House committee OKs cheaper bill for digital TV

House committee OKscheaper bill for digital TV
WASHINGTON -- House lawmakers want all-digital TV broadcasts to kick in sooner than a Senate bill requires, and they want to spend about a third less on the conversion.
Legislation approved Wednesday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee calls for a Dec. 31, 2008, switch-over and provides $990 million to help millions of Americans with older, analog TV sets pay for converter boxes so they can keep receiving broadcasts after the switch is made.
About $160 million of that would go to administrative fees, including campaigns to let consumers know they may need converter boxes.
Senate legislation would spend about $3 billion on the conversion, with a firm switch date of April 7, 2009.
Most Democrats did not support the House bill, which they said would provide converter boxes for only 10 million households -- about half of the homes that would probably need them.
Mormon Church to removemissionaries in Venezuela
CARACAS, Venezuela -- The Mormon Church, citing difficulties with the government of President Hugo Chavez in renewing visas or obtaining new ones, said Wednesday it is pulling its foreign missionaries out of Venezuela and reassigning them to other countries.
The decision comes nearly two months after the government said it was temporarily suspending the granting of visas for foreign missionaries and two weeks after Chavez said he was booting U.S.-based New Tribes Mission from the country, accusing it of links to the CIA.
The U.S. Embassy said 219 American Mormon missionaries left the country over the weekend. Spaniards and Colombians where also among those who left, said Vivian Angulo, a church spokeswoman in Caracas. She said there were few foreign missionaries, if any, left in Venezuela.
U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield told local Union Radio on Tuesday that the security factors also contributed to the church's decision.
King Tut took red wineto grave, researcher says
LONDON -- King Tutankhamen was a red wine drinker, according to a researcher who analyzed traces of the vintage found in his tomb.
Maria Rosa Guasch-Jane told reporters Wednesday at the British Museum that she made her discovery after inventing a process that gave archaeologists a tool to discover the color of ancient wine.
Wine bottles from King Tut's time were labeled with the name of the product, the year of harvest, the source and the vine grower, Guasch-Jane said, but did not include the color of the wine.
Several clues led scientists to believe the wine may have been red: drawings from the time of grapes being pressed into wine were red and purple, for example. But the color of King Tut's wine was impossible to verify until Guasch-Jane invented a process to detect a color compound not found in white wine called syringic acid.
U.N. report: Weaponsstill cross Syrian border
UNITED NATIONS -- Palestinian militants in Lebanon are getting more weapons from Syria, one reason why the Lebanese government has made no significant progress in disbanding and disarming militias that operate with impunity inside its borders, a U.N. report said Wednesday.
The report said that despite some positive steps, Lebanon still has not achieved full "sovereignty and political independence" more than six months after Syria withdrew its troops and intelligence apparatus from its neighbor following a 29-year presence.
That conclusion could be a powerful tool for the United States, France and Britain, which have proposed a Security Council resolution that threatens sanctions if Syria doesn't cooperate with a separate probe into the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister. The council was to discuss the resolution in a meeting later Wednesday.
Meat labeling postponed
WASHINGTON -- Grocery shoppers will have to wait two more years for labels telling where their meat comes from, under a bill moving toward approval in Congress.
Originally required by law in 2004, mandatory meat labeling has been delayed under pressure from meatpackers and supermarkets who say it's a record-keeping nightmare. House-Senate negotiators agreed late Wednesday to postpone it until 2008.
Western ranchers have been counting on the labels to help sell their beef. Labeling went into effect last April for fish and shellfish.
The delay is part of a $100 billion spending bill for food and farm programs for the budget year that began Oct. 1.
Associated Press