$1.1 trillion spending bill nears final vote before going to Obama
WASHINGTON — A $1.1 trillion bill easing the harshest effects of last year’s automatic spending cuts neared final congressional approval Thursday with wide-scale bipartisan support after tea party critics chastened by last October’s government shutdown mounted only a faint protest.
A Senate vote Thursday evening on funding the government through next September was the only step remaining to getting the bill to the White House for President Barack Obama’s signature before a midnight Saturday deadline, when a temporary funding measure expires. The House passed the bill Wednesday with an overwhelming 359-67, bipartisan majority.
The huge bill funds the operations of virtually every agency of government, pairing increases for NASA and Army Corps of Engineers construction projects with cuts to the Internal Revenue Service and foreign aid. It cements a tight lid on government spending demanded by Republicans while paying for the implementation of Obama’s health care law and tighter regulations on financial markets, but at levels lower than the president wanted.
NSA review a quest to regain public trust in surveillance operations
WASHINGTON — Faced with Edward Snowden’s first leaks about the government’s sweeping surveillance apparatus, President Barack Obama’s message to Americans boiled down to this: trust me.
“I think on balance, we have established a process and a procedure that the American people should feel comfortable about,” Obama said in June, days after the initial disclosure about the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data from millions of people.
But the leaks kept coming. They painted a picture of a clandestine spy program that indiscriminately scooped up phone and Internet records, while also secretly keeping tabs on the communications of friendly foreign leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel.
On Friday, Obama will unveil a much-anticipated blueprint on the future of those endeavors. His changes appear to be an implicit acknowledgement that the trust he thought Americans would have in the spy operations is shaky at best. His focus is expected to be on steps that increase oversight and transparency while largely leaving the framework of the programs in place.
The president is expected to back the creation of an independent public advocate on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the bulk collections and currently only hears arguments from the government.
‘Gilligan’s Island’ professor Russell Johnson dies at 89
NEW YORK — Actor Russell Johnson, who became known to generations of TV fans as “The Professor,” the fix-it man who kept his fellow “Gilligan’s Island” castaways supplied with gadgets, has died. He was 89. Johnson died Thursday morning at his home in Washington state of natural causes, said his agent, Mike Eisenstadt.
Johnson was a busy but little-known character actor when he was cast in the slapstick 1960s comedy about seven people marooned on an uncharted Pacific island.
He played high school teacher Roy Hinkley, known to his fellow castaways as The Professor. There was seemingly nothing he couldn’t do when it came to building generators, short-wave radios and other contraptions from scraps of flotsam and jetsam he found on the island. But, as Russell would joke years later, the one thing The Professor never accomplished was figuring out how to patch the hole in the S.S. Minnow so the group could get back to civilization.
Johnson, Dawn Wells and Tina Louise were the last of the cast’s survivors. Wells played vacationing farm girl Mary Ann Summers and Louise was sexy movie star Ginger Grant.
“Russell was a true gentleman, a dear friend with a fantastic wit, and a wonderful actor,” said Wells in a statement on Thursday.
“The other half of ‘The rest’ is gone,” she said, in a reference to the way her character and The Professor were lumped together in the original version of the show’s theme song.
Survivors include his wife and daughter.
By wire sources