The commandant of the Marine Corps said Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan was “probably giving our enemy sustenance.”
The remark was by far the most sharply worded public remark from a senior military commander about the White House’s timetable for starting to wind down the war.
But the commandant, Gen. James Conway, said he thought the deadline might not ultimately comfort the insurgents, who could find that only a small number of U.S. forces leave Afghanistan next July, a scenario that is increasingly set forth by senior military commanders. Conway predicted that Taliban fighters, who he said have been told repeatedly by their commanders that the Americans would leave en masse, would be demoralized when they realize that the United States is staying.
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Marine Corps Commandant: Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal gives the Taliban “sustenance”
SURPRISE SURPRISE: UK plans to decentralize national health care
Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.
Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
Administration now defends insurance manade as a tax
When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”
And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
9 stores in NY fined for propping doors open
Nine stores in Manhattan and the Bronx have been hit with $200 fines for leaving their doors open on hot days in the hope that the escaping cool air would lure sweaty customers. They are the first to be fined as part of a law enacted in 2008.
Last year, only warnings were given out. So far this year, the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs has inspected 105 stores. Seventy were in compliance, 26 were issued warnings and 9 that had been warned last year were fined, said Kay Sarlin, a department spokeswoman.
Fines start at $200, and go to $400 for any further infractions in the following 18 months. The legislation states that any business larger than 4,000 square feet or part of a chain with five or more stores in the city must keep its doors closed when using air-conditioning.
21 die in gun battle near U.S. border with Mexico
A massive gun battle between rival drug and migrant-trafficking gangs near the U.S. border left 21 people dead on Thursday, prosecutors said.
The clash occurred in a sparsely populated area about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the Arizona border — a prime corridor for immigrant and drug smuggling.
Sonora’s Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that nine people were captured by police at the scene of the shooting, six of whom had been wounded in the confrontation. Authorities at the scene found seven rifles.
Officials did not say why the gunfight had broken out, but powerful and well-armed Mexican gangs often fight for control of smuggling routes into the United States.
Mexican candidate for governor is assassinated
A popular candidate for governor who had made increased security his prime campaign pledge was killed along with at least four others Monday morning in a brazen attack, rattling a nation already alarmed by surging drug violence.
Despite years of atrocities tied to drug gangs, the killing of a candidate who was widely considered the front-runner just days before voters go to the polls drew unusually wide condemnation, and it drove election-related violence to a level not seen in Mexico in years.
“This was an act not only against a candidate of a political party but against democratic institutions, and it requires a united and firm response from all those who work for democracy,” a stern-faced President Felipe Calderón, who has found his presidency repeatedly bogged down by drug violence, said in a nationally televised address.
“Unlikely” that Obama will close Guantanamo
Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.
When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.
“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.
Obama urges G20 nations to continue using government “stimulus”
The New York Times, “Obama Asks G-20 States to Maintain Stimulus”
by Sewell Chan
President Obama will face significant challenges at a summit meeting in Toronto next week, where he will be trying to secure cooperation from European and Chinese leaders in nurturing the still-fragile recovery of the global economy.
European countries are pulling back on spending with a speed that the Obama administration believes could derail the global recovery. China signaled this week that it would not let its currency rise in value anytime soon, raising the prospect of a showdown with Congress. Germany and France have turned skittish about an American-led push to raise capital and liquidity requirements for large banks.
Meanwhile, the United States and Britain favor a tax on the giant banks, but do not support a further-reaching proposal by the European Union to tax financial transactions. Canada, Japan and Australia oppose any form of bank tax.
The New York Times article continues here.
Lithium deposit worth nearly $1T discovered in Afghanistan
The New York Times, “U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan”
by James Risen
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The New York Times article continues here.
The nuclear option? U.S. says “No way”
The New York Times, “Nuclear Option on Gulf Oil Spill? No Way, U.S. Says”
by William J. Broad
The chatter began weeks ago as armchair engineers brainstormed for ways to stop the torrent of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: What about nuking the well?
Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow. Why not try it here?
The idea has gained fans with each failed attempt to stem the leak and each new setback — on Wednesday, the latest rescue effort stalled when a wire saw being used to slice through the riser pipe got stuck.
“Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapon system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,” Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert and investment banker, told Bloomberg News on Friday, attributing the nuclear idea to “all the best scientists.”
The New York Times article continues here.
Many employers to face tax penalties under Obamacare
The New York Times, “US plans naval exercises with South Korea:Pentagon”
by Robert Pear
About one-third of employers subject to major requirements of the new health care law may face tax penalties because they offer health insurance that could be considered unaffordable to some employees, a new study says.
The study, by Mercer, one of the nation’s largest employee benefit consulting concerns, is based on a survey of nearly 3,000 employers.
It suggests that a little-noticed provision of the law could affect far more employers than Congress had assumed.
The New York Times article continues here.
House panel rejects a plan to shift detainees to Illinois
The New York Times, “House Panel Rejects a Plan to Shift Detainees to Illinois”
by Charlie Savage
The House Armed Services Committee has dealt a blow to President Obama’s hopes to shutter the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by unanimously approving legislation that would prohibit creating a detention center inside the United States.
The administration had asked Congress to approve about $350 million to buy and renovate a nearly empty prison in Thomson, Ill. The White House plan was to empty Guantánamo and transfer its detainees to Illinois — including 48 who would be held without trial as wartime prisoners.
But late Wednesday, the House committee unanimously approved a defense bill for 2011 that bans spending money to build or modify any facility inside the United States to house Guantánamo detainees, according to a summary of the bill.
The New York Times article continues here.
Blumenthal lies about service in Vietnam
The New York Times, “Candidate’s Words on Vietnam Service Differ From History”
by Raymond Hernandez
At a ceremony honoring veterans and senior citizens who sent presents to soldiers overseas, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut rose and spoke of an earlier time in his life.
“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”
There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.
Astronauts continue to attack Obama’s NASA plan
The New York Times, “Astronauts Attack Obama’s NASA Plan”
by Kenneth Chang
Neil A. Armstrong, the most famous man in the history of NASA and the first man to walk on the moon, on Wednesday sharply criticized President Obama’s plan to cancel the space agency’s program to send astronauts back to the moon.
“If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered,” Mr. Armstrong said in testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “I do not believe that would be in our best interests.”
Mr. Armstrong; Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to walk on the moon; and James A. Lovell Jr., the commander of Apollo 13, wrote a letter last month that called the proposed changes to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration “devastating.”
The New York Times article continues here.
Obamanomics: President encouraged Merkel to bail-out Greece
The New York Times, “Debt Aid Package for Europe Took Nudge From Washington”
by Steven Erlanger, Katrin Bennhold, and David E. Sanger
President Obama had just flown into Hampton, Va., Sunday morning to deliver a commencement address. But before he donned his silky academic robes, he was on the phone with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, offering urgent advice — and some not so subtle prodding — that Europe needed to try something big.
Weeks of hesitant half-steps to address Greece’s debt problems had only worsened market worries about the euro, and were threatening the still-fragile economic recoveries in the United States and Asia. Now, Mr. Obama told Mrs. Merkel that the Europeans needed an overwhelming financial rescue to end speculation that the euro — and European unity — could crumble.
“He was trying to convey that he knew these were politically difficult steps that the leaders there had to take, that he had gone through them as well,” said one senior administration official familiar with the conversation. “And that, from his experience, trying to get out ahead as much as possible was the right way to go.”
That call was part of what a senior Treasury Department official called “one long conversation” with European leaders, who over an extraordinary weekend of late nights and early mornings overcame German resistance and agreed to a wholesale expansion of the bloc’s political and financial mission. Bending the rules, they backed the stability of all 16 countries that use the euro with loan guarantees adding up to nearly $1 trillion.
The New York Times article continues here.
Freddie Mac wants $10.6 billion more
The New York Times (AP), “Freddie Mac Seeks Billions More After Big Loss”
Freddie Mac is asking for $10.6 billion in additional federal aid after posting a big loss in the first three months of the year.
The new request will bring the total bill for rescuing Freddie Mac, which has been effectively owned by the government since nearly collapsing in September 2008, to $61.3 billion.
Freddie Mac said Wednesday that it lost $8 billion, or $2.45 a share, in its first quarter. The results compared with a loss of $10.4 billion a year earlier. The most recent quarter includes $1.3 billion in dividends paid to the Treasury Department.
The New York Times (AP) article continues here.