best job Red Team turns on its offense in the second half to win Mooch Boys Soccer Senior GameA may not be the gift Americans had on their list this holiday season. But the . A shutdown became more likely after President-elect opposed a reached Wednesday to keep through mid-March. Complicating an already complex situation: Trump wants Congress to because the current debt limit suspension . An agreement would give the incoming administration time to use to pay the bills. A question possibly on the minds of the 68 million Americans currently getting : What happens to the Social Security Administration during a government shutdown? Will recipients still get benefits checks? Here's what to know. During a government shutdown, some federal agencies continue their work because at least some of their workers are considered “essential” to continue activities such as air traffic control, border protection, law enforcement, in-hospital medical care, and power grid maintenance, notes the nonprofit, nonpartisan . Among those agencies and programs that continue on because some of their mandatory spending is not subject to annual appropriations by Congress: Medicare, Medicaid and, yes, Social Security. Social Security has "dedicated funding, so it's outside of the budget process," said Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at the . "All that money is there to paid (out). It doesn't have to be appropriated. ... You're still going to get your checks." That means retirement and disability benefits including (SSI) payments will continue to go out. Also unaffected by a shutdown: military veterans' benefits, and medical care, and food benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The Social Security Administration has a contingency plan for shutdowns. In a letter to the director of the Office of Management and Budget three months ago, the described its 2025 fiscal year plan for a potential federal government shutdown. That coincided with a potential mid-September shutdown, which was avoided by an . (That agreement expires on Friday.) The SSA details how it will "continue activities critical to our direct-service operations and those needed to ensure accurate and timely payment of benefits .... (and) will cease activities not directly related to the accurate and timely payment of benefits or not critical to our direct-service operations." The plan, signed by Chad Poist, the SSA's deputy commissioner for the budget, finance and management, cites from the Department of Justice to the Office of Management and Budget that any other government activities needed to disburse Social Security benefits are allowed during a "lapse in appropriations." The SSA's continued activities include processing benefits applications, issuing new and replacement Social Security cards, and information technology work needed for daily processing activities, fraud protection, and other applications. Some discontinued activities during a shutdown include benefit verifications, earnings record corrections and updates unrelated to adjudication of benefits, and IT enhancement activities. "Some of the (SSA) workers could be furloughed until this is resolved, because some of those services are funded differently than the way the benefits are," Copeland said. He suggests anyone who has an appointment to start benefits or to handle benefit calculations to make sure their appointments will happen or need to be rescheduled. "Appointments ... could be impacted," he said. Those recipients whose birthdates range from the 21st to the 31st of the month are scheduled to get a check on Dec. 24, according to the . The January SSI payment is scheduled to go out Dec. 31. The next checks would be Jan. 3 for recipients who began receiving Social Security before May 1997. Those who get both Social Security & SSI will get Social Security paid on Jan. 3 and SSI on Jan. 1, according to . Checks go out on Jan. 8 for those whose birthdates are from the 1st to 10th of the month and Jan. 15 for those whose birthdates are from the 11th to 20th. ,

By Chou Chih-jou, Lery Hiciano and Hollie Younger / Staff reporter, with staff writers and CNA The cancer “clock” in Taiwan “sped up” by 17 seconds in 2022 from the year before, meaning that a new cancer case is diagnosed every four minutes and two seconds in Taiwan, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. 請繼續往下閱讀... Prior to 2019, the number of cancer cases increased by 4,000 to 5,000 a year, HPA Cancer Prevention and Control Division Director Lin Li-ju (林莉茹) said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s willingness to seek medical treatment decreased, but as the pandemic eased in 2022, people started getting screenings and medical treatment again, resulting in an increase in the number of new cancer patients, Lin said. Cancer has been the leading cause of death in the country for 42 years, with more than 50,000 people dying from it every year, HPA data showed. 請繼續往下閱讀... In 2022, lung cancer was the most common, with 17,982 cases, followed by 17,643 cases of colon or rectal cancer and 17,366 cases of female breast cancer. Compared with the previous year, the incidence rates for breast, lung, prostate, uterine, stomach, thyroid and skin cancer all increased. A rise in the number of cancer cases is not necessarily negative. The proportion of early cancer detection for the three most common cancers also increased, meaning there are more opportunities for treatment. Meanwhile, the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) yesterday said that 30 new medical services are now available to patients as part of the National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme, including genetic cancer screenings that can detect seven different strains of cancer. It was introduced on Dec. 1. The new services are to be awarded 123 million NHI points (one point is about NT$0.9 of funding) to benefit 66,000 patients annually, with an investment of NT$110 million (US$3.37 million), it said. The NHIA is to award 5 million points to cover the Ozaki procedure for people under 18 who have aortic valve disease. It is a new surgical procedure to reconstruct the aortic valve and has a high recovery rate, which reduces the need for repeat surgeries, Medical Affairs Division Director Chen Yi-chieh (陳依婕) said, adding that it would benefit about 13 patients per year. The NHIA is to also offer the prostate-specific antigen isoform test to about 19,000 people per year, Chen said, adding that the test does not need biopsies, is more reliable than the current test and reduces the risk of complications. Testing for the hepatitis B core related antigen, a biomarker that indicates viral replication of hepatitis B, is also available, he said. The new test reduces the high relapse rate and complication risk for people who have chronic hepatitis B and stop antiviral treatment, which would help about 34,000 patients per year, he added. As medical technology is continuously developing, new medical treatments are to continue to be added and revised under the NHI budget, Chen said. The NHIA is working together with medical experts and insurance plan holders to offer people the latest medical technology, he added. 新聞來源: TAIPEI TIMES 不用抽 不用搶 現在用APP看新聞 保證天天中獎 點我下載APP 按我看活動辦法

Notre Dame: Historic Paris cathedral formally reopens

Jaland Lowe, Pitt charge past LSU in second half to move to 6-0

Talking Business with Don Cunningham: The transformation of people, places and thingsOne of the most profound scientific discoveries of the 20th century revealed that mass is simply an extremely concentrated form of energy. Scientists even determined that the energy in any given quantity of mass is the weight of that mass times the speed of light squared. Now, the speed of light is a profoundly large number and, when you multiply that number by itself, you get an even more insanely large number. Unfortunately, even though we know we have all this energy locked up in every quantity of mass, actually making it happen (harvesting that energy) is a bit more problematic. During the 20th century, scientists figured out two ways to convert mass to energy and these are referred to as fission and fusion. In fission, a large fissionable atom is hit with a neutron that breaks it up into a bunch of smaller atoms. For fusion, extreme high heat convinces two smaller atoms to fuse together to form a larger atom. In both cases the newly formed atoms have less mass than the original atoms and that difference is the quantity of mass that has been converted to energy. With this in mind, it is extremely unfortunate that the first public awareness of this “mass is energy” phenomenon came when a fission bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. After that, we witnessed an arms race, lots of testing and all our political leaders choosing to use public fear of it all to control us (fear is a politician’s favorite too to make us do their bidding) rather than pushing to advance the technology and use it to make everyone’s life better. Though fusion has proven impossible to manage and control, fission technology has been safely generating electricity since 1954. But the nagging question that should have been asked over and over was always, maybe there is a better way to do this. It has recently occurred to me that there might be a shortcut to solving the problem. Over the centuries there have been uncounted reports of alien spaceships and even many alien abductions. So common are alien abductions that they have been given a name “close encounters of the third kind.” Hopefully, most will agree that alien spaceships are not powered by wood stoves. In fact, the only way to support space travel is some technology that converts mass directly into energy. My shortcut is to explain the whole “mass is energy” concept in layman’s terms to everyone on the planet and let it be known that anyone abducted by aliens must plead with their captors to please, pretty please, share the technology they use for converting mass directly into energy. Robert Crocker ChehalisThe legal fray builds in a very close North Carolina Supreme Court election

NoneNone

Growing Automotive: A Key Driver Transforming The Aramid Fiber Market 2024