Word: director
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lawrence Summers, director of the White House's National Economic Council, said last week that the stimulus bill was on track. This past weekend, the President rejected calls for a second stimulus package, saying the current stimulus needs more time to work, since only a small fraction of the money has been spent. From the beginning, the Administration has said that much of the boost to the economy from the stimulus plan would not come until the second half of this year. Administration officials have also insisted that it's unfair to judge the effectiveness of the stimulus by projections...
...deliberately keep its own director in the dark about a secret program? The latest storm to break over Langley emerged after the New York Times reported over the weekend that former Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered that the program be kept from Congress's oversight committees. Apparently, CIA Director Leon Panetta was told of the program's existence on June 23, four months after he took over the agency. Within 24 hours, he had canceled it and briefed the congressional oversight committees of its existence. Amid the uproar over how and why the agency kept Congress in the dark...
Another retired senior official put it more bluntly: "[Given Cheney's interest,] I don't know why the program was not on the new director's desk within his first two weeks on the job." Both former officials asked not to be named. The second official also questioned the argument that the program was not important enough for Panetta's immediate attention. "The speed of Panetta's actions when he was informed tells me that the program was pretty important," he says. (See the top 10 Secret Service code names...
...time won a majority - a stinging defeat for the LDP and its ruling coalition. DPJ members ended up with 54 seats, compared with 38 for LDP candidates. "This [win] is big enough to indicate that, within the country, the trend is not good for the LDP," says Robert Dujarric, director of Temple University's Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies...
...Even if Nabucco succeeds, the E.U. will face other challenges, says Tomas Valasek, director of foreign policy at the London-based Centre for European Reform. "Nabucco is only part of the puzzle to improve Europe's energy security," he says. "It also needs to reduce its overall consumption, improve its efficiency, create a fully liberalized energy market and speak as one voice when it deals with Moscow." With so much to do before the E.U. can secure its own energy future, odds are it will continue to rely on Russian gas for many years to come...