A west coast trip is necessary and will probably be fairly busy.

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) clashed during a White House meeting on Wednesday, with the Speaker telling the president that he was “not going to allow a debt-ceiling increase without doing something serious about the debt,” Boehner’s office said.

The president convened the meeting of the bipartisan congressional leadership to discuss his “to-do list” for Congress, but an aide to the Speaker said the bulk of the meeting was spent on other issues, including a pile-up of expiring tax provisions and the next increase in the federal debt limit.

Syria – The Ally You Cannot Afford

Bahrain issued arrest warrants on Wednesday for 20 people accused of injuring policemen and civilians with homemade bombs during months of pro-democracy unrest in the island kingdom.

Bahrain has been in turmoil since protesters, mainly from the Gulf Arab state’s Shi’ite Muslim majority, took to the streets calling for democratic reform in early 2011.

Police in Frankfurt cleared hundreds of protesters who set up camp outside the European Central Bank in October as they prepare for as many as 30,000 anti-capitalist activists to besiege Germany’s banking capital.

Officers started carrying off demonstrators gathered under the Occupy Frankfurt banner at about 9 a.m. local time today after issuing several warnings. The camp is being cleared before the ECB begins a conference on monetary policy, and the first of the four-day protest rallies gets under way this afternoon.

The old Irish pound or punt is back in the shops of an Ulster town.

In Clones, County Monaghan, in the Republic of Ireland, more than 40 businesses are accepting the old notes which were replaced by the euro 10 years ago.

While it is no longer legal tender, notes and coins can still be exchanged at Dublin’s Central Bank.

And people in the town are scrabbling behind radiators and down the back of sofas to come up with the old notes.

There are still more than 300m euro worth of Irish punts still out there in Ireland.

The idea to take in the punts was the brainchild of the Morgans – shopkeepers in Clones.

Rupee at record low: Austerity measures needed, says Pranab

It may seem counterintuitive, but one way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere may be to produce pure carbon dioxide in powerplants that burn fossil fuels. In this way, greenhouse gases — once isolated within a plant — could be captured and stored in natural reservoirs, deep in Earth’s crust.

Law enforcement and homeland security personnel face an average of 55 daily encounters with “known or suspected terrorists” named on government watch lists, officials told Reuters.

The figure — which equals more than 20,000 contacts per year — underscores the growing sweep of the watchlists, which have expanded significantly since a failed Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of a U.S. airliner. But officials note that very few of those daily contacts lead to arrests.

Civil liberties groups question the use of watch lists, and they have been ridiculed for ensnaring innocent citizens.

U.S. officials said the encounters, which involve airport and border security personnel as well as federal and local law enforcement officers, are reported to the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), an interagency unit led by an FBI official based in a tightly guarded building in northern Virginia.

Sen. John McCain is talking with Democrats about a joint effort to require outside groups that have spent millions of dollars on this year’s elections to disclose their donors.

McCain (R-Ariz.), once Congress’s leading champion of campaign finance reform, has kept a low profile on the issue in recent years.

He raised the ire of many Republicans a decade ago for pushing comprehensive reform, and many Republicans still held it against him during his 2008 presidential campaign.

A drug made from the saliva of the Gila monster lizard is effective in reducing the craving for food. Researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, have tested the drug on rats, who after treatment ceased their cravings for ordinary food and also chocolate.

Nebraska state Sen. Deb Fischer upset her Republican rivals Tuesday night to win the party’s nomination for the Nebraska Senate.

The underdog candidate will take on former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey this fall in a closely monitored Nebraska Senate race.
Fischer came out of nowhere in the final weeks to pass state Attorney General Jon Bruning, widely regarded as the “establishment” candidate and Don Stenberg, the favorite of the Club for Growth and Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund. Both men heavily outspent Fischer in the primary.

Since the financial crisis and throughout the sluggish economic recovery, working families and small-business owners have watched as the federal government has engaged in a grand experiment in government-led economic engineering. That experiment has failed.