Agreement on spending

Agreement on spending

WASHINGTON — Congressional negotiators sealed an agreement Tuesday night on sweeping spending legislation that boosts housing and heating subsidies but curbs President Barack Obama’s requests for aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The move comes as lawmakers wrapped the budgets of nine Cabinet agencies into a $1.1 trillion spending bill they hope to complete by Christmas.

The measure would combine six of the dozen annual appropriations bills for the budget year that began Oct. 1. It combines a huge increase in foreign aid with an 18 percent cut to a program that helps states with the cost of incarcerating criminal illegal immigrants.

Report: Brazilian police killed 11,000 in 6 years

RIO DE JANEIRO — Police in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have killed more than 11,000 people in the past six years, many execution-style, according to a report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch.

Few of the officers have been charged in the extrajudicial killings, which are often labeled in police reports as the deaths of suspects who resisted arrest, the report said.

The 122-page declaration echoes a 2008 United Nations’ finding that police throughout Brazil were responsible for a “significant portion” of 48,000 slayings the year before.

FBI investigates American in Mumbai terror attacks

ISLAMABAD — The FBI is sending a team to Pakistan and India as part of an inquiry into a Chicago man accused of plotting against a Danish newspaper and sizing up targets ahead of last year’s deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India’s financial capital.

Pakistan’s role in alleged plots spanning three countries has increasingly come under scrutiny as new details emerge about the case and suspect David Coleman Headley’s links to the country.

Headley, 49, an American of Pakistani descent, and Chicago businessman Tahawwur Rana, 48, a Pakistani-born Canadian national, were charged in October with conspiring to attack the Jyllands Posten newspaper in Denmark. The newspaper had published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 that set off protests in parts of the Muslim world.

Flag flap comes to an end

RICHMOND, Va. — A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Mark Warner says a neighborhood association has dropped its request that a 90-year-old Medal of Honor winner remove a flagpole from his front yard.

Kevin Hall, a spokesman for the Virginia Democrat, said Tuesday night that the Sussex Square homeowners’ association agreed to withdraw its previous threat to file legal action against retired Army Col. Van T. Barfoot.

The association had threatened to take Barfoot to court if he failed to remove the 21-foot pole at his suburban Richmond home by Friday. It had said the pole violated the neighborhood’s aesthetic guidelines.

Boy’s tongue gets stuck to metal pole

BOISE, Idaho — Memo to children — and adults for that matter — everywhere: Don’t try to emulate Flick from “A Christmas Story.” Ever. Your tongue will get stuck to a metal pole when the temperature is minus 2.

Boise fire officials were able to help a boy whose tongue was stuck to a metal fence pole Tuesday morning. Firefighters didn’t ask him his age but said he was probably 10.

The boy is OK, Boise fire Capt. Bill Tinsley said. The boy’s tongue was bleeding a little bit but there was no visible tearing, Tinsley said.

“I’ve been doing this 20-some years and this is the first [tongue frozen to pole call] I’ve had,” Tinsley said. “Poor guy.”

SC House panel set to vote on impeachment

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A South Carolina House panel likely will decide today if Gov. Mark Sanford should be the first impeached executive in South Carolina history.

Members of the seven-member panel say the vote will likely set a precedent for judging future governors’ conduct.

Sanford has been under scrutiny since June, when he left the state for five days for a secret Argentina rendezvous with his lover. Since then, the media, South Carolina State Ethics Commission investigators and lawmakers have reviewed Sanford’s entire record, from his use of state aircraft and campaign funds to whether he coerced his staff to lie on his behalf and planned a 2008 South American trade trip as a cover for his extramarital affair.

Combined dispatches