The Earlybird: Today's headlines

Bush's budget, Powell's Mideast meetings, Microsoft's return to court, Hugh's other pardon attempts, Florida's latest election findings, redistricting effects, more power problems, Earnhardt Jr.'s crash, Reagan's own questionable pardon:

• President Bush will present his FY 2002 budget proposal Tuesday before a nationally televised joint session of Congress, CNN.com reports. As he worked to prepare the budget plan, Democrats on Sunday "stepped up their attacks on the president's tax-cut proposal."
• The budget will include "calls for cuts in corporate loan and research subsidies to help pay for a proposed tax cut and spending increases for education, defense and health," the Houston Chronicle reports.
• The plans of some congressional Republicans "to split President Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut into two parts -- one to pass now, one later -- are picking up steam, to the consternation of the White House," U.S. News and World Report's "Washington Whispers" reports.
• During a speech at a Maryland school today, First Lady Laura Bush will "issue a call... for new teachers, including asking those who served their country in the military to help fill depleted ranks in classrooms," USA Today reports.
• Bush adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that "the controversy regarding the pardons issued by former President Clinton is not 'overshadowing' the Bush agenda" and that "Bush is 'focused on other things,'" UPI reports.
• Bush is "making no secret of his disdain for" his new home of Washington, D.C., the Washington Times reports. "The tactic, frowned upon by the media elite, plays well in the heartland."

• Today is the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Gulf War, and military leaders visiting Kuwait -- including Secretary of State Colin Powell -- said "the United States would continue to guard the oil-rich Gulf emirate from any Iraqi aggression," Reuters reports.
• Powell met with Israeli Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat separately on Sunday, but he made "little headway" in the Mideast conflict, the New York Times reports.
• Today Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saed al-Sahaf and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan will meet for talks, CNN.com reports. "No one at the U.N. expects a winner to emerge."

• During a dinner for the National Governors Association on Sunday, governors "applauded loudly" when Bush "proclaimed education the cornerstone of his agenda," AP reports.
• The NGA plans to propose "radical changes in Medicaid that would allow states to provide health insurance to millions of additional people, but the benefits would be less generous than those now guaranteed to poor people," the New York Times reports.
• The Washington Post reports that many state leaders are "skeptical" about Bush's proposed Medicare plan, and they say it "could prove ineffective and place an unfair burden on states."

• Cmdr. Scott Waddle, the commander of the USS Greeneville, sent a statement to a Japanese public television network Sunday that "expressed his 'most sincere regret' on Sunday -- but stopped short of an apology," AP reports.
• "Officers aboard the USS Greeneville when it rammed the Ehime Maru have told investigators conflicting stories about what happened just before the fatal accident," the Washington Times reports.

• In an appeals court this week, Microsoft will try to convince the judges "that the breakup of the software giant is unwarranted," AP reports. "U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's comments outside the courtroom -- comparing Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to Napoleon and suggesting company officials were not 'grown-ups' -- have injected a new wildcard into the case."
• The hearing is unusual because "the court has granted an extraordinary amount of time for the case to be argued -- seven hours over two days" -- and "seven judges will hear the case," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. Usually, each side has less than half an hour to argue their case and "most appeals are heard by three judges."
• "Experts believe it is unlikely that the software giant will be split in two," the Baltimore Sun reports.
• Meanwhile, Microsoft is "is facing federal charges of false and deceptive advertising" for its "campaign targeting Palm Inc., whose products compete against those hand-held devices using Microsoft's Windows software," the Wall Street Journal reports.

• The Bush administration has "has moved to protect President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe from a civil suit in the United States accusing him of ordering murder, torture and terrorism to intimidate political opponents," Reuters reports.
• A study by the Pentagon found that "the Army National Guard has no anti-terrorism teams ready to respond to nuclear, chemical or biological attacks because of defective safety equipment and poor training," AP reports.
• In Indonesia, "ethnic violence that has killed at least 270 people on Borneo island" spread today "to the capital of Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province, where armed gangs of indigenous men burned the homes of settlers from another part of the country," AP reports.

• Hugh Rodham, who admitted last week that he took $400,000 "to help with two successful clemency applications, also approached White House attorneys advocating pardons for a couple convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to Democrats," the Washington Post reports.
• Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said Sunday "that there is a lot of 'embarrassment' in Arkansas over former President Clinton's last-minute flurry of pardons before leaving office and questions of payments and improper access surrounding them," the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports.
• "House and Senate Republicans leading the review of President Clinton's last-minute pardons said Sunday they may consider combining their efforts into a single investigation," AP reports.
• A series of home videos "made by DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe of Bill Clinton's final days and hours as president may become new evidence in red-hot congressional investigations" because they "may contain insights into the controversial last day presidential pardons," the Drudge Report reports.

• An independent study done for USA Today, the Miami Herald and Knight Ridder Newspapers shows that Vice President Al Gore "would have had a net gain of 49 votes if the most-lenient standard" of his requested recounts had been completed. And if "the standard had been more stringent," Bush "probably would have gained votes."
• "Gore would have netted no more than 49 votes if a manual recount of Miami-Dade's ballots had been completed," which "would have been 140 too few to overcome Bush's lead, even when joined with Gore gains in Volusia, Palm Beach and Broward counties -- the three other counties where Gore had requested manual recounts," the Miami Herald reports.
• The Orlando Sentinel reports that "the urgency to fix the flaws" in the wake of the election is gone, as lawmakers "already are preaching restraint in the face of two grandiose reform proposals they will consider when the legislative session opens."
• Today the University of Florida will hold a conference on the Florida White House election. Participants include Gore attorneys David Boies and Dexter Douglass, Katherine Harris (R) attorney Joseph Klock, and representatives from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Florida AFL-CIO, AP reports.

• Roll Call reports that nearly "40 House Members are considering running for higher office in 2002, prompted in part by anticipated changes to their seats during redistricting and an unusually large number of open-seat governors' races."
• South Carolina Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian said it is possible that should the need arise, Gov. Jim Hodges (D) could appoint a Republican to finish GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond's term, AP reports.
• In New Jersey, gubernatorial candidates Donald DiFrancesco (R), Jim McGreevey (D) and Bret Schundler (R) appeared together Sunday at an event sponsored by "a powerful teachers union that could make or break their fortunes this fall," the Newark Star-Ledger reports.

• The five people killed as a tornado tore through Mississippi Saturday night "were among a death toll of 10 that spread throughout the states of Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota and Nebraska," the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports.
• The Los Angeles Times reports that "the rest of the West has outgrown its electrical system just as California has its own.... The booming Southwest has run its power grid at such a fever pitch that its planning reserves... have shrunk to levels that many regulators and industry experts consider dangerous."

• William Powers, New York state GOP chairman and "a fixture on the New York political scene for more than a decade," will resign this week, the New York Post reports.
• Shawn Steel, a conservative health care attorney, was elected to head California's Republican party, which has been "dogged by division and defeat," the Sacramento Bee reports.
• The Washington Times reports on the Rev. Jesse Jackson's "estimated annual income of about $300,000," and wonders where it comes from.
• On Chicago's South Side yesterday, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan gave his first speech since having colon surgery last fall, the Chicago Tribune reports. The speech lasted two-and-a-half hours.
• A week after his father's death in the Daytona 500, and in the first lap of NASCAR's next race, Dale Earnhardt Jr. crashed his own car. Earnhardt Jr. was "bruised and limping, but alive," the Orlando Sentinel reports.
• Robert Wendell Walker Jr., who has been "accused of killing his wife and dismembering and burning her body," had "received a pardon from former President Ronald Reagan" in 1981 for a robbery conviction, the AP reports.