Budget proposal has biggest-ever deficit
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama's $3.8 trillion fiscal year 2011 budget projects the deficit will rise to a record $1.6 trillion this year, a published report says.
But the spending plan says the $1.6 trillion deficit would fall to $1.3 trillion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 and drop to $700 billion, or 4 percent of the gross national product, in 2013 and 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
The reduction would require cuts that have already been proposed but rejected and on cooperation from a nervous Congress, the Journal said.
The president's request comes as the nation continues to face persistently high unemployment. And seeking increased spending on priorities such as education and domestic scientific research could make it hard for Obama to meet his pledge to halve by 2013 the $1.3 trillion deficit he inherited, the Journal said.
The president's budget projects an economic recovery, rising tax receipts, growing incomes and stimulus spending being reduced.
The White House says it's ready to make tough choices to control the deficit such as cutting back or eliminating more than 120 programs, which would save about $20 billion in the fiscal year beginning Oct.1.
U.S. resuming airlift of injured Haitians
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- The White House said Sunday it is resuming a U.S. military airlift carrying seriously injured Haitian earthquake victims to American hospitals.
"Having received assurances that additional capacity exists both here and among our international partners, we determined that we can resume these critical flights," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement.
The flights, which have taken hundreds of severely injured patients to Florida, had been suspended since Wednesday after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist told Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius "Florida's healthcare system is quickly reaching saturation, especially in the area of high-level trauma care," The New York Times reported.
Crist asked the federal government to activate a national emergency program that helps states pay for the medical costs of major disasters. It was not immediately clear if Haiti qualified for the program, CNN said.
Miami surgeon Barth Green said dozens of major U.S. hospitals have offered to take Haitian patients, The Miami Herald reported.
"We have hospitals waiting to receive them. But at the highest level of the U.S. government, they can't seem to get them out," said Green, head of neurological surgery at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine.
Green estimated 100 of his "sickest of the sickest" patients in Port-au-Prince would die if they were not immediately transported out of Haiti.
Reports of Mehsud's death investigated
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- U.S. and Pakistani officials expressed growing certainty Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud has died of injuries from a drone attack.
Rumors about the death of the 28-year-old Taliban leader have been circulating since Pakistan's state-run television reported he died of wounds suffered in the Jan. 14 drone attack and that he was buried recently. The Pakistani government earlier said it was investigating these reports.
However, The New York Times quoted Pakistani and U.S. officials as saying Sunday they were increasingly convinced the attack killed Mehsud.
Pakistani government officials told the Times there was a good chance the Taliban leader is dead but they could not provide proof.
Separately, an official in the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington told the Times intelligence reports were about 90 percent certain about Mehsud's death.
Hakimullah Mehsud took over the Taliban leadership after Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a similar drone attack last August. Among his terrorist actions, Hakimullah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the Dec. 30 suicide attack at a U.S. base in Afghanistan that killed seven employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The United States had been targeting Hakimullah Mehsud since then. U.S. administration officials have been saying the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies are using their sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas to launch such attacks against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
U.S. officials told the Times Mehsud's death would be a major blow to the Taliban as it comes when the militant group has been hit hard by the escalation of U.S. drone strikes and the Pakistani military's campaign. But whether it would slow the insurgency is not certain.
Obama wants 'No Child' law overhaul
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama is proposing major changes in the No Child Left Behind law to create a new model for how schools are judged successes or failures.
The administration also calls for the elimination of former President George W. Bush's 2014 deadline for making every U.S. child academically proficient, The New York Times reported in its Monday edition.
Educators who have been briefed on the changes said they would reshape or eliminate many provisions of the act that school boards, teachers unions, associations of principals and other groups have criticized.
"They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way," said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators.
The administration also wants to change federal school financing so money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by longstanding formulas based on the number of students and other factors, including the proportion of low-income students.
Since the No Child law was signed eight years ago, many educators have taken issue with branding tens of thousands of schools as failing without forcing them to change, the Times said.
Under the current system, every year, each school receives a type of pass-fail report card. Administration officials say this fails to differentiate between schools in perpetual failure mode, schools where low-scoring students are improving with help and high-performing suburban schools still appearing to neglect some low-scoring pupils.
Some of the president's proposals include a system that would divide schools into more divisions and offer recognition to those succeeding and large amounts of money to failing schools to help them improve.
