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Archive for the 'Economy' Category

Nov 13th, 2010

Summary: An independent 25-member task force led by former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and former national security adviser Samuel Berger is cautioning President Barack Obama about the high cost of the Afghanistan war and suggests the United States should downsize its ambitions and reduce its military presence in Afghanistan if Obama’s December 2010 Afghanistan policy review finds the current strategy is not working. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 13, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that morale had fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, while those in Iraq showed much improved mental health amid lower violence. There were 133 reported active-duty Army suicides from January 2009 through October 2009, compared with 115 for the same period in 2008.


Aug 29th, 2010

Summary: As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on August 29, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Kandahar, Afghanistan showed signs of slipping back under Taliban control as August 2009 became the deadliest month of the eight-year war for U.S. troops in Afghanistan — a setback for President Barack Obama’s war strategy.


May 6th, 2010

Summary: It was not immediately clear why the Dow Jones industrial average lost some 6 percent of its value in a matter of minutes and then recovered almost as quickly. The Dow ended with a loss of 346.51 points or 3.2 percent after its biggest intraday move in history. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on May 6, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter gave U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann a liar “Pants on Fire” rating for her false statement, “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” In fact, the February 1976 scare happened on the watch of Gerald Ford, a Republican — not that President Ford was blameworthy in the least; in fact, he called for a nationwide vaccination program, in which 40 million Americans were vaccinated in just 10 days.


Apr 2nd, 2010

Summary: On Good Friday, Christians around the world commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ — the holiest day in the Christian calendar. … The U.S. economy has posted its largest job gain in three years, with unemployment in March remaining at 9.7 percent for the third straight month. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on April 2, 2009, Aubrey Immelman featured PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning project of the St. Petersburg Times to help find the truth in American politics by fact-checking statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists, and interest groups and rating them on the Truth-O-Meter.


Dec 7th, 2009

Summary: For President Barack Obama, the economic cost of his Afghanistan surge plan proved troubling, after he received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care reform plan. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on December 7, 2008, Aubrey Immelman reported that from Basra in the south to Irbil in the north, Iraqi activists are trying to counter the rising influence of religious fundamentalists and tribal chieftains who have insisted that women wear the veil, prevented girls from receiving education, and sanctioned killings of women accused of besmirching their family’s honor.


Nov 21st, 2009

Summary: The United States government has spent $53 billion on reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools, and bridges. But there are growing concerns, according to the New York Times, that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 21, 2008, Aubrey Immelman reported that followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had stomped on and burned an effigy of President George Bush in the same central Baghdad square where Iraqis beat a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein with their sandals five years earlier. Chanting and waving flags, thousands of Iraqis filled Firdous Square to protest a proposed U.S.-Iraqi security pact that would allow American troops to stay for three more years.


Apr 29th, 2009

Summary: Iraq is falling fall far behind schedule in creating a system to maintain its own military equipment, costing American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to fill in the gaps, according to a new U.S. audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. … The death toll from twin car bomb blasts in a crowded Baghdad market rose to 51. The car bombs, which also wounded 76 people in the capital’s sprawling Sadr City slum, followed a series of other attacks in the past two weeks that have stirred fears of a return to broader sectarian bloodshed in Iraq.


Apr 16th, 2009

Summary: A Homeland Security Department intelligence estimate warns that right-wing extremists could use the bad state of the U.S. economy and the election of the country’s first black president to recruit members and incite violence. Aubrey Immelman announces pro-life public lecture by Stephanie Gray of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn.


Mar 30th, 2009

Summary: Pentagon spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to fight terrorism elsewhere has reached $685.7 billion since 2001, according to a U.S. government watchdog agency. The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, said the Iraq war accounted for $533.5 billion in Defense Department spending obligations through December 2008, while spending on operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and the Philippines totaled $124.1 billion. The remaining $28.1 billion was for operations to defend the U.S. mainland, the GAO said in a letter to Congress dated March 30, 2009.


Mar 20th, 2009

Summary: What’s worse — corporate bailout or no bailout? Financial analysts and federal officials have warned that doing nothing to save AIG — or banks or the auto industry — would lead to catastrophe: an economic domino effect of bank losses, stock market chaos, and job cuts. Here’s what might happen if companies deemed “too big to fail” were allowed to do just that.