Tag: Open Thread

Gates told CNN that he has been surprised by the limited scope of criticism aimed so far at his recommendations for the Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2010, which begins October 1, and had heard some “important voices raised in support.”

“I’m relatively optimistic, actually,” he said in the interview, which was taped last week. “I think we’ve presented, as one news magazine referred to it, a radically sane set of proposals. They don’t represent a cut, and where we have eliminated one program, you have added to others.”

“It would still be imprudent to say that we’re past the worst of it but I do think…we are in a stage of stabilization,” Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told reporters.

In Geneva, a World Health Organization official said the virus had not spread in a sustained way outside North America, as would be required before the global pandemic alert level is raised to its highest level — but he added he still expected this to happen.

US President Barack Obama, who champions aggressive action against global warming, invited negotiators from 17 other major economies including developing powers such as China and India to meet in Washington.

The talks came as the clock ticks to a December meeting in Copenhagen that is meant to approve a new global treaty to slow down the planet’s rising temperatures.

Hundreds of Iraqis protested in the southern city of Kut against U.S. forces and the provincial governor also condemned the military operation.

The U.S. military had any immediate comment on the Iraqi stance but said the raid was carried out with the full approval of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government.

Hospitals tested patients with flu symptoms for the never-before-seen virus, which has also infected eight people in the United States. There have been no further deaths in Mexico City since Friday, but 24 new suspected cases were being tested and officials warned the strain was spreading fast between people, meaning there was a risk of a major outbreak.

“It has pandemic potential because it is infecting people,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said in Geneva.

The idea, called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, is at the cutting edge of attempts to dramatically reduce CO2 spewed by industrial plants into the atmosphere.

The technology exists, but is little tested and a group of energy companies, academics and state officials hope to make New York one of the field’s trail blazers.

The tomb of the Egyptian queen has never been found but archaeologists are discovering more evidence that Cleopatra’s priests carried her body to the temple after her suicide, where it could lie with her lover Marc Antony.

“This could be the most important discovery of the 21st century,” Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, told reporters on a tour of the temple on Sunday. “This is the perfect place for them to be hidden.”

But even with U.S. economy now in its sixth quarter of recession, Donald Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, said the central bank’s attempts to heal ailing credit markets and spur an economic recovery have been working, in ways that include lowering mortgage interest rates.

“The situation in financial markets and the economy would have been far worse if the Federal Reserve hadn’t taken the actions we did,” Kohn told a conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Henderson said GM faced no pressure from the Obama administration’s autos task force to make a decision on whether to file for bankruptcy before an established June 1 deadline and said it was “feasible” that the automaker could still avoid bankruptcy despite the short time frame remaining.

But Henderson also said the automaker was drawing up a game plan that would let it emerge as quickly as possible from bankruptcy if it needed to take that route.