史上最大赤字：未來１０年將超過９兆美元
(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama hit key swing states Saturday, taking a jab at his GOP counterpart's endorsement by the nation's vice president.At an event in Laramie, Wyoming, on Saturday, Vice President Dick Cheney said he will cast his ballot for the McCain-Palin ticket.
"This year, of course, I'm not on the ballot, so I am here ... not to vote for me, but I want to join daughter Liz, who is with me today, join us in casting ... our ballots for John McCain and Sarah Palin."
Obama started his day with a morning rally in Henderson, Nevada, and moved on to Pueblo, Colorado, and Springfield, Missouri.
At a rally in Pueblo, Obama lashed out at the Cheney endorsement.
"I'd like to congratulate Sen. McCain on this endorsement, because he really earned it. That endorsement didn't come easy," he said. "George Bush may be in an undisclosed location now, but Dick Cheney's out there on the campaign trail because he'd be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain."
"He knows that with John McCain, you get a twofer: George Bush's economic policy and Dick Cheney's foreign policy, Obama continued. "And that is a risk we cannot afford to take."
In a statement, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds responded, "Barack Obama and Dick Cheney aren't just cousins; they've shared support for the Bush energy policy and the out-of-control spending that John McCain has fought to oppose," he said.
Earlier at a rally in Henderson, Nevada, Obama continued to defend his tax plan for the middle class -- and defended against "socialist" claims.
"The choice in this election isn't between tax cuts and no tax cuts. It's about whether you believe we should only reward wealth or we should also reward the work and the workers who give it," he said. "John McCain calls this socialistic. I call it opportunity."
Across the country, former President Clinton hit the campaign trail for Obama in Beckley, West Virginia.
Clinton defended Obama's economic policies and blasted the GOP for believing in a "top-down economy."We can't afford the wrong philosophy, and they're out there whacking on Obama, saying he's for redistribution," Clinton said. "Gimme a break, folks."
"We just had the biggest redistribution of income upwards in the last eight years since the 1920s, and we know how the 1920s ended," he added.
Sen. Joe Biden said he hoped McCain would finish the campaign with a positive tone. The Delaware senator said he doesn't remember a presidential campaign ending so viciously.
"In my view, over the last few weeks, John McCain's campaign has gone way over the top," Biden said Saturday at an outdoor rally on Evansville, Indiana's Main Street. "They are trying to take the low road to the highest office in the land. It's not only George Bush's economic policies that John McCain has bought hook, line and sinker. He's also bought Karl Rove's brand of political tactics. 
"It is disappointing, I never thought I'd see this from a McCain campaign," Biden continued. "They're calling Barack Obama every name in the book. They are going out in a way that I don't recall it being more personally vicious."
Biden also holds events in Marion, Ohio; and Bowling Green, Ohio. Watch analysts weigh the state of the race
Biden's Republican counterpart, Gov. Sarah Palin, kicked off a bus tour of Central Florida on Saturday by focusing on the financial concerns of the nearly 3 million Floridians over the age of 65.
Palin, speaking at a rally in New Port Richey, Florida, promised that she and McCain will "keep our defining commitments to our senior citizens."
But she wasted little time on the Republican agenda and turned her sights, as usual, on Obama, who has accused McCain of wanting to cut Medicare funding and place Social Security benefits in the stock market.
"Obama goes around promising a new kind of politics, then he comes here to Florida. ... He tries to exploit the fears and worries about Social Security and Medicare to our retirees, and that's the oldest and cheapest kind of politics there is," she said.
The Alaska governor had rallies scheduled in five cities in three key states Saturday: Florida, North Carolina and Virginia
At an event Saturday in Springfield, Virginia, McCain also hit Obama hard on issues facing seniors.
"Every four years, the Democrats roll out these ads try to scare seniors over Social Security and Medicare. ... I was there when we saved Social Security under President Reagan, and I'm going to protect Social Security. I'm going to protect Medicare, and I'm not going to let this Congress tax away your retirement," McCain said.
McCain also told voters in Springfield, in northern Virginia, that the area is key to a Republican victory.
"I want to remind you again: Fairfax County is key to this election," McCain said. "You know that. You know how important it is for us to win here; you know how important it is that we put this country in the right direction. I need your help for the next three days."
A month ago, McCain's brother Joe called northern Virginia "communist country." And just two weeks ago, McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer said the area wasn't even a "real" part of the state.
"I certainly agree that northern Virginia has gone more Democratic. And as a proud resident of Oakton, Virginia, I can tell you that the Democrats have just come in from the District of Columbia and moved into northern Virginia. And that's really what you see there. But the rest of the state, 'real' Virginia, if you will, I think will be very responsive to Sen. McCain's message."
Asked whether she wanted to clarify her comments, Pfotenhauer stood by them.
After Virginia, McCain traveled to Perkasie, Pennsylvania, for a rally before heading to New York for a scheduled appearance on "Saturday Night Live."
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified Monday that Congress should consider passing a new stimulus package to try to jump start the economy.Bernanke, speaking before the House Budget Committee, came just short of an outright endorsement of a package to pump tax dollars into the economy. But he clearly said the economy needs additional help from Congress.
"With the economy likely to be weak for several quarters, and with some risk of a protracted slowdown, consideration of a fiscal package by the Congress at this juncture seems appropriate," he said.
Experts said Bernanke's testimony gives an important lift to the chances that Congress will pass some sort of stimulus package, perhaps in a lame duck session after the November election and before the new Congress takes office in January.
"Effectively, the Fed chairman is giving Congress a green light to go ahead with an additional fiscal stimulus package," said Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist for research firm Global Insight.
Earlier this year, Congress approved a $170 billion plan - nearly $100 billion in payments to tax filers - to boost consumer and business spending. Talk has grown louder in recent weeks in Washington and on the presidential campaign trail for further steps including an extension of unemployment benefits, infrastructure spending and other measures.
Bernanke's comments were cheered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
"Chairman Bernanke added his voice to the chorus of economists, experts and policymakers who insist that America needs a job-creating recovery package to get our economy back on track and to restore consumer and investor confidence," said a statement released by her office.
The Bush administration said it was open to discussing a new stimulus package with lawmakers but said it did not see Bernanke's statements as a blanket endorsement of any plan proposed so far by Congress.
"I think we just need to wait and see," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "We're open to ideas and we'll take a look at what comes our way."
Bernanke, who with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has led the government's extraordinary efforts in recent weeks to stem the financial crisis, was asked by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., whether the economy is in a recession.
"We are in a serious slowdown," Bernanke said, refusing to give the yes-or-no answer DeLauro said she wanted.
He said "recession" is a technical description of economic conditions. "Whether it's called a recession or not is of no consequence," Bernanke said.
Some economists saw Bernanke's comments as his most dire assessment yet of the U.S. economy.
"The Fed has accepted that the rate cuts and actions, even if they are of help to the financial sector, will not be adequate to stabilize the economy," said Arpitha Bykere, economic analyst for RGE Monitor.
Most of Bernanke's nearly 90-minute appearance focused on economic stimulus. He said that Congress should consider another measure but nonetheless declined to say how much money should be spent. He said that's a decision for Congress, not the Federal Reserve.
Bernanke suggested Monday that any stimulus program should be activated as quickly as possible to boost the economy when it is facing its greatest period of weakness.
In addition, Congress should weigh whether to make credit more available to consumers, homeowners, businesses and other borrowers, Bernanke said. He said that loan guarantees and direct lending by government are among the ways lawmakers can get credit flowing again.
Democrats have been pushing for a second stimulus package for months. Among the proposals they've put forward: extend jobless benefits, increase food stamps, invest in infrastructure projects and impose a requirement for a foreclosure moratorium.
Republicans have made their own proposals, which focus more on tax breaks than direct payments. Among them, reduce or suspend the capital gains tax and offer a bigger tax break for home buyers.
The presidential candidates, whose crisis-related stimulus plans largely differ from one another, nevertheless both call for suspending the income tax on unemployment benefits and temporarily exempting seniors over 70-1/2 from having to make withdrawals from their IRAs and 401(k)s.
At Monday's hearing, Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash, pushed Bernanke about the value of spending on infrastructure projects, such as roads and water projects. Such projects have economic value, but it generally takes a long time for spending on such projects to get into the system, Bernanke said. Baird responded that in his district and across the country there are many projects ready to go and lacking only funding.
LONDON, England (AP) -- The spying game is not what it used to be."We saw ourselves almost as people with a priestly calling to tell the truth," John le Carre says of his days as a spy.
That is a matter of regret for John le Carre, eminent novelist and former spy, who has done more than almost any other writer to forge our idea of how the game is played.
Ian Fleming's action-hero James Bond may be more famous, but le Carre's universe has the ring of truth. His secret agents exist in a world of stalemate, moral compromise, ambiguity and betrayal.
That's again the terrain of his 21st novel, "A Most Wanted Man," but in some ways the landscape has changed. The end of the Cold War changed things. The September 11 attacks changed them again, revealing a frightening new menace and adding a glossary of chilling new terms -- "war on terror," "extraordinary rendition" -- to our common language.
"I have no nostalgia for the Cold War," says le Carre, who worked for British intelligence in Germany in the 1960s, when tensions with the Soviet Union were at their chilliest. "I think I have nostalgia for the hope that existed during the Cold War that when it ended we would redesign the world. We never did that. We missed the whole trick."
"A Most Wanted Man," which comes out October 7, is set firmly in our jittery post-9/11 world. Le Carre locates the action in Hamburg, Germany, the port city where several of the 9/11 hijackers planned their attacks. Its central character is Issa, an enigmatic half-Chechen refugee who appears in Hamburg sporting a long black coat, muddy motives and a claim to a mysterious fortune.
To Annabel Richter, an idealistic young human rights lawyer who takes up his case, Issa is a challenge. To the German, British and American spies who hone in on him, he is a possible asset and a potential threat.
Le Carre is fascinated by the way globalization and immigration have brought disparate peoples closer together, without bridging the gaps in culture, wealth and experience that divide them. Despite attempts at mutual understanding, the novel's characters are on a collision course.
"We know so little, we understand so little, about Islam -- the cultural differences that separate us, the thought processes that separate us," says the writer, whose real name is David Cornwell. "It's very difficult to find a common ground. I'm not offering solutions here, but trying to paint a moment in our time. I'm very hung up on trying to catch the moment of where we are and trying to make a neat little story that reflects our feelings."
Since his breakthrough book, "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," in 1963, le Carre has become one of Britain's most successful writers. Many of his books -- most recently "The Constant Gardener" -- have been turned into films. His books may be categorized as thrillers, but they are reviewed as serious novels.
Nan Graham, editor-in-chief at le Carre's U.S. publisher, Scribner, says he transcends genres. "As a storyteller, he's simply one of the best we have," she said.
She said le Carre "has always put his characters in a moral maze. And I think this book, which is partly about the War on Terror, makes it clear that the War on Terror is fraught with as much moral ambiguity as the Cold War."
Le Carre lives with his wife Jane in a house high above the rugged coast of southwest England, and in a large home in one of London's leafiest nooks. Sitting amid the book-lined walls and solid wooden furniture of his London house, he looks the picture of middle-class contentment, a white-haired 76-year-old wearing a hearing aid and a gray sleeveless sweater.
But he is not mellowing into old age. His conversation, like his writing, fizzes with a moral outrage that is at odds with his kindly, avuncular manner.
The enemy in his new book is not just terrorism, but also the treachery and betrayal of supposed allies. Le Carre's German spies are caught between their own goals and the demands of impatient American colleagues, depicted as willing to cut a few ethical corners in the cause of neutralizing a perceived threat.
Le Carre can see the criticism coming.
"I don't expect a terribly warm reception in the United States," he says. "I'm not anti-American. But I'm certainly anti the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld disaster of the last eight years." Like many liberal Europeans, he feels that the United States has been "hijacked."
America has claimed the right "to seize any citizen of any country whom it deems offensive to it," he says. "America has licensed torture. In the end, I ask the same question that I've been asking through a whole lot of books: How much of this stuff can we do to ourselves in protection of our democracy and remain a democracy worth protecting?"
The book has more personal concerns. The three central characters -- Issa, Annabel and Tommy Brue, a careworn British banker -- have fathers who cast long shadows their offspring struggle to shake off.
"All of us are molded much more than we ever want to let on by our parental origins and the way we are brought up and the angers of our childhood," says le Carre.
The intersection of psychology and ideology, politics and the personal, is prime le Carre territory.
His own father, a charming con man and fraudster, helped propel him into storytelling and spying, two creative forms of deception. Le Carre drew on that background for his most autobiographical novel, "A Perfect Spy," which charts a boy's induction into a life of personal and professional deceit.
Le Carre has been a full-time writer for more than four decades, and kept silent for years about his time as a spy. These days he's more willing to discuss it, although he says he never became more than a "very lowly" operative. His career in espionage was ended by the British double agent Kim Philby, who exposed him and dozens of other British agents to the Soviets.
If the author has a surrogate in the novel, it's Gunther Bachmann, a mid-ranking German intelligence official who upholds the values worth preserving.
"I'm with Bachmann, instinctively," le Carre says. He stands for all the "really good field men and field women" in spy agencies everywhere.
"They're not interventionists, they're not judgmental. But they have a knack for it -- they can listen at the bazaars, they know how to befriend people, how to manipulate them. How to do a deal with them and stick to the deal.
"Intelligence work at its best is academic, it's human, it's earthy and it's vocational. It's not about how to break somebody's neck on a dark night."
Le Carre comes from a generation of spies that was shocked by the way intelligence was manipulated to make the case for war in Iraq, through the British government's infamous "dodgy dossier" and other exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
"In my day -- in the spook world -- we saw ourselves almost as people with a priestly calling to tell the truth," he said. "We didn't shape it or mold it. We were there, we thought, to speak truth to power. I never had any sense of the stories being twisted to suit the political requirements."
Idealism in a spy? Perhaps it's less unlikely than it sounds. Like his books, le Carre is a mix of unblinking realism and hopeful humanism. His characters struggle valiantly to do the right thing. They usually fail.
Candidates John McCain and Barack Obama face-off Friday in first presidential debate. McCain had thrown the debate into doubt when he said he would only take part if a deal was reached on solving the financial crisis gripping the U.S. and global markets. By noon in Washington though, McCain agreed to take part despite continuing deadlock on the bailout.
A group of 11 European tourists and four Egyptians have been kidnapped in the southern Egyptian desert and apparently taken to neighboring Sudan, an Egyptian government spokesman said on Monday. The tourists included five Germans, five Italians and one Romanian, Magdi Rady, a spokesman for the Egyptian prime minister, told CNN.
Stocks in Asia and Europe continued to tumble Tuesday following Wall Street's worst day since markets reopened seven years ago after the 9/11 terror attacks. Tokyo's Nikkei fell 4.95 percent while the Hong Kong Hang Seng shed 5.9 percent as the effects of Lehman Brothers' collapse reverberated around the world.
