WASHINGTON — A mortgage rescue plan to save hundreds of thousands of homeowners from foreclosure drew overwhelming Senate support Monday, inching toward passage despite Republican objections.
The Senate voted 76-10 to advance the bill, a broad array of housing measures including overhauls of the Federal Housing Administration, the Depression-era mortgage insurer, and government-sponsored home loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Its centerpiece is a new $300 billion FHA program to allow debt-ridden homeowners who are currently too financially risky to qualify for government-backed loans to refinance into safer, more affordable mortgages.
The measure is on track for passage by an overwhelming margin, possibly by week’s end. President Bush has promised a veto.
@3. Headline News Briefs 14 no:Less-deadly cluster bombs planned
The Pentagon is changing its policy on cluster bombs, which scatter hundreds of smaller explosives over a large area where those bomblets can sit for years until they are disturbed and explode. The policy shift, which is outlined in a three-page memo signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, would require that after 2018, more than 99 percent of the bomblets in a cluster bomb must detonate. Limiting the amount of live munitions left on the battlefield would lessen the danger to civilians who have been killed or severely injured when they accidentally detonate the bombs.
@3. Headline News Briefs 14 no:Rainbow Family ban considered
The U.S. Forest Service should consider banning the Rainbow Family from Forest Service land after a confrontation last week led to the arrest of at least eight people, an agency official said Monday. John Twiss, director of Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations in Washington, D.C., said he was among the officers who responded when Rainbow Family members threw sticks and rocks at federal officers when they tried to arrest a member Thursday for an alleged drug offense. This year’s annual Rainbow event, a weeklong gathering of eccentrics, young people and hippie types, was held on the Bridger-Teton National Forest near Big Sandy, Wyo.
Florida: Bertha a Category 3 hurricane
Hurricane Bertha strengthened to a Category 3 storm Monday as it swirled in the central Atlantic, but it posed no immediate threat to land. Forecasters expect the Atlantic season’s first hurricane, which has maximum sustained winds of 115 mph, to head toward Bermuda.
N.Y.: Fewer airline delays in May
Domestic airlines improved their on-time arrival rates in May, according to government data released Monday. A total of 21 percent of commercial flights in the U.S. arrived at least 15 minutes late, were canceled or diverted in May, according to the Transportation Department’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That is down from more than 22 percent of late flights in the same month last year and in April of this year.
Texas: Last shuttle mission set
NASA has tentatively set the final space shuttle mission for May 31, 2010, four months before the shuttle fleet retires. NASA has 10 missions remaining for the shuttle fleet, which President Bush ordered to retire by Sept. 30, 2010. The schedule announced Monday and reported in the Houston Chronicle includes five flights this year, five in 2009 and three in 2010.
Germany: Headless Hitler repairs
Madame Tussauds will repair the wax figure of Adolf Hitler that a visitor beheaded at its new Berlin branch and return it to the museum “as quickly as possible.” On Saturday, the first day the museum opened, a 41-year-old Berlin man pushed aside two employees to attack the wax Hitler figure, ripping off its head while shouting, “No more war!” He was only the second person to enter the museum.
Chile: Group hunts Nazi doctor
Representatives of a Jewish human rights organization arrived in Chile on Monday in a renewed hunt for former SS doctor Aribert Heim. Efraim Zuroff, considered the top Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Sergio Widder, the center’s representative in Latin America, are to visit Puerto Montt and then travel to the Argentine resort city of Bariloche. The center says Heim’s sadism as a doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp earned him the nickname “Doctor Death.” If alive, Heim would be 94.
From Herald news services
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