The Daily Blog

Luc Ferry, Former French Education Minister, To Be Questioned After Making Morocco Orgy Claims About Associate.

PARIS — The French prosecutor’s office says it has launched a preliminary investigation after a former government minister alleged that another ex-minister had participated in an orgy with young boys in Morocco.

A judicial official said on Wednesday that former Education Minister Luc Ferry will likely be questioned after alleging during a television show that another minister was caught at an orgy in Marrakech. The official spoke on condition of anonymity since she wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

Ferry did not name the minister or the government in which that minister had served, but said he heard about the case from a prime minister. Ferry, who appeared on the television show on Monday, did not specify which one.

Taliban Executes New Tactic: High-Profile Inside Jobs.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A car with the license plate of a high-ranking Afghan general approached the gates of the Defense Ministry in Kabul last month. A special “A” pass also was on its windshield, so guards quickly waved it through.

Once inside, a man in an army uniform jumped from the car and stormed the ministry’s main office building, an Afghan government official said. He gunned down two Afghan soldiers before being killed. The gunman also wounded an Afghan army officer, who died later at a hospital.

The April 18 attack – brazen and cleverly orchestrated by insurgents – is indicative of the high-profile yet small-scale attacks that are trademarks of the Taliban’s spring campaign. Unable to match the firepower of the U.S.-led coalition and Afghan forces, insurgents conduct suicide bombings and assaults on government buildings, figuring these types of attacks will prove their resilience.

On Saturday, a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform detonated a vest laden with explosives at a provincial governor’s compound in northern Afghanistan, killing two top Afghan police commanders and wounding the German general who commands NATO forces in the north. Two Germans and two other Afghans died.

It’s unclear how deep of a dent the U.S.-led military campaign made in the insurgency over the winter or if these attacks are preludes to more widespread fighting by the Taliban this summer. Insurgents need to take back part of the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, their traditional strongholds, if they hope to retain their power base and the opium fields that fund their movement.

“Certainly the types of attacks they are now doing is an indicator they don’t want to send a large number of fighters against coalition or Afghan National Security Forces because they know they will get the worse of that,” said Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the coalition. “The types of attacks they are doing are intended to create a propaganda flash and try to discredit the Afghan government.”

Military and NATO officials, including the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, have predicted heavy fighting this summer. They have also predicted the Taliban will continue its campaign of terror and assassination. That campaign targets anyone who backs the Afghan security forces, peace talks with insurgents, or the Afghan government’s reintegration program designed to lure Taliban foot soldiers back into their communities with offers of economic development for their villages.

“This is going to be a tough fighting season. The Talibs are not going to take these security gains laying down, and we have already seen them trying to come back. There are no certainties here,” said British Maj. Gen. Phil Jones, a veteran of four tours in Afghanistan and NATO’s point man on efforts to reintegrate Taliban fighters back into society.

Nearly all the Taliban’s recent attacks have been on a small scale, with one or two notable exceptions in the mountainous northern province of Nuristan – a remote area where no permanent NATO or Afghan forces are deployed. Insurgents, however, have increased the tempo of assaults with attacks conducted by disgruntled Afghan soldiers and police or militants impersonating soldiers.

“The enemy is making huge efforts to infiltrate Afghan security organizations,” Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defense minister, recently told parliament.

The Taliban claim that indirect tactics, such as suicide attacks, assassinations and infiltration, are part of their new strategy against the government.

“The mujahedeen are able to infiltrate into the ranks of the enemy and are using these opportunities to attack,” Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said after the attack.

Since September 2007, the coalition has recorded 21 incidents in which a member of the Afghan security forces – or someone in a uniform used by them – have killed coalition forces. Forty-nine coalition troops, including at least 35 Americans, have been killed. At least six members of the Afghan security forces also died in the incidents.

Of the 21 incidents, eight were attributed to combat stress or personal disagreements; seven were due to unknown motives; four involved members of the Afghan security forces who were co-opted by insurgents or sympathetic to the insurgency, and two involved attackers who were impersonating Afghan police or soldiers.

The sale of Afghan security force uniforms is banned in Afghanistan, but they are still easily obtained.

While insurgents have claimed credit for nearly all the attacks, no evidence has been found suggesting they have successfully embedded individuals in the Afghan security forces with the intent to attack coalition forces, training mission officials said.

In the two most recent attacks in Kabul, however, militants had inside help.

In the attack on the Defense Ministry, the man who drove the car with heavily tinted windows into the facility was the nephew of the general, the government official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the information.

The Afghan army would never stop or search a vehicle driving into the ministry with a special pass on its windshield, the official said, adding that the general had not yet been told about the car or the involvement of his nephew, who is believed to have fled to Pakistan where many insurgent groups have safe havens.

The official said the investigation was still under way, and he would not elaborate as to why the general had not been questioned, or whether he even knew that a vehicle assigned to him by the ministry was used in the attack.

A month later, on May 21, the Afghan intelligence service said a soldier serving with the security unit at the main military hospital in Kabul picked up a Pakistani national and drove him to a mosque in the capital. There, inside a restroom, the man slipped an Afghan army uniform over a suicide explosives vest and got back into the soldier’s official vehicle.

He was then easily driven through the gates. The attacker blew himself up in a tent being used as a cafeteria. The explosion killed six Afghan students and wounded 23 others. No foreigners were injured.

Police later arrested the driver – a soldier who had been in the army for eight months. NATO said the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network was responsible.

Fatah, Hamas Agree To Form Interim Government.

GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement and its bitter rival, the Islamist Hamas, struck a deal on Wednesday to form an interim unity government and fix a date for general election, both sides said.

The deal, which took many officials by surprise because of profound Fatah-Hamas divisions over how to resolve generations of conflict with Israel, was thrashed out in Egypt and followed a series of secret meetings.

“The two sides signed initial letters on an agreement. All points of differences have been overcome,” Taher Al-Nono, the Hamas government spokesman in Gaza, told Reuters. He added that Cairo would shortly invite both sides to a signing ceremony.

The accord was first reported by Egypt’s intelligence service, which brokered the talks.

In a statement carried by the Egyptian state news agency MENA, the intelligence service said the deal was hatched by a Hamas delegation led by Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of the group’s politburo, and Fatah Central Committee member Azzam al-Ahmad.

“The consultations resulted in full understandings on all points of discussions, including setting up an interim agreement with specific tasks and to set a date for election,” the statement said.It said the agreement would allow Egypt to invite all Palestinian factions to sign a national reconciliation agreement in Cairo in the next few days.

Restoring Palestinian unity is seen as crucial to reviving any prospect for a Palestinian state based on peaceful co-existence alongside Israel. Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian movement until a 2006 election victory by Hamas, backs negotiated peace but the Islamists reject it.

Al-Ahmad and Abu Marzouk said the agreement covered all points of contention, including forming a transitional government, security arrangements and the restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organization to allow Hamas to join it.

A senior Egyptian intelligence official told Reuters that he expected Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who is based in Damascus, to attend the signing of the agreement in Cairo.

Obama, Boehner Each Earn Wins in Budget Pact.

WASHINGTON - Rivals in a divided government, President Barack Obama and the most powerful Republican in Congress split their differences to stave off a federal shutdown that neither combatant was willing to risk.

Their compromise is the result of a battle pitting the enduring power of the presidential veto and the White House soapbox - despite a “shellacking” in the last election - against a strong-willed GOP House speaker vaulted into office by a voter revolt against Washington’s free-spending ways.The resulting measure will bleed about $40 billion from the day-to-day budgets of domestic agencies over just the next six months, the biggest rollback of such government programs in history. It allows Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to claim his GOP shock troops had put Cabinet department operating budgets on track toward levels in place before Obama took office. In the end, the White House had to meet Boehner more than halfway on spending.On the other side was a strong-willed Obama, who mostly succeeded in forcing Republicans to cave in on dozens of controversial conservative policy prescriptions - including rolling back environmental protections and cutting off Planned Parenthood from taxpayer assistance while protecting favored programs like education, clean energy and medical research.

It was, in short, the type of split-the-differences deal that a political scientist might have predicted from the start, given the realities of divided government.Obama stood firm against GOP attempts to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to issue global warming rules and other reversals of environmental regulations. Obama’s wins on the environment were matched by a bitter battle in which he said no way to GOP demands to cut off Planned Parenthood from federal help. The results, taken together, pleased core Democratic constituencies of environmentalists and women.But it’s clearly a win for Boehner, who despite accepting billions of dollars in questionable savings demanded by Democrats as a substitute for cuts in domestic programs, ended up basically where he started in the first place. The original plan backed by Boehner in February called for cuts in the range of $35 billion as a campaign promise down payment that reflected the fact that the budget year was half over.

But conservative Republicans, many elected with tea-party backing, demanded far bigger cuts of more than $60 billion that would have led to widespread furloughs and harm to programs like food inspection, tax collection and U.S. overseas diplomatic efforts. The final deal, a product of weeks of wrangling, got Republicans back to their original goal, while avoiding most of the harsher effects of the tea party-backed version.

“We’re not going to roll over and sell out the American people like it’s been done time and time again here in Washington,” Boehner said Friday, hours before the agreement came together. “When we say we’re serious about cutting spending, we’re damn serious about it.”

The agreement was sealed around 10:30 Friday night by staff surrogates of Obama, Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and communicated to Boehner in the middle of a meeting of all House Republicans. Much of the final days’ battles involved a GOP push to preserve modest spending increases for the Pentagon against Democratic raids, while Republicans were forced to accept billions of dollars in phantom savings, cutting money that probably wouldn’t have been spent anyway.

“We have a deal,” Boehner said, earning applause and praise from the rank-and-file, who credited him with battling to the very end. Boehner, GOP officials said, knew that he would lose leverage to Obama in any shutdown.

“We are behind the speaker 100 percent,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., as she took a phone call outside the closed-door meeting.

Democrats said Boehner was being whipsawed by tea party hard-liners demanding the full roster of cuts and policy riders. But at the same time, Boehner didn’t try to squelch such talk and seemed to be playing the tea partiers against the Senate Democrats to win more spending cuts.

“We used every tool we had,” said a chuckling GOP leadership aide, who required anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The government shutdown that so many feared was headed off just in time and the House and Senate quickly passed an emergency measure to keep the government open until Friday in order to give lawmakers time to draft the measure and advance it through the House and Senate.

As a result, about 800,000 federal workers avoided furloughs while national parks and Washington’s tourist attractions remained open Saturday. Obama made a surprise visit to the Lincoln Memorial Saturday afternoon, to the delight of tourists at the monument.

“Because Congress was able to settle its differences … this place is open today,” Obama said. “And that’s the kind of future cooperation I hope we have going forward.”

Obama was referring to upcoming, and far bigger, battles over cutting the budget further and advancing must-pass legislation this summer to permit the government to borrow more money to meet its obligations. The so-called debt limit battle is freighted with politics, especially for tea partiers, and there’s a widespread expectation that Obama is going to have to accept significantly more in spending cuts in that upcoming round.

There are few details available regarding the pending appropriations bill, which would fund the day-to-day operating budgets of federal agencies through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year. It’s still being put in legislative form.But aides did say that the measure avoids outright cuts to the IRS, though Obama’s hoped-for increases were denied. Cuts to Pell Grants for college students from low-income families were restored, as were cuts to health research and Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative that provides grants to better-performing schools. Large cuts to foreign aid were tamed.

Anti-abortion lawmakers did succeed in winning a provision to block taxpayer-funded abortions in the District of Columbia. And Boehner won funding for a personal initiative to provide federally funded vouchers for District of Columbia students to attend private schools.

Some $18 billion of the spending cuts involve cuts to so-called mandatory programs whose budgets run largely on autopilot. To the dismay of budget purists, these cuts often involve phantom savings allowed under the decidedly arcane rules of congressional budgeting. They include mopping up $2.5 billion in unused money from federal highway programs and $5 billion in fudged savings from capping payments from a Justice Department trust fund for crime victims

Both ideas officially “score” as savings that could be used to pay for spending elsewhere in the day-to-day budgets of domestic agencies. But they have little impact, if any, on the deficit.

Government Shutdown Threat Prompts Obama, GOP To Scramble To Strike Budget Deal.

WASHINGTON - The federal government lurched toward a shutdown for the first time in 15 years on Friday as Republicans and Democrats in Congress struggled for a way out and swapped increasingly incendiary charges over which side was to blame.

The Obama administration readied hundreds of thousands of furlough notices for federal workers, to be released if no deal was reached by a midnight deadline to keep operations running.

“We know the whole world is watching us today,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and into the night the two sides were still swapping proposals from opposite wings of the Capitol in search of an elusive agreement.

Republicans placed the House on standby for a late-night vote, in case a decision was made to seek a stopgap bill to keep the government running for a few days to allow more time for negotiations.

Reid, President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner all agreed a shutdown posed risks to an economy still recovering from the worst recession in decades. But there were disagreements aplenty among the principal players in an early test of divided government — Obama in the White House, fellow Democrats in control in the Senate and a new, tea party-flavored Republican majority in the House.

For much of the day, Reid and Boehner disagreed about what the disagreement was about.

Reid said there had been an agreement at a White House meeting Thursday night to cut spending by about $38 billion as part of a bill to finance the government through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year.

He said Republicans also were demanding unspecified cuts in health services for lower income women that were unacceptable to Democrats.

“Republicans want to shut down our nation’s government because they want to make it harder to get cancer screenings,” he said. “They want to throw women under the bus.”

Boehner said repeatedly that wasn’t the case — it was spending cuts that divided two sides.

For a nation eager to trim to federal spending but also weary of Washington bickering, the spending showdown had real implications.

A closure would mean the furloughs of hundreds of thousands of workers and the services they provide, from processing many tax refunds to approving business loans. Medical research would be disrupted, national parks would close and most travel visa and passport services would stop, among many others.

Government Shutdown Threat: Budget Deal Remains Unreached.

WASHINGTON—Washington is hurtling toward a government shutdown on Friday night as the time to agree on a budget for the remainder of the fiscal year grows very short.

Because of Senate rules, Democrats could be forced to break two GOP filibusters in order to pass a spending bill, and each vote requires a 30-hour delay. Government funding expires on Friday night, meaning that if negotiators don’t reach a deal by the end of today or early tomorrow, just one Republican senator could stall the vote until the deadline arrives.

If the talks Tuesday between House Republicans and the White House are any guide, the two parties are a long way from a deal. House Republicans emerged from the White House telling reporters that they are committed to finding a solution to the impasse, but were unwilling to do it unless the White House and Senate Democrats agree to cuts beyond the $33 billion level that had previously been floated.

“The Speaker told the president that the House will not be put in a box and forced to choose between two options that are bad for the country (accepting a bad deal that fails to make real spending cuts, or accepting a government shutdown due to Senate inaction),” a summary of the meeting provided to reporters by House Republican leadership read.

The House has instead proposed a one-week spending bill that would cut government spending by $12 billion while funding the military through the end of September, when the fiscal year ends.

House Democrats quickly rejected the offer. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters it was time to put an end to the “sporadic, episodic” stop-gap bills and reach a final agreement. He said that Democrats would whip opposition to the House bill if it is brought to the floor.

House Republicans aren’t willing to take yes for an answer, Hoyer said, and were demanding far more than they were entitled by their partial control of the government, noting that Democrats control the Senate and White House. “You would think if you’re going to reach a compromise, we get two, they get one,” he said. ” It appears that one side doesn’t want to compromise.”

Government Warns ‘Water Walking Balls’ Could Be Deadly.

WASHINGTON — The government is warning people to stay out of those giant see-through inflatable spheres known as “water walking balls” because of the risk of suffocation or drowning.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission said Thursday that it “does not know of any safe way to use” the products, which are popular at amusement parks, resorts, malls and carnivals. They resemble hamster balls but are large enough for humans.People climb into the plastic, airtight balls and then roll around — or try to walk — on water in pools, lakes or rivers.

“We want to tell the public how dangerous these products are before someone is killed,” said Inez Tenenbaum, chairman of the commission. “Our investigation into water walking balls will not stop with today’s warning.”The agency is worried about too little oxygen in the balls as well as the buildup of carbon dioxide.

Another concern: the fact that the product has no emergency exit and can be opened only by a person outside of the ball — a serious problem if a person inside the ball experiences distress.

The commission said it is aware of two incidents in which people were hurt.

In the first, a 5-year-old girl in Kingston, Mass., passed out last year while inside a ball for a brief time. In the other, a young boy suffered a broken arm when the ball he was in fell out of a shallow above-ground pool onto the hard ground.The balls, CPSC says, could also spring a leak or puncture, raising the drowning risk, especially with young children who can’t swim.

Calls to manufacturers such as Eurobungy USA in Miami were not immediately returned.

One company that sells the water balls says on its website that there is enough oxygen to last 30 minutes. It says a ride usually lasts about 7-10 minutes, and that the balls are not dangerous as long as they are used safely.

The commission said it has informed state amusement ride officials of the risks associated with the water walking balls. It is encouraging state officials not to allow the rides.

Prolonged Government Shutdown Could Wither Confidence And Even Trigger Recession.

An extended federal government shutdown could devastate the U.S. economy by dealing a blow to Americans’ confidence, experts said Tuesday.

If lawmakers cannot reach agreement on a bill to fund the government by April 8, a broad array of federal programs will come to a halt. Although most shutdown plans remain classified, during the last major federal government shutdown in 1995, certain health services were shut down. Court cases were delayed. And federal workers were furloughed. This time around, some fear low-income families will miss crucial government payments. But there is another consequence that could make all of those challenges far worse: The economy could slip back into recession.

Already, Americans face a host of economic woes. The unemployment rate remains high. Home prices are still falling, aggravating a widespread foreclosure crisis. Oil prices are rising, pushing transportation costs steadily higher and tearing precious resources from the economy.

In this context, a prolonged federal shutdown would drain Americans’ confidence in their government, hobbling spending, borrowing and investment — and pushing the economy toward recession, said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.

“Confidence is already very, very fragile,” said Zandi, who has been an economic adviser to both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. “A very short shutdown would be manageable, but the damage that it would do to the confidence in the economy would quickly mount with each passing day.”

After about two weeks, that loss of confidence would “be fodder for a new recession,” Zandi wrote in a report last month. On Tuesday, he said that report remains as applicable as ever.

Republican lawmakers have warned that, if the government does not rein in federal spending, it could incite a crisis of confidence among investors in U.S. debt, which could make financing U.S. debt much more expensive. But economists say public confidence could fast wither if Congress fails to pass a budget for the remainder of the fiscal year, wounding the economy from the inside.

Economic strains at home, the conflict in Libya, and the continuing crisis in Japan have already made Americans worried. Both major indices of consumer psychology plummeted this month: On Friday, Reuters and University of Michigan said their consumer sentiment index fell in late March to its lowest level since November 2009, down from February’s three-year high. On Monday, the Conference Board said its index of consumer confidence fell sharply in March, reversing two months of strong gains.

Confidence has far-reaching economic implications. It affects consumer spending, which drives about two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. Confidence also influences whether an entrepreneur will take out a loan to expand a business, or whether an investor will provide a fledgling company with capital. In the stock market, where trillions of dollars are at stake, investors’ decisions are often influenced by a feeling of confidence.

“Even though the actual direct effects of a two-week government shutdown may not seem like such a big deal, it could trigger a mass panic or sell-off, or other types of market dynamics that could be really hard to predict or control,” said Andrew Lo, professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He added that Americans might “start wondering whether or not government works at all.”

On a short-term basis, the strain from a government shutdown would occur on a micro level, as struggling families would go without payments, and workers would be forced to stay home. But these issues would most likely have little broader impact on the economy during the first few days of a shutdown, said Alec Phillips, an economist at Goldman Sachs.

And not all aspects of government would be affected. Functions deemed “essential,” such as national security, would continue.

Some economists are skeptical that a shutdown would affect the broader economy.

“In many respects it’s the bureaucracy that shuts down — the statistical agencies that collect and report on the state of the economy and commerce, various kinds of permitting and approvals,” said Brian Bethune, chief financial economist for North America at IHS Global Insight. “These shutdowns have happened before, and they really haven’t had that big of an impact on the economy.”

During the last major government shutdown, under President Bill Clinton, confidence dipped. The freeze began in December 1995 and lasted through January. During that period, consumer confidence dropped 10.8 points, which at the time was its biggest monthly fall in nearly four years, according to the Conference Board’s records.

The economic consequences, at that point, were minimal. The Standard and Poor’s 500 stock index, after falling in January 1996, soon rebounded.

But this time around, a shutdown would occur during a period of historic weakness.

“It could be a nonevent, in which case everybody takes a two-week vacation, and they’re back to normal afterward,” Lo said. “Or it could turn into something much more ugly.”

Libyan Woman Claims Rape By Soldiers, Is Dragged Away.

TRIPOLI, Libya — A distraught Libyan woman stormed into a Tripoli hotel Saturday to tell foreign reporters that government troops raped her, setting off a brawl when hotel staff and government minders tried to detain her.

Iman al-Obeidi was tackled by waitresses and government minders as she sat telling her story to journalists after she rushed into the restaurant at the Rixos hotel where a number of foreign journalists were eating breakfast.

She claimed loudly that troops had detained her a checkpoint, tied her up, abused her, then led her away to be gang raped.

Her story could not be independently verified, but the dramatic scene provided a rare firsthand glimpse of the brutal crackdown on public dissent by Moammar Gadhafi’s regime as the Libyan leader fights a rebellion against his rule that began last month.

The regime has been keeping up a drumbeat of propaganda in the Tripoli-centered west of the country under its control even as it faces a weeklong international air campaign against the Libyan military.

At a hastily arranged press conference after the incident, government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said investigators had told him the woman was drunk and possibly mentally challenged.

Before she was dragged out of the hotel, al-Obeidi managed to tell journalists that she was detained by a number of troops at a Tripoli checkpoint on Wednesday. She said they were drinking whiskey and handcuffed her. She said 15 men later raped her.

“They tied me up … they even defecated and urinated on me,” she said, her face streaming with tears. “The Gadhafi militiamen violated my honor.”

The woman, who appeared in her 30’s, wore a black robe and a floral scarf around her neck and identified herself. She had scratches on her face and she pulled up her black robe to reveal a bloodied thigh. She said neighbors in the area where she was detained helped her escape.

The Associated Press only identifies rape victims who volunteer their names.

As al-Obeidi spoke, a hotel waitress brandished a butter knife, a government minder reached for his handgun and another waitress pulled a jacket tightly over her head.

Al-Obeidi said she was targeted by the troops because she’s from the eastern city of Benghazi, a rebel stronghold.

The waiters called her a traitor and told her to shut up. She retorted: “Easterners – we’re all Libyan brothers, we are supposed to be treated the same, but this is what the Gadhafi militiamen did to me, they violated my honor.”

It soon turned into a scene of chaos with journalists attempting to protect the woman from government minders who physically attacked and intimidated her.

Journalists who tried to intervene were pushed out of the way by the minders. A British television reporter was punched, and CNN’s camera was smashed on the ground and ripped to pieces by the government minders.

Eventually the minders overpowered the woman and led her outside, shoving her into a car that sped away. Al-Obeidi kept crying that she was certain she would be thrown in jail. She begged photographers to take her picture, raising her robe to show them her bruised body. A minder tried to cover her mouth with his hand to keep her from talking.

“Look at what happens – Gadhafi’s militiamen kidnap women at gunpoint, and rape them … they rape them,” al-Obeidi screamed.

She said she wanted to be taken to see the leader himself.

“I want to see Moammar Gadhafi. Didn’t he say that every victim will have justice? I want my rights,” she said.

The government spokesman said the woman was under investigation.

“The investigators did phone me and told me the lady is drunk and that she seems to be suffering mentally,” Ibrahim said. “They are checking on her health condition, her mental condition, whether she was really abused or if these were fantasies.”

Gadhafi’s crackdown has been the region’s most violent against the wave of anti-government protests sweeping the Middle East. Tensions have been rising between foreign reporters in the Libyan capital and the government minders who have sought to tightly control what they see and whom they talk to. Most of the international press corps is being housed at the Rixos hotel.

Big Political Challenges Greet Obama’s Return Home.

WASHINGTON — Returning home to some messy politics, President Barack Obama is confronting a battery of challenges, from a spending standoff that threatens to shut down the government to congressional angst over the U.S.-led attacks on Libya. Foreign crises rage across Africa and the Middle East, and Americans still want the economy to improve more quickly.The president left behind a wave of goodwill in Latin America as he shored up alliances that the White House said would prove pivotal for years to come. Yet the timing made for political and logistical headaches, as his five-day trip to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador took place just as the U.S. and allies launched a U.N.-sanctioned assault against Moammar Gadhafi’s menacing regime.Now lawmakers are questioning the costs and objective of the military action while voicing growing frustration that Obama didn’t consult with Congress more thoroughly before authorizing the U.S. airstrikes. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, encapsulated much of the GOP sentiment by asking in a tweet, “Is Congress going to assert its constitutional role or be a potted plant?”

No sooner had Obama touched down on U.S. soil late Wednesday afternoon then House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, issued a blistering letter demanding more details about the steps ahead on Libya.

“I and many other members of the House of Representatives are troubled that U.S. military resources were committed to war without clearly defining for the American people, the Congress and our troops what the mission in Libya is and what America’s role is in achieving that mission,” Boehner said.

The criticism comes not just from the right. Liberal Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has said he intends to offer legislation to block the U.S. from funding military actions in Libya. Moderate Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., an authoritative voice on military issues as a former Navy secretary, said the U.S. strategy lacks clarity and the endpoint is undefined.

Obama, in news conferences from Santiago to San Salvador, has been adamant in saying the main U.S. military role will be limited and front-loaded as allies strive to keep Gadhafi from killing those seeking to oust him. Insisting the U.S. will soon play a supporting role, Obama told Univision, “The exit strategy will be executed this week.”

Obama will have more opportunities in the coming days to speak about the fast-changing Libya conflict, if he chooses. No specific address to the nation is planned.

The military challenge comes as the threat of a government shutdown looms again.

Federal operations are churning along on another temporary spending bill, this one expiring April 8. That means Obama has just over two weeks to help broker a deal to keep the government running for the six months left in the fiscal year. House Republicans don’t want to budge from the $61 billion in steep cuts they’ve approved, but that won’t fly in the Senate and Obama has threatened to veto it, leaving the path to compromise unclear.

“I can’t remember a more action-packed agenda, with two major, urgent items at the top of the list,” said Norman Ornstein, who studies Congress and politics at the American Enterprise Institute. “Libya, of course, but with the added twist of harsh criticism of the president’s failure to bring in Congress. And the budget battle, which I believe is much more likely than not to lead to a shutdown.”

The pressure will be on Obama to intervene in the budget talks.

Also looming is a fight over the federal debt limit, which Democrats cannot increase without some Republican support in both the Senate and House. The administration has warned Congress that failing to raise the debt limit would lead to an unprecedented default on the national debt and wreck the national economic recovery.

The Treasury Department estimates the government will hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling sometime between April 15 and May 31. But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has warned that GOP senators would not vote to increase the federal debt limit unless Obama agreed to significant long-term budget savings that could include cost curbs for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Republican leaders also are pounding on Obama’s policies at the one-year anniversary of his signature health care law, which also occurred just as he returned home. The law divides the nation just as much as it did a year ago.

The administration and its allies celebrated the anniversary, but it came and went without comment from the president.

Obama is operating in a shrinking window of governing until the politics of his 2012 re-election essentially halt cooperation in Washington.

Obama will try to pick up with his domestic agenda of cutting spending but redirecting funding to make the country competitive in the longer term. He spent much of March emphasizing education, and that’s about to resume: He will conduct a Univision-sponsored televised town hall about education at a District of Columbia high school on Monday.

Although Libya dominated news coverage during the president’s absence, it is a broader revolt in the Arab world that keeps bearing down on him. Support for Yemen’s U.S.-backed president is crumbling among political allies. Tensions remain high in Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th fleet. The White House now finds itself routinely condemning violent crackdowns on protests.

And there’s this: It won’t be long before Obama is overseas again.

In two months, he’ll be pushing the U.S. agenda on a trip to England, Ireland, Poland and France.