President Barack Obama on Monday will announce his intent to nominate Clinton administration veteran Sylvia Mathews Burwell to be his new budget chief, a senior administration official said.
Ms. Burwell is a veteran of budget battles, having worked in top posts inside the Clinton administration's White House, ...
A Mississippi baby born with the AIDS virus appears to have been cured after being treated with an aggressive regimen of drugs just after her birth 2½ years ago, an unusual case that could trigger changes in care for hundreds of thousands of babies born globally each year with HIV.
The findings, reported Sunday by researchers, mark only the second documented case of a patient being cured of infection with the human immune-deficiency virus. The first, an adult man known as the Berlin patient, was cured as a result of a 2007 bone-marrow transplant.
Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins Children's Center called it 'really unheard of' that after the treatment ended, there was no detectable virus.
The new case was discovered after the baby girl's mother stopped treatment on her, and doctors realized that the virus was undetectable even without drugs, which HIV patients normally must take for the rest of their lives.
Researchers cautioned that the report on the baby girl involves just one patient, and the findings appear to have little immediate relevance to people who contract HIV as adults or adolescents and are almost always diagnosed and treated long after their initial infection. But if further study confirms that very early treatment can cure HIV-infected newborns, it could spur widespread use of such an aggressive regimen in babies born with HIV, nearly all of them in low- and middle-income countries.
World Health Organization guidelines now call for treating infants born to an HIV-infected mother with a modest daily dose of antiretroviral treatment for four to six weeks—or until testing determines the baby's own HIV status. If the baby tests positive, a more aggressive treatment is begun.
But WHO doesn't address use of a more intense medication approach right after birth, in part because few studies have examined the issue. In addition, it is difficult to determine with certainty that early whether a baby is HIV-positive, and overtreatment would risk wasting scarce medications that offer a better chance of helping other patients.
In this case, researchers believe that a doctor's decision to start an aggressive antiretroviral treatment within 31 hours of the infant's birth led to the cure. They theorize that the drugs prevented the formation of so-called viral reservoirs that harbor the virus. These reservoirs have been the key stumbling block to a cure because even though AIDS drugs stop HIV from replicating, the virus lurks in the reservoirs, ready to come surging back when treatment is stopped.
In this case, "the child got therapy and then went off therapy, and now there's no detectable virus," said Deborah Persaud, a pediatrician and AIDS researcher at Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore and lead author of a study reporting the cure. "That's really unheard of. If people go off therapy, most of them rebound…within a few weeks."
She described the findings at a news conference Sunday in advance of their presentation Monday at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.
"This is a very important proof of concept" said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of the National Institutes of Health. Further research is required "to see if you can generalize this to children who are born into situations where their risk of infection is very high."
The chance an infected pregnant woman will transmit the virus to her baby during gestation, birth or breast-feeding ranges from 15% to 45%, according to WHO. But treatment with antiretroviral therapy during pregnancy and especially around the time of birth cuts the risk of mother-to-child transmission to below 2%. Still, estimates are that between 300,000 and 400,000 infants are born globally each year with the infection, about 90% of them in resource-poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
In the U.S., high compliance with prenatal care and routine HIV testing during pregnancy has all but eliminated HIV-positive newborns. From a peak of 1,650 cases in 1991, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the number is now down to fewer than 200 a year.
In 2010, the number was 174. One of them, born in a rural Mississippi hospital that fall, is now the first case of a child considered cured of the disease.
The baby was born to a mother who hadn't had prenatal care and didn't know her HIV status. A rapid HIV test after the birth revealed that she was infected, prompting doctors to transfer the baby to University of Mississippi Medical Center more than 100 miles away.
There, Hannah Gay, a pediatrician and infectious-disease expert, ordered an HIV test for the infant. She didn't wait for the result. Figuring this was an especially high-risk case, Dr. Gay started the baby on three standard antiretroviral drugs at higher, treatment-level doses. A few days later, the test came back positive, she said, and she kept the infant on the treatment-level doses.
Over the next few weeks, the baby's viral levels gradually declined, and by day 29, HIV couldn't be detected with standard testing. That remained the case for more than a year.
"I saw her once a month; her viral load was undetectable, and her immune system was healthy—what we expect with a baby taking the medicines regularly," Dr. Gay said.
But at about 18 months, for reasons that aren't clear, the mother stopped bringing the baby in for the checks. Dr. Gay summoned health-department and child-protection workers, who found her last August, and she returned to the clinic. The baby had been off therapy for at least five months, Dr. Gay said.
Before resuming treatment, Dr. Gay ordered a test to make sure the baby's virus hadn't developed resistance to any of the drugs. To her astonishment, technicians couldn't find any virus to test.
At first, Dr. Gay worried that she had been treating an uninfected baby for more than a year. But a quick check of her records verified that five different tests had detected the virus in the days and weeks following her birth.
When she was convinced last August, she called a longtime friend and colleague, Katherine Luzuriaga, a researcher at University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Luzuriaga had been working with Dr. Persaud on a study of a group of teenagers who had been born with the virus and treated since infancy and who now had no evidence of virus that could replicate. The pair had set up a network of labs to study whether they could consider taking the teenagers off the drugs.
With that lab network, established with a grant from the Foundation for AIDS Research, a New York-based philanthropy, samples from the baby have been subjected to a variety of the most advanced tests to detect and monitor the AIDS virus.
While the tests have detected an occasional "signal" of the virus, the various analyses from several labs using different techniques "confirms to us that this is a case of 'functional cure,' meaning that the virus hasn't rebounded and that…we can't detect virus activity in this child," Dr. Persaud said. The work also was supported by the NIH.
Write to Ron Winslow at ron.winslow@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared March 4, 2013, on page A3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Baby Cured of HIV for the First Time, Researchers Say.
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 4, 2013 — The White House has begun to walk back its predictions of disaster for the sequester. Gene Sperling, President Obama's top economic advisor, said on Sunday that the cuts won't hurt much immediately, but they will hurt over the long run.
Sperling said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "Nobody ever suggested that this was going to have all its impact in the first few days. It is a slow grind."
In its attempts to incite panic among voters and GOP lawmakers, the administration had indeed suggested immediate, disastrous impact. Obama had spoken of thousands of teachers, firefighters, air traffic controllers and TSA agents laid off immediately. The deployment of a Navy aircraft carrier, the Nimitz-class USS Harry S. Truman, has been delayed to emphasize the collapse of American military readiness, and thousands of illegal immigrants detained prior to deportation were released to emphasize the collapse of border security that will presumably be caused by the sequester.
The fiscal cliff and the sequester have both taken their toll on voter and business confidence. The threat of impasse over the debt ceiling at the end of the month will likewise keep markets unsettled. It has become increasingly apparent that Congress and the White House are governing by crisis; we lurch from crisis to crisis, the government resembling nothing so much as a mob of zombies shambling in search of its next meal of brains.
The problem with zombies is that they beget zombies. The economy is in a fragile recovery, not rising up with renewed vigor from its sick bed, not lapsing into death, but reanimating with little direction and no clear path to a healthy future. The true unemployment rate remains locked firmly in the double digits, and business profits are creating no enthusiasm for business hiring. Zombie politics is creating a zombie economy.
A serious problem in the economy now is uncertainty. Republicans, looking to the supply side, believe that cutting taxes will give businesses the confidence and incentives to start hiring. The problem as they see it is a tax code that punishes hard work and investment, so the way to fix investment is to fix the tax code.
Businesses don't hire because they are profitable; they hire because adding employees will make them more profitable, and because over the foreseeable future, profitable employees won't turn suddenly into a liability. Cutting taxes to push up profits won't create greater business certainty unless other, more fundamental problems are addressed.
The Democrats come at this from the demand side, assuming that if only the government can spend more, it can put more money in consumer pockets and stimulate demand for goods, thus giving businesses a reason to hire more workers to produce them. The problem as they see it is insufficient demand due to a government that is too stingy with spending.
READ MORE: Obama and sequestration: The lone horseman of the apocalypse
People don't buy houses and cars just because they have money in their pockets. They buy them if they have money and if they aren't worried that their jobs won't disappear tomorrow. Major purchases are a vote of confidence in a family's economic future, and until more fundamental problems are addressed, there will be no surge in consumer demand for big-ticket items.
None of this means that cutting taxes or boosting government spending won't result in some production and consumption, but they will act at the edges of the economy, producing anemic hiring and output gains.
The more fundamental problem and a huge source of uncertainty is the enormous overhang of unfunded liabilities in our economy - that is, entitlements and pensions. The national debt is a bit over $16 trillion, about 100 percent of GDP. Last year's budget deficit was over $1 trillion, or 7 percent of GDP.
Unfunded liabilities of the federal government are in excess of $87 trillion - 550 percent of GDP.
In order to make those liabilities fully funded, the government would have to raise about $8 trillion per year in taxes. Anything less, and the combined current year deficit and growth of unfunded liabilities will put us deeper in the hole. If we taxed every corporation and individual earning more than $70,000 at a 100 percent rate, we would raise only $6.7 trillion.
Unfunded liabilities - Social Security, Medicare, federal employee pensions - are sucking the life out of the American economy. Tax reform is essential to improving our economic environment, but it isn't what makes the future almost absurdly horrible to contemplate. It will greatly improve confidence that our problems can be fixed, but at some point it will be imperative that entitlements be addressed directly.
The fiscal cliff, sequestration, and even the debt ceiling are manufactured crises involving arbitrary and artificial deadlines. As we stagger from one to the next, we do it blind to how bad things really are. We're zombies who think we're still fully alive.
Our political leaders are shambling around blindly. Unable to fix anything, they're good only at instilling terror in those who watch on. Like zombies, they wander in search of more to devour with no apparent concern about the devastation they're leaving in their wake. Unlike "real" zombies, our political and economic zombies can be cured - we don't need to shoot them in the brain and start over. We do need to look at them realistically.
Closing tax loopholes isn't enough. Cutting taxes isn't enough. We're in desperate need of entitlement reform, and if we don't try to get it, the debt ceiling talks will be a fraud. The smart money, though, is on Congress and the president punting - again. That's zombies for you - no sense of responsibility and no serious solutions to anything, just irresponsible appetite and more zombies.
READ MORE of Jim Picht in Stimulus That!
James Picht is the Senior Editor for Communities Politics and teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars' College in Natchitoches, La., where he went to take a break from working in Moscow and Washington. But he fell in love with the town and with the professor of Romance languages, so there he stayed. Now he teaches, annoys his children, and makes jalapeno lemonade. After watching Congress in action, he thinks it should be rated TV-MA. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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Riccardo Gangale/Associated Press
A polling station in Ilbissil, Kenya. Memories of election tumult five years ago has led some Kenyans to fear ethnic violence.
NAIROBI, Kenya – Millions of Kenyans poured into polling stations across the country on Monday morning to cast their votes in a crucial, anxiously awaited presidential election, the first since the country exploded in violence five years ago.
The turnout appeared to be tremendous. Starting hours before dawn, lines of voters wrapped in blankets and heavy coats stretched for nearly a mile in some places.
Already, some violence has flared. In Mombasa, at least four police officers were butchered with machetes in an overnight attack that authorities believe was carried out by the Mombasa Republican Council, a fringe separatist group that opposes the elections and believes Kenya's coast should be a separate country. Reuters reported a higher death toll, quoting senior police officials as saying nine security officers, two civilians and six attackers had died.
Some Western election observers in Mombasa, the biggest city on Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, have pulled back to their hotels because of security concerns.
In northeastern Kenya, near the border with Somalia, there was a small explosion at a polling station and a grenade was thrown into a police camp. Early reports indicated there were few, if any, casualties in the incidents.
Kenya's top politicians are urging voters to remain calm and avoid the mayhem that erupted at the end of 2007 and early 2008 when a disputed election ignited ethnic grievances and set off clashes that killed more than 1,000 people.
"We must keep the peace," said William Ruto, after voting Monday in his hometown, Eldoret. Mr. Ruto is running for deputy president and has been charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity connected to the violence in the last election.
Raila Odinga, Kenya's prime minister and one of the leading contenders for president, brimmed with confidence as he stepped into a cardboard ballot box in a Nairobi slum and cast his vote. "Today, Kenyans have a date with destiny," he said.
Kenya is one of the most industrialized countries in Africa, a beachhead for Western interests and a close American ally but its history has been haunted by intense and often violent ethnic politics. Mr. Odinga, an ethnic Luo, says he was cheated out of victory in 2007.
His main rival is Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kikuyu and the son of Kenya's first president. Mr. Kenyatta has also been charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity, accused of bankrolling Kikuyu death squads that murdered scores of Luo civilians in 2008. The Kikuyu-Luo political feud goes back decades to Kenya's independence in 1963.
Many analysts predicted that neither Mr. Odinga nor Mr. Kenyatta will win more than 50 percent of the vote, mandating a heated runoff in April.
The voting on Monday seemed to be proceeding smoothly in some areas but was bumpy in others, with polling stations not opening on time. There were also problems with the new biometric voter identification process. The new digital equipment was not working at many polling stations and officials had to revert to printed voting lists, which are thought to be more susceptible to corruption.
This election is the most complicated Kenya has ever held. A host of new positions have been created, like governorships, senate seats and county women's representatives, in an attempt to change the winner-take-all nature of Kenyan politics. In some places, the sheer number of ballots caused long delays.
"The cracks are beginning to show," Mr. Odinga said Monday morning. But he added he was still confident that, this time, he would win.
Police continue to search for the driver of a BMW and a passenger who fled an accident after slamming into a livery cab, killing a young pregnant woman and her husband. Their unborn baby survived.
Nachman and Raizy Glauber, both 21, were looking forward to welcoming their first child into their tight-knit community of Orthodox Jews. Now the infant must be raised by relatives and neighbors.
The horrific crash happened in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn as the couple headed to a hospital, said Isaac Abraham, a neighbor of Raizy Glauber's parents who lives two blocks from where the crash happened.
The engine of the livery car ended up in the backseat, where Raizy Glauber, who was seven months pregnant, was sitting before she was ejected, Abraham said. Her body landed under a parked tractor-trailer, said witnesses who raced to the scene after the crash. Nachman Glauber was pinned in the car, and emergency workers had to cut off the roof to get him out, witnesses said.
The Glaubers both were pronounced dead at hospitals, and the medical examiner said they died of blunt-force trauma. Doctors performed a cesarean section on the mother to deliver the baby, a boy.
AP Photo/VosIzNeias.com, Eli Wohl
Their son was in serious condition, Abraham said. Neighbors and friends said the boy weighed only about 4 pounds. The Glaubers' livery cab driver was treated for minor injuries at the hospital and was later released. Both the driver of the BMW and a passenger fled and were being sought, police said.
On Saturday, Raizy Glauber "was not feeling well, so they decided to go" to the hospital, said Sara Glauber, Nachman Glauber's cousin. Abraham said the Glaubers called a car service because they didn't own a car, which is common for New Yorkers.
The Glaubers were married about a year ago and had begun a life together in Williamsburg, where Raizy Glauber grew up in a prominent Orthodox Jewish rabbinical family, Sara Glauber said.
Raised north of New York City in Monsey, N.Y., and part of a family that founded a line of clothing for Orthodox Jews, Nachman Glauber was studying at a rabbinical college nearby, said his cousin.
Brooklyn is home to the largest community of ultra-Orthodox Jews outside Israel, more than 250,000. The community has strict rules governing clothing, social customs and interaction with the outside world. Men wear dark clothing that includes a long coat and a fedora-type hat and often have long beards and ear locks.
Jewish law calls for burial of the dead as soon as possible, and hours after their deaths, the Glaubers were mourned by at least 1,000 people at a funeral outside the Congregation Yetev Lev D'Satmar synagogue.
Afterward, the cars carrying the bodies left and headed to Monsey, where another service was planned in Nachman Glauber's hometown.
The Pakistani city of Karachi is in mourning after a powerful bomb ripped through a mainly Shia Muslim area, killing at least 45 people.
Schools and businesses are closed after a strike was called to protest against the attack in Abbas Town.
No group has yet said it planted the bomb, which went off near a mosque as worshippers left evening prayers.
Pakistan's Shia minority are the target of frequent sectarian attacks from Sunni militant groups.
Sunday night's explosion destroyed several buildings and set others on fire, sending a huge column of smoke into the sky and causing a power cut in part of the city.
Police are investigating whether it was a suicide attack and some reports have spoken of a second explosion.
At least 150 people were wounded by the blast, police say.
Shias targetedMonday's strike, being observed in several cities across Sindh province, was called by an alliance of political groups.
Public transport stayed off the roads and petrol pumps and filling stations were also closed. Three days of mourning have also been announced by Shia groups.
Some relatives and local residents were still sorting through the rubble on Monday morning.
"I am here to look for my relative,'' Farzana Azfar told the Associated Press news agency. "People say he was here. But people say they have no idea about him. It appears that some bodies are still in the rubble," she said.
Pakistan's main political and religious leaders rushed to condemn the attack - the latest to target the Shia minority.
But the ability of the authorities to protect Shias is being severely tested, correspondents say - and this as elections are around the corner.
Some activists called 2012 the worst year in living memory for attacks on Pakistan's Shia community, with rights groups estimating that about 400 perished in militant attacks.
But this year is also shaping up to be among the deadliest: nearly 200 people were killed in two separate bombings targeting Shias in the south-western city of Quetta in January and February.
Although no group has yet said it carried out this latest bombing, suspicion is likely to fall on Sunni militant groups.
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The BBC's Mike Wooldridge said that the attack would be "deeply worrying for the government"
Groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi have long regarded Shia Muslims as heretics and have stepped up attacks in recent years.
They are thought to have set up several training camps for militants, and police seizures have shown they have access to large quantities of weapons and explosives, the BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says.
Last month Pakistan's Supreme Court called on the authorities to devise a strategy to protect Shia Muslims more effectively, given the increase in attacks.
Karachi - Pakistan's biggest city and commercial capital - has a long history of violence.
As well as a sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia, that city has also seen conflict between different ethnic communities - Pashtuns from north-west Pakistan, Mohajirs (immigrants from India following the Partition in 1947) and Sindhis.
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1 of 2. Noraziah Noor (seated L) and Nurunisa Abu Bakar (2nd R), the wives of Inspector Zulkifli Mamat and Corporal Sabarudin Daud respectively, who are the members of the Malaysian Police 69th Commando Battalion killed on Friday in the standoff between Malaysian security forces and armed followers of the Sultanate of Sulu, recite a prayer as they wait for the arrival of their bodies at an airport in Subang, outside Kuala Lumpur March 2, 2013. A standoff between Malaysian security forces and armed Filipinos ended in violence on Friday, with at least two police officers killed amid conflicting reports of casualties as Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak declared his patience had run out. Malaysian state news agency Bernama said that two police commandos had been killed in a mortar attack and two wounded after security forces tried to force out the group of at least 100 Filipinos who have been holed up in eastern Sabah state for more than two weeks.
Credit: Reuters/Bazuki Muhammad
LAHAD DATU, Malaysia | Sun Mar 3, 2013 3:02am EST
LAHAD DATU, Malaysia (Reuters) - Gunmen have killed five policemen in Malaysia's Sabah state where members of an armed faction from the Philippines have been facing off with security forces as they stake an ancient claim to the remote corner of Borneo island.
Police on Friday tried to end the standoff with scores of followers of the sultan of Sulu, a south Philippine region, who occupied a Sabah village in February to press their claim. Two policemen and 12 followers of the sultan were killed.
The killing of the five policemen late on Saturday, in an ambush on police hunting followers of the sultan, will reinforce fears that insecurity is spreading in a region rich in resources that has been of increasing interest to investors.
Malaysia's inspector general of police, Ismail Omar, tried to ease any worries on Sunday, saying the situation was under control.
"I don't want speculation that Sabah is in crisis," Ismail told a news conference in the town of Lahad Datu. "We have our security forces at three places to respond."
The confrontation had threatened to reignite tension between the Philippines and Malaysia. Ties have been periodically frayed by security and migration problems along their sea border.
Economic interests are also at risk.
Oil majors like ConocoPhillips and Shell have poured in large sums to develop oil and gas fields in Sabah. Chinese companies have been investing in hydro-power and coal mining.
Much of Borneo's forest has been cleared, to the horror of indigenous people and environmentalists, and replanted with palm oil. Tens of thousands of migrants have come to Sabah from the Philippines to clear the timber and work the plantations.
For generations Borneo, one of the worlds' biggest islands, was a forbidding expanse of jungle, thinly populated by head-hunting tribesmen, and claimed by Muslim sultans and later European colonialists based in coastal trading towns.
"DRASTIC ACTION"
Colonial Britain and the Netherlands carved up the island in the nineteenth century and Malaysia and Indonesia took their shares upon independence. Britain agreed to independence for the tiny oil-rich sultanate of Brunei on Borneo's west coast.
But under a pre-colonial pact between sultans, Sulu, in what would later become the Philippines, was awarded control of the northern corner of Borneo, in what would later become Malaysia.
A British trading company agreed during colonial times to pay Sulu a nominal lease for Sabah - it now amounts to 5,300 ringgit ($1,700) a year - and the claim of the ancient Sulu sultanate on Sabah was all but forgotten, until February.
Then, about 150 followers of the Sulu sultanate, which has no power but commands respect in the southern Philippines, sailed in and occupied a Sabah village, staking their claim and demanding a renegotiation of Sabah's lease.
Malaysia has said the demands will not be met and has sent in the security forces. Both Malaysia and the Philippines have called on the gunmen to give up and go home.
An increasingly exasperated Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, who faces an election in weeks, has promised "drastic action" if the group does not leave.
The trouble looks to be at least partly the result of efforts to forge peace in the southern Philippines, in particular a peace deal signed between the Philippine government and Muslim rebels last October to end a 40 year conflict.
Jamalul Kiram, a former sultan of Sulu and brother of the man Philippine provincial authorities regard as sultan, said the peace deal had handed control of much of Sulu to Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels, ignoring the sultanate.
The sultan loyalists had gone to Malaysia to revive their claim to Sabah as a protest in response to what they saw as the unfair peace deal, he said.
A senior Malaysian defense official said the gunmen in Sabah had links with a Philippine rebel faction leader called Nor Misuari, who also saw no benefit from the pace deal.
"He will surely stir up more trouble," said the Malaysian official, who declined to be identified.
(Reporting by Niluksi Koswanage in KUALA LUMPUR; Additional reporting by Manuel Mogato in MANILA; Editing by Robert Birsel)
WASHINGTON — Seventeen months after President Barack Obama signed doomsday budget legislation that was never intended to become law, the sweeping spending reductions in the measure have been imposed.
Late Friday night, Obama formally triggered spending cuts that will reach across the breadth of the federal government after he failed to persuade congressional Republicans to replace them with a mix of cuts and tax increases.
In a 70-page report to Congress accompanying the order and detailing the reductions — agency by agency and program by program — Jeffrey D. Zients, Obama's budget director, called them "deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions."
But even as the cuts become official, some of the immediate impact is difficult to see.
The process of trimming government budgets is slow and cumbersome, involving lengthy notifications to unions about temporary furloughs, reductions in overtime pay and cuts in grant financing to state and local programs. Less federal money will, over time, mean fewer government contracts with private companies. Reduced overtime for airport security checkpoint officers will make lines longer, eventually.
And so as the first weekend began for the new, slimmer government, little of that is evident yet.
Letters to governors, informing them of the smaller grants are beginning to go out, officials said. Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, wrote to Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio: "You can expect reductions totaling approximately $35 million," helpfully putting the amount in a bold type.
The Air Force Thunderbirds — the elite team of F-16 pilots who perform tricks at air shows — announced on its website that all of its shows have been canceled starting April 1. The last show will be in Titusville, Fla., on March 23.
Still, it will take some time, officials acknowledged, before the cuts begin to make life more difficult for teachers, defense contractors, Head Start students, border patrol agents or others who rely on the largess of the federal government.
On Friday, Obama used janitors and security guards as examples of federal employees whose pay will be cut because of the reductions. "They've got to figure out how to manage that," he said.
In fact, as pointed out by The Washington Post's Fact Checker, Capitol officials emailed the building's staff to say that the president's comment was not true. The Capitol's sergeant-at-arms, who is in charge of the building's officers, said that, "None of my employees will have their pay cut nor will they face furloughs."
In his weekly address on Saturday morning, the president acknowledged that the reductions would not affect everyone equally.
"While not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away, the pain will be real," Obama said. "Many middle-class families will have their lives disrupted in a significant way."
And heading into the weekend, some officials seemed eager to offer reassurance that government would continue to function despite the deep cuts.
While Leon E. Panetta, who just left the job of defense secretary, had thundered about the critical risk to national security — and lamented what he viewed as a shift of Washington's political class away from good governance — his successor, Chuck Hagel, spoke in more conciliatory terms.
To be sure, Hagel listed the specific risks to national security that could arrive with the cuts, also called the sequester. But even as he noted that the United States "has the best fighting force, the most capable fighting force, the most powerful fighting force in the world," he pledged that he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff "will manage these issues."
"These are adjustments," Hagel said of the cuts to be imposed by the cuts. "We anticipated these kinds of realities, and we will do what we need to do to assure the capabilities of our forces."
Obama has signaled that he remains eager to replace across-the-board cuts with deficit reduction that consists of more targeted reductions and increased revenue from closing tax loopholes. An email sent late Friday to supporters from his former campaign operation had the subject line "Devastating."
"Congress can stop all of this right away — and pursue a balanced approach to deficit reduction," wrote Jon Carson, the president of Organizing for Action, the political operation created to advance the president's agenda. "That's what the vast majority of Americans want."
But Obama, too, said in his address on Saturday that it was time to move on to other topics.
"I'm going to push through this paralysis and keep fighting for the real challenges facing middle-class families," he said, citing efforts to increase the minimum wage, provide money for more preschool for children and pass an immigration overhaul.
In the Republican radio response, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, the chairwoman of the Republican conference, also called the cuts "devastating" to America, but said that Republicans in the House would not yield on the issue of taxes.
"Spending is the problem, which means cutting spending is the solution," she said. "It's that simple."
In fact, nothing about the sequestration law is simple. And the 70-page report on its implementation proves that point. The report calculates how much each program will lose, "as required by sections 251A(7)(A) and 253(f)(2) of BBEDCA." Those numbers are detailed in page after page of complex tables.
In his letter, Zients called the law establishing the cuts "a blunt and indiscriminate instrument. It was never intended to be implemented and does not represent a responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction."
SEFFNER, Fla. – Crews planned to begin demolishing a Florida home Sunday that is perched over a huge sinkhole, deeming it too dangerous to keep searching for the man swallowed into the earth from his bedroom.
The search for Jeff Bush, 37, was called off Saturday. The 20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole is almost completely covered by the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them. Two neighboring homes were evacuated as a precaution.
Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said heavy equipment would be brought in to begin the demolition Sunday morning.
"At this point it's really not possible to recover the body," Merrill said, later adding "we're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole."
Jessica Damico, spokeswoman for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, said the demolition equipment would be placed on what they believe is solid ground and reach onto the property to pull apart the house. The crew will try pulling part of the house away from the sinkhole intact so some of the residents' keepsakes can be retrieved.
Bush was in his bedroom Thursday night in Seffner — a suburb of 8,000 people 15 miles east of downtown Tampa — when the ground opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five others in the house escape unharmed as the earth crumbled.
On Saturday, the normally quiet neighborhood of concrete block homes painted in Florida pastels was jammed with cars. Engineers, reporters, and curious onlookers came to the scene.
At the home next door to the Bushes, a family cried and organized boxes. Testing determined that their house and another had been compromised by the sinkhole. The families were allowed to go inside for about a half-hour to gather belongings.
Sisters Soliris and Elbairis Gonzalez, who live on the same street as the Bushes, said neighbors were worried for their safety.
"I've had nightmares," Soliris Gonzalez, 31, said. "In my dreams, I keep checking for cracks in the house."
They said the family has discussed where to go if forced to evacuate, and they've taken their important documents to a storage unit.
"The rest of it, this is material stuff, as long as our family is fine," Soliris Gonzalez said.
"You never know underneath the ground what's happening," added Elbairis Gonzalez, 30.
Experts say thousands of sinkholes form yearly in Florida because of the state's unique geography, though most are small and deaths rarely occur.
"There's hardly a place in Florida that's immune to sinkholes," said Sandy Nettles, who owns a geology consulting company in the Tampa area. "There's no way of ever predicting where a sinkhole is going to occur."
Most sinkholes are small, like one found Saturday morning in Largo, 35 miles away from Seffner. The Largo sinkhole, about 10 feet long and several feet wide, is in a mall parking lot.
The state sits on limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, with a layer of clay on top. The clay is thicker in some locations — including the area where Bush became a victim — making them even more prone to sinkholes.
Jonathan Arthur, the state geologist and director of the Florida Geological Survey, said other states sit atop limestone in a similar way, but Florida has added factors such as extreme weather, development, aquifer pumping and construction.
"The conditions under which a sinkhole will form can be very rapid, or they can form slowly over time," he said.
But it remained unclear Saturday what, if anything, had caused the Seffner sinkhole.
"The condition that caused that sinkhole could have started a million years ago," Nettles said.
Jeremy Bush, who tried to rescue his brother, lay flowers near the house Saturday morning and wept.
He said someone came to his home a couple of months ago to check for sinkholes and other issues, apparently for insurance purposes, but found nothing wrong. State law requires home insurers to provide coverage against sinkholes.
"And a couple of months later, my brother dies. In a sinkhole," Bush said Friday.
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