WASHINGTON — The Agriculture Department abruptly ordered congressional auditors to leave its Washington offices this week and told employees not to cooperate with them. ‘You are hereby instructed not to meet with any member of the (Government Accountability Office) today, or until this matter is resolved,’ Michael Watts, head of the department’s office of adjudication, wrote to employees Wednesday in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press. The auditors were seeking information for an ongoing review of Agriculture’s civil rights office, including whether the department had provided false information about the office’s progress in handling discrimination complaints. J. Michael Kelly, Agriculture’s deputy general counsel, said the GAO investigators called the department Wednesday morning to say they were on their way over and wanted to speak with certain employees. He said the auditors refused to let department attorneys sit in on the meetings. After initially allowing interviews to proceed, department officials stopped them and told the investigators to leave the building, Kelly said. ‘We are not interested in having our employees potentially put themselves at risk when they have not yet been advised of their rights and when we were not allowed to provide counsel,’ Kelly […]
In a nondescript conference room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside listened last week as an Army prosecutor outlined the criminal case against her in a preliminary hearing. The charges: attempting suicide and endangering the life of another soldier while serving in Iraq. Her hands trembled as Maj. Stefan Wolfe, the prosecutor, argued that Whiteside, now a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed, should be court-martialed. After seven years of exemplary service, the 25-year-old Army reservist faces the possibility of life in prison if she is tried and convicted. Military psychiatrists at Walter Reed who examined Whiteside after she recovered from her self-inflicted gunshot wound diagnosed her with a severe mental disorder, possibly triggered by the stresses of a war zone. But Whiteside’s superiors considered her mental illness ‘an excuse’ for criminal conduct, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. At the hearing, Wolfe, who had already warned Whiteside’s lawyer of the risk of using a ‘psychobabble’ defense, pressed a senior psychiatrist at Walter Reed to justify his diagnosis. ‘I’m not here to play legal games,’ Col. George Brandt responded angrily, according to a recording of the hearing. ‘I am here out […]
Seven years in the credit-counseling business didn’t prepare Ann Estes for the alarming trend she began noticing last fall: As her clients’ mortgage bills became unaffordable, a growing number of them began paying their credit card bills before - and sometimes instead of - their mortgages. ‘We’ve never seen anything like this,’ says Estes, who counsels clients by phone from her office in Richmond, Va. ‘Their homes are at risk, and they know it. But people say, ‘I don’t want to let my credit cards go because that’s my cash flow.’ ‘ Across the nation, credit counselors are reporting the same trend. Credit bureau analyses of consumer payment data show that financially squeezed borrowers have begun paying their credit card and car bills before their mortgages. That’s a striking reversal from the norm, one that reflects rising desperation. It suggests that some people essentially have given up trying to stay current with their mortgages and instead are focused on using credit cards to squeak by. If the trend persists, many economists say, it could accelerate mortgage losses and further drag down the economy. Rising living costs, along with cheap and plentiful credit, have led consumers to […]
WASHINGTON — The United States will drastically reduce emergency food aid to some of the poorest countries this year because of soaring food prices, The Washington Post reported Saturday. Citing unnamed officials, the newspaper said the US Agency for International Development was drafting plans to cut down the number of recipient nations and the amount of food provided to them. A 41-percent surge in prices of wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months has generated a 120-million-dollar budget shortfall that will force the USAID to reduce emergency operations, the report said. That deficit is projected to rise to 200 million dollars by the end of the year. The USAID is reviewing all of the agency’s emergency programs, which target countries like Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, Honduras and Sudan’s Darfur region. ‘We’re in the process now of going country by country and analyzing the commodity price increase on each country,’ The Post quotes Jeff Borns, director of USAID’s Food for Peace program as saying. ‘Then we’re going to have to prioritize.’
NEW YORK — Food stamps are the symbol of poverty in the US. In the era of the credit crunch, a record 28 million Americans are now relying on them to survive – a sure sign the world’s richest country faces economic crisis We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families. Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s. The increase – from 26.5 million in 2007 – is due partly to recent efforts to increase public awareness of the programme and also a switch from paper coupons to electronic debit cards. But above all it is the pressures being exerted on ordinary Americans by an economy that is suddenly beset by troubles. Housing foreclosures, accelerating jobs […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
