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James McKay, a spokesman for the PAC, said the ad was critical of Zoeller, even though others running are also elected officeholders, because of the length of time Zoeller has been involved in government.
Of the other Republicans who have created fundraising committees, state Sen. Brent Waltz raised $165,967 last year and former congressional aide Jim Pfaff raised $25,288. Pfaff, who has been endorsed by Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson, received $1,000 from Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition.
On the Democratic side, Shelli Yoder raised $243,397 for her much less-competitive primary. Yoder, who teaches at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, got 45 percent of the vote in her race against Young in 2012.
Young is giving up the seat to run for the Senate.
In Indiana’s 3rd District, where Rep. Marlin Stutzman is also seeking the GOP nomination for Senate, the top fundraisers are state Sen. Jim Banks ($435,626) and agribusinessman Kip Tom ($418,236).
Banks has the support of the conservative Club for Growth, whose members have given him a combined $126,736.
Tom received contributions from many agricultural interests including the PACs for Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, John Deere, ethanol producers and sugar farmers. He also got $5,400 each from former Angie’s List CEO Bill Oesterle and his wife, Kristi. That’s the maximum contribution for both a primary and general election campaign.
Among the other Republican candidates, former Wisconsin state legislator Pam Galloway raised $274,110, including $200,000 she loaned her campaign.
State Sen. Liz Brown raised $241,715, including $75,502 from her own pocket.
Banks and Tom each had more than $350,000 in the bank at the start of the year compared with Brown’s $167,409 and Galloway’s $83,275.
Todd Nightenhelser, the one Democrat who has reported raising any funds in the heavily Republican district, raised $766 last year. Most of that was from his own pocket.
Among those challenging incumbents, the top fundraiser so far is former state Rep. David Orentlicher, the Democrat trying to unseat Bucshon in the 8th District. Orentlicher raised $101,576.
Richard Moss, an ear, nose and throat surgeon hoping to deny Bucshon the GOP nomination, raised $35,805 last year. Most of that is money he loaned his campaign.
Bucshon, who is seeking a fourth term, had $445,929 in the bank at the end of the year, compared with Moss’ $31,755.
In the 2nd District, where GOP Rep. Jackie Walorski is seeking a third term, retired South Bend police officer Lynn Coleman raised $55,029 in December, the month he started his campaign. Coleman received the maximum $10,000 contribution from Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly’s PAC. He also got a $250 contribution and donation of an email list from the former campaign of Brendan Mullen, the Democrat who got 48 percent of the vote against Walorski in 2012.
Walorski ended the year with $773,403 in the bank.
Contact Maureen Groppe at mgroppe@gannett.com or @mgroppe on Twitter.
One reason why so many people are fascinated by the stock market is that it's inherently unpredictable. No matter how well a company seems to be doing, an unexpected shock can send its stock price plummeting. And regardless of how sure you might be that a beaten-down company will simply fade away, a turnaround strategy can lead to a huge rebound in its stock price.
There's simply no way to predict with certainty what the broader market's going to do over a short time period. Even a year isn't enough time for market fluctuations to link up perfectly with long-term fundamental prospects.
Yet that doesn't stop most stock analysts from making their predictions, and this year, I've decided to join in the fun. Below, you'll learn about our rationales for our picks for where the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES:^DJI) will end the year, but the most important lesson will come from what the predictions tell you about the way that market sentiment works.
Data sources: Reuters and author.
In late November, Reuters did a poll in which the news service asked almost four dozen investing strategists for their predictions of where the Dow Jones Industrial Average would finish the year. At that time, the stock market had just gone through the October correction, and a number of concerns still plagued investors. The status of trade relations between the U.S. and key international partners, especially China, was still very much in doubt, and a number of provocations on the trade front had created skepticism that the two nations would be able to reach a compromise. At the same time, investors were also nervous about earnings growth, with the boost from reduced corporate tax rates having run its course and making a slowdown nearly inevitable.
Few of those surveyed believed that the nearly 10-year-old bull market would come to a quick end, but they had relatively low expectations for the market. The average call was for the Dow to finish 2019 at 26,865, representing a modest low-single-digit percentage increase from where the Dow was at that time.
Yet the interesting thing about the Reuters survey was how much it had changed in just two months. The late-August version of the poll, which obviously occurred before the market's October swoon, had come out with predictions for 28,700 for the Dow. That's almost 7% higher than the November number.
It's true that there had been some new information during that period that could have prompted a change in view. Although trade tensions were still present, the recent behavior of interest rates hadn't yet asserted itself, and most investors seemed to expect solid economic growth well into 2019. By late November, the threat of an inverted yield curve seemed to signal greater fears of an economic recession -- with its negative implications for the stock market.
As I see it, stock market investors still haven't fully acknowledged the possibility that the Dow could actually fall significantly for an entire year. Rising interest rates haven't yet reached painful levels, but the regularity with which rate hikes have occurred has put some strain on the pace of the recovery. Globally, restraints on trade could lead to less investment in long-term global projects, putting further pressure on markets. And with many investors having never seen anything more than a short-term correction, a bona fide bear market is overdue.
Obviously, a prediction for Dow 24,000 doesn't reflect the impact of a bear market's standard 20% drop from its highest levels. That's because I think any such downturn will lead to an immediate bounce by the end of 2019. If the economy's back on an even keel by that time, then the market will keep moving higher from there. If problems still dominate, then that bounce will prove short-lived, and the Dow could fall again in 2020.
Yet I'll admit one thing: I want to see stocks lose ground. After having gotten a golden opportunity to buy great stocks at ultra-cheap levels in 2009, investors have had to be a lot more patient with their investing since then. A bear market would give them another chance to go through their watch lists and buy the stocks that they see as having the best prospects ahead at a bargain price.
Like me, Wall Street analysts often make predictions based on their own hopes and fears about the future. That makes those predictions more useful as an indicator of current sentiment than as any true gauge of where the Dow's likely to actually finish the year.
Arizona-based real estate group HomeSmart International is planning to go from 10,300 agents to 100,000 by 2021.
It is opening in 19 new markets this year, including Atlanta, Nashville, Philadelphia and Cincinnati.
HomeSmart 's founder and president believe tech-forward brokerages will win the consumer.
Hiring someone with an extensive background in talent management and organizational growth as newly promoted HomeSmart International president Ashley Bowers has, may be one of the smartest things the company’s founder, Matt Widdows did a couple of years ago. Because when you have a goal to expand your real estate company from 10,300 to 100,000 agents by 2021, you are going to need someone in charge who knows how to motivate people and bring them together with a common goal and a common culture.
Video-footage has captured the tail end of a man’s incredibly rare encounter with one of Eurasia’s deadliest animals, which occurred only a short distance from his house, in Russia’s Far East.
If you thought brutal winters would be your biggest worry in Russia’s austere Far East, this video of the world’s largest cat species (with the teeth to match) casually vaulting a roadside fence not far from Komsomolsk-on-Amur, might give you pause for thought.
Although rarely a man-eater and tending to avoid direct contact with people, the reclusive tigers are more than capable hunters and can eat up to 60 pounds of prey in a single night.
While spotting one of the 600 pound predators is extremely unlikely, there have been several sightings in villages throughout the Khabarovsk Krai just north of Vladivostok on Russia’s eastern edge in the past few months. The animal has allegedly already eaten several pet dogs while skillfully evading capture attempts by the hunting department of the Regional Ministry of Natural Resources.
“I would like to remind people that if they see a tiger nearby, the main thing is not to approach it and not to take any independent decisions” said the Director General of the Amur Tiger Center Sergey Aramilev, reminding residents to contact professionals instead.
It seems like every few months or so, someone comes forward with another ridiculous rumor about either Beyoncé or Jay Z (or sometimes, about the both of them). This time, someone is alleging that contrary to his assertion that he’s 44 years old, Jay Z is actually 50.
The one thing Torain didn’t explain, however, is just how he knows that he and Jay are the same age. It’s highly likely that he’s making this all up, but in the event that he’s telling the truth, that would make Hova a full 18 years older than wife Beyoncé. However, there’s also a rumor that Bey is lying about her age, and that she’s 35, not 32. In that case, the age gap wouldn’t be so bad.
Our main query: Who cares? They’re still one of the most powerful and awesome couples out there, regardless of age or youth.
It won't happen again. Honest.
NASDAQ OMX Group, the parent company of the technology-heavy American stock exchange, was granted approval this morning by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to distribute up to $62 million in cash to investors involved in the glitchy initial public offering for Facebook last May.
System failures stalled trading of the popular social networking company's shares by a half hour, leaving investors unable to confirm orders and therefore angry that they had incurred possible losses -- to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, by some estimates.
Nasdaq proposes to compensate market participants for certain claims related to system difficulties in the Nasdaq Halt and Imbalance Cross process (“Cross”) in connection with the Facebook IPO in an amount not to exceed $62 million.
(iv) buy Cross orders priced above $42.00 and that were executed in the Cross, but not immediately confirmed, but only to the extent entered with respect to a customer that was permitted by the member to cancel its order prior to 1:50 p.m. and for which a request to cancel the order was submitted to Nasdaq by the member, also prior to 1:50 p.m.
The original NASDAQ proposal offered up to $40 million; of the 17 letters the SEC received in response, 14 raised concerns. Among the major brokerage firms affected by the rocky IPO were UBS, Knight Capital Group, Citadel and Citigroup.
In a Stanford-led research report, three participants with movement impairment controlled an onscreen cursor simply by imagining their own hand movements.
A clinical research paper led by Stanford University investigators has demonstrated that a brain-to-computer hookup can enable people with paralysis to type via direct brain control at the highest speeds and accuracy levels reported to date.
The report involved three study participants with severe limb weakness — two from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, and one from a spinal cord injury. They each had one or two baby-aspirin-sized electrode arrays placed in their brains to record signals from the motor cortex, a region controlling muscle movement. These signals were transmitted to a computer via a cable and translated by algorithms into point-and-click commands guiding a cursor to characters on an onscreen keyboard.
Each participant, after minimal training, mastered the technique sufficiently to outperform the results of any previous test of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for enhancing communication by people with similarly impaired movement. Notably, the study participants achieved these typing rates without the use of automatic word-completion assistance common in electronic keyboarding applications nowadays, which likely would have boosted their performance.
One participant, Dennis Degray of Menlo Park, California, was able to type 39 correct characters per minute, equivalent to about eight words per minute.
This point-and-click approach could be applied to a variety of computing devices, including smartphones and tablets, without substantial modifications, the Stanford researchers said.
“Our study’s success marks a major milestone on the road to improving quality of life for people with paralysis,” said Jaimie Henderson, MD, professor of neurosurgery, who performed two of the three device-implantation procedures at Stanford Hospital. The third took place at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Henderson and Krishna Shenoy, PhD, professor of electrical engineering, are co-senior authors of the paper, which was published online Feb. 21 in eLife. The lead authors are former postdoctoral scholar Chethan Pandarinath, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Paul Nuyujukian, MD, PhD, both of whom spent well over two years working full time on the project at Stanford.
Stanford's Jaimie Henderson and Krishna Shenoy are part of a consortium working on an investigational brain-to-computer hookup.
Shenoy’s lab pioneered the algorithms used to decode the complex volleys of electrical signals fired by nerve cells in the motor cortex, the brain’s command center for movement, and convert them in real time into actions ordinarily executed by spinal cord and muscles.
“These high-performing BCI algorithms’ use in human clinical trials demonstrates the potential for this class of technology to restore communication to people with paralysis,” said Nuyujukian.
Millions of people with paralysis reside in the United States. Sometimes their paralysis comes gradually, as occurs in ALS. Sometimes it arrives suddenly, as in Degray’s case.
Now 64, Degray became quadriplegic on Oct. 10, 2007, when he fell and sustained a life-changing spinal-cord injury. “I was taking out the trash in the rain,” he said. Holding the garbage in one hand and the recycling in the other, he slipped on the grass and landed on his chin. The impact spared his brain but severely injured his spine, cutting off all communication between his brain and musculature from the head down.
“I’ve got nothing going on below the collarbones,” he said.
Degray received two device implants at Henderson’s hands in August 2016. In several ensuing research sessions, he and the other two study participants, who underwent similar surgeries, were encouraged to attempt or visualize patterns of desired arm, hand and finger movements. Resulting neural signals from the motor cortex were electronically extracted by the embedded recording devices, transmitted to a computer and translated by Shenoy’s algorithms into commands directing a cursor on an onscreen keyboard to participant-specified characters.
The researchers gauged the speeds at which the patients were able to correctly copy phrases and sentences — for example, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Average rates were 7.8 words per minute for Degray and 6.3 and 2.7 words per minute, respectively, for the other two participants.
The investigational system used in the study, an intracortical brain-computer interface called the BrainGate Neural Interface System*, represents the newest generation of BCIs. Previous generations picked up signals first via electrical leads placed on the scalp, then by being surgically positioned at the brain’s surface beneath the skull.
An intracortical BCI uses a tiny silicon chip, just over one-sixth of an inch square, from which protrude 100 electrodes that penetrate the brain to about the thickness of a quarter and tap into the electrical activity of individual nerve cells in the motor cortex.
This is like one of the coolest video games I’ve ever gotten to play with.
Shenoy said the day will come — closer to five than 10 years from now, he predicted —when a self-calibrating, fully implanted wireless system can be used without caregiver assistance, has no cosmetic impact and can be used around the clock.
Degray, who continues to participate actively in the research, knew how to type before his accident but was no expert at it. He described his newly revealed prowess in the language of a video game aficionado.
The study’s results are the culmination of a long-running collaboration between Henderson and Shenoy and a multi-institutional consortium called BrainGate. Leigh Hochberg, MD, PhD, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brown University and the VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology in Providence, Rhode Island, directs the pilot clinical trial of the BrainGate system and is a study co-author.
“This incredible collaboration continues to break new ground in developing powerful, intuitive, flexible neural interfaces that we all hope will one day restore communication, mobility and independence for people with neurologic disease or injury,” said Hochberg.
Stanford research assistant Christine Blabe was also a study co-author, as were BrainGate researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Case Western University.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01DC014034, R011NS066311, R01DC009899, N01HD53404 and N01HD10018), the Stanford Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program, Stanford BioX-NeuroVentures, the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neuroscience, the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, Larry and Pamela Garlick, Samuel and Betsy Reeves, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the MGH-Dean Institute for Integrated Research on Atrial Fibrillation and Stroke and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing holds intellectual property on the intercortical BCI-related engineering advances made in Shenoy’s lab.
Stanford’s departments of Neurosurgery and of Electrical Engineering also supported the work. Shenoy and Henderson are members of Bio-X and the Stanford Neuroscience Institute.
*CAUTION: Investigational Device. Limited by Federal Law to Investigational Use.
Stanford engineers and neurosurgeons have worked together to develop an experimental technology that could one day allow people with paralysis to affect the world around them using only their minds.
TOTTENHAM's transfer dealings in the latest window have exposed early tension in the relationship between manager Andre Villas-Boas and the White Hart Lane board.
Sunday Express Sport can reveal that some of the summer signings were not driven by Villas-Boas – the Portuguese boss even being overruled on some of his targets.
Not only did chairman Daniel Levy take a leading role in who came in and who went out of the club but billionaire owner Joe Lewis also had a major say, leaving Villas-Boas frustrated.
Villas-Boas believes that the lateness of Luka Modric’s much protracted £30million move to Real Madrid affected the chances of signing his main target, Porto playmaker Joao Moutinho.
In the end a club record bid of £22m and some 11th-hour haggling wasn’t enough to bring the player to North London.
It’s understood that Villas-Boas was keen on Manchester United midfielder Anderson but was instead pushed in the direction of Fulham’s Mousa Dembele.
Ajax’s Jan Vertonghen was a deal well down the path to fruition when the former Porto and Chelsea manager arrived. He responded by leaving the Belgian defender on the bench for Tottenham’s opening game of the season.
It’s believed the decision to bring in French international keeper Hugo Lloris was triggered by the owner Lewis.
Many Spurs fans have also expressed their disappointment in Rafael van der Vaart being allowed to leave for former club Hamburg.
On top of that, Villas-Boas still has to repair his relationship with England defender Michael Dawson, who rejected a switch to QPR, and midfielder Jermaine Jenas, who turned down a late move to Sunderland.
Another manager cursing the window is Liverpool boss Brendan Rodgers, who lost out on one of his long-term targets – Fulham’s Clint Dempsey.
But having helped clear the decks with the departures of the likes of Charlie Adam, Alberto Aquilani and Andy Carroll, he felt short changed when American owners John W Henry and Tom Werner refused to go above £4m when it came to trying to capture Dempsey.
Spurs came in just before the window closed with an acceptable bid of £6m.
There were no such frustrations for the summer’s busiest manager – QPR’s Mark Hughes – who was backed to buy a virtual team, selling another in the hectic process.
Two of the deals for Real Madrid’s Esteban Granero and Inter Milan keeper Julio Cesar were particularly eye catching.
But there’s no pleasing some people. Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini splashed another £52m but was still bemoaning the fact that he had missed out on his real wish list, which included Robin van Persie, Eden Hazard, Javi Martinez and Daniele De Rossi.
Chelsea were the top spenders with an £83m outlay.
Owner Roman Abramovich, buoyed by their Champions League success, rediscovered his appetite for opening his wallet.
Thankfully for him a judge saved him a massive £3billion bill when he won a high-profile court case last week against former friend Boris Berezovsky.
HOMESTEAD, Fla. (AP) — Journalists were given a glimpse Wednesday of a newly expanded south-Florida detention facility where nearly 150 teenage migrants sleep in rows of bunk beds in a large windowless room and use portable toilets housed in adjacent tents.
The sleeping area in a converted Job Corps building in Homestead, Florida, is just part of the growing detention center operated by a private company for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
With a high, steel-framed ceiling and exposed ducts, the large room has an industrial feel, in contrast with smaller dorms where younger children sleep up to 12 per room that reporters saw on a similar tour of the facility last June. In the room where 17-year-old boys sleep, there are 144 bunk beds lined up in eight rows of nine. One of them had a red rosary hanging from the top bed frame.
Journalists were not permitted to interview the children Wednesday, and no cameras or recorders were allowed inside the tightly controlled compound surrounded by a chain-link fence. The children wore badges and walked in groups of 10 to 15 in single file, usually led by a uniformed employee who would frequently order them to stop so they didn’t come across other groups while trying to enter buildings. Some said “hello,” and a group of girls in pink sweatshirts offered a “good morning” in English and Spanish, but others avoided eye contact.
Comprehensive Health Services, which runs the facility, has hired 230 new employees and received 225 more children since December, when federal officials announced the expansion. Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber said none of the children were transferred from a controversial facility that shut down in January in Tornillo, Texas.

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