Solicitation Number: 14-284-SOL-0015A

Notice Type: Combined Synopsis/Solicitation Synopsis:
Added: Dec 06, 2013 3:35 pm (i)

This is a combined synopsis/solicitation for a commercial item prepared in accordance with FAR Subpart 12.6, as supplemented with additional information in this notice.

This announcement constitutes the only solicitation; proposals are being requested and a written solicitation will not be issued.

(ii) The solicitation number is 14-284-SOL-0015A. This solicitation is issued as an Request for Quote (RFQ).

(iii) The corresponding NAICS code is 325412 and the small business standard size is 750 employees.

(iv) The contract line item number, item, quantity and unit of measure is:

Line No. 001; potassium iodide tablet, 65mg, unit dose package of 20s; 700,000 packages (of 20s)

(v) Delivery is required on or before February 1, 2014.
Delivery will be made to:
DHHS, SSC
Bldg #5 Receiving Dock
Perry Point,MD 21902

How President Barack Obama spent Day 12 of his holiday vacation in Hawaii on Wednesday:

- HEALTH CARE TWEET: Obama sent a tweet from the administration's (at)WhiteHouse Twitter account to mark the major benefits of his signature federal health care law taking effect.

In the personally written tweet, signed off with his initials, the president referenced a Seattle boy who stood next to him and other lawmakers when he signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

"I signed the ACA for kids like Marcelas Owens. He lost his mom bc she couldn't afford coverage. Today millions of Americans finally can," the tweet said.

Michelle Obama sent a tweet from her (at)FLOTUS account signed "mo" that asked people to serve military members and their families in 2014 "as well as they've served us."

The richest people on the planet got even richer in 2013, adding $524 billion to their collective net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world's 300 wealthiest individuals.

The aggregate net worth of the world's top billionaires stood at $3.7 trillion at the market close on Dec. 31, according to the ranking. The biggest gains came in the technology industry, which soared 28 percent during the year. Of the 300 people who appeared on the final ranking of 2013, only 70 registered a net loss for the 12-month period.

"The rich will keep getting richer in 2014," John Catsimatidis, the billionaire founder of real estate and energy conglomerate Red Apple Group Inc., said in a telephone interview from his New York office. "Interest rates will remain low, equity markets will keep rising, and the economy will grow at less than 2 percent."

Bill Gates, the founder and chairman of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp., was the year's biggest gainer. The 58-year-old tycoon's fortune increased by $15.8 billion to $78.5 billion, according to the index, as shares of Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, rose 40 percent.

Gates recaptured the title of world's richest person on May 16 from Mexican investor Carlos Slim. Gates's fortune has also benefited from a rally in stock holdings that include the Canadian National Railway Co. and sanitizing-products maker Ecolab Inc., which rose 34 percent and 45 percent respectively.

Top 100 CEOs made average $7.96M; average Canadian worker made $46,600

By the time you finish lunch on Thursday, Canada's top paid CEOs will have already earned the equivalent of your annual salary.
It may be hard to swallow, but according to an annual review by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, by 1:11 p.m. on Jan. 2, the average top paid Canadian CEO will have been earned as much as the average full-time worker's yearly income.

The review found the average compensation among Canada's top 100 CEOs was $7.96 million in 2012. This compared with the average annual Canadian worker's salary of $46,634.

85-year-old former prime minister and defense minister, comatose since 2006, suffers renal failure in hospital

Comatose former prime minister Ariel Sharon's condition has gravely deteriorated and he is near death, doctors said on Wednesday.

A spokesperson for Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer said Sharon's condition began taking a turn for the worse in recent days.

Doctors said Sharon, 85, who has been in a vegetative state since 2006, was suffering from renal failure that could lead to multiple organ system failure and death.

Hebrew media reports late Wednesday said doctors had told the family that Sharon had, at most, no more than four days to live.

"The situation now depends mainly on the family and the decisions they make," a senior doctor at the Sheba Hospital told Walla News.

Five years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great Recession. While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope.

Who was to blame? Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a "bubble," of an imprudent but innocent failure to maintain adequate reserves for a rainy day? Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices, of dubious mortgages portrayed as sound risks and packaged into ever more esoteric financial instruments, the fundamental weaknesses of which were intentionally obscured?

If it was the former - if the recession was due, at worst, to a lack of caution - then the criminal law has no role to play in the aftermath. For in all but a few circumstances (not here relevant), the fierce and fiery weapon called criminal prosecution is directed at intentional misconduct, and nothing less. If the Great Recession was in no part the handiwork of intentionally fraudulent practices by high-level executives, then to prosecute such executives criminally would be "scapegoating" of the most shallow and despicable kind.

But if, by contrast, the Great Recession was in material part the product of intentional fraud, the failure to prosecute those responsible must be judged one of the more egregious failures of the criminal justice system in many years. Indeed, it would stand in striking contrast to the increased success that federal prosecutors have had over the past fifty years or so in bringing to justice even the highest-level figures who orchestrated mammoth frauds. Thus, in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the "junk bond" bubble that, in many ways, was a precursor of the more recent bubble in mortgage-backed securities, the progenitors of the fraud were all successfully prosecuted, right up to Michael Milken.

In temporarily blocking enforcement of the part of President Obama's health care law that requires many employers to provide health insurance coverage for birth control or face penalties, Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday opened a second

The initial front opened in November, when the justices agreed to hear a pair of cases from for-profit companies challenging that provision. Now Justice Sotomayor has ordered the Obama administration to file a brief by Friday morning responding to a different kind of challenge, this one from groups affiliated with religious organizations.

In the meantime, she issued a temporary injunction barring the administration from enforcing the birth control requirement against an order of Colorado nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, and related groups.

After the brief is filed, Justice Sotomayor or the full court could extend or dissolve Tuesday's temporary injunction while litigation moves forward in the lower courts. It is also possible that the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case immediately.

To understand the context of Justice Sotomayor's decision, it helps to look at the details of the Affordable Care Act. The law distinguishes among three kinds of organizations: religious employers, for-profit corporations and nonprofit groups affiliated with religious organizations but not owned or controlled by them.

The facts that we know so far - from Fisa court documents to LOVEINT - show that the NSA has overstepped its powers

Time and again since the world learned the extent of what the NSA was doing, government officials have defended the controversial mass surveillance programs by falling back on one talking point: the NSA programs may be all-powerful, but they have never been abused.

President Obama continually evokes the phase when defending the NSA in public. In his end-of-year press conference, he reiterated, "There continues not to be evidence that the [metadata surveillance] program had been abused". Former NSA chief Michael Hayden says this almost weekly, and former CIA deputy director and NSA review panel member Mike Morrell said it again just before Christmas.

This mantra is likely to be repeated often in 2014 as Obama is set to address the nation on government surveillance, and Congress and the president debate whether any reforms are necessary.

There's only one problem: it's not true.

Israel and its powerful lobby in Washington D.C. are considered a risk to "our Western politics," said a London-based political activist on Monday, in a reference to Tel Aviv's opposition to a newly-reached nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 - the five permanent members of the UN Security council plus Germany.

People around the world start to realize that the price we are paying "for the Jewish lobby's interfering with our Western politics is severe," said Gilad Atzmon in a phone interview with Press TV.

After Iran and the six world powers reached an interim deal in Geneva on Nov. 24 over Tehran's nuclear energy program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fiercely opposed the agreement calling it "weak and desperate."

Netanyahu even appealed to members of the US Congress as negotiations were underway to kill the Geneva deal, which is set to ease some of sanctions imposed on Tehran.

Atzmon said "it is Israel that imposes civil threats, not just to the region but to the world" but now it is opposing a deal that will bring peace to the region.

The Israeli regime is obliterating Palestine through its continued expansionist policies while the world turns a blind eye to the plight of Palestinians, says a political analyst.

"Over the past 20 years, Palestine has been plundered by Israel, its rich arable lands confiscated, its water resources rerouted to benefit illegal settlers and its people treated as mere cattle awaiting slaughter," Catherine Shakdam wrote in a Monday article for Press TV.

"After decades of injustice, humiliation and bloodshed, the land of Palestine is but a shadow of its former self, a fractured country whose ever-shrinking borders will soon collapse on themselves to leave behind only the memory of what once was," she added.

Shakdam said the Tel Aviv regime has mastered the practicing of "apartheid" policies over the past decades, adding, "Far beyond security concerns, Israel seeks to eat away at Palestine until nothing is left but memories, believing otherwise would simply be utterly naïve."