Prodded by national anger at Wall Street, the Senate on Thursday passed the most far-reaching restraints on big banks since the Great Depression. In its broad sweep, the massive bill would touch Wall Street CEOs and first-time homebuyers, high-flying traders and small town lenders.
The 59-39 vote represents an important achievement for President Barack Obama, and comes just two months after his health care overhaul became law. The bill must now be reconciled with a House version that passed in December. A key House negotiator predicted the legislation would reach Obama’s desk before the Fourth of July.
The legislation aims to prevent a recurrence of the near-meltdown of big Wall Street investment banks and the resulting costly bailouts. It calls for new ways to watch for risks in the financial system and makes it easier to liquidate large failing financial firms. It also writes new rules for complex securities blamed for helping precipitate the 2008 economic crisis, and it creates a new consumer protection agency.
Prodded by national anger at Wall Street, the Senate on Thursday passed the most far-reaching restraints on big banks since the Great Depression. In its broad sweep, the massive bill would touch Wall Street CEOs and first-time homebuyers, high-flying traders and small town lenders.
The 59-39 vote represents an important achievement for President Barack Obama, and comes just two months after his health care overhaul became law. The bill must now be reconciled with a House version that passed in December. A key House negotiator predicted the legislation would reach Obama’s desk before the Fourth of July.
The legislation aims to prevent a recurrence of the near-meltdown of big Wall Street investment banks and the resulting costly bailouts. It calls for new ways to watch for risks in the financial system and makes it easier to liquidate large failing financial firms. It also writes new rules for complex securities blamed for helping precipitate the 2008 economic crisis, and it creates a new consumer protection agency.
Stocks took their deepest plunge in more than a year Thursday as fears grew that Europe’s debt crisis could spread around the world and undermine the U.S. economic recovery. The possibility has been brewing for weeks, but analysts said some investors are just waking up to it.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 376 points, its biggest point drop since February 2009. All the major indexes were down well over 3 percent and are now showing losses for 2010. Interest rates fell sharply in the Treasury market as investors once again sought the safety of U.S. government debt.
The number of people applying for unemployment benefits last week rose unexpectedly and the Greek government’s response to its debt crisis sparked new protests in Athens, but analysts said neither event appeared to set off Thursday’s selling.
Tensions deepened Thursday on the Korean peninsula as South Korea accused North Korea of firing a torpedo that sank a naval warship, killing 46 sailors in the country’s worst military disaster since the Korean War.
President Lee Myung-bak vowed “stern action” for the provocation following the release of long-awaited results from a multinational investigation into the March 26 sinking near the Koreas’ tense maritime border. North Korea, reacting swiftly, called the results a fabrication, and warned that any retaliation would trigger war. It continued to deny involvement in the sinking of the warship Cheonan.
“If the (South Korean) enemies try to deal any retaliation or punishment, or if they try sanctions or a strike on us …. we will answer to this with all-out war,” Col. Pak In Ho of North Korea’s navy told broadcaster APTN in an exclusive interview in Pyongyang.
Downtown Bangkok became a raging battleground Wednesday as the army stormed a barricaded protest camp and toppled the Red Shirt leadership, enraging demonstrators who fired grenades and set fires that cloaked the skyline in a black haze.
At least two protesters and an Italian news photographer were killed. Two other foreign journalists and 15 Thais were wounded in the fighting.
The Red Shirt protest leadership surrendered to authorities Wednesday afternoon and the army declared itself in full control, but violence raged on afterwards.
Surreal scenes of warfare erupted soon after dawn in one of the ritziest parts of the capital, a city of 10 million people, as troops armed with M-16s converged on the central business district.
The number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week by the largest amount in three months. The surge is evidence of how volatile the job market remains, even as the economy grows.
Applications for unemployment benefits rose to 471,000 last week, up by 25,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the first increase in five weeks and the biggest jump since a gain of 40,000 in February.
The total was the highest since new claims reached 480,000 on April 10. It also pushed the average for the last four weeks to 453,500.
U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter on Tuesday was defeated in a Democratic primary in his bid for a sixth term after taking the risky step of switching from the GOP.
Voters picked U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak as the party’s nominee and rejected the 80-year-old Specter in his first Democratic campaign since his Republican Party defection.
With 79 percent of precincts reporting, Sestak received 435,630 votes, or 53 percent; Specter received 384,027 votes, about 47 percent.
Political novice Rand Paul rode support from tea party activists to a rout in Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday night, jolting the GOP establishment and providing fresh evidence of voter discontent in a turbulent midterm election season.
Paul had 59 percent of the vote with returns counted from 29 percent of the precincts, compared to 37 percent for Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who was recruited to the race by the state’s dominant Republican, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
In a Democratic primary that commanded far less national attention, Attorney General Jack Conway led Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo, 49 percent to 39 percent.
Posner said in addition to talks on freedom of religion and expression, labor rights and rule of law, officials also discussed Chinese complaints about problems with U.S. human rights, which have included crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.
He said U.S. officials did not whitewash the American record and in fact raised on its own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person’s immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally.
The United States was represented by officials from the State Department, White House, the departments of Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, the trade representative’s office and the Internal Revenue Service. The Chinese side was led by Director General for International Organizations Chen Xu and included officials from nine agencies.
Thailand’s leader defended the deadly army crackdown on protesters besieging the capital’s heart, saying Saturday the country’s very future was at stake. Protesters dragged away the bodies of three people from sidewalks — shot by army snipers, they claim — as soldiers blocked major roads and pinned up notices of a “Live Firing Zone.”
“I insist that what we are doing is necessary,” Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said in a defiant broadcast on national television, making it clear he would not compromise. “The government must move forward. We cannot retreat because we are doing things that will benefit the entire country.”
On Saturday, the protesters launched a steady stream of rudimentary missiles at troops who fired back with live ammunition in several areas around a key commercial district of Bangkok.
BP was confident Saturday its latest experiment using a mile-long pipe would capture much of the oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, even as the company disclosed yet another setback in the environmental disaster.
Engineers hit a snag when they tried to connect two pieces of equipment a mile below the water’s surface. BP PLC chief operating officer Doug Suttles said one piece of equipment, called the framework, had to be brought to the water’s surface so that adjustments could be made to where it fits with the long tube that connects to a tanker above.
The framework holds a pipe and stopper, and engineers piloting submarine robots will try to use it to plug the massive leak and send the crude through the lengthy pipe to the surface.
A Swedish artist who angered Muslims by depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a dog was assaulted Tuesday as furious protesters interrupted his university lecture about the limits of free speech.
Lars Vilks told The Associated Press a man leaped from the front row and head-butted him as he was delivering his lecture at Uppsala University, breaking Vilks’ glasses but leaving him uninjured.
Police later said the attacker was stopped before he could reach Vilks and that the artist may have bumped into plain-clothes officers who briskly evacuated him from the room. Three people were detained, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether the attacker was among them.
President Barack Obama on Monday nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, declaring she would demonstrate the same independence, integrity and passion for the law exhibited by retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.
If confirmed by the Senate, Kagan would become the third woman on the high court. At 50, she is relatively young for the lifetime post and could help shape the high court’s decisions for decades.
The former Harvard Law School dean “is widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost legal minds,” Obama said. He introduced her in the White House East Room as “my friend.”
The European Union put up a staggering $1 trillion Monday to contain its spreading government debt crisis and keep it from tearing the euro currency apart and derailing the global economic recovery.
Analysts said the huge sum supplied the “shock and awe” markets had been waiting for for weeks, at least in the short term, and the euro soared on the news.
European leaders negotiated into the early hours of Monday before reaching a deal in which governments that use the euro would join the EU and International Monetary Fund in putting up euro750 billion in loans available to prop up troubled governments.
The European Central bank will buy government and private debt to keep debt markets working and lower borrowing costs, a crisis measure dubbed the “nuclear option,” while the U.S. Federal Reserve joined with other central banks in the effort, reactivating a currency swap program used during the earlier stages of the financial crisis to ship dollars overseas to be pumped into banking systems as short-term credit.
He urged supporters to join as well, calling Twitter “a weapon that also needs to be used by the revolution.”
Since then, Chavez says, he has been overwhelmed by nearly 54,000 messages from supporters, critics and people writing to ask for help with a problem or lodge a complaint. On Thursday, he announced that a new team of 200 aides would help him manage the stream.
“I’m creating a team due to the avalanche of requests, and some grievances,” he said.
Opposition lawmaker Juan Jose Molina said he was not surprised by Chavez’s ability to attract a crowd in cyberspace, but he thinks the president should spend less time tweeting and more time working to reduce soaring inflation and violent crime.
Within days, Britain may have something it hasn’t seen since World War II — a coalition government.
The first-place Conservatives and third-place Liberal Democrats are negotiating in hopes of resolving an election that failed to produce a clear winner. It remains to be seen whether the right-wing and center-left party can share power or even cooperate on keeping a minority Conservative administration in control of Parliament. They are likely to find common ground on the economy and taxes but have divergent views on voting-system reform, nuclear weapons and some key foreign policy issues.
With negotiations between the parties likely to stretch on for at least two more days and the ruling Labour party still lobbying for its own alternative coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the only thing that’s clear “is how confused it is at the moment,” according to Bill Jones, a professor of politics at Liverpool Hope University in northern England.
