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A person familiar with the legislative planning said the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said.
The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't have a position on the proposal, but it is concerned that employers would find it expensive and complicated to properly check the biometrics.
Mr. Schumer said employers would be able to buy a scanner to check the IDs for as much as $800. Small employers, he said, could take their applicants to a government office to like the Department of Motor Vehicles and have their hands scanned there.
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Saudi Arabia walked out on OPEC yesterday. It said it would not honor the cartel's production cut. It was tired of rants from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the well-dressed oil minister from Iran.
As the world's largest crude exporter, the kingdom in the desert took its ball and went home.
As the Saudis left the building the message was shockingly clear. According to The New York Times, “Saudi Arabia will meet the market’s demand,” a senior OPEC delegate said. “We will see what the market requires and we will not leave a customer without oil."
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The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in New Hampshire shows John McCain leading Mitt Romney by five percentage points. It’s McCain 31% Romney 26%. The survey was conducted Friday night, the night following the Iowa caucuses. As noted yesterday on Rasmussen Reports, McCain was one of the big winners on Thursday in Iowa. The current poll is a reversal from a pre-Christmas survey when Romney had a slight advantage.
Ron Paul earns 14% of the vote and Mike Huckabee gets 11% as the only other candidates in double digits. Rudy Giuliani attracts 8% of the vote, Fred Thompson 5%, some other candidate 2%, and 3% are not sure.
McCain and Romney are tied among Republicans likely to vote in the Primary but McCain has an advantage among Independent voters. Independents are still more likely to participate in the Democratic Primary. Still, the survey suggests that 32% of voters in the GOP Primary will be unaffiliated with either major party.
Said By CNet
The FBI has repeatedly misused the Patriot Act's extraordinary surveillance powers by obtaining information on Americans unlawfully, the Justice Department's inspector general said Friday in a report that already has drawn promises of a congressional investigation.
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Additionally, the number of Americans who said the Internet was their primary political news source doubled: it was 15 percent during the 2006 midterm election campaigns, compared with 7 percent during the 2002 midterms. Compared with the last presidential election year, however, 2006 numbers were down slightly, the study found (click for PDF). About 18 percent of Americans used the Internet as a primary source during the 2004 presidential election campaign, according to Pew Internet, the nonprofit research arm of the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center. "All of this is a harbinger in what will happen in a very interesting and highly contested presidential election in 2008. It's the first time since 1952 that we have had both parties wide open--no VPs or presidents running for re-election or higher office," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
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The Missouri constitutional amendment is important because it ensures that lawmakers cannot pass future laws that prohibit human stem-cell research in the state. There was a great deal of concern that they could put random restrictions on the type of stem-cell research we could do in Missouri, says Michael Howard at the Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine. Howard conducts research on spinal-cord injury using mouse embryonic stem cells.
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But some experts think political advertisers should at least be thinking about the power of the fast-forward button. "In general, advertisers have started to be concerned as adoption of DVRs increases," said Bruce McGregor, a senior digital home services analyst at Current Analysis. "Election ads would fall into that category if (voters have) seen the same political ads the last month and want to fast-forward through them." Ditty is hardly alone, of course, in his bid to skip through what he sees as a worsening environment of negative political ad campaigning, even while continuing to watch a significant amount of television.
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Family members of three people slain by a 14-year-old on newsman Sam Donaldson's New Mexico ranch sued the makers of the video game ''Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'' on Monday, claiming the crimes would not have occurred had the teenager never played the violent game. The $600 million lawsuit names several companies and Cody Posey, who it alleges played the game ''obsessively'' for several months before he shot his father, stepmother and stepsister in July 2004. Posey, now 16, was sentenced earlier this year to state custody until he is 21.