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...Pelosi had another reason for backing the compromise: unlike some on the left, she actually believes domestic surveillance laws needs updating in light of the new terror threats. "We can't go without a bill," she said on the House floor Friday, "That's simply just not an option." Existing U.S. surveillance law, passed in 1978, needs to be improved, she believes, not just to protect Americans at home but to protect U.S. troops in the field. "Our troops in the field depend on timely and reliable intelligence," she said...
...else the E.U. could simply plow on with what it has under the existing treaties. This last option has been decried as a recipe for gridlock. Yet studies have shown that the 27 member states still function well with machinery designed for 15. Last December, Helen Wallace of the London School of Economics published research showing that E.U. enlargement has barely changed day-to-day work: the European Parliament produced as much legislation in 2006 as it did five years before, the European Commission has maintained its work rate, and there has been no significant rise in non-compliance cases...
...bookkeeper at a battered Florida construction company, she first heard about the plan on TV at 3 a.m., not long after her salary was cut in February by $100 a week and she realized she couldn't keep making her mortgage payments. Selling the house was hardly an option. Properties on her block were going for $135,000; two years ago, she'd paid $188,000. She had phoned her bank and tried to renegotiate the terms of her loan. "Every time I called," she says, "they gave me another number to call." She grew frustrated. Then she panicked...
...other, more likely, option is for the governments to press ahead with the Lisbon treaty in the hope that the Irish will change their mind. The E.U. could offer the Irish a protocol to clarify that the treaty does not affect national powers on taxation, and a promise to use the Croatian accession treaty to restore the one-commissioner-per-country rule. The Irish would then vote again on the Lisbon treaty next summer. But that would be risky: the E.U. would appear arrogantly dismissive of the June 12 result, and the Irish could vote no again...
...elected school committee plans to vote later this summer on whether to provide contraceptives. But that won't do much to solve the issue of teens wanting to get pregnant. Says rising junior Kacia Lowe, who is a classmate of the pactmakers': "No one's offered them a better option." And better options may be a tall order in a city so uncertain of its future. - With reporting by Kimberley McLeod/New York...