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WORLD & NATION: AT HOME

Compiled from news dispatches

April 24, 2008

The House voted yesterday to block the Bush administration from cutting federal spending on Medicaid health care for the poor by $13 billion over the next five years. President George W. Bush has threatened a veto, but supporters have more than enough votes in the House to override him, and maybe in the Senate, too. Two-thirds of the Republicans joined every voting Democrat in the 349-62 vote to impose a one-year moratorium, through next March, on seven rules changes that the administration argues are needed to rectify waste and abuse in the state-federal partnership to provide health care to the poor. The Bush administration instituted the rules with the aim of saving the Treasury about $13 billion over five years and $33 billion over 10 years in programs that provide health coverage and nursing home care to the poor.

Senate Democrats failed yesterday to overcome a

threatened Republican filibuster of a bill that would loosen the restrictions on the length of time in which workers could file pay discrimination claims against their employers.

The 56-42 vote was split largely along party lines. Six Republicans joined all but one of the Democrats and independents in attempting to block the filibuster, which required 60 votes for success. Two

Republicans, including John McCain, did not vote. The legislation, already passed by the House, would circumvent the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision last summer that federal law imposes a tight deadline - 180 days from the date of the first paycheck received - for employees to file pay discrimination complaints.

A federal judge in New Orleans ordered a public school

system to stop allowing in-school Bible giveaways, saying the practice violates the First Amendment separation of church and state. "Distribution of Bibles is a religious activity without a secular purpose" and amounts to school board promotion of Christianity, Judge Carl J. Barbier ruled in a case

brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana against the Tangipahoa Parish School Board. The ACLU filed the lawsuit for an anonymous family whose daughter said she felt pressured into taking a Bible because she was afraid her classmates would call her a "devil-worshiper" and think she didn't believe in God.

An Air Force training jet crashed at Columbus, Miss., Air Force Base yesterday, killing both pilots aboard, base officials said. The base said the T-38C Talon crashed about 12:30 p.m., and that the pilots' names were being withheld until relatives could be notified.