office – Page 9 – 4VF News – Daily News Channel

Failing to reform health care ‘truly scary,’ Obama says

President Obama complained Tuesday about opposition scare tactics against a proposed health care overhaul but said that failing to fix problems in the current system would be the scariest outcome of all. Obama addressed a supportive town hall meeting that contrasted with combative events held by Democratic Congress members, which have generated heated and sometimes disruptive responses. Also Tuesday, hostile crowds shouted questions and made angry statements against proposed health-care legislation at meetings in Pennsylvania and Missouri led by Democratic senators Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill.

Childless man released from child support debt

A Georgia man who spent a year in jail for nonpayment of child support — despite the fact he has no children — has been cleared of the debt, his attorney said Tuesday. Frank Hatley, 50, spent 13 months in jail for being a deadbeat dad before his release last month. In June 2008, a judge ordered him to jail for failing to reimburse the state for public assistance that was paid to support his “son” — a child who DNA tests proved was not fathered by Hatley

Disruptions drown out debate at health care meetings

The battle raging over President Obama’s health care plan has spread from across the aisles in Congress to across the country.

Tehran’s Trials: Blaming the West, Google and Twitter

Iran’s hardline regime sharply escalated the post-election confrontation on August 8 by putting two foreign embassy staffers and a French teacher on trial alongside dozens of political dissidents. The stepped-up campaign to characterize the widespread unrest since the June 12 presidential election as a foreign-led attempted “soft overthrow” appears to be an effort by the ruling faction to rally the increasingly-splintered conservative base against a popular — and old — enemy: the West

Unemployment Falls, but Long-Term Joblessness Remains a Concern

For all the relief over the jobless figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday morning — 247,000 jobs were lost in July, far fewer than economists had expected — a dark problem lurks in the numbers: dangerously high levels of long-term unemployment in America.

Health Care: White House’s Deal with Pharma Rankles Dems

It was only a few years ago that an up-and-coming member of the House Democratic leadership pointed to a cozy arrangement in the Republican-written Medicare prescription-drug program as a symptom of everything wrong with Washington. The 2003 bill barred the government from negotiating for lower drug prices for its 43 million Medicare recipients. Instead, that task was delegated to private insurers and their agents, whom Democrats argued — and still argue — don’t have the muscle to get the steep discounts that a huge government program could.

Missing Florida girl’s dad held in burglary

The father of a Florida girl who has been missing for nearly six months was charged Thursday with burglary with assault, police told CNN.

Geithner vs. the Regulators: A Time for Swearing

The expletive-laden rant Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unleashed during a closed meeting with regulators on Friday, July 31, has players in Washington and on Wall Street wondering one thing: What got the usually mild-mannered Geithner so incensed? Establishing a new regulatory framework for the financial markets is not the kind of politically charged, life-or-death issue that should drive a normally discreet Cabinet member to go on a blue streak in front of dozens of officials. But Geithner and the Obama Administration have more at stake in getting reform pushed through Congress by the end of the year than it may seem.

Dogs and the Scent of a Crime: Science or Shaky Evidence?

In detective dramas, a dog’s powerful sense of smell has become a predictable crime solver: the trusty canine takes a sniff of a suspect object and follows the scent, eventually coming to the perpetrator of the evil deed.

Moussavi, Khatami blast Iran trials

Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi and reformist former President Mohammad Khatami on Sunday blasted the trials of people arrested in post-election demonstrations. Those on trial had been tortured into confessions, Moussavi said in a statement posted on his Ghalam News Web site. “They have been stepped on so severely that they would have confessed to anything else, had they been instructed to do so,” Moussavi said.