Republicans Ask Obama to Reach Agreement to Avoid Fiscal Abyss
President Barack Obama released a message today on the occasion of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, also used by Republicans to remind him that there are urgent outstanding issues in the country.
The president referred to the date by speaking about prospects for his second term in office and tried to calm the frustrations of those who are still suffering the effects of superstorm Sandy.
But the Republican representative to the western state of Washington, Cathy McMorris Rodgers noted in her greeting to the nation a number of different views on the importance of the current holiday.
McMorris Rodgers, who currently ranks fourth in the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, reminded the president and the country that the United States is still affected by serious economic difficulties and called for urgent action on the most immediate crisis: the fiscal cliff.
The lawmaker said that “too many US citizens are jobless , our national debt exceeds the size of the economy and threatens the future of our children,” and then said that the Republican Party is ready to find a solution.
According to McMorris Rodgers, Republicans see this as an opportunity to permanently solve problems that the current administration has ignored for long.
If in the coming weeks no agreement is reached on these controversial issues, drastic cuts in public spending would be combined, ending certain tax exemptions starting January 1, 2013.
Most citizens then would suffer an unprecedented increase of taxes, of about $500 billion dollars, and according to estimates the unemployment rate, currently at 7.9 percent, would rise to nine percent.
India To Test Homemade Interceptor Missile
India will test on Friday a homemade interceptor missile from a base in the central eastern state of Orissa, as part of a program to protect its most populated cities from intercontinental missiles.
The defensive missile will be launched from the Wheeler island, near the coast, with the objective of detecting and destroying a modified version of of the ground-to-ground Prithvi missile that as a hostile device, it will be launched from the Integral Test Camp of Chandipur.
The interception will take place withing the Earth’s atmosphere, a scientist involved in the Advance Air Defense System developed by India told the IANS news service.
The South Asian nation is planning to implement before 2014 an anti-missile defense system (AMD), capable of protecting the populous cities of New Delhi and Mumbai from an attack with devices of such kind.
The Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) chose these cities as the bases of the mentioned shield’s first stage because they are the most vulnerable cities of the country to a foreign missile attack, Defense Ministry sources said.
In the first stage, the system will be capable of intercepting and destroying any missile from an enemy country during its flight at a 1,243-mile distance and in a second stage, at a distance of 3,107 miles, DRDO experts announced.
The Indian sophisticated version of the Stars War project is under the supervision of a commission of the Indian Security cabinet that will have the last word before it is deployed in New Delhi and Mumbai.
Chile: String of Quakes Seem to be Aftershocks
The string of quakes in recent days in central Chile seem to be aftershocks of the earthquake that struck the country on February 27, 2010, said experts on the subject.
According to the technical committee conducted by the Seismological Service of the University of Chile and the National Emergency Office (Onemi) of the Ministry of the Interior, that’s the main hypotheses about the more than fifty earthquakes in recent days, mostly near Navidad, Bernardo O Higgins’ region.
According to the director of the Onemi, Benjamin Chacana, a higher intensity earthquake can occur.
Yesterday, more than twenty tremors were registered near Navidad, one of 5.6 degrees on the Richter scale.