The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.
Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.
“Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat,” Locke said Monday at a news conference.
Natoma Canfield, the cancer-stricken woman who has become a centerpiece of President Obama’s push for health care reform, will not lose her home over her medical bills and will probably qualify for financial aid, a top official at the Cleveland medical center treating her told FoxNews.com.
Though Canfield’s sister Connie Anderson said her sibling is afraid she’ll lose her house and Obama warned at an Ohio rally Monday that the patient is “racked with worry” about the cost of tests and treatment, she is already being screened for financial help.
Lyman Sornberger, executive director of patient financial services at the Cleveland Clinic, said “all indications” at the outset are that she will be considered for assistance.
House Democratic leaders still do not have enough votes to pass health care reform, the chamber’s top vote counter said Sunday, even though the administration is aiming to have the bill passed this week.
The reality check came from Rep. James Clyburn, the House Democratic whip.
“No, we don’t have them as of this morning, but we’ve been working this thing all weekend,” Clyburn, D-S.C., said.
But despite the challenge of corralling wavering Democrats, Clyburn joined with other Democratic officials in saying he was confident the measure would pass, echoing comments from Speaker Nancy Pelosi Saturday.
Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting.
Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted. The nation’s chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, even absent charges or a conviction. Obama said, “It’s the right thing to do” to “tighten the grip around folks” who commit crime.
When it comes to civil liberties, the Obama administration has come under fire for often mirroring his predecessor’s practices surrounding state secrets, the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There’s also Gitmo, Jay Bybee and John Yoo.
The Lockerbie bomber was at the centre of a fresh row last night after it emerged he is taking a cancer-busting drug that could keep him alive for FIVE more years.
Terminally ill Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was prescribed chemotherapy treatment Taxotere after returning to Libya.
But yesterday reports claimed Megrahi wasn’t given the drug while he was in Greenock prison – amid claims he could have been kept behind bars if he had taken the medication.
Last night Tory justice spokesman Bill Aitken demanded answers from Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the healthcare bill will pass by next weekend.
“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”
President Barack Obama will look to campaign on the new healthcare law in midterm elections, Gibbs said.
The U.S. and the U.K. have moved “substantially” closer to losing their AAA credit ratings as the cost of servicing their debt rose, according to Moody’s Investors Service.
The governments of the two economies must balance bringing down their debt burdens without damaging growth by removing fiscal stimulus too quickly, Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of sovereign risk at Moody’s in London, said in a telephone interview.
Under the ratings company’s so-called baseline scenario, the U.S. will spend more on debt service as a percentage of revenue this year than any other top-rated country except the U.K., and will be the biggest spender from 2011 to 2013, Moody’s said today in a report.
The Washington Examiner reports that House Democrats appear poised to adopt a rule that would pass the Senate health care bill without actually voting on it.
Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) is preparing to pass the health care overhaul through the House of Representatives without a vote, as was originally reported by the National Journal’s Congress Daily. Mark Tapscott observes that such a maneuver would be the penultimate refutation of the people’s will.
In the Slaughter Solution, the rule would declare that the House “deems” the Senate version of Obamacare to have been passed by the House. House members would still have to vote on whether to accept the rule, but they would then be able to say they only voted for a rule, not for the bill itself.
Affiliates of the once mighty liberal activist group ACORN are remaking themselves in a desperate bid to ditch the tarnished name of their parent organization and restore federal grants and other revenue streams that ran dry in the wake of a video scandal.
The letters A, C, O, R and N are coming off office doors from New York to California. Business cards are being reprinted. New signs with new names are popping up in front of offices.
The breakaways are trying to shed the scandal that emerged six months ago when videos showed some ACORN workers giving tax tips to conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute. But while their names are different, most groups have kept the same offices and staff.
The White House is backing down from efforts to drop “sweetheart” deals poisoning health care legislation as House Budget Committee Democrats meet Monday to craft a “fix-it” bill that does not yet have a price tag.
In a new take on its policy, White House top strategist David Axelrod said President Obama only objects to state-specific arrangements, such as an increase in Medicaid funding for Nebraska, ridiculed as the “cornhusker kickback.”
But instead of dropping them, the concept behind those deals could be widened so that all states benefit.
U.S.-Israeli relations have hit a 35-year low over a contentious east Jerusalem building project that threatens to derail peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians, Israel’s envoy to Washington was quoted as saying Monday.
Ambassador Michael Oren’s remarks clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assurances that the political turmoil resulting from the settlement announcement, which the Obama administration slammed as “an insult,” was under control.
“Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975 … a crisis of historic proportions,” the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted Oren as saying to Israeli diplomats in a phone briefing over the weekend.
Israeli officials said that the U.S. is pressing the Jewish nation to scrap the east Jerusalem building project.
On the Fuerte Tiuana military base in Caracas, there is a warehouse full of light bulbs. Hundreds of boxes of Firefly energy-efficient bulbs are sitting in vast stacks, ready to be loaded onto waiting trucks by the troops.
Meanwhile, the other half of the warehouse is a graveyard for used and spent light bulbs.
Huge amounts of filaments and broken glass have been swept into small mountains before being shipped to Venezuela’s second city, Maracaibo, for safe disposal because of the mercury content.
Outside the warehouse, a platoon of soldiers is standing to attention for their colonel before being dispatched to hand out the light bulbs in one of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods.
“Today’s mission is vital for the health and development of the nation. And it comes directly on orders from the commander-in-chief,” barks the colonel.
Attorney General Eric Holder failed to tell the Senate about seven legal briefs he signed when lawmakers considered his nomination to his current job, according to a letter released on Friday.
Two of the briefs involved appeals to the Supreme Court for Jose Padilla, who sought release from a military prison in South Carolina where he was being held after then-President George W. Bush designated him an “enemy combatant.”
Padilla was held in a military brig for three years before his case was moved to a criminal court in Miami, where he was convicted on charges of offering his services to militants.
Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk, but not job loss because of a child with asthma or someone in the family is bipolar—you name it, any condition—is job locking.
Think of a situation where we can internationally competitive because we don‘t have this weight on us that other country—other businesses really don‘t have in other countries because they don‘t have this expense of health care which will all be reined in, those costs under this bill.
We cannot afford the status quo. We will make this difference and it will make a wonderful difference in the lives of our people, but also, in the vitality of our economy. That‘s what we want people to talk about.
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