The Obama administration lost its court bid to maintain a six-month moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling which a federal judge ordered lifted last month.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government’s emergency request to stay that judge’s order pending appeal.

The motion was denied because the government failed to show “a likelihood of irreparable injury if the stay is not granted,” the appeals panel judges wrote in a 2-1 ruling.

The government also “made no showing that there is any likelihood that drilling activities will be resumed pending appeal.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said he will soon issue a new order to block deepwater drilling regardless of how the court ruled and oil companies have not resumed drilling due to the legal uncertainties.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says he will issue a new order imposing a moratorium on deepwater drilling after a federal judge struck down the existing one.

Salazar said in a statement Tuesday evening that the new order will contain additional information making clear why the six-month drilling pause was necessary in the wake of the Gulf oil spill. The judge in New Orleans who struck down the moratorium earlier in the day complained there wasn’t enough justification for it.

Most health insurance plans will soon be barred from turning children down due to pre-existing medical problems, under an enforcement plan the White House announced Tuesday for the new patients’ bill of rights.

President Barack Obama is marking the first 90 days since he signed the landmark health care overhaul legislation by spelling out details of how the law’s short-term benefits will be implemented. The major expansion of coverage to some 32 million now uninsured doesn’t come until 2014, but other safeguards take effect for plans renewing on or after Sept. 23.

President Barack Obama likened the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the September 11 attacks in an interview published on the eve of his fourth visit Monday to the stricken region.

“In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come,” he told Politico.com.

Obama said he would be making a fresh bid to get Congress to pass a major energy and climate bill.

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The cap on the blown-out well in the Gulf is capturing a half-million gallons a day, or anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of the oil spewing from the bottom of the sea, officials said Monday. But the hopeful report was offset by a warning that the farflung slick has broken up into hundreds and even thousands of patches of oil that may inflict damage that could persist for years.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man for the crisis, said the breakup has complicated the cleanup.

“Dealing with the oil spill on the surface is going to go on for a couple of months,” he said at a briefing in Washington. But “long-term issues of restoring the environment and the habitats and stuff will be years.”

Allen said the containment cap that was installed late last week is now collecting about 460,000 gallons of a day out of the approximately 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons believed to be spewing from the well a mile underwater.

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“I think that America has a lot to learn from Kalamazoo Central about what makes for a successful school in this new century,” Obama said, listing community and parent involvement and high standards set by teachers.

“You could have made excuses—our kids have fewer advantages, our schools have fewer resources, so how can we compete? You could have spent years pointing fingers—blaming parents, blaming teachers, blaming the principal or the superintendent or the government,” the president said.

“But instead, you came together. You were honest with yourselves about where you were falling short. And you resolved to do better.”

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Lebanon’s military fired anti-aircraft artillery at Israeli warplanes that were flying over Lebanon, a senior Israeli security official said on Tuesday.

“Our aircraft have been targeted by the Lebanese anti-aircraft guns while flying over southern Lebanon, and there was no damage,” the official who requested the anonymity told AFP.

A military spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied the report.

Lebanon issues almost daily reports of Israeli violations of its air space, but its military rarely opens fire unless the planes fly within range of its guns.

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Responding to the massive BP oil spill, Congress is getting ready to quadruple—to 32 cents a barrel—a tax on oil used to help finance cleanups. The increase would raise nearly $11 billion over the next decade.

The tax is levied on oil produced in the U.S. or imported from foreign countries. The revenue goes to a fund managed by the Coast Guard to help pay to clean up spills in waterways, such as the Gulf of Mexico.

The tax increase is part of a larger bill that has grown into a nearly $200 billion grab bag of unfinished business that lawmakers hope to complete before Memorial Day. The key provisions are a one-year extension of about 50 popular tax breaks that expired at the end of last year, and expanded unemployment benefits, including subsidies for health insurance, through the end of the year.

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The US military on Monday said it will carry out anti-submarine and other naval exercises with South Korea in the “near future” after a North Korean sub sank a South Korean warship.

The announcement came after an international investigation last week concluded that a North Korean submarine fired a heavy torpedo at the Cheonan on March 26, sinking the South Korean vessel and killing 46 sailors.

The decision to conduct anti-submarine as well as maritime interdiction exercises with Seoul’s military “are a result of the findings of this recent incident,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters.

He declined to offer more details of the “important” exercises but said they would take place “in the near future.”

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A trillion-dollar package to shore up ailing eurozone economies merely buys time until the deficits of certain members of the 16-member zone are cleaned up, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday.

Speaking at a conference of the Confederation of German Trade Unions, Merkel said that recent speculation against the euro “is only possible because of huge differences in the economic strengths and debt levels of member states.”

With the rescue package, “we have done nothing more than to buy time until we have brought order to these competitive differences and to the budget deficits of individual euro countries,” she said.

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Deadly riots over new austerity measures engulfed the streets of Athens on Wednesday, and three people were killed as angry protesters tried to storm parliament, hurled Molotov cocktails at police and torched buildings.

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Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that he is dispatching a team of attorneys from multiple divisions within the Justice Department to New Orleans to meet with the U.S. Attorney and response teams and to monitor the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The British Petroleum oil spill has already cost lives and created a major environmental incident,” said Attorney General Holder. “The Justice Department stands ready to make available every resource at our disposal to vigorously enforce the laws that protect the people who work and reside near the Gulf, the wildlife, the environment and the American taxpayers.”

The team will be led by Ignacia S. Moreno, Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, and Tony West, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, and will include relevant United States Attorneys. The combined group from the Department plans to make a site visit and meet with representatives from federal agencies working on the response.

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A U.S. Navy SEAL was cleared Thursday of charges he covered up the alleged beating of an Iraqi prisoner suspected of masterminding the grisly 2004 killings of four American security contractors.

A six-man Navy jury found Petty Officer 1st Class Julio Huertas not guilty of dereliction of duty and attempting to influence the testimony of another service member. The jury heard too many differences between the testimony of a sailor who claimed he witnessed the Sept. 1 assault at a U.S. base outside Fallujah, Iraq, and statements from a half-dozen others who denied his account.

Smiling and composed as he left the courthouse at the U.S. military’s Camp Victory on Baghdad’s western outskirts, Huertas said he felt vindicated.

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As Congress debates sweeping legislation aimed at guarding against another financial meltdown, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has become Wall Street’s spokesman and defender amid a chorus of populist voices.

With President Barack Obama set to visit New York to push for passing financial reform, the billionaire mayor, who got his start on Wall Street in the 1960s and is considered a national expert on financial matters, argues that too much regulation could endanger the economy as much as others say it would protect it.

“The bashing of Wall Street is something that should worry everybody,” Bloomberg declared last week.

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They’ve been called Oreos, traitors and Uncle Toms, and are used to having to defend their values. Now black conservatives are really taking heat for their involvement in the mostly white tea party movement—and for having the audacity to oppose the policies of the nation’s first black president.

“I’ve been told I hate myself. I’ve been called an Uncle Tom. I’ve been told I’m a spook at the door,” said Timothy F. Johnson, chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group of black conservatives who support free market principles and limited government.

“Black Republicans find themselves always having to prove who they are. Because the assumption is the Republican Party is for whites and the Democratic Party is for blacks,” he said.

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General Motors posted a post-bankruptcy 2009 net loss of 4.3 billion dollars Wednesday but said it hoped to achieve profitability in 2010.

The new GM, which emerged from bankruptcy protection on July 10, achieved global revenues of 57.5 billion dollars and ended the year with net cash of one billion dollars.

“As the results for 2009 show, there is still significant work to be done,” Chris Liddell, GM vice chairman and chief financial officer said in a statement.

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