sponsored by the late Rep. Mark Beaubien, makes two exceptions to its requirement that everyone in a motor vehicle wear a seatbelt: The drivers and passengers in emergency vehicles and those sitting in the back seats of taxis.
Exemptions already exist for those who have medical conditions that prohibit them from wearing seatbelts, those who drive cars manufactured before 1965, those using motorcycles or mopeds, rural letter carriers, and when driving in reverse.
LEXINGTON COUNTY, S.C. — A good Samaritan who pulled over to help after an apparent car crash on Interstate 26 was instead carjacked by the man he was trying to help, according to Lexington County deputies.
Mikel Edison King, 36, of Blythewood, is charged with carjacking, and deputies expect additional charges, according to the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department.
After dropping King off, the victim drove back to Lexington County to notify authorities, Koon said. Newberry County deputies found King a short time later and arrested him. He remains in the Lexington County Detention Center awaiting a bond hearing.
Carjacking is a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison, under South Carolina law.
MIAMI — Some students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked out of school Wednesday to protest insufficient mental health resources on campus following two Parkland shooting survivors’ suicides last month.
The Miami Herald’s news partner CBS 4 Miami reports that the walkout happened around 11 a.m. and took about 15 minutes as Broward County Sheriff’s Office deputies blocked traffic. At least one student complained that the resources provided at the school are not enough for students needing help.
Stoneman Douglas sophomore and gun control activist Lauren Hogg tweeted about her dismay Wednesday morning.
“I’m just gonna put this out there- Giving kids bananas and asking them not to kill themselves without actually talking about mental health is NOT the mental health support we need at school,” she wrote.
CBS 4 Miami also reported that Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie held a meeting at 1 p.m. updating the community on available mental health resources and support, including the 211 helpline and Eagles’ Haven Wellness Center.
FRESNO, Calif. — A woman gave birth to a baby at a McDonald’s restaurant in Madera, Calif., police say.
It happened Monday night when the woman went into labor in the lobby, according to a Madera police Facebook post.
When officers and paramedics from Pistoresi Ambulance arrived, they realized there was no time to transport the mom.
So they helped deliver the baby at the fast food restaurant, ushering into the world a healthy baby boy.
As unique as the situation may seem, this isn’t the first time a baby has been born at a McDonald’s.
In fact, a baby was born in late March inside a McDonald’s restroom stall in Illinois.
For a couple of years now, a number of entrepreneurs have been racing to solve the same problem: the financial services industry’s persistent inability to provide personalized advice and appropriate investments at a reasonable price to customers who are not rich.
It was easy at first for established players to dismiss companies like Betterment, Wealthfront and LearnVest as robo-advisers, niche services or certain failures. That line of thinking wrote their offerings off as training wheels for know-nothing young adults until they graduated to a grown-up, gray-haired financial adviser — even though these start-ups gathered piles of fancy venture capital money.
But recent developments suggest that those new players may be something more than the starter homes of the personal finance world.
Betterment, which builds and manages investment portfolios of index and exchange-traded funds, realized that 20 percent of its assets were from customers over the age of 50. They were asking for advice on withdrawing their retirement money, and the company is now introducing a service to assist them.
Then there’s the index fund giant Vanguard, whose investment products are often at the heart of the portfolios that these new services are building for their own customers. It is now piloting an offering of its own that nearly matches the new players on price while offering unlimited financial planning along with investment management. That’s something that most of the new “we’ll run your money for you” companies don’t offer.
Vanguard’s full-service offering, called Personal Advisor Services, costs 0.3 percent annually of the assets it’s managing. For now, customers need $100,000 in accounts there to join, but the company plans to drop the minimum to $50,000 at some point soon. An existing Vanguard service that resembles the new one costs 0.7 percent annually on the first $1 million and requires at least $500,000 on balance.
This new program, which has no wait list for now but may add one if too many people sign up, may not work, though Vanguard has spent more than two years planning and testing it. But by extending both investment advice and planning to many more customers and asking them to pay less than half of what some of its other customers already pay, Vanguard is all but admitting that the start-ups were right in identifying an enormous advice gap in the financial services industry.
With this week’s column, we’re introducing a chart on our site that lists these companies and explains their pricing and services. For now, we’ve limited it to services that will help you pick the right index funds or similar investments and rebalance them over time, while charging you less than 0.50 percent of your money each year. Some of the companies charge monthly fees (or no fees at all, like WiseBanyan). We will update this chart as companies come and go and offerings change.
The fact that so many start-ups have jumped into this space speaks to a problem with a basic business model that has plagued the financial advice industry for decades. Helping people sort through their investments, budgets, employee benefits, taxes, estate planning and insurance takes time. No two clients are exactly alike.
If advisers earn their compensation through commissions from investment or insurance companies, then they’re likely to favor those funds and policies. This often isn’t in the best interest of the customers, most of whom ought to be in low-cost index funds. And the better index funds and similar investments tend to come from companies that don’t pay commissions.
Customers can pay advisers directly, and many do pay them 1 percent each year of the money under management. But a large number of the best advisers won’t get out of bed for less than $5,000 or $10,000 annually (drawn from a $500,000 or $1,000,000 portfolio), given the amount of time and resources it takes to do right by a client. Some others charge by the hour and still agree to work in a client’s best interest, but plenty of customers dislike being on the clock.
Some people need no professional help at all. They don’t mind spending time managing their finances. They invest in the right things, don’t bail out when the markets go bonkers and don’t have messy financial situations resulting from inheritances or disabled children or small business tax complications.
But companies like Betterment and Wealthfront realized that many other people wanted a bit of hand-holding when it came to investments. So they built easy-to-use sites that sought customers’ goals and risk tolerance and then put the money in a portfolio of index or exchange-traded funds. To address the question about what these random entrepreneurs know about investing, both companies cite decades of research about the right way to construct their collections of investments and rebalance customer holdings when markets rise and fall.
Security is a slightly different question. An event like the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard L. Madoff is exceedingly rare but never entirely impossible, though thieving financial planners do steal money stored with well-known third-party companies, too. Some faith is necessary with any financial services start-up. At the same time, the power of legacy brand names can allow many financial service companies to collect much more in fees than they deserve.
Betterment charges from 0.15 to 0.35 percent of the money under management annually, while Wealthfront runs the first $10,000 without charge and then takes 0.25 percent annually after that. LearnVest takes a different approach, charging a flat setup fee plus continuing monthly fees for advice about your financial life, though it doesn’t make specific investment recommendations.
Vanguard casts no aspersions on either approach, and it may well start a service someday that does exactly what Betterment and Wealthfront do. Though its origins are in helping people who want to make their own investment decisions, it’s now reacting to the growing number of calls from people who don’t know whether they’ve saved enough and aren’t sure how to start spending what they have saved.
“They are increasingly saying, ‘How can you help me in more of an ongoing advisory capacity?’ ” said Karin Risi, a Vanguard principal in advice services and asset management. “This is a big investment and a big aspirational move to say, ‘Yes, we want to help many more clients.’ ” Vanguard plans to move existing customers who are already paying 0.7 percent annually for their advice into the new, less expensive service before too long.
Betterment’s new feature feeds a similar need for additional advice. Jon Stein, the company’s 34-year-old founder and chief executive, built a product that he wanted to use. But then he started hearing from customers decades older who needed help taking money out as opposed to putting money away.
To assist them, the company created a feature that calculates (and can automatically distribute) a safe monthly withdrawal. You tell it how long you expect to live and your risk tolerance, though the tool’s default assumptions are that you will last until 90, that you want a 99 percent chance of not outliving your money and that inflation will run at a 3 percent annual clip. Then it provides a suggested monthly check that comes from a single Betterment account. For now, the tool can’t optimize withdrawals based on the tax advantages of pulling money from, say, a regular individual retirement account versus a Roth I.R.A., but the company will add that in the future.
While many traditional financial planners are crossing their fingers and hoping no all-out price war breaks out, there is already some pricing innovation around the edges. New this month is a service called the XY Planning Network. Michael Kitces, a co-founder, had long observed an intense frustration among his younger financial planning peers who couldn’t afford to serve average people in their 20s and 30s without pushing bad investments and inappropriate insurance on them. The network will pair consumers up with planners who are willing to work on a monthly retainer and make money only from the fees they charge their customers. The network is considering teaming up with Betterment to handle investments so its planners can focus on all of the other aspects of their customers’ financial lives.
Still, Betterment and Wealthfront can have their algorithms help run portfolios, and human advisers at LearnVest and XY Planning Network and the more traditional financial planning and wealth management firms can hold the hands of beginners and help people as their financial lives get more complex. Vanguard will try to do it all without charging very much for the privilege, and other brand-name companies will no doubt jump in with their own efforts.
Not all of these players will survive, but their sheer number will probably bring prices down even further or force established advisers to do more to justify their existing fees. As long as nobody runs off with the money, consumers stand to gain over the long term from all of the people now clamoring to do the best job of helping them out.
The Your Money column on Saturday, about online sites that offer inexpensive investment services, misstated one of the assumptions in a calculator provided by one such site, Betterment. The calculator’s default setting assumes that users want a 99 percent chance of not outliving their money, not a 99 percent chance of outliving their money. A chart accompanying the article also misstated, in some editions, the investment minimum for another site, Wealthfront. The minimum is $5,000, not $0.
Jennifer Lopez may be single again very soon. Page Six reports the pop diva is ready to call it quits with her boyfriend, Casper Smart, following claims that he’s been sexting transgender models behind her back. Lopez and Smart have been dating since 2011.
Sources close to Lopez, 44, who recently released a new single and is set to drop a memoir this summer, tell the paper she is furious that Smart’s alleged cheating will draw media attention away from her work.
On Monday, details of 27-year-old Smart’s second alleged sexting transgression, this time allegedly with a transgender female model named Xristina Marie, leaked online. “[Jennifer] is coming back to the Bronx and the only thing anyone can talk about is her boy toy and the transsexuals,” the source adds, referencing Lopez's first-ever concert in her old 'hood this week.
The latest allegations against Smart come after transgender bikini model Sofie Vissa came forward with a story claiming that she exchanged salacious messages with Smart over Instagram. She claims to have screen shots of their alleged chats as well as “naked images of Casper Smart."
A third source tells People.com that Lopez and Smart are still together — for the moment. "She is excited about where her life is right now," says the friend. "Her new single ['First Love'] is on fire, and her album is about to drop, and she has movies and hit TV shows [The Fosters] that she’s producing. She couldn't be in better shape professionally. Personally, it’s a bit more tricky."
The source adds, "Put it this way, they were having problems before the sexting. You do the math."
Arbitration set; will Steph, Walsh talk buyout?
Could Stephon Marbury's rocky career with the Knicks officially end today?
Knicks president Donnie Walsh insists that he's not looking to come to a buyout agreement when he and Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni meet with Marbury and his representatives in an arbitration hearing today in Manhattan.
The hearing was called to arbitrate the $400,000 fine Marbury received for refusing to play in a game against the Pistons the day before Thanksgiving, but it is hard to believe the two sides wouldn't use it as an opportunity to talk buyout.
That's because today's meeting marks the first time that Marbury and Walsh have met face-to-face since Marbury stormed out of a meeting with the Knicks on Dec. 1.
It also comes at a crucial time for Marbury; to be eligible to play in the postseason with another team, he must be bought out and put on waivers by the Knicks by Sunday.
The Celtics, who have two open roster spots, are said to be very interested in signing Marbury. Other possible destinations are the Lakers and Heat.
Walsh indicated yesterday, however, that the Knicks aren't all that interested in freeing up Marbury to sign with a possible playoff opponent.
"Those are the things you have to put in your head," Walsh said. "It's all a part of the general picture. It could impact on you. It's a competitive issue."
When asked if he thinks the buyout can be resolved by Sunday, Walsh said he did not have an answer.
"You want to do the right thing by the player and you and the team," Walsh said.
D'Antoni, who replaced Isiah Thomas as Knicks coach this season, made it clear from the start that Marbury was not in his plans, at least not until Nov. 26.
That's when the Knicks - who are owned by Cablevision, which also owns Newsday - contend they asked Marbury to play in a game in which the team was shorthanded and he refused. Marbury has contended that he never refused to play but simply said he preferred not to.
The he-said, he-said drama will be hashed out today in front of an arbitrator. D'Antoni will miss his team's practice in order to tell his side of the story.
Said D'Antoni: "It's not a great situation for anybody. I hate it for Steph, I hate it for the Knicks, I hate it for everybody."
Mourners gathered Thursday night in Washington's Dupont Circle to remember the gay college student whose murder changed the way we think about hate crimes, and call attention to the battles that remain.
It's been 20 years since Matthew Shepard was robbed, pistol-whipped and tied to a fence by two men he met in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming. He was left in the freezing cold overnight, and a cyclist who thought he was a scarecrow discovered him. He later died in a hospital.
Shepard's ashes will be interred Friday at the Washington National Cathedral -- the only place where his parents felt they would be safe from desecration.
His death galvanized the LGBTQ civil rights movement, leading to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, also named for a black man who was killed by three white supremacists in Texas.
Speakers at Thursday's candlelight vigil told those in attendance that the fight continues for equal rights and treatment for the LGBTQ community, especially transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
The world is a different place than it was when Shepard was killed, said Rev. V. Gene Robinson, who will carry his ashes and preside over Friday's service.
"But the kind of hatred and violence that killed Matthew Shephard is alive and well and living in this country," Robinson told CNN affiliate WJLA.
"We've grown more likely to label some people 'other' and treat them horribly. ... Every good person I know needs to stand up and say that's not who we are," Robinson said.
Several speakers drew attention to the plight of transgender and gender-nonconforming people, who are protected under the hate crimes act, but have lost other protections under the Trump administration.
With the din of traffic humming in the background, one speaker read aloud the names of 28 transgender people killed in 2018.
"Today, we can change our gender marker on our IDs but we can lose our lives on the streets of these cities simply by someone finding out that we are transgender," another speaker said.
A recent New York Times report of an administration proposal to exclude transgender people from anti-discrimination laws stoked fears of more losses . Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, called on the gay community to stand with transgender people in their fight for legal protections from discrimination.
"We can't just say the 'T' at the other end of the initials and not do the hard work of getting to know them and love them and then stand with them," he said.
This pretty, listed house is the former laundry and dairy to neighbouring Goldsborough Hall.
Now a charming four-bedroom home, it is blessed with architectural features. The property also comes with potential to develop a separate outbuilding in the garden into a home office/annexe, subject to planning.
Owner Linda Hayes bought it in 1993 and had happy memories of the village, near Knaresborough, as she often cycled there as a child.
“During this time the laundry and dairy were left in a derelict state. Little did I realise that I would purchase the property,” she says.
The laundry, a former 18th century corn barn, was once a hive of activity.
“They had a big copper pan where they heated water on a fire and there a scorch marks on the back of the pine kitchen door to this day,” says Linda, who adds that Queen Mary often visited her daughter, Princess Mary, at Goldsborough Hall and the pace of work for the laundry maids was frantic during her stay.
The Old Dairy has been sensitively converted and has four bedrooms.
LAKE CHARLES, LA (KPLC) - With Monday's deadly attack at Ohio State University, some could be wondering - could an attack happen at McNeese?
Campus officials hope not, but they prepare anyway.
Candace Townsend, McNeese's director of public relations and university events, said she's been through active shooter training and is part of a core group that meets weekly.
"In terms of being prepared, I think those of us involved in a situation like that are as prepared as we can possibly be, but you're never prepared for every aspect of a situation and an emergency, so I think our best philosophy is to expect the unexpected," she said.
Their system relies on police, who are trained to neutralize a threat - and redundant notification systems.
"At the beginning, get information out to tell you to take cover - to be safe. And then as information comes in, we're able to clarify - update," she said.
Townsend said they reach students via text, email, message board and on-campus sirens.
Like most people, student Nicholas Bedwell is horrified by the Ohio State attacks.
"I just think it's crazy that bad things like that can happen somewhere where we go to learn everyday - somewhere where we're not expecting that to happen," he said.
Yet he said he's not fearful.
"I always feel safe here. The campus police do a really good job at keeping us informed and telling us what to do when bad things happen. There are also emergency telephones in different places on campus that are accessible," said Bedwell.
"Our text messaging, emergency system is just that. It's for a true emergency, so students probably have never really gotten a message from us unless it was a test," said Townsend. "And we announce those tests in advance. We usually do those once a semester," she said.
Townsend urged students to pay attention to texts and emails from the university.
When it comes to emergency announcements, Townsend said students cannot opt out of the system. She said it is important for students to keep their information up-to-date.
Contrary to his youthful, vibrant public image, former President John F. Kennedy privately battled chronic, debilitating back pain much of his life.
A new report chronicles JFK's pain issues and the many treatments he received throughout the years. The report includes private details -- from multiple failed spinal surgeries and narcotic injections, to use of a back brace that some believe may have played a role in his death.
"He went through the wringer visiting different surgeons and physicians and experts in their field -- well-known people," said study co-author Dr. Justin Dowdy. He is a neurosurgeon and partner at Hot Springs Neurosurgery Clinic in Arkansas.
While Kennedy's care would be different today due to advances in surgery and imaging technology, Dowdy doesn't see reason to second-guess clinicians' recommendations at the time.
"They did the best they could with the information at their disposal," he observed.

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.