The Earlybird: Today's headlines

Bush requests fast-track, Senate approves budget, Olson vote delayed, FBI messes McVeigh case, Davis signs bond measure, Fed to cut rates, newspapers finish Florida review, Miller to stay Dem, Ventura's out of a job:

• President Bush asked Congress on Thursday "for expanded authority to negotiate trade agreements," the Los Angeles Times reports. But "even though the narrowly divided Congress is led by Republicans who agree with the president's goals, by all accounts any major trade initiative will die without support from at least some Democrats."
• A federal judge in Idaho yesterday "stopped the Bush administration... from banning road-building and commercial logging in 58 million acres of roadless national forest," the Idaho Statesman reports.
• Bush nominated conservative John P. Walters to be his drug czar on Thursday, the New York Times reports.
• "Justice Department veteran Robert Mueller is a leading choice" to succeed Louis Freeh as director of the FBI, the Wall Street Journal's "Washington Wire" reports.
• During a White House ceremony, Bush congratulated "Boston College on Thursday for winning the NCAA hockey title," AP reports.
• A new CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll shows Bush's approval rating has dropped to "53 percent, compared to 62 percent last month."

• On Thursday the Senate approved the $1.95 trillion budget plan that the House approved the day before, the Baltimore Sun reports.
• Bush "now has a working majority in Congress to pass at least $1.35 trillion" in tax reductions "by the end of the month," the Washington Times reports.
• But "new divisions among Democrats and conservatives over how to distribute the benefits of" the tax cut "threaten to delay Senate action on the measure," the Wall Street Journal reports.
• Some Bush aides have considered "dropping a part of the current bill, such as curbing the marriage penalty, that could be used later to propel a second tax-cut measure," the Wall Street Journal's "Washington Wire" reports.

• The House moved Thursday toward "passage of a bill that Republican sponsors said would increase the supply of electricity in California but would not impose the energy price caps sought by Democrats," the New York Times reports.
• California Gov. Gray Davis (D) "signed a historic $13.4-billion bond measure Thursday to finance" a plan for the purchase of electricity, the Los Angeles Times reports. The Sacramento Bee reports that Davis said "he will travel the state if necessary to defend his decision to spend billions of state dollars on electricity for two cash-starved utilities."
• "White House officials said Thursday they have not closed the door to a temporary rollback of the 18 cent a gallon tax on gasoline," CBSNews.com</ A> reports.
• Vice President Dick Cheney "said Thursday that some conservationist critics of the administration's energy plan have 'blinders on from 30 years ago' and fail to understand that '21st century technology' means energy exploration can be done without creating environmental problems," USA Today reports.

• Today Bush will meet with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo at the White House, Reuters reports. "Senior administration officials said Bush would announce the U.S. contribution to a global fund to halt the spread of AIDS and other infectious diseases" before the meeting begins.
• Scientists are "nursing fresh hope for a vaccine against HIV" after a study showed a prostitute in Africa "has never been infected, despite thousands of episodes of unprotected intercourse," the Washington Post reports.
• "A new drug that helped more than 90 percent of patients with a rare form of leukemia won government approval in record time Thursday and was hailed as 'the wave of the future' in fighting cancer," AP reports.

• On Thursday Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, "delayed a scheduled vote on President Bush's nomination of Theodore B. Olson as solicitor general... to examine allegations that Olson gave misleading testimony about his role in a conservative magazine's effort to discredit former president Bill Clinton," the Washington Post reports.
• The House voted Thursday "to freeze payment of $244 million in back UN dues until the nation is given back its seat," the Boston Globe reports.
• Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., said in an interview Thursday night that he plans to remain a Democrat, Cox News Service reports.

• "In an astonishing disclosure six days before Timothy McVeigh's slated execution, the Justice Department on Thursday handed his lawyers thousands of FBI documents that it said were mistakenly withheld from his trial in the Oklahoma City bombing," the Tulsa World reports.
• McVeigh may seek a stay of execution because of the withheld evidence, the Oklahoman reports.
• McVeigh "was part of an underground network of white-supremacist guerrillas dedicated to the overthrow of the American government," the London Independent reports. "It is now believed" that the Aryan Republican Army "financed and helped to stage the bombing."

• On Thursday Chinese Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng met with U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and Xiang "signaled the Chinese were ready to set the" spy plane "incident aside to prevent a further deterioration of Sino-U.S. relations," AP reports.
• Former President Clinton gave a speech in Hong Kong on Thursday and said "the United States should work as a partner with" China "so that 'the world will be a better place,'" the Los Angeles Times reports.
• "China is stepping up preparations for an underground test at its Lop Nur nuclear weapons testing facility," the Washington Times reports.

• Italy will elect a new prime minister on Sunday, the New York Times reports. The candidates are conservative media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi and liberal former mayor of Rome Francesco Rutelli.
• "As violence escalated in the Middle East, senior Palestinian officials Friday urged the international community to move fast to stop 'Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people,'" UPI reports.
• Israeli "tanks yesterday sent five surface-to-surface rockets whistling into Gaza City, hitting a Fatah office and what Israel said was the Palestinian Authority's agency responsible for arms manufacturing in Gaza... in retaliation for the bombing of a group of Romanian workers repairing an electronic security fence near Kisufim," Ha'aretz reports.
• "The European Court of Human Rights delivered a stinging rebuke to Turkey yesterday, finding it guilty of widespread human rights abuses arising from its 1974 invasion of northern Cyprus," Reuters reports.

• The jury began deliberating yesterday in the case of four men accused of conspiracy "stemming from the August 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania," CNN.com reports.
• A federal judge in New York cleared the way Thursday "for victims of Nazi-era labor camps to begin receiving compensation from a fund backed by German corporations and the Berlin government," Reuters reports.

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq both gained points Thursday, "buoyed by some better-than-expected retail sales results and a sudden cut in interest rates by the European Central Bank," MSNBC.com reports.
• The Federal Reserve Board is expected to "cut rates by half a percentage point" on Tuesday, CNNfn.com reports.

• A review by USA Today and eight other news organizations of 171,908 Florida presidential ballots shows that "voting mistakes by thousands of Democratic voters -- errors that legally disqualified their ballots -- probably cost former vice president Al Gore 15,000 to 25,000 votes."
• "Bush still would have prevailed... if undervotes had been counted under more restrictive standards, the review indicates," the Miami Herald reports.
• In the end, neither Gore nor Bush "amassed a commanding, unambiguous lead. The outcome depends on how you count the ballots," the Miami Herald reports.

• White House director of political affairs Ken Mehlman was sent to Chester, Va., yesterday to rally support for 4th District candidate Randy Forbes (R) before Tuesday's special election, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.
• "Scott Conklin, widely perceived as the underdog in the Republican-dominated" Pennsylvania 09 special election next month "says don't write him off just yet" -- a recent poll commissioned by his campaign shows him trailing Republican William Shuster "only slightly," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
• Kentucky state Rep. Jon Draud (R) announced that he will not challenge Rep. Ken Lucas, D-Ky., in 2002, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. "I don't think I can win," Draud said.

• The extended deadline to file for candidacy in Virginia came and went on Thursday, leaving "Lt. Gov. John H. Hager and Attorney General Mark L. Earley competing for the [GOP] gubernatorial nomination," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.
• The Newark Star-Ledger reports that a new Quinnipiac University poll shows former Rep. Bob Franks, R-N.J., leading conservative Bret Schundler "among registered Republican voters by 46 percent to 24 percent, despite his late start."
• Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Steve Grossman (D) called this week's Democratic criticism of acting Gov. Jane Swift (R), who is expected to run for a full term in 2002 and is now in the hospital waiting to give birth to twins, "outrageous," the Boston Herald reports.
• New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo (D) "blasted GOP Gov. George Pataki Thursday for having former California Gov. Pete Wilson, who supported what some consider anti-Hispanic initiatives, act as co-chairman for a Los Angeles fund-raiser this week," the Albany Times Union reports.

• Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore (R) cancelled the state's "European American Heritage and History Month," saying "the requesting organization is headed nationally by David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.
• Four senators -- Max Cleland, D-Ga., Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. -- sponsored a bill yesterday "to establish -- on or near the National Mall -- a museum that would document the struggles of black Americans in their march toward full citizenship," the Washington Times reports.

• "One of the wackiest sideshows of" Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura's [I] "tenure as the state's entertainer-in-chief came to an end Thursday with the demise of the XFL," the St. Paul Pioneer Press reports.