Congress looking at possible ag cuts
Washington Under orders to cut agriculture spending by $3 billion, Republicans in Congress have proposed reducing food programs for the poor by $574 million and conservation programs by $1 billion, the Associated Press has learned.
The proposal by the chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., also would cut payments to farmers by 2.5 percent across the board.
The plan faces hostility from congressional Democrats and other critics who say the cuts would hurt food stamps and conservation programs.
Payments to farmers would fall by $1.145 billion over five years. But that is considerably less severe than what President Bush had proposed. Bush had sought a 5 percent reduction in payments, plus a far-reaching plan for capping payments that would cut billions more dollars from subsidies collected by large farm operations.
Goss sees no need for Sept. 11 reviews
Washington Contrary to recommendations from his own internal watchdog, CIA Director Porter Goss will not order disciplinary reviews for a former director, George Tenet, and other officials criticized for their performance before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Goss said in a statement Wednesday that the report from the CIA’s inspector general, John Helgerson, did not suggest “that any one person or group of people could have prevented 9/11.”
“After great consideration of this report and its conclusions, I will not convene an accountability board to judge the performances of any individual CIA officers,” Goss said.
Chemists who made atoms ‘dance’ win prize
Two Americans and a French scientist won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for developing a chemical “dance” that makes molecules swap atoms, a process now used to create medicines, plastics and other products with more efficiency and less environmental hazard.
The $1.3 million prize will be shared by Robert H. Grubbs, 63, of the California Institute of Technology; Richard R. Schrock, 60, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yves Chauvin, 74, honorary director of research at the Institut Francais du Petrole in Rueil-Malmaison, France.
They explained and improved a process called metathesis.
Tipster links bomber to area of radical schools
Bali, Indonesia Police pursued a tip Wednesday from a caller claiming that one of the latest Bali suicide bombers studied on an Indonesian island known for having hard-line Islamic schools.
It was one of the few possible leads announced since police started circulating nationwide photographs of the three bombers’ severed heads, recovered from the attacks Saturday on crowded tourist-resort restaurants. The blasts killed 22 and injured 104.
The tipster called police in Solo, a city on the main island of Java. He identified one of the bombers by name and said he had studied in the area, home to a radical Islamic boarding school attended by several militants convicted in previous terror attacks, said Abdul Madjid, Solo’s police chief commissioner.
The al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiya group was emerging as the key suspect in Saturday’s attacks.