Shorts (right)
Presidential panel urges more oversight of offshore drilling
WASHINGTON — The presidential panel investigating the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico recommended Tuesday that Congress approve substantial new spending and sweeping new regulations for offshore oil operations at a time when the appetite for both is low.
Releasing its final report, the commission found that the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill arose from a preventable series of corporate and regulatory failures. It warned that unless industry practices and government regulation improved, another such accident was inevitable.
“If dramatic steps are not taken,” said Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida and co-chairman of the commission, “I’m afraid at some point in the coming years another failure will occur, and we will wonder why did the Congress, why did the administration, why did the industry allow this to happen again.”
Rising Chinese inflation to show up in U.S. imports
BEIJING — When garment buyers from New York show up next month at China’s annual trade shows to bargain over next autumn’s fashions, many will face sticker shock.
“They’re going to go home with 35 percent less product than for the same dollars as last year,” particularly for fur coats and cotton sportswear, said Bennett Model, chief executive of Cassin, a Manhattan-based line of designer clothing. “The consumer will definitely see the price rise.”
Inflation has arrived in China. And after Tuesday’s release of crucial financial statistics by China’s central bank, few economists expect Beijing officials to be able to tame rising prices any time soon.
Clinton talks politics in Yemen
SANAA, Yemen — The Obama administration wants to help Yemen do more than hunt down Islamic terrorists, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told this fragile Arab country on Tuesday as she sought to broaden a relationship almost wholly defined by American concerns that Yemen is a staging ground for plots against the United States.
Clinton, the first secretary of state to visit Yemen since James A. Baker III in 1990, undertook a delicate balancing act, gently prodding the country’s longtime autocratic president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to open up his political system while leaving no doubt that he remained a crucial partner in the fight against Islamic extremism.