Word: congress
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more in claims that it forecast. The agency has just $3.6 billion on hand to cover any unexpected losses in its $685 billion portfolio. That paltry level of reserve funding, less than is mandated by the government, has left some members of Congress in a twitchy mood and some onlookers to wonder if the FHA will eventually need a massive infusion of cash. (See high-end homes that won't sell...
...National Institute of Military Justice who teaches military law at Yale. The charges that Calley directed the massacre of 104 Vietnamese villagers in 1968 fed the national debate over the war and his 1971 trial underlined the country's divisions. Politics intruded into the Calley case when Congress refused to release secret testimony about the incident. President Richard Nixon mitigated Calley's sentence over the objections of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. Freed by an appeals court after only 3½ years of military house arrest, Calley, who had been sentenced to a life term of hard labor...
Lessons have been learned since the Calley case, Silliman says, not the least of which is the danger of political intrusion and command influence. While members of Congress may enter the hot debate, President Barack Obama as Commander in Chief must be wary not to exert "unlawful command influence" in his pronouncements on the case, Silliman says, just as President George W. Bush and Administration officials in the chain of command were cautious in the Abu Ghraib cases. So far, Obama has not stepped over the line, Silliman says, by specifically naming Hasan. This is as close as the President...
...surprisingly, this wall has wreaked havoc on the ecosystems of the area. It cuts off migration routes for species such as the Sonoma Pronghorn, already endangered, whose population has crashed to as few as 31 individuals. If congress had not exempted the border patrol from the ESA, this damage would have been sufficient to stop or dramatically alter the construction plans. Instead, building the wall has categorically ignored environmental damage and, as a result, threatened the survival of the only known pair of breeding jaguars in the United States...
...what it used to enthusiastically and sincerely call progress. But even though the U.S. is a mature, developed country, many economists believe it has shortchanged infrastructure investment for decades. It possibly did so again in this year's stimulus package. Just $144 billion of the $787 billion stimulus bill Congress passed earlier this year went to direct infrastructure spending. According to IHS Global Insight, an economic-consulting firm, U.S. spending on transportation infrastructure will actually decline overall in 2009 when state budgets are factored in - this at a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers contends that...