9/24/08 - BREAKING NEWS ODDS AND ENDS

Spielberg, wife donate $100,000 to fight gay marriage ban

Agence France-Presse
First Posted 06:15:00 09/24/2008

LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood heavyweight Steven Spielberg and his wife have donated $100,000 to help defeat a California referendum seeking to outlaw same-sex marriage, his spokesman said Tuesday.
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Close Support of the Third Kind?
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Santiago bares P11.5-B ‘secret pork barrel’ in 2008 budget

By Maila Ager
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 16:46:00 09/23/2008

MANILA, Philippines -- Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago has uncovered a “secret pork barrel” in the 2008 budget amounting to P11.5 billion from one department alone, which she alleged could be used by legislators in the 2010 elections.

Santiago said the amount, “secretly inserted” in this year’s budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways, was “unusually large” as it represented 12 percent of the estimated P95 billion budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways.

“That amount is unusually large. Normally, insertions are smaller in percentage than 12 percent. That’s my first point. Why so big?” she told reporters before the session on Tuesday.
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Because it is supposed to be "secret".
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RP gets lowest score ever for anti-corruption efforts

By Jesus F. Llanto, abs-cbnNEWS.com, Newsbreak | 09/23/2008 5:01 PM

The Philippines is perceived as more corrupt now than last year, a study by the international anti-corruption group Transparency International showed.

The 2008 Corruption Perception Index showed that the Philippines got a score of 2.3 in 2007—down by 0.2% from 2.5 in 2007. This year’s score is the lowest for the country since 1995 when the first CPI was devised as a tool for a country’s resolve to fight corruption.
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Maybe Miriam is not trying hard enough?
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(continued)

...Johann Graf Lambsdorff, professor at University of Passau in Germany, said countries can gain a lot from fighting corruption. “Evidence suggests that an improvement in the CPI by one point [on a 10-point scale] increases capital inflows by 0.5 percent of a country’s gross domestic product and average income by as much as 4 percent.”
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Oh. I thought they said that contraceptives is the solution to poverty?
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