Stress Tested: Has Geithner’s Bank Confidence Game Worked?

From his earliest days as Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner’s biggest challenge has been restoring confidence in America’s fragile banks without taking the politically costly step of asking Congress for more money. To judge by the results of the government-run stress tests released Thursday afternoon, Geithner has somehow pulled it off — at least for now. Not that three months of supervisory scrutiny of the country’s top 19 banks hasn’t produced some grim news.

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Sessions Could Make Obama’s Supreme Court Fight Tougher

Political junkies who weren’t thrilled at the prospect of a relatively staid confirmation process for President Barack Obama’s as yet unnamed Supreme Court nominee can rest easy. This week Senate Republicans named perennial bomb thrower Jeff Sessions, 62, of Alabama to be the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, promising to bring at least a few sparks to a confirmation process that — if Minnesota’s Al Franken is seated — was bound to be relatively easy. While Sessions alone can’t change the basic legislative math that promises whomever Obama picks to replace retiring Justice David Souter a fairly easy path to confirmation, he can certainly liven up the proceedings

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Supreme Court rules against networks on indecent speech

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that federal regulators have the authority to clamp down on broadcast TV networks that air isolated cases of profanity, known as "fleeting expletives." The 5-4 vote was a victory for Bush-era officials who pushed fines and sanctions when racy images and language reached the airwaves. Controversial words have been aired in scripted and unscripted instances on all the major over-the-air networks in the past six years, when the Federal Communications Commission began considering a stronger, no-tolerance policy

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White House apologizes for low-flying plane

A White House official apologized Monday after a low-flying Boeing 747 spotted above the Manhattan skyline frightened workers and residents into evacuating buildings. The aircraft was a White House plane taking part in a classified, government-sanctioned photo shoot, the Federal Aviation Administration said. “Last week, I approved a mission over New York.

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FAA relents, will open database on airplane-bird collisions to public

After getting pelted by criticism from everyone from airline passengers to federal accident investigators, the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday reversed course and said it will publicly reveal its records on bird strikes. The FAA said it will make its entire bird-strike database available on a public Web site on Friday, and is withdrawing a proposal to keep certain data confidential. The FAA had argued that protecting certain information, such as the names of airlines and airports involved in bird mishaps, would encourage airlines to participate in the voluntary reporting program

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Mortgage Fraud Crackdown Is Gathering Steam in Florida

Florida’s Gulf Coast was crawling with shady real estate investors like Neil Husani during this decade’s housing boom. According to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tampa, Husani and three co-conspirators working with his Sarasota-based Capital Force, Inc., bilked seven area banks out of $83 million in a mortgage fraud scheme.

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