FBI says letter sent to Obama tested positive for poison ricin

By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A letter addressed to President Barack Obama contained a substance that preliminarily tested positive for the deadly poison ricin, authorities said on Wednesday.

News that the letter to Obama was being investigated came as a flurry of other reports of suspicious letters and a package caused the evacuation of parts of two Senate buildings and set nerves in Washington on edge.

The letter contained "a granular substance that preliminarily tested positive for ricin," an FBI statement said. But the statement added: "There is no indication of a connection to the attack in Boston," where three people were killed in bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday.

The U.S. Secret Service said the letter to Obama was received at a mail screening facility on Tuesday.

The mail facility that received the letter was not located near the White House itself, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said in a statement.

"The Secret Service is working closely with the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI in this investigation," Donovan said.

Parts of the Russell and Hart Senate office buildings were cleared while officials investigated suspicious letters and a package, a Capitol Police spokesman said.

CNN read a statement from a spokesman to Senator Richard Shelby, saying that Capitol Police were investigating a suspicious package that had been delivered to their office.

Senator Carl Levin said one of his Michigan regional offices had received a suspicious-looking letter, but it was not opened. Authorities are investigating, Levin said in a statement.

On Tuesday U.S. authorities intercepted a letter sent to Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker that preliminary tests showed contained the deadly poison ricin.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Vicki Allen and Jim Loney)

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Positive signs lost to latest boat

IT WAS a rare moment for Julia Gillard. At the end of her five-day visit to China, praise was being heaped upon her from all sides.

Her talks went so well that Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted a "new level" in economic and strategic ties.

An agreement was signed providing for annual meetings between Australian and Chinese leaders.

There will also be formal dialogues every year between economic and foreign ministers from the two countries.

It was dubbed a "historic pact" and a new "strategic partnership".

The Australian newspaper, often highly critical of the Prime Minister, called Gillard's achievement "a foreign policy coup" and "one of the most significant breakthroughs in the Australia-China relationship since Gough Whitlam recognised the communist state more than 40 years ago".

The Fairfax press described it as "a triumph" that will give Australia "greater access than the superpower has granted virtually any other western nation".

For a while, the PM and her advisers, far more used to brickbats than bouquets, were feeling pretty chuffed.

Then a rickety fishing boat carrying 66 Sri Lankans chugged into Geraldton harbour, and everything was back to normal.

China was largely forgotten as the asylum-seeker issue revved up again and talkback jocks were back in familiar territory.

"Border protection trumps foreign policy," said a Liberal strategist, happily.

And the Gillard government handled the situation with its usual lack of finesse.

In political terms, the boat's arrival was clearly a major embarrassment for the Gillard government.

Instead of heading for Christmas Island, or being intercepted in waters to our north, this one made its way undetected to the Australian mainland just 430km from Perth. When federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, responsible for border security, blundered in with a statement that he would review "whether there need to be changes in the way we patrol seas in the northwest", an exasperated West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, had to put him right.

Barnett pointed out that Geraldton is in the southern half of WA, not the northwest. It is 2000km from Christmas Island. He suggested the feds buy an atlas.

But it was Gillard's immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, who had annoyed Barnett initially by accusing him of using language "bordering on hysteria" in his comments about the latest boat's arrival.

Barnett had said: "This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia's border security. That a boat, laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking."

I'd bet most Western Australians agreed with their premier, even taking the view that he was merely stating the bleeding obvious. (Except, perhaps, for the use of the word "unprecedented". Asylum seeker boats have reached the mainland before, though not for a very long time.)

Certainly O'Connor's bagging of Barnett did not go down well in the West, where it is common knowledge that state authorities, not federal agencies, had to deal with the situation after the boat was spotted 500m from shore.

WA police took charge. About 20 of them were assigned to it -- a lot of bodies to divert from other duties for 24 hours or more in a town like Geraldton. State health officials and child protection people were quickly involved. I understand that, until reinforcements could be flown or driven in from Perth, the only feds on the spot were a customs officer and a quarantine official. According to a well-placed source: "The WA police were getting instructions from Customs in Fremantle. It was clear the feds were absolutely floundering.

"The state people needed information, but at the federal level they were buck-passing all over the place."

The Gillard government thinks about asylum seekers primarily in the context of endangered Labor electorates in western Sydney where the policy failure resonates loudly.

But it should not forget that voters a lot further west, on the other side of the continent, will also have a say in the September 14 election and they don't need any more reasons to feel aggrieved about Canberra.

The other major political issue of the week -- the unveiling of Malcolm Turnbull's broadband policy -- was also bad news for Gillard, in that it seriously blunted one of the few advantages Labor had over the Coalition.

It would result in an inferior National Broadband Network, relying heavily on Telstra's old copper wire connections to homes rather than "fibre to the premises" as provided for in the government's plan.

Because the Turnbull NBN would be cheaper, but with download speeds a lot slower than those Labor is rolling out, there was much derision on social network sites and not just from tech-heads.

Russell Crowe, for example, tweeted: "Coalition NBN plan, half the cost to be as efficient? Obviously somebody needs to explain to them the point of the NBN."

But the Coalition used to be against an NBN. Turnbull has dragged Tony Abbott and co. to a point where they accept the need for such a network, even if only the economy-class version.

In the words of that Liberal strategist I quoted earlier: "Now Gillard can't go to the election saying, 'If you want

an NBN you have to vote Labor'. She was able to do that last time."

Gillard can hardly be blamed for basking in that brief period of foreign policy glory in Beijing. There is very little prospect of anything similar on the home front.

Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.

View the original article here

Positive signs lost to latest boat

IT WAS a rare moment for Julia Gillard. At the end of her five-day visit to China, praise was being heaped upon her from all sides.

Her talks went so well that Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted a "new level" in economic and strategic ties.

An agreement was signed providing for annual meetings between Australian and Chinese leaders.

There will also be formal dialogues every year between economic and foreign ministers from the two countries.

It was dubbed a "historic pact" and a new "strategic partnership".

The Australian newspaper, often highly critical of the Prime Minister, called Gillard's achievement "a foreign policy coup" and "one of the most significant breakthroughs in the Australia-China relationship since Gough Whitlam recognised the communist state more than 40 years ago".

The Fairfax press described it as "a triumph" that will give Australia "greater access than the superpower has granted virtually any other western nation".

For a while, the PM and her advisers, far more used to brickbats than bouquets, were feeling pretty chuffed.

Then a rickety fishing boat carrying 66 Sri Lankans chugged into Geraldton harbour, and everything was back to normal.

China was largely forgotten as the asylum-seeker issue revved up again and talkback jocks were back in familiar territory.

"Border protection trumps foreign policy," said a Liberal strategist, happily.

And the Gillard government handled the situation with its usual lack of finesse.

In political terms, the boat's arrival was clearly a major embarrassment for the Gillard government.

Instead of heading for Christmas Island, or being intercepted in waters to our north, this one made its way undetected to the Australian mainland just 430km from Perth. When federal Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, responsible for border security, blundered in with a statement that he would review "whether there need to be changes in the way we patrol seas in the northwest", an exasperated West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, had to put him right.

Barnett pointed out that Geraldton is in the southern half of WA, not the northwest. It is 2000km from Christmas Island. He suggested the feds buy an atlas.

But it was Gillard's immigration minister, Brendan O'Connor, who had annoyed Barnett initially by accusing him of using language "bordering on hysteria" in his comments about the latest boat's arrival.

Barnett had said: "This is a serious, unprecedented and unacceptable breach of Australia's border security. That a boat, laden with people, can sail into a busy regional port in broad daylight is shocking."

I'd bet most Western Australians agreed with their premier, even taking the view that he was merely stating the bleeding obvious. (Except, perhaps, for the use of the word "unprecedented". Asylum seeker boats have reached the mainland before, though not for a very long time.)

Certainly O'Connor's bagging of Barnett did not go down well in the West, where it is common knowledge that state authorities, not federal agencies, had to deal with the situation after the boat was spotted 500m from shore.

WA police took charge. About 20 of them were assigned to it -- a lot of bodies to divert from other duties for 24 hours or more in a town like Geraldton. State health officials and child protection people were quickly involved. I understand that, until reinforcements could be flown or driven in from Perth, the only feds on the spot were a customs officer and a quarantine official. According to a well-placed source: "The WA police were getting instructions from Customs in Fremantle. It was clear the feds were absolutely floundering.

"The state people needed information, but at the federal level they were buck-passing all over the place."

The Gillard government thinks about asylum seekers primarily in the context of endangered Labor electorates in western Sydney where the policy failure resonates loudly.

But it should not forget that voters a lot further west, on the other side of the continent, will also have a say in the September 14 election and they don't need any more reasons to feel aggrieved about Canberra.

The other major political issue of the week -- the unveiling of Malcolm Turnbull's broadband policy -- was also bad news for Gillard, in that it seriously blunted one of the few advantages Labor had over the Coalition.

It would result in an inferior National Broadband Network, relying heavily on Telstra's old copper wire connections to homes rather than "fibre to the premises" as provided for in the government's plan.

Because the Turnbull NBN would be cheaper, but with download speeds a lot slower than those Labor is rolling out, there was much derision on social network sites and not just from tech-heads.

Russell Crowe, for example, tweeted: "Coalition NBN plan, half the cost to be as efficient? Obviously somebody needs to explain to them the point of the NBN."

But the Coalition used to be against an NBN. Turnbull has dragged Tony Abbott and co. to a point where they accept the need for such a network, even if only the economy-class version.

In the words of that Liberal strategist I quoted earlier: "Now Gillard can't go to the election saying, 'If you want

an NBN you have to vote Labor'. She was able to do that last time."

Gillard can hardly be blamed for basking in that brief period of foreign policy glory in Beijing. There is very little prospect of anything similar on the home front.

Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.

View the original article here

Republican senator sees Obama budget offer as positive

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday became the first prominent Republican to publicly praise, however lukewarm, the budget proposal the White House outlined last week.

Graham said that while he believes President Barack Obama's plan is overall bad for the economy, "there are nuggets of his budget that I think are optimistic." He was speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" program.

Graham, a conservative who has deviated from party positions in the past, and has said he would consider raising up to $600 billion in new tax revenue if Democrats accept significant changes to Medicare, the government health program for elderly Americans, and Medicaid, the health safety net for low-income people.

The White House on Friday said the president would propose a budget that would offer cuts to so-called entitlement programs such as Social Security, a retirement program, and Medicare in exchange for increased tax revenues and a commitment to spend money on education and infrastructure repair.

Obama's proposal, which will formally be made public on Wednesday, is a symbolic document, and both the Senate and House of Representatives have already passed their own budget resolutions.

The president's aides have said he hopes to use the offer to appeal to enough middle-of-the-road lawmakers of both parties to pass a broad deal to reduce the budget deficit.

Obama also hopes to reverse the deep spending cuts that automatically kicked in March 1 as a result of the failure of the White House and Congress to reach an agreement on replacing them.

Graham's reception of the president's budget proposal is warmer than fellow Republicans and some of the president's own allies have accorded it so far.

House Speaker John Boehner said last week the president was ignoring Republicans' staunch opposition to any tax hikes. And independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who votes with the Democrats, said he would oppose any efforts to lower payments to Social Security beneficiaries.

But Graham said that the president's offer contained approaches to cutting spending that he supports. One is the proposal to index cost-of-living increases for government program benefits to a less-generous measure of inflation.

"The president is showing a little bit of leg here, this is somewhat encouraging," Graham said. "He has sort of made a step forward in the entitlement-reform process."

Obama has invited 12 Republican senators for dinner on the day of the budget release as part of an effort to soften resistance among the opposition political party.

"The president's focus, in addition to the regular order process that members of Congress say they want, is to try to find a caucus of common sense, folks who are willing to compromise, that don't think compromise is a dirty word, and try to get something done," White House senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer said on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" program.

(Reporting By Aruna Viswanatha and Philip Barbara, writing by Mark Felsenthal)

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