In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush’s surveillance program. During the briefing, said administration and Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances. Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States. One former official noted that before Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, top administration officials weighed shooting down the aircraft if it got too close to Washington, D.C. What if the president had strong evidence that a […]
Americans are working as hard as ever, but their paychecks aren’t keeping pace with rising inflation. That means trouble for their pocketbooks – and for an economy that’s fueled by their spending. Indeed, after two years of a “jobless recovery” following the 2001 recession, the US economy now faces something equally unsettling: a “wageless recovery.” Several government reports this week tell the story. For the first year since the Great Depression, the personal savings rate went negative in 2005. Pay and benefits, meanwhile, rose just 3.1 percent last year – the lowest rate since 1996 and not enough to outpace a 3.4 percent jump in the consumer price index. Is there any relief in sight? None came Thursday, as the government reported a decline in worker productivity for the closing months of last year, a trend that could limit future wage growth. The outlook isn’t all discouraging, but a four-year-old economic expansion is clearly struggling to maintain its momentum. The reason: Americans are being squeezed from both sides of the household ledger. On the income side, wage growth has been historically low for a period of economic recovery. On the spending side, energy prices and interest […]
In an unprecedented action, the Environmental Protection Agency’s own scientific panel on Friday challenged the agency’s proposed public health standards governing soot and dust. The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, mandated by Congress to review such proposals, asserted Friday that the standards put forward by EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson ignored most of the committee’s earlier recommendations and could lead to additional heart attacks, lung cancer and respiratory ailments. The Los Angeles Basin, especially the Riverside area, and the Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra have the worst particulate pollution in the nation. The problem in urban areas is largely attributable to truck exhaust and diesel-powered vehicles; the Owens Valley has major dust storms. In December, Johnson proposed to slightly tighten the health standards that state and local governments must meet in regulating industries and other sources of pollution. But those standards, governing the smallest and most hazardous particles of soot, were substantially weaker than the scientists’ recommendations. Johnson also proposed to exempt rural areas and mining and agriculture industries from standards governing larger coarse particles, and he declined to adopt the panel’s proposed haze reduction standards. EPA officials are taking public comment on the […]
President Bush plans to propose a $2.7 trillion budget tomorrow that would shrink most parts of the government unrelated to the nation’s security while slowing spending on Medicare by $36 billion during the next five years, according to White House documents. The spending plan Bush is to recommend to Congress will call for the elimination or reduction of 141 programs — for a savings of $14.5 billion — across a broad swath of federal agencies, according to administration and congressional officials who have had access to budget documents in advance. Wide-ranging as they are, those cuts pale in comparison with the White House’s attempt to carve money from Medicare — the first tangible result from a vow the president made in his State of the Union address last week to constrain the massive entitlement programs for the elderly and the poor. Overall, the budget for the 2007 fiscal year would further reshape the government in the way the administration has been striving to during the past half-decade: building up military capacity and defenses against terrorist threats on U.S. soil, while restraining expenditures on many domestic areas, from education programs to train service. For the second consecutive year, […]
Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely. The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. Thy also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted. AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users’ main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
