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SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012 PAGE 5A
House keeps lid on student loans
B R I E F
Women’s health cash diverted By ALAN FRAM Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Republicans ignored a veto threat and overcame a rebellion by party conservatives to push a bill through the House Friday keeping interest rates on millions of federal student loans from doubling this summer. Lawmakers voted 215-195 to approve a bill that has become an election-year battle between the two parties over helping families in a persistently ailing
economy. The measure sparked debate over women’s health issues, too. The White House and most Democrats opposed the $5.9 billion bill because of how Republicans covered the costs: eliminating a preventive health care fund in President Barack Obama’s health care law. They say the program mostly benefits women, while Republicans call it a loosely controlled slush fund. “This is a politically motivated proposal and not the serious response that
the problem facing America’s college students deserves,” the White House wrote in a veto message shortly before the House vote. Democrats accused Republicans of supporting the effort to keep student loan interest rates low only because of political pressure from Obama. The House measure is destined to die in the Senate, where majority Democrats have written a version of the bill paid for by raising Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on high-income owners of some privately owned companies, which GOP senators oppose. GOP lawmakers were pressured by
conservative groups like the Club for Growth to oppose the legislation because, they said, the government should not subsidize student loans. In the end, 30 Republicans voted no, while 202 voted yes. In the end, 165 Democrats opposed the bill, and 13 voted for it. The House bill would keep interest rates for subsidized Stafford loans at 3.4 percent for another year. Without congressional action, they would rise automatically to 6.8 percent on July 1, a condition set in a law Democrats pushed through Congress five years ago.
The spacecraft’s final resting place will be aboard the USS Intrepid
AP PHOTO
College life is just too much to bear
This Thursday photo provided by the CU Independent shows a bear that wandered into the University of Colorado Boulder, Colo., dorm complex Williams Village falling from a tree after being tranquilized by Colorado wildlife officials. WASHINGTON
Photos show nuke activity
ew satellite imagery appears to show a train of mining carts and N other preparations under way at North
EADS, COLO.
Tornadoes destroy 7 homes
At least seven homes and a hog farm were destroyed after rare nighttime tornadoes reportedly ripped through sparsely populated counties on the southeastern Colorado plains. Authorities say tornadoes were reported early Friday in Prowers, Kiowa and Bent counties, where the homes were destroyed. State emergency management division spokeswoman Micki Trost says a hog farm in Prowers County was also destroyed. The National Weather Service hasn’t confirmed the touchdowns yet but a team is assessing the damage. Overnight tornadoes are rare in Colorado, where cooler nighttime temperatures usually don’t create severe weather. AMSTERDAM
Tourists are ‘weeded out’
This country of canals and tulips is also famous for “coffee shops” where joints and cappuccinos share the menu. Now, the Netherlands’ famed tolerance for drugs could be going up in smoke. A judge on Friday upheld a government plan to ban foreign tourists from buying marijuana by introducing a “weed pass” available only to Dutch citizens and permanent residents. For many tourists visiting Amsterdam the image endures, and smoking a joint in a canal-side coffee shop ranks high on their to-do lists, along with visiting cultural highlights like the Van Gogh Museum and Anne Frank House. Worried that tourism will take a hit, the city’s mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, is hoping to hammer out a compromise with the national government, which relies on municipalities and local police to enforce its drug policies. BEIRUT
Suicide bomber kills 10
Two weeks into a cease-fire agreement, there still was no peace in Syria: Security agents in Damascus collected the remains of 10 people killed in a suicide bombing. Activists reported troops firing on protesters. Video showed a crowd carrying a slain boy to U.N. observers as proof of regime violence. The head of the United Nations said Syrian President Bashar Assad’s continued crackdown on protests has reached an “intolerable stage,” and that the U.N. will try to speed up the deployment of up to 300 monitors to Syria.
AP PHOTO
The Space Shuttle Enterprise flies on the back of the NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft past the Empire State Building as it circles to land at JFK Airport on Friday in New York. Enterprise will make its new home at New York City’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in June.
Shuttle flies into hearts of New Yorkers By MEGHAN BARR Associated Press
NEW YORK — In a city understandably wary of low-flying aircraft, New Yorkers and tourists alike watched with pure joy and excitement Friday as space shuttle Enterprise glided over the skyline on its final aerial journey before it becomes a museum piece. Ten years after 9/11, people gathered on rooftops and the banks of the Hudson River to marvel at the sight of the spacecraft riding piggyback on a modified jumbo jet that flew over the Statue of Liberty and past the skyscrapers along Manhattan’s West Side. “It made me feel empowered. I’m go-
ing to start crying,” Jennifer Patton, a tourist from Canton, Ohio, said after the plane passed over the cheering crowd on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, the floating air-and-space museum that will be the shuttle’s permanent home. “I just feel like to have a plane fly that low over the Hudson, right past New York City, and to have everyone cheering and excited about it, shows that we don’t have fear, that we have a sense of ‘This is ours.”’ Onlookers bundled up on the blustery spring day along the piers on the West Side, cameras slung around their necks. The roar of the aircraft could
barely be heard over the howling winds. In truth, the camera angles on TV made it seem as if the shuttle was a lot closer to the buildings than it really was. The low-altitude flight was well-publicized, and few people were caught offguard. Not one person called 911 to report a low-flying plane, police said. That’s a striking contrast to what happened in 2009 when the Pentagon conducted a photo-op flyover in lower Manhattan by a passenger jet and F-16 fighter. The sight of the aircraft flying past the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan’s financial district set off a flood of 911 calls and sent office workers rushing
into the streets in panic. On Friday, the jet carrying the shuttle turned east and flew over central Long Island. Nassau County office workers looked out their windows and marveled as it passed over the Roosevelt Field Mall, near the spot where Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris in 1927. The shuttle will be taken to the Intrepid by barge in June and is scheduled to open to the public in mid-July. Space shuttle Discovery flew over the nation’s capital last week and will end up at the Smithsonian. Endeavor is going to Los Angeles, and Atlantis is staying at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
Bin Laden now campaign issue Sandusky prosecutors Obama campaign implies Romney might not have gone after al-Qaida leader. By BEN FELLER AP White House Correspondent
WASHINGTON — The killing of Osama bin Laden, first presented as a moment of national unity by President Barack Obama, has become something else: a political weapon. Obama’s re-election campaign is portraying his risky decision to go after America’s top enemy as a defining difference with his Republican presidential opponent, suggesting Mitt Romney might not have had the guts to order a mission that put lives and perhaps a presidency at stake. Obama himself is opening up on the raid again — and opening the secretive White House Situation Room as an
Obama
bin Laden
interview stage — to hail the one-year anniversary. The broader goal for Obama, whether through campaign web videos or the trappings of the White House, is not to just to remind voters of an enormous victory on his watch. It is to maximize a political narrative that he has the courage to make tough calls that his opponent might not. “Does anybody doubt that had the mission failed, it would have written the beginning of the end of the president’s first term?” Vice President Joe Biden says in laying out Obama’s foreign policy campaign message. “We
know what President Obama did. We can’t say for certain what Governor Romney would have done.” The strategy underscores the fact that the Obama who ordered the raid as commander in chief is now seeking a second term as president. Obama’s campaign followed that Friday with a new web video questioning whether Romney would have taken the same path Obama did. If features a quote from a 2007 Romney interview in which he said it was not worth “moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.” That prompted Obama’s 2008 opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, to issue a scathing statement in which he accused Obama of playing politics with the bin Laden killing and “diminishing the memory of September 11th.”
rap defense’s subpoenas By MARK SCOLFORO Associated Press
HARRISBURG— Jerry Sandusky’s lawyers have been improperly issuing subpoenas and using them for a fishing expedition to aid his defense against child sex-abuse charges, prosecutors said in a court filing Friday. The attorney general’s office asked a judge to have the subpoenas withdrawn and to force Sandusky’s lawyers to show how information they are seeking is relevant to the criminal case. Among their claims is that lawyers for the former Penn State assistant football coach sent subpoenas to police and others that improperly revealed the names of alleged victims. Sandusky lawyer Joe Amendola, citing a gag order in the case, declined to comment on the merits of the prosecution motion, but said he would respond in a court filing next week. Attached to the prosecution
motion were examples of the subpoenas that provided a glimpse of defense strategy as the trial date nears. Sandusky From the state police, Amendola sought copies of an accident report involving the young man described as “Victim 1” by the investigative grand jury, and any documents that the state police have provided to the Freeh Group, the firm hired by Penn State to look into the Sandusky matter. He asked state Labor and Industry Secretary Julia Hearthway for unemployment, unemployment fraud and worker’s compensation records for certain individuals, but their names were to have been redacted in the copy posted on the court’s Sandusky case website.
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Korea’s nuclear test site but no indication of when a detonation might take place. Earlier this month, South Korean intelligence reported digging of a new tunnel at the Punggye-ri site, which it took as a sign that North Korea was covertly preparing for a third nuclear test. The U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies provided The Associated Press on Friday with its analysis of a sequence of photos of the site obtained from a private satellite operator and taken between March 8 and April 18. The analysis estimates that 282,500 cubic feet of rubble have been excavated at the site, where the communist country conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.