Pentagon prepares to ask Congress for break from 'sequester'

By David Lawder and David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is preparing to ask Congress soon for more authority to shift funds to cope with automatic spending cuts, confronting lawmakers with another exception to the "sequester" just days after they gave a break to the flying public and the airline industry.

The request may be sent to the House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee as early as next week, a House Republican aide said on Wednesday.

The Pentagon won increased budget flexibility in March, but officials have told members of Congress they believe it was insufficient to cover shortfalls in training and operations.

The Defense Department move would follow closely the fix last week to ease airline flight delays caused by the temporary furloughs of air-traffic controllers by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The cuts, known as "sequestration," were originally hatched by Washington in 2011 as a way to force the White House and Congress to find an alternative budget deal rather than have spending cuts kick in automatically.

But policymakers failed to reach such a deal earlier this year and the cuts - totaling $109 billion for the current fiscal year - took effect on March 1.

Defense spending has taken the single biggest hit from the automatic cuts, with a $46 billion reduction through the September 30 end of the fiscal year.

One House aide said the request would cite a shortfall in war-fighting because of higher than expected costs of withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials paved the way for the move in testimony to congressional committees over the past few weeks in which they expressed worries about the sequester's impact on military readiness, particularly with tensions rising in Syria and Korea.

"With the events in the world today, with Korea, Syria, Iran, the continued fight in Afghanistan ... the discussion on readiness could not come at a more critical time," General John Campbell, Army vice chief of staff, told a U.S. Senate panel on April 17.

"The reality is that if sequestration continues as it is ... we risk becoming a hollow force," he added.

Members of Congress from states with a heavy military presence have been urging a shift of funds since the sequester took effect and might be hard-pressed to vote against it.

An April 18 bipartisan letter from Virginia senators and representatives urged Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to move quickly to prevent furloughs and loss of pay for "thousands of Virginians."

'REPROGRAMMING'

The Defense Department is preparing the request to shift funds, said Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Robbins, a Pentagon spokeswoman, but has not "yet specified the timing or the amount" it wants to transfer, or "reprogram" in budget jargon.

Congress last week approved a similar request from the Justice Department to shift $313 million within its budget to avoid furloughing some 60,000 employees.

Robbins said it was not yet clear whether the Pentagon would submit several different reprogramming requests or one large omnibus-style request, but the budget shifts would be sought "soon."

The Pentagon was one of several government agencies that won some budget flexibility in a stop-gap government funding measure passed in late March.

That allowed more than $10 billion that was locked up in other accounts to be shifted to the Pentagon's operations and maintenance account, which funds training exercises and military readiness.

While that has helped, it did not make up for the deep budget cuts brought on by the sequester. The Army alone is facing about a $13 billion shortfall in training, operations and Afghanistan war costs, Army Secretary John McHugh and Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno told lawmakers last week.

(Editing by Fred Barbash and Peter Cooney)

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Pope washes women's feet in break with church law

ROME (AP) — In his most significant break with tradition yet, Pope Francis washed and kissed the feet of two young women at a juvenile detention center — a surprising departure from church rules that restrict the Holy Thursday ritual to men.

No pope has ever washed the feet of a woman before, and Francis' gesture sparked a debate among some conservatives and liturgical purists, who lamented he had set a "questionable example." Liberals welcomed the move as a sign of greater inclusiveness in the church.

Speaking to the young offenders, including Muslims and Orthodox Christians, Francis said that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion in a gesture of love and service.

"This is a symbol, it is a sign. Washing your feet means I am at your service," Francis told the group, aged 14 to 21, at the Casal del Marmo detention facility in Rome.

"Help one another. This is what Jesus teaches us," the pope said. "This is what I do. And I do it with my heart. I do this with my heart because it is my duty. As a priest and bishop, I must be at your service."

In a video released by the Vatican, the 76-year-old Francis was shown kneeling on the stone floor as he poured water from a silver chalice over the feet of a dozen youths: black, white, male, female, even feet with tattoos. Then, after drying each one with a cotton towel, he bent over and kissed it.

Previous popes carried out the Holy Thursday rite in Rome's grand St. John Lateran basilica, choosing 12 priests to represent the 12 apostles whose feet Christ washed during the Last Supper before his crucifixion.

Before he became pope, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio celebrated the ritual foot-washing in jails, hospitals or hospices — part of his ministry to the poorest and most marginalized of society. He often involved women. Photographs show him washing the feet of a woman holding her newborn child in her arms.

That Francis would include women in his inaugural Holy Thursday Mass as pope was remarkable, however, given that current liturgical rules exclude women.

Canon lawyer Edward Peters, who is an adviser to the Holy See's top court, noted in a blog that the Congregation for Divine Worship sent a letter to bishops in 1988 making clear that "the washing of the feet of chosen men ... represents the service and charity of Christ, who came 'not to be served, but to serve.'"

While bishops have successfully petitioned Rome over the years for an exemption to allow women to participate, the rules on the issue are clear, Peters said.

"By disregarding his own law in this matter, Francis violates, of course, no divine directive," Peters wrote. "What he does do, I fear, is set a questionable example."

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said he didn't want to wade into a canonical dispute over the matter. However, he noted that in a "grand solemn celebration" of the rite, only men are included because Christ washed the feet of his 12 apostles, all of whom were male.

"Here, the rite was for a small, unique community made up also of women," Lombardi wrote in an email. "Excluding the girls would have been inopportune in light of the simple aim of communicating a message of love to all, in a group that certainly didn't include experts on liturgical rules."

Others on the more liberal side of the debate welcomed the example Francis set.

"The pope's washing the feet of women is hugely significant because including women in this part of the Holy Thursday Mass has been frowned on — and even banned — in some dioceses," said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of "The Jesuit Guide."

"It shows the all-embracing love of Christ, who ministered to all he met: man or woman, slave or free, Jew or Gentile."

For some, restricting the rite to men is in line with the church's restriction on ordaining women priests. Church teaching holds that only men should be ordained because Christ's apostles were male.

"This is about the ordination of women, not about their feet," wrote the Rev. John Zuhlsdorf, a traditionalist blogger. Liberals "only care about the washing of the feet of women, because ultimately they want women to do the washing."

Still, Francis has made clear he doesn't favor ordaining women. In his 2011 book, "On Heaven and Earth," then-Cardinal Bergoglio said there were solid theological reasons why the priesthood was reserved to men: "Because Jesus was a man."

On this Holy Thursday, however, Francis had a simple message for the young inmates, whom he greeted one-by-one after the Mass, giving each an Easter egg.

"Don't lose hope," Francis said. "Understand? With hope you can always go on."

One young man then asked why he had come to visit them.

Francis responded that it was to "help me to be humble, as a bishop should be."

The gesture, he said, came "from my heart. Things from the heart don't have an explanation."

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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Britain to offer childcare tax break to parents

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron will unveil a new tax break on Tuesday to help working parents with their childcare costs from 2015, the government said, seeking to placate families squeezed by austerity, a stagnant economy and weak wage growth.

The announcement comes a day before Chancellor George Osborne is due to reject calls to abandon the coalition government's deficit reduction programme when he delivers his budget statement to parliament.

Trailing in the polls before an election due in 2015, Cameron and Osborne's Conservatives are accused by the Labour opposition of choking the economic recovery with a focus on austerity rather than growth.

Under pressure to do more to revive the economy and help hard-pressed households, Cameron will visit a nursery school in London on Tuesday to set out details of the tax break. It will be open to 2.5 million families and will be worth up to 1,200 pounds ($1,800) a year per child.

Britain's childcare costs are among the highest in the world, hitting parents already struggling with years of rising household bills and economic uncertainty.

"This is a boost direct to the pockets of hard-working families in what will be one of the biggest measures ever introduced to help parents with childcare costs," Cameron said in a statement.

A finance ministry spokeswoman said around 1 billion pounds had been set aside for the scheme, doubling the existing budget and taking in five times as many parents. The annual breakdown of public funding for the system will be announced later.

The Labour Party, which urged Osborne on Saturday to cut payroll taxes to boost growth, said many families had already lost money in government cuts.

"This announcement will not make up for the up to 1,500 pounds that families on middle and low incomes have lost in cuts to childcare support," Labour education spokesman Stephen Twigg said.

(Editing by Alison Williams)

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