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...Commission plan to be endorsed on Wednesday. Spain is similarly promising to slash its deficit of 11.4% to just 3% by 2013, although the country - which is still reeling from the recession, with unemployment of nearly 19% - has been vague about how it will do that beyond proposing $69 billion in cost-cutting measures over the next four years. Last month, French officials somehow managed to sound proud when they announced that France's 2009 deficit of 7.9% was lower than the expected 8.2% - and that they would hold it below 8.2% for the rest of this year. (Read...
...seek to bring its deficit to under 3% by 2013, although that is based on optimistic economic growth levels of at least 2.5% annually. Meeting those targets gets even more challenging with the tax cuts that President Nicolas Sarkozy keeps handing out - most recently to businesses worth over $10 billion annually - coupled with his call for all E.U. countries to continue pumping their economies with stimulus spending to foster growth. Even Germany, the E.U.'s most disciplined member, will see its 2009 deficit of nearly 4% rise to almost 5% in 2010 under the government's plan to cut taxes...
...love the machines, swoon over the history and long to see Americans back on the moon and flying on toward Mars. For this space-happy group, here's some good news: even in hard economic times, President Obama would actually increase NASA's budget - to more than $100 billion - over the next five years. But space junkies had better be satisfied with that positive development, because it's just about the only...
...cancel than what it plans to pursue. The six-year-old Constellation program, which had been focused on developing new boosters, Apollo-like orbiters and a 21st century lunar lander, all with the goal of making long-term stays on the moon possible, will be scrapped, after $9 billion and a single flight of the Ares 1 booster last October. The longer-term goal of venturing out to Mars is being tabled along with it. (See pictures of the Ares rocket...
...place of that program, NASA will tackle a grab bag of other projects: extending the life of the so-far unfinished International Space Station (ISS) until 2020, and spending $4.9 billion to develop better robotics, $7.8 billion to develop new flight techniques such as in-orbit fuel depots and closed-loop life-support systems, and $3 billion to develop new unmanned ships. There are no entirely unworthy objectives in that list (with the possible exception of the ISS), but there's also no clear way of getting humans back into space after 2010, once the shuttles are mothballed. What...