AOL / AP: Time running short, Republicans and Democrats agreed Tuesday on a $1.1 trillion spending bill to avoid a government shutdown and delay a politically-charged struggle over President Barack Obama’s new immigration policy until the new year. In an unexpected move, lawmakers also agreed on legislation expected to be incorporated into the spending measure […]
Discord at C.I.A. Over Interrogation Program
NEW YORK TIMES: In January 2003, 10 months into the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prison program, the agency’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that the relentlessly brutal treatment of prisoners was a train wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” He […]
For Saudi Arabia, plunging oil prices are a political weapon
FINANCIAL TIMES: ….the more threatening regional rival to the House of Saud and its absolutist brand of Sunni Islam is Iran – which, since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion installed a Shia government there, has forged an Arab Shia axis from Baghdad to Beirut, with influence, too, in Saudi neighbours Yemen and Bahrain. Wahhabi Saudi […]
Life in Ukraine’s rebel ‘republics’
In spite of all attempts and of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s promises to stop it, the war in southeastern Ukraine keeps going. Both Russian and Ukrainian Internet are full of information about life under fire in the South-East.
LNP Editorial on real estate reassessment raises complex issues
Not made clear is that homes and businesses built are taxed at values comparable to what they would have been taxed had they existed during the re-assessment period.
HBO’s ‘The Newsroom’ Draws Backlash Over Rape Plot
NEW YORK TIMES: …[Aaron] Sorkin, in an astonishing case of prescience, created a plot that hewed closely to the recent article in Rolling Stone magazine about an accusation of gang rape at the University of Virginia… In the episode, Don Keefer, a television news producer, was ordered to find a college student who had started […]
Pennsylvania pension costs to climb by $466 million next year
After four years of seeing pension costs grow — the state spent about $500 million on pensions in the last budget before Corbett took office, compared to more than $1.7 billion this year…
Senator George Mitchell says Penn State remains on track with post-Sandusky Athletics Integrity Agreement
PENNLIVE.COM: Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell’s ninth quarterly review lacked the pizazz of September’s lifting of the ban on football bowl games…
Rolling Stone rape story fiasco
USA TODAY COLUMN: …”It was too delicious a story,” Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times public editor,told American Journalism Review at the time. “It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press….” In the current imbroglio, Rolling Stone’s biggest problem was its failure to try to interview the […]
U.S. Deportations in Fiscal 2014 Lowest Since Obama Took Office
WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Obama administration deported 315,943 people in the year that ended Sept. 30, a 14% drop from the previous year, said a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement representative. The 2014 total represents the second consecutive year in which removals have declined. In fiscal 2013, the administration removed 368,644 foreigners… Congress is funded […]
For Obama, a Go-It-Alone Push Fits the Times
NEW YORK TIMES: …[President Barack] Obama has long since concluded that pursuing dreams of reconciliation in his final two years in office is a fool’s chase. So he is offering an alternative model for 21st-century presidential success… George C. Edwards III, a Texas A&M professor who edits Presidential Studies Quarterly, wrote last year that critics […]
LETTER: Praise for all three county commissioners
I think we should all thank the current three commissioners for their efforts over the past 7 years. By eliminating the plethora of redundancy taking place at the county and adopting a zero tolerance towards the misuse of tax payer funds…
AOL DAILY FINANCE
A single tea bag might cost 10 cents, though the restaurant will charge you $3 to plop it into a mug of hot water. If you want value, ask for a cup of hot water and lemon, which is free at most restaurants.
Gov.-elect Tom Wolf’s $1 billion drilling tax prediction might be high
But his estimate assumes a wholesale price of gas that drillers in the Marcellus right now can only dream about. At current prices and production, a 5 percent severance tax would produce about $675 million a year…