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We knew the Republicans were battling with Obama over the budget—but the Democrats? The New York Times reports the president, who has invited five senior members of his own party to fill in some budget details, is getting a lot of pushback. The lawmakers—Senators Baucus and Conrad, and Reps. Rangel, Waxman and Spratt—have erased his proposal to limit tax deductions for the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers; his cuts in government subsidies to big farmers and agribusiness; and his planned cap on emissions. Obama “is taking a gamble in outsourcing the drafting of his agenda’s details to these five veteran lawmakers and others in Congress, each with his own political and parochial calculations,” The Times reports. But the president is not going to roll over: The White House is indicating it will push back against the senators.
As New York’s attorney general probes deeper into Merrill Lynch’s bonuses, more information is coming to light about the bank’s costly wager in Brazil. Its ambitious expansion into Brazil last spring—poaching 10 dealmakers there and offering them millions in guaranteed bonuses—is an example, The Wall Street Journal reports, of investment bankers costing their firm far more than they earned. Through December, Merrill’s investment bankers in Latin America cost at least $100 million in expenses while earning about $50 million. The loss may be a blip on the firm’s $27.6 billion hole in 2008, but they show how “how aggressively Merrill was willing to pay for talent as it revved up its ambitions outside the U.S., at a time when the firm was suffering from crippling trading losses,” The Journal reports.
A police officer has been shot dead in a republican stronghold in Northern Ireland—the third such killing in 48 hours. The violence is testing the province’s fragile peace, and loyalist paramilitaries may retaliate. “We are tonight staring into the abyss,” said a member of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labor Party. “I would appeal to people to pull back.” On Monday night, the officer and a colleague were responding to a call about “suspicious activity” in County Armagh when their patrol cars were attacked they were fired on; the second officer was injured. Two days earlier, a pair of unarmed soldiers were shot dead as they picked up pizzas in County Antrim. “Loyalist paramilitaries have so far resisted reaction, despite numerous attacks against police officers over the past 18 months,” The Times of London reports. “But while the death of soldiers is regarded as an attack on the British state, the murder of a local police officer may be interpreted as an attack on the local unionist community.”
President Obama completed a turnaround of Bush administration policy this morning by officially ending a federal ban on funding of stem cell research. "In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values," he said, carefully noting that the new rules would not "open the door" for "dangerous, profoundly wrong" human cloning. Obama went out of his way to make clear that under his watch, "We base our public policies on the soundest science" and "appoint scientific advisors based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology." The National Institutes of Health now has 120 days to figure out federal funding guidelines and limitations.
Trouble at sea: The US government has filed a formal complaint with China, saying its boats harassed Navy ships patrolling international waters off the Chinese coast. It seems the Chinese have taken to pestering US ships by impeding their path, blinding crews with a bright spotlight, and buzzing them with surveillance craft. In an episode that reads like a bizarre game of maritime chicken, the crew of the USNS Impeccable blasted one of a group of Chinese ships that surrounded it with a fire hose. In response, the Chinese crew stripped to its underwear, did not move, and narrowly avoided a collision. Just in the past week, the US has documented five cases that the Pentagon describes as “increasingly aggressive conduct” by Chinese ships.
Just five months after writing an optimistic op-ed piece in the New York Times encouraging Americans to invest in the stock market, Warren Buffett admitted that the economy has "fallen off a cliff." Shares of Berkshire Hathaway, the billionaire's company, have lost nearly half of their value, and the prospects for the future do not look good. In an interview with CNBC, he said the economy has become a "worst case scenario" and added to growing criticism of Obama's economic plan, saying that it could lead to major inflation. While he is unsure when the market will bottom out, he does expect that in five years the economy would be back on track.
Two months into Roland Burris’ term as Illinois senator, Democrats are circling his seat like vultures waiting for a wounded antelope to drop. Burris, appointed to his seat by the ousted Rod Blagojevich, has been plagued by allegations he pledged help to Blago in exchange for the seat. While the 71-year-old freshman senator has not officially announced whether he’ll run in 2010, he’s already created a campaign website to seek contributions. If he does run, he may be up against William Daley, brother of the mayor of Chicago and co-chairman of the Obama transition team, as well as Obama buddy and Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias. Cheryle Jackson, Blagojevich’s first press secretary and current head of the Chicago Urban League, also has said she’s interested in running, as has Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.
Iceland’s banking industry took another hit today as Iceland’s last surviving major bank was nationalized after its funding dried up. Straumur-Burdaras Investment Bank lost $883 million in 2008 and lent money to a number of companies that went bankrupt. Iceland’s financial regulator, the Financial Supervisory Authority, suspended the bank’s board, and Chief Executive William Fall resigned. The bank’s major shareholders included Samson Global Holdings, controlled by Icelandic multimillionaire Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson.
Talk about a rough start to the season: First Alex Rodriguez is outed as the most famous steroid user in baseball. Then, just as he is beginning his effort at redemption, he discovers a hip injury that will keep him out for six to nine weeks. At least his arthroscopic surgery today in Colorado was a success. Dr. Marc Philippon, known as “the hip doctor to the stars,” confirmed the good news: “Alex is doing very well. There were no surprises.” If all goes well, the Daily News reports, A-Rod could be swinging a bat by the end of the week, and back on the field at the new Yankee Stadium in two months.
Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who recently finalized a power-sharing deal with aging dictator Robert Mugabe, sought to allay concerns today that the car accident last week that left his wife dead and him injured was an assassination attempt. It was an accident, he said: “There was only a ‘one in a thousand’ chance that the incident involved any foul play.” The PM’s vehicle flipped three times after being struck by an out-of-control truck carrying aid for HIV/AIDS patients. Tsvangirai, still noticeably shaken by the episode, today thanked God for 31 years with his wife, Susan, and asked his supporters to join him in celebrating her life.
Work on a new London playhouse has led to the discovery of the long-lost first stage of William Shakespeare. The wooden foundations of aptly named The Theatre, the location of which was lost for 400 years, were found five feet under the surface after construction began. Archaeologists determined the remains were, in fact, part of the open air playhouse that opened in 1576 and was home to Romeo & Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The new venue will open in 2012. Any guesses as to the first play?
It appears no one, not even the floppy-haired namesake of “The Ken Burns Effect,” can escape the clutches of the recession. After 22 years, General Motors Corp. announced it will cut off support—said to be 35 percent of each Burns film—for the “gold standard” of public television documentaries, as the financial crisis “has forced GM to rein in such spending.” Burns is responsible for the notable epics The Civil War, Jazz, and Baseball; his latest, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea will air this fall.
America has fewer self-identified Christians than ever before, according to a survey released today by Trinity College, the Washington Post reports. The survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of 2008 showed that only 76 percent of Americans call themselves Christians, compared to 86 percent in 1990. Furthermore, the number of people identifying themselves as generic Christian has risen from 194,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million, which corresponds strongly to a decline in people identifying themselves as mainline Protestants, including Methodists and Lutherans. The survey also supported several trends that sociologists have already identified—the growing number of people with no religion and an increase in religious minorities including Muslims, Mormons, Wiccans and pagans.
Wall Street is openly talking about how the Dow may plummet to 5,000, and that could be a good thing. In a blog post, Henry Blodget writes on The Business Insider, "The more negative everyone gets, the more likely we're getting close to bottom." The only problem is that strategists aren't yet predicting the low—so the turning point may be a way off. Lucky for us, according to experts, stocks probably won't hit Depression lows unless the Obama administration crashes and burns as badly as Hoover did.
After spending a presidential campaign on the bus with McCain, Senator Joe Lieberman is now singing a different tune. The Connecticut independent, who just months ago accused Obama of being “naïve, untested, and unwilling,” now applauds Obama’s national security team, and he’s even clashed on the Senate floor with McCain. Obama, who disappointed Lieberman by backing challenger Ned Lamont in his 2006 re-election bid, gained some points by urging Democrats to preserve Lieberman’s chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. “That obviously sealed the deal and I appreciated it a lot,” Lieberman said. Although he’s up for re-election in 2012, the senator says his change of heart is not politically motivated.
Several months ago, 43 women from a town an hour north of Baghdad turned themselves in as members of the Al Khansaa all-female suicide bombers wing of Al Qaeda and publicly renounced the terrorist group, Newsweek reports. Ironically, the women's defection has raised the standing of the area's tribal leaders, some of whom probably helped recruit the women into the Qaeda network to begin with. Quitting Al Qaeda hasn't been easy, as their community subjects them to harassment and ostracizes them. A local official told his wife not to go near them, and the teen daughter of one former Khansaa member was expelled for school for her mother's sins. The women are collectively forbidden from veiling their faces so they'll be recognizable on the street, and the neighbor of at least one woman is filing continuous complaints against her in hopes she'll move away.
President Obama was so miffed by repeated questions from New York Times reporters about whether his policies are "socialist" that he called the paper after their sit-down to set the record straight. "Just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter—It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question," he said, before noting the bank rescue "wasn't on my watch." He added, "I just think it's clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system." But could Obama have seriously thought the Times' line of questioning ("Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?... Is there anything wrong with saying yes?") was less than serious? As the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins points out, in the same interview, Obama admitted to reading "most of the big national papers" that have been analyzing the policies for some time.
What goes around comes around. And with that, Marty Peretz, the former owner of the New Republic magazine, is taking the publication back under his watch along with a group of investors, including former Lazard executive Laurence Grafstein. "Something is happening today that I am very happy about," Peretz told Politico. "There is a group of us that are acquiring the New Republic from CanWest." CanWest purchased the liberal-leaning magazine in early 2007. Until then, Peretz had a stake in the publication dating back to 1974. Like before, Peretz will be editor-in-chief and Frank Foer will remain as editor.
Martha Stewart's dog Ghenghis Khan was killed in a gas explosion on Friday at the Pazzazz Pet Boarding kennel in the Pocono Mountains. As the kennel received a propane delivery, the tank ignited and set the pens on fire. The truck driver was critically burned. Fifteen dogs died in the explosion and two died over the weekend. Stewart was "deeply saddened" by the death of her pet and said her "heart goes out" to the kennel owner.
Reports that President Barack Obama will push for a global stimulus are right on time: The World Bank is forecasting that the global economy will shrink this year for the first time since the 1940s. The bank predicts that, due to the economic crisis, some 46 million people will be pushed into poverty by the end of 2009. The World Bank president said action must be taken “to avoid social and political unrest” and called on developed nations to devote 0.7 percent of stimulus program funds toward a new Vulnerability Fund for developing countries, only one quarter of which have the ability to launch their own programs.
Will the stimulus soon go global? According to The Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama plans to push for a worldwide stimulus at a G-20 meeting next month. “Washington's focus is at odds with France, Germany and other European nations that want the Group of 20 summit on April 2 to focus on rewriting rules governing financial markets. These nations say lax regulation was a major cause of the financial crisis and want to tighten their grip on hedge funds and private-equity firms.”
The North Korean army is on standby, and the nation issued a statement Sunday that, if anyone attempts to block a satellite launch scheduled for Monday, the communist nation will declare war on them. Many fear North Korea's launch will be disguised as a missile test. The launch is timed to coincide with the United States' annual war games with South Korea which North Korean officials suspect are rehearsals for an invasion. North Korea's state-controlled Korean Central News Agency announced today, "Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war." Speaking in the voice of the North's military, the statement said, "Our revolutionary armed forces will launch without hesitation a just retaliatory strike operation not only against all the interceptor means involved but against the strongholds" of the US, Japan, and South Korea. The US's special envoy to Pyongyang has a series of meetings scheduled with Korean leaders to deal with the threat, and is attempting to convince North Korea to cancel the launch.
For two hours last night there was no talk of the recession or dire news to report, as Washington pols and Hollywood luminaries turned out for a Kennedy Center birthday fete for ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy. President Obama led a rousing round of “Happy Birthday” and Caroline Kennedy, while presenting her uncle with a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, gave a nod to her wayward Senate bid, saying, "I never thought I would be in a room with so many senators.” Lauren Bacall hailed Kennedy, whose birthday was February 22, as “the greatest senator,” and Bill Cosby did stand-up, while James Taylor performed for the senator, who watched it all from the balcony.
A pastor was shot and killed during his Sunday sermon yesterday in Maryville, Illinois' First Baptist Church. The Associated Press reports that the gunman walked down the aisle shortly after 8AM and shot the pastor with a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, firing four rounds until the weapon jammed. The pastor attempted to deflect the bullets with his Bible, which, witnesses report, sent a "confetti-like spray of paper into the air." When congregants wrestled the gunman to the ground, he injured himself and two others with a knife.
Raymond Chandler couldn't have written a better plot: The Times of London reports that Helg Sgarbi, 43, will go on trial today for allegedly blackmailing Germany's richest woman, BMW heiress Susanne Klatten, 46, out of millions of euros. Reportedly the grandson of a forced laborer, Sgarbi's possible motive may have been revenge against Klatten's grandfather, who advised Hitler on economic policy. The lawyer Sgarbi chose, Egon Geiss, 77, made his name defending Nazis and may try to stir up stories from the Nazi past. Supposedly, Sgarbi first bilked Klatten out of $8.8 million by telling her that a US Mafia don was threatening to kill him after accidentally running over the man's daughter in Florida. Klatten delivered, but when she tried to end the affair after admitting it to her husband, Sgarbi sent her compromising pictures of the two of them and asked for $62 million.
President Barack Obama repealed former-president Bush’s ban on federal funding for stem-cell research today, but he has his sights set much broader than that single issue. "I would simply say this memorandum is not concerned solely — or even specifically — with stem cell research," said the chairman of the White House’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. According to the Associated Press, “[Obama’s] advisers said it was part of a broader declaration that solid science — not political ideology — would guide the new administration's policies on matters ranging from renewable energy to climate change.”
Director Zack Snyder's Watchmen scored $55.7 million in its opening weekend as the U.S.'s number one movie, but failed to break the March opening record of $70.9 million set by his earlier film, 300, also the adaptation of a graphic novel. The film is another lucrative collaboration between Warner Bros and its financing partner Legendary Pictures Film, which collaborated on The Dark Knight. The R-rated film's haul included $5.5 million from 124 IMAX theaters. Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail dropped to second place this week with a comparatively diminutive $8.8 million, with kidnapping film Taken rounding out the top three with $7.5 million.
It’s been awhile since we’ve checked in on Josef Fritzl, the Austrian father whose trial begins next week for allegedly imprisoning his daughter in the basement as a sex slave for 24 years and fathering seven children with her. So what’s new? Via a televised statement, Fritzl's daughter Elisabeth, 43, will testify that her father slipped pornography under her pillow when she was only a child and began assaulting her at age 11 and later, in the dungeon, chained her to the wall while he raped her and physically hurt her in other ways she does not care to specify. Fritzl will mount the shocking defense that his daughter was having sex, smoking and drinking in her teens, that he wanted to save her and that their sex was consensual. Fritzl also believes he could earn up $1.4 million by selling his memoirs and is trying to sell footage for a television documentary for a similar sum. His children's lawyer already succeeded in blocking a scheme to sell public tickets to the house for $14 a head.
The Queen of Talk is weighing in on the reported reconciliation between Rihanna and Chris Brown. Speaking on her show recently, Oprah said to the pop star (who was not present), “If a man hits you once, he will hit you again. He will hit you again.” Oprah also said she will discuss domestic violence on an upcoming show, “dedicated to all the Rihannas of the world." 19-year-old Brown was charged with two felony counts of assault and making criminal threats. He entered no plea last week.
Here’s an unemployment figure you don’t need to shed a tear over: David Addington, the aide to former vice president Dick Cheney who pushed many of the most controversial policies in the war on terror, is, according to The New York Times, “said to still be looking for work.” The revelation comes as part of a larger report about the futures of lawyers such as John Yoo, the Bush administration official who argued for the unitary executive and wrote the infamous “torture memo.” “What is a government lawyer’s responsibility if legal advice he gives turns out to be, in the view of many authorities, grievously flawed? Can he be blamed for damaging, and arguably illegal, acts carried out with his imprimatur? Should he suffer any punishment?”
Take it with a grain of salt: In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis takes aim at several recent claims, including that banks aren’t lending (he says bank credit has increased during the recession) and that bank nationalization is the best solution (“The announcement of nationalization would undermine confidence in the financial system and send shudders through the investment community”). The piece is more interesting than you might expect, though it ends with the type of platitude you’d expect from a CEO: “The answer, in my view, is to let competitive forces lead us back to responsible lending practices, not the type of indiscriminate lending that has created so many problems.”
