Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Iraq Oil Should Pay For Reconstruction
Democrats Want Iraqis to Use Oil Surplus
Democrats plan to push legislation this spring that would force the Iraqi government to spend its own surplus in oil revenues to rebuild the country, sparing U.S. dollars. The legislation follows a recommendation by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, that the Bush administration halt troop withdrawals in July. Petraeus on Wednesday was wrapping up two days of congressional testimony in which he has said security gains in the war zone are too fragile to promise further drawdowns. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said pausing troop reductions would signal to the Iraqis that the United States was committed to the war indefinitely. "Rather, we need to put continuous and increasing pressure on the Iraqis to settle their political differences, to pay for their own reconstruction with their oil windfalls, and to take the lead in conducting military operations," said Levin, D-Mich. Iraq has about $30 billion in surplus funds stored in U.S. banks, according to Levin.
Robots To Replace Human Labour
Robots Seen Doing Work Of 3.5 Million...
Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks. Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration. The thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners
Hand Held Lie Detector
The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph. The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
The Great American Depression
USA 2008: The Great Depression
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.
Failing Grades
Three out of 10 US public school students do not graduate from high school, and major city school districts only graduate one out of two students, according to a study released Tuesday. In a report on graduation rates around the country, the EPE Research Center and the America Promise Alliance also showed that the high school graduation rate -- finishing 12 grades of school -- in big cities falls to as low as just 34.6 percent in Baltimore, Maryland, and barely over 40 percent for the troubled Ohio cities of Columbus and Cleveland. And it said that black and native American student's have effectively a one-in-two chance of getting a high school diploma.
Michael Hayden: Iran Developing Nuclear Weapons
CIA Chief Believes Iran Seeking Nukes
CIA director General Michael Hayden said on Sunday he believed that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. In an interview to NBC's 'Meet the Press,' Hayden said the CIA stood by November's National Intelligence Estimate, which assessed that Teheran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. "We stand by the judgment," he said, but added that the report "unfortunately, tends to get oversimplified in public discourse." For instance, he said, "another part of the report that we emphasized is that program that stopped in 2003. It was [clear] they were weaponizing, building the actual device. It remains a program that the Iranians continue to deny ever existed. And the other aspects of the Iranian nuclear effort beyond the weaponization - the development of fissile material, the development of delivery systems - all continue apace."
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