Benchmark to open Sale Creek clinic
BenchMark Physical Therapy is opening a new clinic next week in Sale Creek at 14821 Dayton Pike, Suite D, to offer physical therapy, workers’ conditioning and sports medicine in the northern part of Hamilton County.
Physical therapist Kaylea Fields will serve as the clinic director. She received her Doctorate of Physical Therapy from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and she is certified in ASTYM Treatment, which stimulates regeneration of soft tissues and the resorption of scar tissue,
Dry Needling, a manual therapy technique using small, fine needles that are inserted into dysfunctional tissues, and LSVT, an exercise treatment approach for neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, will be offered.
She is also an Orthopaedic Clinical Specialist.
March home prices jump 6.8 percent
U.S. home prices climbed in March with buyers paying a premium for ownership as the number of properties up for sale declines, and mortgage rates increase.
The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index released Tuesday increased 6.8 percent in March from a year earlier.
The home price index is slightly higher than the 2006 peak, before the housing market and the economy crashed. The steadily improving economy has helped bring back buyers and higher prices. Home prices are outstripping wage growth easily.
Those soaring prices have been offset by historically low mortgage rates in recent years, but the average 30-year mortgage rate has shot up to a seven-year high of 4.66 percent, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac.
“Until inventories increase faster than sales, or the economy slows significantly, home prices are likely to continue rising,” said David Blitzer, a managing director at S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Yahoo hacker goes to prison
A young computer hacker who prosecutors say unwittingly worked with a Russian spy agency was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday for using data stolen in a massive Yahoo data breach to gain access to private emails.
U.S. Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco.
Baratov was named in a federal indictment last year that charged two Russian spies with orchestrating the 2014 Yahoo breach involving 500 million users.
Baratov was charged with using that stolen data passed to him by Russia’s Federal Security Service to hack dozens of email accounts of journalists, business leaders and others.
Prosecutors said Baratov, 23, was an “international hacker for hire” who did little or no research of his customers.
He pleaded guilty in November to nine felony hacking charges. He acknowledged that he began hacking as a teen seven years ago and charged customers $100 a hack to access web-based emails.
Baratov, who was born in Kazakhstan but lived in Toronto, Canada, where he was arrested last year, charged customers to obtain another person’s webmail passwords by tricking them to enter their credentials into a fake password reset page.
Consumer confidence bounces back in May
American consumers were feeling a bit more optimistic in May following a slight decline in confidence in April.
The index measures both consumers’ assessment of current economic conditions and their expectations for the future.
Both categories rose this month, however, consumers’ views of the current labor market were mixed. The percentage of respondents who said they felt that jobs were “plentiful” rose, as did the percentage of consumers saying that jobs were “hard to get.”
According to the survey, the number of consumers who think current business conditions are good shot up to 38.4 percent from April’s 34.8 percent. It’s the highest mark in that category of the survey since a 40.8 percent reading in December of 2000.
Consumers’ views of the short-term future were mixed. Those expecting business conditions to improve over the next six month ticked down slightly, as did the number who thought conditions would worsen.