Tag: Weekend News Digest

About 40 protesters parked at a cul-de-sac Saturday afternoon and walked to the Fairfield home of Douglas Polling. They were met on the curb by two security guards, and one activist read a letter detailing the financial struggles that many Connecticut residents have faced. The group then left the note in Polling’s mailbox.

Polling already agreed to forfeit his bonus, but the protesters want AIG executives to do more to help working families.

AIG is paying out the executive bonuses to meet a Sunday deadline, but the troubled insurance giant has agreed to administration requests to restrain future payments.

The Treasury Department determined that the government did not have the legal authority to block the current payments by the company. AIG declared earlier this month that it had suffered a loss of $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history.

The key priority must be restoring frozen bank lending through cash infusions and dealing with the shaky assets souring bank’s balance sheets, the gathered finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 countries said in a statement at the end of talks in southern England.

The statement did not back a U.S. push for concrete, coordinated efforts for governments to spend more money to boost their economies. It acknowledged the importance of the stimulus efforts already in place, and called for stronger financial regulation.

It wasn’t the Great Depression. It was the 1981-82 recession, widely considered America’s worst since the depression.

That painful time during Ronald Reagan’s presidency is a grim marker of how bad things can get. Yet the current recession could slice deeper into the U.S. economy.

But the economy always recovers. It runs in cycles, and economists are watching an array of statistics, some of them buried deep beneath the headlines, to spot the turning point. The Associated Press examined three markets – housing, jobs and stocks – and asked experts where things stand and how to know when they’ve hit bottom.

None of them expects it to come anytime soon.

In the short-term, the massive stimulus will help balance budgets and keep key services, such as Medicaid, going. But economists agree the money will not quickly eradicate high unemployment, low consumer spending or distress in the housing market – the triple threats behind a nationwide tax-collection shortfall that is expected to drag on even after the economy begins to rebound.

Without higher taxes, bigger cuts to government services – or yet more federal funding – states face budget gaps that could reach $120 billion nationwide in their 2011 budgets, according to an analyst at the Rockefeller Institute, a think tank in Albany, N.Y. James Diffley, managing director of Global Insight’s U.S. Regional Services Group, says it’s unlikely budget gaps will close before 2013.

Meanwhile, commanders will be shifting their attention to helping Iraqi forces take full control of their own security.

The Pentagon has not released the full details of President Barack Obama’s plan to end America’s combat role in Iraq by Aug. 31 of next year, but the broad contours are taking shape.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted heads of state and finance ministers from Europe’s largest economies to try to establish a common European position on economic reforms before an April 2 summit of the Group of 20 nations.

“All financial markets, products and participants including hedge funds and other private pools of capital which may pose a systematic risk must be subjected to appropriate oversight or regulation,” Merkel said in a statement released on behalf of the summit members, following the talks.

Civilian casualties have been a huge source of friction between the U.S. and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has stepped up demands that U.S. and NATO operations kill no civilians and that Afghan soldiers take part in missions to help prevent unwanted deaths.

A U.S. military statement said the decision to dispatch a general to the western province of Herat to investigate shows how seriously the U.S. takes civilian casualties. The U.S. rarely releases the findings of civilian casualty investigations, and the disclosure this time could show the effect of Karzai’s criticisms.

Prime Minister Aso Taro will “shortly” announce a plan to compile the fresh economic package, Yoshihide Suga, a senior official of Aso’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), told reporters.

Some LDP members already suggested that the package should be worth 20 trillion yen to 30 trillion yen (217 billion yen to 326 billion yen), Suga said, adding: “I think we need such a size.”

Chemicals in the saliva may be a way to assess a mate, Wendy Hill, dean of the faculty and a professor of neuroscience at Lafayette College, told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday.

In an experiment, Hill explained, pairs of heterosexual college students who kissed for 15 minutes while listening to music experienced significant changes in their levels of the chemicals oxytocin, which affects pair bonding, and cortisol, which is associated with stress. Their blood and saliva levels of the chemicals were compared before and after the kiss.

The $827 billion Senate version of the plan – designed to bring the economy out of the worst downward spiral since the Great Depression – was expected to pass the Senate on Tuesday. The House had already passed its $819 billion version of the measure.

Lawmakers were likely to begin reconciling those differences later this week, with Obama still pressing to have the stimulus measure on his desk for signing by mid-month.