A new report finds that “U.S. companies’ planned layoffs rose 15 percent in May from April to the highest monthly total since December 2005. … May’s total was 46 percent higher than the 71,115 planned layoffs in the same month last year.”
Speaking at AIPAC yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “escalated the Bush administration’s anti-Iran rhetoric.” “We would be willing to meet with them but not while they continue to inch toward nuclear weapons under the cover of talks,” she said. “The real question isn’t why won’t the Bush administration talk to Iran. The real question is why won’t Iran talk to us.”
More than five years since the United States invaded Iraq, the U.S. government has finally “opened its first permanent office [in Iraq] for Iraqi refugees seeking to settle in the United States, responding to criticism that the Bush administration has failed to help thousands of Iraqis whose lives are in danger because of their work with American organizations.”
63 percent: The share of Americans who say “the government should not regulate whether gays and lesbians can marry the people they choose,” according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll. In the same poll, 33 percent said the government has the right “to prohibit or allow” such marriages while 4 percent had no opinion.
Opponents of teaching evolution in school have adopted a new strategy. Instead of pushing for “intelligent design” curriculum, they are seeking to require that the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution be taught in public schools. While the phrase sounds benign, critics say it is an effort to “undermine the teaching of evolution” and to push “religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.”
The U.S. will tell the G8 nations at July’s climate conference that it will not be able to meet large cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Despite the European Union’s pledge to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2020, the chief climate negotiator for the U.S. told Reuters, “It’s frankly not do-able for us.”
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) declared yesterday that cost overruns for Pentagon weapons had “reached crisis proportions.” Levin has proposed “an independent office at the Defense Department that would attempt to ensure the accuracy of cost estimates used in defense contracts.”
Economists say “[p]rices have been soaring long enough and fast enough” that “the nation is at risk of a self-reinforcing cycle of inflation like that experienced in the 1970s.” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke highlighted the risk yesterday saying the rapid price escalation, if sustained, “might lead the public to expect higher long-term inflation rates, an expectation that ultimately could become self-confirming.”
An analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense found that clients of a Jack Abramoff associate – Kevin Ring — received more than $16 million in earmarks in the fiscal 2004 transportation spending bill.
And finally: Comic book publisher Marvel is revamping UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s “dull-as-dishwater image.” In a new comic, “Captain Britain and MI13,” Brown is depicted staving off “an attack of evil, green-skinned aliens” who have managed to infiltrate the British Cabinet. The writer of the comic, Paul Cornell, admitted that in real life, he does “admire the prime minister.”
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