House votes to kill pricey jet fighter engine

President Barack Obama won a showdown vote Wednesday in the GOP-controlled House to kill a costly alternative engine for the Pentagon's next-generation fighter jet.

The win by Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates is a switch from where the House stood last year under Democratic control. It reflects a sustained administration push to win over the votes of scores of Republican freshmen elected last fall on campaign promises to cut the budget.

Many taxpayer watchdog groups also weighed in against the engine program, slated to cost $3 billion over the next few years and $450 million this year alone.

The 233-192 tally was a loss for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, whose state reaped thousands of jobs from the engine, built by the General Electric Co. and Rolls-Royce.

It was a big victory for lawmakers from Democrat-dominated Connecticut, where the main F-35 fighter engine is built by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies Corp.Former President George W. Bush had also tried to kill the second engine.

The showdown vote came just hours after Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen testified against the alternative engine before the Armed Services Committee, which has repeatedly backed it.

"I've been doing money a long time, I can't make sense out of a second engine," Mullen said.

The vote was an early test for 87 GOP freshmen who confronted a choice between cutting spending and injecting competition into the F-35 program, the costliest weapons program in Defense Department history.

The money for the engine was included in a $1.2 trillion spending bill that would make deep cuts while wrapping up the unfinished business lawmakers inherited after last year's collapse of the budget process. That includes $1.03 trillion for agency operating budgets that need annual approval by Congress and $158 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Democratic-controlled Senate supports the second engine. That, combined with Boehner's backing, could yet keep the program alive.

The engine battle divides along regional rather than party lines, in contrast to the partisan warfare on the underlying bill, which sharply cuts domestic programs and foreign aid and earned a veto threat from the White House budget office and a warning from Obama against unwise cuts "that could endanger the recovery."

Debate on the bill is expected to take all week. A frosty reception awaits the bill in the Democratic-controlled Senate, which won't take up its version until next month. So it'll require passage of a separate short-term government funding bill by March 4 to prevent a government shutdown that neither side says it wants.

The GOP bill, separate from the 2012 budget Obama unveiled on Monday, covers spending for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The GOP legislation would make sweeping cuts to domestic programs ranging from education and science to agriculture and the Peace Corps. It slashes the Environmental Protection Agency, a favorite target of Republicans, by 29 percent from last year's levels, and would eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting, the AmeriCorps national service program, police hiring grants and family planning programs unpopular with conservatives.

The Food and Drug Administration budget would decline by 10 percent, and spending also would fall by 10 percent for a food program for pregnant women and mothers and their children.

The cuts are all the more dramatic because they would be shoehorned into the last half of the budget year that started Oct. 1.

The bill marks the first significant attack on federal deficits by Republicans elected last fall with the support of smaller-government tea party activists.

The measure came to the floor just a day after Obama unveiled his budget for next year and is merely a first round in what looms as a politically defining struggle that soon will expand to encompass Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the massive government programs that provide benefits directly to tens of millions of people.

"We know we can't balance this budget simply by reducing non-security, nondefense spending," said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, referring to the 359-page bill that would cut $61 billion from domestic programs.

The measure is sweeping in its scope, cutting spending from literally hundreds of domestic budget accounts and eliminating many others. At the same time, the Pentagon budget would be increased by almost 2 percent from current levels.

In a reflection of tea party priorities, the practice in which lawmakers direct money to their pet projects is banned in the bill. And in a fulfillment of a promise that Republicans made to the voters last fall, about $100 billion would be cut from funds that Obama requested for the current fiscal year.

At a White House news conference, Obama said he looked forward to working with lawmakers in both parties on the spending bill, but warned against "a series of symbolic cuts this year that could endanger the (economic) recovery."

A few hours after Obama spoke, the White House issued a formal statement expressing "strong opposition" to the legislation for "cuts that would sharply undermine core government functions and investments key to economic growth and job creation."

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Troubled banks rise to highest level in 18 years

The number of banks at risk of failing made up nearly 12 percent of all federally insured banks in the final three months of 2010, the highest level in 18 years.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp said Wednesday that the number of banks on its confidential "problem" list rose to 884 in the October-December quarter, up from 860 in the previous quarter. Those are banks rated by examiners as having very low capital cushions against risk.

Twenty-two banks have failed so far this year. And more banks are at risk, even as the FDIC reported the industry's highest earnings as a group since the financial crisis hit three years ago.

Only a small fraction of the 7,657 federally insured banks — about 1.4 percent with assets of more than $10 billion — are driving the bulk of the earnings growth. They are the largest banks, including Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co.

The big banks accounted for about $20.6 billion of the industry earnings of $21.7 billion in the fourth quarter. The total earnings compared with a net loss of $1.8 billion in the same quarter of 2009. The agency said bank earnings were buoyed in the latest quarter by reduced charges for soured loans.

Most of the big banks have recovered with help from federal bailout money and record-low borrowing rates. On the other side, many smaller banks are struggling.

Last year, 157 U.S. banks were brought down by the soured economy and mounting loan defaults. That was the most in one year since 1992, the height of the savings and loan crisis. They were mostly smaller or regional banks. The failures compare with 25 in 2008 and three in 2007. They cost the federal deposit insurance fund an estimated $21 billion in 2010.

Smaller and regional banks depend heavily on making loans for commercial property and development — sectors that have suffered huge losses. Companies shut down in the recession, vacating shopping malls and office buildings financed by the loans.

Overall, banks' net income reached a three-year high of $87.5 billion in the October-December quarter. That contrasted with a loss of $10.6 billion in 2009. But Bair said banks need to lend more vigorously as the economy recovers.

Bank industry revenue remained fairly strong through the financial crisis, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair noted, but there is little "upward momentum."

"A key reason why revenues haven't grown faster is that loans have not been growing," Bair said at a news conference. "It's not going as at fast a pace as I would like to see."

The problem is partly due to continued uncertainty about the economy on the part of bankers, Bair said. But she added: "I also think that banks need to get back to the basics of making loans."

Loan balances declined at a majority of U.S. banks in the October-December quarter, falling by $51.8 billion, or 0.4 percent, from the July-September quarter.

A change reported Monday by Bank of America for results from its FIA Card Services subsidiary for 2009 and 2010 caused the FDIC to significantly revise its industry earnings for the three past quarters. For the January-March quarter of 2009, industry net income was revised to a $6.5 billion net loss from the previously reported $7.6 billion profit. The net loss in the April-June quarter of 2009 widened to $12.7 billion from $3.7 billion, and net income in the July-September quarter of 2010 increased to $24.7 billion from $14.5 billion.

The FDIC's deposit insurance fund, which fell into the red in 2009, posted a slight improvement in the October-December quarter. Its deficit narrowed to $7.4 billion from $8 billion in the third quarter. Bair said the agency expects the balance to turn positive this year.

The spate of bank failures that began to accelerate in 2008 are expected to cost the insurance fund about $100 billion through 2013.

The FDIC is backed by the government, and deposits are guaranteed up to $250,000 per account. Also, the agency still has tens of billions in loss reserves apart from the insurance fund.

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Scientists Building Largest Antimatter Trap Ever

Creating matter's strange cousin antimatter is tricky, but holding onto it is even trickier. Now scientists are working on a new device that may be able to trap antimatter long enough to study it.

Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (say an electron, for example), a matchingis thought to exist (in this case, a positron) with the same mass, but an opposite charge.

The problem is that whenever antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, the two annihilate. So any container or bottle made of matter that attempts to capture antimatter inside would be instantly destroyed, along with the precious antimatter sample one tried to put inside the bottle.

Physicist Clifford Surko of the University of California, San Diego is hard at work to overcome that issue. He and his colleagues are building what they call the world's largest– a device they say will be able to store more than a trillion antimatter particles at once.

The key is using magnetic and electric fields, instead of matter, to construct the walls of an"bottle."

"We are now working to accumulate trillions of positrons or more in a novel 'multicell' trap – an array of magnetic bottles akin to a hotel with many rooms, with each room containing tens of billions of antiparticles," Surko said in a statement.

Surko presented his work today (Feb. 18) here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The researchers are also developing methods to coolto super-cold temperatures so that the particles' movements are slowed and they can be studied.

The scientists also want to compress large clouds of antiparticles into high-density clumps that can be tailored for practical applications.

"One can then carefully push them out of the bottle in a thin stream, a beam, much like squeezing a tube of toothpaste," Surko said. "These beams provide new ways to study how antiparticles interact or react with ordinary matter. They are very useful, for example, in understanding the properties of material surfaces."

Surko said another project is to create a portable antimatter bottle that could be taken out of the lab and into various industrial and medical situations. "If you could have a portable trap it would greatly amplify the uses and applications of antimatter in our world."

Antimatter may sound exotic, but it's already used in everyday technology, such as medical PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanners.

During a PET scan, the patient is injected with radioactive tracer molecules that emitwhen they decay. These positrons then come into contact with electrons in the body, and the two annihilate, releasing two gamma-ray photons. The gamma-ray photons are then detected by the scanner, giving a 3-D image of what's going on inside the body.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @.

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