World/Nation Briefs February 22, 2012
Santorum: Obama is ill-intentioned power grabber
PHOENIX - A surging Rick Santorum is making increasingly harsh remarks about President Barack Obama, questioning not just the president's competence but his motives and even his Christian values.
Mitt Romney also is sharpening his anti-Obama rhetoric. He said Tuesday the president governs with "a secular agenda" that hurts religious freedom. In general, however, the former Massachusetts governor has not seriously challenged Obama's motives, often saying the president is decent but inept.
But Santorum and Newt Gingrich have heightened their claims that Obama's intentions are not always benign, ahead of Wednesday's televised GOP presidential debate and next week's primaries in Michigan and Arizona.
Administration seeks to lower corporate tax rate
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration will propose lowering the current 35 percent corporate tax rate, while at the same time eliminating loopholes and subsidies and imposing a minimum tax on the overseas profits of American companies.
Administration officials said the Treasury Department on Wednesday will detail aspects of President Barack Obama's proposed overhaul of the corporate tax system, a plan he broadly outlined in his State of the Union speech last month.
The 35 percent nominal corporate tax rate is the highest in the world after Japan. But deductions, credits and exemptions allow many corporations to pay taxes at a much lower rate.
The administration plan is not likely to go as far as a House Republican proposal to lower the rate to 25 percent. But Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told a House committee last week that the administration wants to create more incentives for corporations to invest in the United States.
UN agency says Iran hiding work on nuclear bomb
VIENNA - The U.N. nuclear agency on Wednesday acknowledged its renewed failure in trying to probe suspicions that Tehran has worked secretly on atomic arms, in a statement issued shortly after an Iranian general warned of a pre-emptive strike against any nation that threatens Iran.
The double signs of defiance reflected continued Iranian determination not to bow to demands that it defuse suspicions about its nuclear activities despite rapidly growing international sanctions imposed over its refusal to signal it is ready to compromise.
With the International Atomic Energy Agency already failing to dent Iranian stonewalling in talks that ended just three weeks ago, hopes had been muted that the latest effort would be any more successful even before the IAEA issued its statement.
The fact that the communique was issued early Wednesday, shortly after midnight and just after the IAEA experts left Tehran, reflected the urgency the agency attached to telling its side of the story.
As the two-day IAEA visit was winding down, Iranian officials sought to cast it in a positive light, with foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast telling reporters that "cooperation with the agency continues and is at its best level."
Red Cross calls for daily cease-fire in Syria
BEIRUT - Food and water are running dangerously low in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, with frantic cries for help from residents amid government shelling that pounded rebel strongholds and killed at least 30 people Tuesday, activists said.
Shells reportedly rained down on rebellious districts at a rate of 10 per minute at one point and the Red Cross called for a daily two-hour cease-fire so it can deliver emergency aid to the wounded and sick.
"If they don't die in the shelling, they will die of hunger," activist and resident Omar Shaker told The Associated Press after hours of intense shelling concentrated on the rebel-held neighborhood of Baba Amr that the opposition has extolled as a symbol of their 11-month uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime.
Another 33 people were killed in northern Syria's mountainous Jabal al-Zawiya region when government forces raided a town in pursuit of regime opponents, raising Tuesday's overall death toll to 63, activists said.
- The Associated Press