Archives: Morning Breakouts

With the CBO findings, GOP efforts to undo the health law and to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility took a hit. Democrats immediately pounced on the cost issue as new ammunition in this ongoing battle while Republican leaders instead pointed to their own estimates.

A new Gallup Poll found that public opinion is "closely divided" over whether Congress should vote to undo the health law. And on Capitol Hill, the divide is deep and entrenched, closely tracking with political loyalties.

The New York Times reports on how microlending has "prompted political hostility in Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua and other developing countries." Such negativity "toward microfinance is a sharp reversal from the praise and good will that politicians, social workers and bankers showered on the sector in the last decade." The article notes "[p]hilanthropists and investors poured billions of dollars into nonprofit and profit-making microlenders, who were considered vital players" in helping to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including the MDG target to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Such attention "helped the sector reach more than 91 million customers, most of them women, with loans totaling more than $70 billion by the end of 2009," with half of all borrowers from India and Bangladesh.

Though world food prices "jumped to a record high" in the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) latest index, the agency "is drawing comfort from the absence of widespread riots, usually the defining element of a food crisis," the Financial Times reports looking at the factors that have led some food prices to rise significantly without sparking international panic. "To an outsider, the relative calm, compared with riots in more than 30 countries three years ago, is striking. But a closer look reveals big differences to the situation then, differences that make clear why the world is not facing a crisis. At least not yet," the newspaper writes.

"The United Nations is widely known for functions like peacekeeping, health programs, refugee support and the International Court of Justice. But those are just a part of its bureaucracy, whose size and structure still bewilder many of its own employees," the New York Times writes in an article that examines how the current economic situation could impact the role of the U.N. in the future.

"A new report [.pdf] from international aid agency Oxfam says reconstruction work has barely begun in Haiti following the country's catastrophic earthquake a year ago," RTE News reports (1/6). Even in developed countries, disaster recovery can be a slow process, the report states. But it also "said efforts in Haiti had been paralyzed by a lack of leadership from the Haitian government and the international community," Reuters reports.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, was sworn in Wednesday as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, kicking off a GOP agenda that press reports say will set the tone for the 2012 election.

As the House vote on repealing the health law looms in the near future, some Democrats are contemplating their votes in the context of stiff election pressure or expressing their doubts about the measure's individual mandate.