Boost for first-time buyers as buy-to-let landlords' profits are slashed in crackdown on mortgage interest tax relief

07/09/2015 17:40
Tax perk: Wealthier landlords will no longer be able to claim 45% tax back on mortgage interest paymentsIt will hit middle-class landlords who have a sole buy-to-let property right through to professional landlords with bigger portfolios, who sit in the highest tax bracket.
 
Some experts believe the move could also force landlords to hike rents to compensate for the blow, which would spell bad news for tenants.
 
But it could be good news for first-time buyers who are competing with landlords on the property market which is currently seeing demand outstripping supply.
 
The move comes as the Bank of England said last week it will monitor the booming buy-to-let sector in the coming months. This year, buy-to-let lending has accounted for more than 15 per cent of mortgages taken out.
 
It also comes after the National Landlords Association warned yesterday that costs in the private rental sector could rise by up to £2.6billion if mortgage interest payments for the buy-to-let sector were made non-deductible.
 
Many experts have previously said the 45 per cent tax relief puts landlords at an advantage in the property market against first-time buyers. 
 
In the budget document, it says: 'The current tax system supports landlords over and above ordinary homeowners. Landlords can deduct costs they incur when calculating the tax they pay on their rental income. A large portion of those costs are interest payments on the mortgage.
 
'Mortgage Interest Relief was withdrawn from homeowners 15 years ago. However, landlords still receive the relief.
 
'The ability to deduct these costs puts investing in a rental property at an advantage. Tax relief for finance costs is particularly beneficial for wealthier landlords with larger incomes, as every £1 of finance cost they incur allows them to pay 40p or 45p less tax.'
 
George Osborne said he wanted to support homeownership but 'act in a proportionate and gradual way.'
 
However, one expert warns some investors could now struggle to turn a profit. Phil Nicklin, from Deloitte, said: 'This measure will almost double the effective cost of borrowing for a taxpayer on the highest rate of tax. 
 
'Currently interest payments of £100 only cost £55 after tax relief, but will cost £80 from 2020. A landlord who borrows at even a modest level might end up paying more in tax than he makes in profit.
 
'This measure must make buy-to-let investment a less attractive proposition in future and may reduce the options for those who see it as an alternative to a pension.' 
 
 
Adrian Anderson, director of Mayfair-based mortgage broker Anderson Harris, said: 'There had been fears among landlords that relief on mortgage interest payments for buy-to-let landlords would be completely abolished so while the changes will hit higher-rate taxpayers, it is not as bad as it might have been.
 
'It is only fair that there is a more level playing field between first-time buyers and landlords but if this tax break had been completely withdrawn, buy-to-let would have been far less attractive to investors.
 
'Thousands of landlords may well have struggled to keep up repayments on their mortgage or struggle to pay the tax, especially when interest rates rise.'
 
Robert Pullen, manager at Blick Rothenberg Chartered Accountants, said: 'Buy-to-let landlords are now being hit further by a restriction to tax relief on mortgage interest payments.
 
'The new rules appear complex; basic rate tax relief is permitted only and will be phased in. This may result in a shortage of let properties, or an increase in rental rates charged to compensate landlords.'
 
Gráinne Gilmore, head of UK residential research at upmarket estate agents Knight Frank, said: 'This is a significant change in tax status for those with a rental portfolio, although the measured rate of introduction between 2017 and 2020 will help landlords plan their approach.
 
'Those planning to purchase a buy-to-let property will have to factor these new rules into their calculations, and this could affect the offers they are willing to make.
 
'If the relatively low yield environment seen today, especially in the South of England, is still evident when these changes start to come into force, there could be upward pressure on rents.'
 
The budget document has also revealed the current system that allows those to claim 10 per cent of their rent for wear and tear will be scrapped. From next April, landlords will only be able to deduct costs they actually incur.
 
The Chancellor also announced an increase in the amount of money homeowners can earn in rent from lodgers before tax. It comes after many campaigned for a higher earning level in the rent-a-room scheme.
 
The level has been set at £4,250 of income for the past 18 years, but will rise to £7,500 from April 2016.
 
Matt Hutchinson, director of website Spare Room has campaigned for the last six years for a higher threshold.
 
He said: 'There are an estimated 19million empty bedrooms in owner-occupied properties in England alone. Freeing up just five per cent of those rooms would accommodate almost a million people - the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham.
 

Google Unit Apologizes For 'Ingress' Nazi Concentration Camps

07/07/2015 17:06
Ingress
A startup, born inside Google, has issued an apology for the inclusion of Nazi concentration camps in its augmented reality game Ingress.
 
Ingress, developed by Google's Niantic Labs, is a multiplayer mobile game that tasks players with tracking down sources of energy leaking through portals around the globe. Some of those portals were found to be placed inside infamous concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau.
 
The said portals, according to Google, were situated in controversial locations because of the historic value of the Nazi camps.
 
German weekly Die Zeit broke the news about the concentration camps being turned into augmented reality playgrounds. The newspaper counted 77 Ingress portals in and near Sachsenhausen, where approximately 30,000 detainees died as a result of the harsh conditions inside the camp.
 
The director of the Sachsenhausen Memorial, Günter Morsch, said everyone who is part of the site's foundation is appalled that the location, along with other Nazi camps, was included in a game. Sachsenhausen is definitely no place for games, Morsch stated.
 
Jean-Michel Thomas, president of the Comité Internationale de Dachau, shared Morsch's outrage.
 
"We strongly object to parts of the Dachau concentration camp being chosen as locations for the video game Ingress," said Thomas. "We demand that this desecration be banned."
 
Niantic Labs' chief John Hanke apologized for the offense in a statement.
 
"After we were made aware that a number of historical markers on the grounds of former concentration camps in Germany had been added, we determined that they did not meet the spirit of our guidelines and began the process of removing them in Germany and elsewhere in Europe," Hanke stated. "We apologize that this happened."
 
Rabbi Avraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was in Europe visiting memorials at the sites of the concentration camps when news of Ingress' use of the camp sites came to light. The rabbi pointed to the youth and the lack of "historical perspective" for Ingress' infractions.
 

Photographer Catches the ISS Flying Past the Moon

07/03/2015 17:50
Using a little bit of math and a lot of patience, anyone can watch the International Space Station go flying past the Moon. And if you’ve got a DSLR and a telescope handy, you can save that moment in a stunning photo.
 
Amateur photographer Dylan O’Donnell captured the image above of the ISS transiting the moon on June 30th. Given the fraction-of-a-second window to get the image, preparation is everything:
 
The CalSky website sends me alerts for potential fly overs for which I’ve been waiting a long time – about 12 months. I got one this week and this was adjusted by 15 seconds by the time of the “occultation”.
 
If you think that it might be a case of sitting there with your camera and a clock, with one hand on the shutter release, you’d be absolutely correct! The ISS only passed over the moon for 0.33 seconds as it shoots by quite quickly.
 
 Knowing the second it would pass I fired a “burst” mode of exposures then crossed my fingers and hoped it would show up in review – and it did!
 
O’Donnell also took photos at different exposures of the moon either side of the ISS pass, and stitched those images together to expose the lunar surface in quite such intimate detail. You can read about the process on his blog.
 

Chris Christie’s Path to Relevance

06/30/2015 21:24
Chris Christie is highly unlikely to win the nomination. The reasons, like his moderate-conservative views and the ethics scandal over bridge traffic in New Jersey, have been summarized elsewhere.But many candidates with little or no chance to win the nomination nonetheless play a big role in presidential primaries, and Mr. Christie could be one of them. He could drain votes from Jeb Bush, widening the opening for Marco Rubio or even improving Scott Walker’s oddsto win both Iowa and New Hampshire.
 
The long-shot candidates who matter tend to be the natural candidates of a large and often dissatisfied faction of a political party, whether as a result of their identity or their stances on the issues. Think of Rick Santorum in 2012, a natural candidate of the evangelical Protestant voters dissatisfied with Mitt Romney. Or Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator running against Hillary Clinton.
 
Mr. Christie’s path to relevance depends on his becoming a lot more like Mr. Sanders or Mr. Santorum than he would care to admit. He would need to become the natural candidate of the party’s relatively moderate, affluent, secular, blue-state voters.
 
Mr. Christie is not to the blue-state Republicans as Mr. Sanders is to the progressive left, or Mr. Santorum was to evangelicals. He is not the unconditional, unabashed supporter of the views of the party’s moderate wing. If anything, Mr. Christie has spent more time pitching himself to conservatives than any other group as part of his effort to remain competitive.
 
But it is nonetheless easy to imagine how Mr. Christie emerges as a strong candidate for relatively moderate, metropolitan, blue-state Republicans.
 
Here, the historical comparison is John McCain. By any relevant measure, Mr. McCain was about as conservative as George W. Bush in 2000. In this sense, Mr. McCain was nothing like Mr. Santorum or Mr. Sanders. But Mr. McCain’s iconoclasm and Mr. Bush’s strength among Southerners and evangelicals gave Mr. McCain a strong pitch to relatively moderate, secular, Northern and independent voters.
 
Recent news reports suggest that Mr. Christie, deprived of the opportunity to make a broader pitch, is planning to run the sort of “straight talk” campaign that served Mr. McCain well in New Hampshire. The moderate positions that make Mr. Christie a tough sell for conservatives, like on immigration and gun control, make him a relatively good fit for the state’s moderate voters: 47 percent of the electorate was moderate in 2012. In an overlapping category, an equal share identified as “independent,” as well.
 
Mr. Christie will face plenty of competition for relatively moderate and independent voters in New Hampshire. Mr. Bush, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul all have claims to the moderate and independent vote. Mr. Rubio’s appeal could well be broad enough to appeal to these voters, as well, even if he is unlikely to advance a message targeted at them. But Mr. Christie’s strength as a campaigner makes it all the easier to envision how he could secure a meaningful foothold in the nation’s first primary. There is a reason, after all, that he twice won the governorship of a solidly Democratic state and was once considered a front-runner for the nomination.
 

Victims named in Charleston church shooting

06/18/2015 23:25
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Grief mingled with relief Thursday as police announced the arrest and identity of a man accused of opening fire on a prayer group in a historic African American church.
 
Within hours of the arrest of Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old from Eastover, S.C., police also released the names of the nine victims killed, which included the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who is also a South Carolina state senator; the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, the mother Charleston Southern University student; and Cynthia Hurd, the manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library.
 
The other victims were Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; DePayne Middleton; Tywanza Sanders, 25; Myra Thompson, 59; and Daniel Simmons.
 
Almost immediately, the shooting — by a white man in a black church — sparked discussion about race relations and hate groups.
 
“This is the most unspeakable and heartbreaking tragedy in historic Emanuel AME church, the mother church of the AME churches,” said Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. (D). “People in prayer Wednesday evening, a ritual coming together, praying and worshiping God. . . . The only reason someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate. The only reason. It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine.”
 
It also pulled back to the forefront the ongoing debate about gun control.
 
“Once again innocent people were killed because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” said President Obama from the White House.
 
Although he acknowledged many facts are not yet known, the president also said that insufficient gun laws were partially to blame.
 
“Now is the time for mourning and for healing,” the president added. “But let’s be clear: At some point we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”
 

On China’s Yangtze River, a Race Against Time to Find Survivors

06/02/2015 18:41
JIANLI, China — Rescue divers from across China converged on a remote stretch of the Yangtze River on Tuesday in a race to save people believed to be trapped inside the hull of a capsized cruise ship that had carried 456 passengers and crew members.
 
As of Tuesday evening, nearly a full day after the four-story ship, the Oriental Star, capsized amid high winds and heavy rain, only 14 people were known to have survived the accident, including a 65-year-old woman, Zhu Hongmei, who was dramatically pulled from an air pocket inside the ship just after midday Tuesday by divers. They briefly instructed her on how to use scuba equipment before guiding her into the muddy water and free of the overturned vessel, according to Chen Shoumin, the commander of the local military district, who spoke at a televised briefing.
 
Late on Tuesday, the official Xinhua News Agency lowered the number of people onboard to 456 from 458, and said there were 14 survivors, down from an earlier report of 15. The agency did not explain why the numbers had changed. As of late Tuesday, 437 were still missing, according to state news media.
 
Five bodies have been recovered, said Xinhua, and many hundreds are probably still inside the vessel. Mr. Chen said that more people might still be alive in the ship and that additional rescuers were on their way to the scene of the accident, in Jianli County in Hubei Province in central China, with plans calling for 183 divers to be there by Wednesday.
 
Other rescue workers were seen on state television tapping hammers on the hull, then listening for any response that could indicate survivors.
 
It appeared that the death toll could exceed that of East Asia’s last major such disaster, the sinking of the South Korean ferry Sewol ln April 2014, in which 304 people were killed, most of them high school students. Many of the passengers who boarded the Oriental Star in Nanjing on Thursday for a trip to last 10 days or more were older people on group tours, although there were also children among the passengers, including a 3-year-old.
 
In an indication of how seriously the ruling Communist Party regarded the accident, Premier Li Keqiang arrived at the scene on Tuesday, Xinhua reported. Xinhua and other state media outlets showed pictures of him giving instructions to the rescue crews. News organizations reported that Xi Jinping, the country’s president and the party’s leader, had “issued important instructions immediately” to direct rescue operations.
 
“This shows that the party and the government, they genuinely care about the people,” Mr. Chen said.
 
But some anxious relatives of the passengers disputed that, saying they had been kept in the dark.
 
The offices of the Xiehe Tourism Agency in Shanghai, where many of the tourists had booked their trips, were closed on Tuesday with a note taped to the door saying the managers had gone to the site of the accident.
 
Grieving family members who had shown up at the office were sent by officials to a local petition bureau and told to wait there. Many of them were angry that the government had not provided them with any information about the accident or a list of possible victims.
 

IRS Breach Puts Spotlight on the Internet's 'Costco of Cybercrime'

05/28/2015 10:41
The Internal Revenue Service revealed Tuesday that criminals accessed tax information for more than 100,000 taxpayers via an online system -- and they bypassed security screens using personal information like Social Security numbers and addresses, which experts say are routinely sold online between criminals for just a few dollars.
 
The IRS said that 200,000 taxpayers' accounts received suspicious login attempts, and half of those accounts were accessed. The attackers were able to look at taxpayers' filings because they "confirmed" their identities by entering personal data like Social Security numbers, dates of birth and street addresses.
 
"A lot of sites, including the IRS, have you register with this personal information -- and if you know that information, they assume you are the person you say you are," Jeff Williams, chief technology officer of app-security software maker Contrast Security, told NBC News. "Unfortunately, a lot of people can have that information: your health care providers, your bank, your school, the DMV. It's got to be thousands, maybe millions, of people who could theoretically get that information."
 
Data breaches at retailers like Target and health care providers including Premera add to the troves of personal data floating around online. These Social Security numbers, addresses and other identifying bits of info are then packaged into databases and sold between criminals in dark corners of the web. They can demand higher prices for their hauls by piecing together multiple types of personal information for specific targets -- making it easier for criminals to carry out more sophisticated thefts -- but single pieces of data like Social Security numbers can sell for $10 on their own.
 
"It sounds [like a] small [amount of money], but this is a type of crime that's done in bulk: the Costco of cybercrime," Ken Westin, senior security analyst at cybersecurity firm Tripwire, told NBC News. "It's a whole economy of its own for these criminal cyber syndicates."
 
Criminals can try to use this information to file fraudulent tax returns -- as the IRS suspects the criminals are planning to do in this case -- open credit cards to run up bills, receive medical treatments and commit identify theft.
 
Not every entry in these databases of stolen and sold sensitive information will work for criminals looking to score, Westin pointed out, but "they can get a few thousand dollars from a lot of targets, and maybe even tens of thousands from a few if the criminals get lucky."
 
The IRS is sending letters this week to the 200,000 taxpayers whose accounts had attempted unauthorized access, and the half of those people whose accounts were accessed will be offered free credit monitoring. The agency warned criminals may have accessed accounts with the intent of using them for identity theft next tax season.
 
"I'm surprised that people seem to be surprised this could happen to an IRS site -- as if the government can protect your information better," said Williams, the Contrast Security CTO. ""In truth the government typically outsources the building of these apps and sites, and they're not even close to the protection of financial services, for example."
 

Doctor group seeks to clear confusion in cancer screening

05/19/2015 21:10
mammograms_breast_cancer_ap.jpgMammograms at 40 or 50? Every year or every other year? What's the best colon check?
 
Screening for cancer has gotten more complicated in recent years with evolving guidelines that sometimes conflict. Now a doctors' group aims to ease some confusion — and encourage more discussion of testing's pros and cons — with what it calls advice on "high-value screening" for five types of tumors.
 
Too often, even the doctors who order those tests aren't sure of the latest recommendations, said Dr. Wayne J. Riley, president of the American College of Physicians, which published the advice Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
 
"We want to make sure that folks get the right test at the right time for the right conditions," Riley said. "We also want our physician colleagues to try to avoid the customary, knee-jerk reaction to just test without having some sort of dialogue" about the right choice for each patient.
 
So the ACP, internal medicine specialists, reviewed leading cancer screening guidelines to find the least intensive testing strategies with the broadest expert consensus.
 
Dr. Richard Wender of the American Cancer Society said even though it disagrees on some specifics, emphasizing areas of agreement is valuable, a starting point for those doctor-patient conversations.
 
Cancer screening is a balance to ensure the people who will benefit most get checked while not over-testing. After all, there are potential harms including false alarms that spark unneeded extra testing, and sometimes detection of tumors too small and slow-growing to be life-threatening.
 
On the other hand, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this month that too few people who clearly should be getting screened for certain cancers are. For example, 58 percent of people ages 50 to 75 had been recently checked for colorectal cancer; the government goal is 70.5 percent.
 
The American College of Physicians' advice:
 
BREAST CANCER
 
The American Cancer Society has long recommended annual mammograms starting at age 40. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which advises the government, says to get mammograms every other year from age 50 to 74, and says starting at age 40 brings little benefit but should be a personal choice if women are told the pros and cons.
 
The ACP sided with the task force's approach, saying even experts who prefer mammograms at 40 agree that women should be fully informed of the pros and cons to help them decide for themselves.
 
Routine screening isn't for 30-somethings, and more expensive MRI scans aren't for screening average-risk women, yet the ACP said doctors sometimes order both.
 
COLORECTAL CANCER
 
Colonoscopies, which allow doctors to see precancerous growths in the colon, get the most attention. But the ACP advised people ages 50 to 74 to choose from equally good screening choices: a stool test every year; a colonoscopy every 10 years; a sigmoidoscopy, which views the lower colon, every five years; or a combination of a stool test every three years and a sigmoidoscopy every five years.
 
The ACP said 60 percent of adults have colonoscopies more frequently than needed, adding no medical value but lots of cost.
 

George Zimmerman involved in Florida shooting

05/11/2015 23:31
George Zimmerman was involved in a shooting Monday in Lake Mary, Florida.
 
According to WESH, the shooting involved two men and Zimmerman suffered a minor gunshot wound and was taken to a local hospital. 
 
"The injuries are not serious," Lake Mary Deputy Police Chief Colin Morgan said. 
 
"I don't know exactly what precipitated it, but another motorist pulled up alongside him and fired a shot at him," Zimmerman's attorney Don West said. "I believe that the window of the vehicle was broken.  As I understand it he was shot through the passenger window and the bullet narrowly missed his head and lodged the roof." 
 
Morgan said the other man reportedly has been involved in other cases with Zimmerman in the past. 
 
He added that Zimmerman will be brought to the police station when he leaves the hospital. 
 
“[Zimmerman] walked normally into the ambulance, so he wasn’t being helped or nothing,” witness Ricardo Berrare told WESH. 
 
Zimmerman was acquitted in 2013 of fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in a case that sparked protests and national debate about race relations.
 
The Justice Department later announced it was not bringing a civil rights case against Zimmerman.
 
Since his acquittal, Zimmerman has had several brushes with the law.
 
Those include two incidents involving allegations of assault by girlfriends, and his wife claiming he smashed her iPad.
 

Mother's cellphone ring may startle fetus, study says

05/07/2015 22:01

NEW-Pregnant-Belly.jpg

While many studies have investigated whether cellphone radiation is harmful, little is known about how the sound of a cellphone ringing might impact a baby in utero.
 
So researchers in New York decided to dig, in part because resident physicians—who regularly use cellphones and beepers at work—seem to have more pregnancy complications. Their study is small and has yet to be peer-reviewed or published, but the researchers say their findings, to be presented at a meeting of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in San Francisco this week, warrant further investigation.
 
"Cycles of normal fetal behavior are definitely disturbed or interrupted by the frequent use of cellphones and beepers," one of the researchers tells the Philadelphia Inquirer.
 
"If you're a baby in-utero and someone wakes you up every hour, you will not be a happy camper." To test the possible link, they used high-quality ultrasound on 28 pregnant medical residents in their third trimester and observed how the fetuses reacted to the sounds of cellphones ringing and beepers beeping when attached at the hip to the mothers' scrubs (ie, close to the babies' heads).
 
Almost every time, the babies would exhibit the "startle reflex," turning their heads, opening their mouths, blinking more rapidly, etc. The sound, the researcher tells What to Expect, "wakes up and possibly scares the unborn baby." They haven't yet studied what other types of sounds may do this (alarm clocks, car horns, etc.) and what decibel level disrupts the baby, but they say they're already planning future studies.
 
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Boost for first-time buyers as buy-to-let landlords' profits are slashed in crackdown on mortgage interest tax relief

07/09/2015 17:40

Google Unit Apologizes For 'Ingress' Nazi Concentration Camps

07/07/2015 17:06

Photographer Catches the ISS Flying Past the Moon

07/03/2015 17:50

Chris Christie’s Path to Relevance

06/30/2015 21:24

Victims named in Charleston church shooting

06/18/2015 23:25

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