Legion of Angels News Archive

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday funded a $25 billion loan package for troubled automakers as part of a mammoth spending bill to keep the government running through March 2009, but the legislation did not extend a ban on offshore oil drilling.

The spending bill, which passed by a vote of 370 to 58, is needed to keep the government operating after the fiscal year expires on September 30.

It is expected to pass the Senate.

The bill sets aside $7.5 billion in taxpayer funds needed to guarantee $25 billion in low-interest loans to help struggling General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC produce more fuel-efficient cars and trucks.

A long-standing ban on oil offshore drilling is now likely to expire next week because it was not included in the bill, which carries a price tag of more than $600 billion.

That will not lead to a rush of new drilling as the politically sensitive topic is likely to be revisited after the November 4 election.

Congress must pass the bill by September 30 because it failed to approve any of the 12 annual spending bills needed to keep the government operating in the fiscal year starting October 1.

The bill includes $23 billion in emergency aid to states hit by hurricanes and other recent natural disasters.

It provides full-year funding through September 30, 2009 for three large, politically sensitive areas: defense, domestic security programs and expanded veterans’ benefits.

The $488 billion provided for the Pentagon is less than the $492 billion sought by President George W. Bush. It includes less money for outside contractors and more to supervise them.

However, it does not include new funding for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress would have to confront that issue when existing funds for those wars run out in mid-2009.

Congress also will have to deal with the rest of the government’s funding requirements, for programs like health care, law enforcement and foreign aid.

Democrats, who control Congress, have spent the past year battling the Bush administration over about $14 billion in proposed increases for education, science research and other domestic spending.

“I’ve never had anybody in my life come up to me and say, ‘Obey, why don’t you guys in Congress get your act together and cut cancer research?’” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey in a debate on the House floor.

The amount in dispute has been dwarfed by the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package sought by the Bush administration.

The House bill passed on Wednesday doubles spending to help low-income people pay their heating bills and boosts funding for domestic food aid. It also extends funding for student loans.

However, it does not expand unemployment benefits or other measures sought by Democrats to help citizens cope with a slumping economy.

Democrats aim to deal with that in a separate economic stimulus package and hope they will they will have an easier time winning the additional early next year if Democratic Den. Barack Obama is elected president.

Separately on Wednesday, the House approved a $600 billion defense policy bill for fiscal 2009 that would authorize about $70 billion in new funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It also authorizes funding for part of a U.S. missile shield in Europe, a system that has drawn strong criticism from Moscow.

Authorization bills authorize programs and set policy, but a separate defense spending bill, one of 12 spending bills Congress has failed to pass, must be approved before funds are actually allocated.

The defense authorization bill now moves to the Senate.

Source — Yahoo!

WASHINGTON - The next president will inherit a record budget deficit of $482 billion, according to a new Bush administration estimate released Monday.

The administration said the deficit was being driven to an all-time high by the sagging economy and the stimulus payments being made to 130 million households in an effort to keep the country from falling into a deep recession. But the numbers could go even higher if the economy performs worse than the White House predicts.

The budget office predicts the economy will grow at a rate of 1.6 percent this year and will rebound to a 2.2 percent growth rate next year. That’s a half percentage point more than predicted by the widely cited “blue chip” consensus of leading economists. The administration also sees inflation averaging 3.8 percent this year, but easing to 2.3 percent next year — better than the 3.0 percent seen by the blue chip panel.

“The nation’s economy has continued to expand and remains fundamentally resilient,” said the budget office report.

A $482 billion deficit, however, would easily surpass the record deficit of $413 billion set in 2004.

The deficit numbers for 2008 and 2009 represent about 3 percent of the size of the economy, which is the measure seen as most relevant by economists. By that measure, the 2008 and 2009 deficits would be smaller than the deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Congress and earlier administrations cobbled together politically painful deficit-reduction packages.

The administration actually underestimates the deficit, however, since it leaves out about $80 billion in war costs. In a break from tradition — and in violation of new mandates from Congress — the White House did not include its full estimate of war costs.

The White House in February had forecast that next year’s deficit would be $407 billion, which puts the increase in the projections at $72 billion.

Figures for the 2008 budget year ending Sept. 30 will actually drop from an earlier projection of $410 billion to $389 billion, the report said.

The White House still projects that the budget will reach a surplus by 2012, helped by revenues boosted by optimistic economic projections of economic growth.

Still, the new figures are so eye-popping in dollar terms that it may restrain the appetite of the next president to add to it with expensive spending programs or new tax cuts. In fact, pressure may build to allow some tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 to expire as scheduled at the end of 2010, with Congress also feeling pressure to curb spending growth.

John McCain used the news to slam both the Bush White House for its “profligate spending” and Democratic rival Barack Obama for saying he would not try to balance the budget.

“I have an unmatched record in fighting wasteful earmarks and unnecessary spending in the U.S. Senate and I have the determination and experience to do the same as President,” McCain said in a statement.

Obama’s campaign used the new numbers to attack McCain for embracing Bush’s tax cuts. Obama, said campaign policy director Jason Furman, “will restore balance and fairness to our economy by cutting wasteful spending, shutting corporate loopholes and tax havens, and rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, while making health care affordable and putting a middle class tax cut in the pocket of 95 percent of workers and their families.”

The deficit for 2007 totaled $161.5 billion, which represented the lowest amount of red ink since an imbalance of $159 billion in 2002. The 2002 performance marked the first budget deficit after four consecutive years of budget surpluses.

That stretch of budget surpluses represented a period when the country’s finances had been bolstered by a 10-year period of uninterrupted economic growth, the longest period of expansion in U.S. history.

In his first year in office, helped considerably by projections of continuing surpluses, Bush drove through a 10-year, $1.35 trillion package of tax cuts.

However, the country fell into a recession in March 2001 and government spending to fight the war on terrorism contributed to pushing the deficit to a record in dollar terms in 2004.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., said the new deficit figure confirms “the dismal legacy of the Bush administration: under its policies, the largest surpluses in history have been converted into the largest deficits in history.

Source — MSNBC

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Treasury Department says the federal deficit swelled to $268.7 billion in the first nine months of this budget year as record spending during the period outpaced revenues.

The department’s fresh look at the government’s balance sheets, released Friday, shows that the deficit for the budget year that began Oct. 1 was up sharply from the red ink of nearly $121 billion for the corresponding nine-month period last year.

The new year-to-date deficit of $268.7 billion was the third-highest on record. A flood of tax rebates, aimed at stimulating the sluggish economy, left the government’s coffers and contributed to the bigger deficit, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

Spending totaled $2.2 trillion, while revenues came to $1.93 trillion.

The Bush administration estimated in February that the deficit for this year would be $410 billion. That would be just under the all-time high of $413 billion logged in 2004. Some private economists think this year’s budget deficit will turn out to be higher than expected as an economic slowdown has cut into tax revenues.

Spending of $2.2 trillion so far this year is up from $2.1 trillion reported for the corresponding period last year. Meanwhile, revenues of $1.93 trillion are down from $1.945 trillion a year ago.

So far this budget year, the biggest spending categories are programs from the Health and Human Services Department, including Medicare and Medicaid, $520.4 billion; Social Security, $491.7 billion; military, $439.5 billion; and interest on the public debt, $377.3 billion.

For the month of June alone, the government actually ran a surplus of $50.7 billion. Revenues totaled $259.9 billion for the month, while spending came to $209.2 billion. The monthly showing was better than the $33 billion surplus economists were forecasting.

Source — CNN

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — The president of the United Arab Emirates has agreed to cancel all of Iraq’s debts to the country, an official government source said.

Sheikh Khalifa agreed to annul Iraq’s nearly $7 billion in debt after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Debt relief is a major issue for Iraq, and the West has urged nations to forgive billions in Iraqi debt.

U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt recently said that a “significant majority” of the Iraq debt is held by Arab states.

“What is going on right now are technical discussions between the Iraqis and each of the Gulf Arab states, including the Saudis, on exactly what the amount of the debt is, whether that would include interest, what are the documents that would support the actual claim,” he said in late May.

The UAE Cabinet on Sunday also nominated Abdullah Ibrahim al-Shehhi to be the country’s new ambassador to Iraq. Al-Shehhi previously served as the emirates’ ambassador to India.

Al-Shehhi will travel to Iraq after his nomination is confirmed. The source said the UAE intends to reopen its embassy in Baghdad by the end of the year.

The United States and other nations have urged Arab countries to post ambassadors to Iraq, reopen embassies, and forge closer relationships with the post-Saddam Hussein government.

The UAE mission in Iraq has not been active since a UAE diplomat was kidnapped and released two years ago and two Iraqis working for that mission were killed.

Since Egypt’s ambassador, Dr. Ihab al-Sherif, was abducted and killed in July 2005, no ambassador from an Arab country has been stationed permanently in Iraq.

Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the assassination, saying it had killed al-Sherif — “praise be to God” — because of Egypt’s foreign policies and its alliances with the United States and Israel.

UAE announced the ambassador nomination a month after its Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan visited Baghdad. During that visit, al-Nahyan extended an official invitation to al-Maliki to visit the UAE.

Iraq’s government said that al-Nahyan’s one-day visit is the first to Iraq by a Gulf Cooperation Council foreign minister since the 2003 U.S-led invasion that toppled Hussein’s regime. The Gulf Cooperation Council also includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Until al-Nahyan’s visit, only Syria and Jordan had sent foreign ministers to go to Iraq in the post-Saddam era. The Arab League’s secretary-general has also visited.

In addition to the war-time violence, the Sunni-Shiite rivalry in Iraq and the Muslim world has been a factor in the slow pace of diplomatic relations between Iraq and the Arab world.

Iraq has a mixed population, mostly Arab with some Kurds and Turkmens, and mostly Shiite Muslim, with a Sunni Muslim minority. Most Arab countries — including the UAE — are Sunni-ruled.

Iraq’s government is Shiite-dominated and it is forging a close relationship with its neighbor, the non-Arab Shiite nation of Iran — a development that is a concern to Arab nations wary of Iran’s Islamic Republic government.

Al-Maliki’s government is seeking to develop close ties to all countries of the region.

Source — CNN

NEW YORK (AP) – Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips.

The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user’s real name or e-mail address.

Lawyers for Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data — equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books — would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users’ privacy.

The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer’s unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.

Stanton ruled this week that the plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that the privacy concerns are speculative.

Stanton rejected a request from the plaintiffs for Google to disclose the source code — the technical secret sauce — powering its market-leading search engine, saying there’s no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms to treat copyright-infringing videos differently.

The court has yet to rule on Google’s requests to question comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Viacom’s Comedy Central.

Viacom is seeking at least $1 billion in damages from Google, saying YouTube has built a business by using the Internet to “willfully infringe” copyrights on Viacom shows, which include Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants” cartoon.

The lawsuit was combined with a similar case filed by a British soccer league and other parties.

Together, the plaintiffs are trying to prove that YouTube has known of copyright infringement and can do more to stop it, a finding that could dissolve the immunity protections that service providers have when they merely host content submitted by their users.

Though Google said giving the plaintiffs access to YouTube viewer data would threaten users’ privacy, Stanton referred to Google’s own blog entry in which the company argued that the IP address alone cannot identify a specific individual.

In a statement, Google said it was “disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

Google did not say whether it would appeal the ruling or seek to narrow it.

Stanton’s ruling made only passing reference to a 1988 federal law barring the disclosure of specific video materials that subscribers request or obtain.

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Stanton should have considered that law along with constitutional free-speech rights, including a right to read or view materials anonymously.

He said a user’s ID can sometimes include identifying information such as a first initial and last name.

Viacom said it isn’t seeking any user’s identity. The company said any data provided “will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against YouTube and Google (and) will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner.”

This is not the first time Google has fought the disclosure of user information it had been stockpiling. While gathering evidence for a case involving online pornography, the U.S. Justice Department subpoenaed Google and other search engines for lists of search requests made by their users.

After Google resisted, a federal judge ruled that Google was obliged to turn over only a sample of Web addresses in its search index, not the actual search terms requested.

Source — CNN