A controversial tax on polluters passes its final major legal hurdle in Australia as senators back the plan, in a victory for the Labor government.

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Australia Senate backs carbon tax

The reversal follows a huge backlash from consumers, even before the plan was to take effect.

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Bank of America Drops Plan for Debit Card Fee

The committee, which was set up in response to a summer protest movement, recommended that the plan be paid for partly with cuts to the defense budget.

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Israeli Panel Offers Plan to Ease Cost of Living

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lay out his plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace on Tuesday-and he insisted Israel will not return to its 1967 borders. “I intend to speak the unvarnished truth,” Netanyahu said. He has been dealing with the…

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Netanyahu to Outline Peace Plan Tuesday

After denouncing the House Republican budget plan for Medicare as “right-wing social engineering” and “radical change” on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) found himself on the defensive and his nascent presidential bid in shambles . Within two days, he popped up on Fox’s “On the Record” to explain to host Greta van Susteren that he had apologized to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the main author of the plan. Read full article > >

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Does Newt Gingrich still believe the GOP Medicare plan is ‘radical’?

I am physically just back from China; mentally still lost and adrift somewhere in the noosphere; and in body-clock terms — well, how convenient that Salvador Dali so precisely imagined the state of my current body-clock (right) many years ago . For now I have just barely enough energy to thank the final outstanding group of Guest Bloggers in this space — David Allen, Julio Friedmann, Kentaro Toyama , and Michele Travierso — who rounded out this experiment in such impressive style, plus the Atlantic’s Justin Miller and John Hendel who shepherded them and their predecessors through the blogging process. Some time soon, most likely around 3 or 4 am, I intend to begin weighing in further about: – My gratitude to the 40-plus other guests who over the past two months have shared experiences, developed arguments, and — for me at least — provided surprises in this space. I’ll say something about them all, by name. – A slew of other issues that have piled up, of which at the moment I can stand to mention only two, each involving a rising Republican politician. The one involving Jon Huntsman Jr. , in his last days as U.S. Ambassador to China, was his unexpected but heartening public condemnation today of the wave of arrests, crackdown, and repression so dramatically taking place in China at the moment. His statement was unexpected, in that ambassadors usually avoid “meddling” in host-country affairs this way, especially with one foot out the door; and it was heartening, because what has been happening in China over the past six weeks is the most unsettling step backward there in a very long time. More on the crackdown itself soon. It’s too bad, again, that Huntsman muddied the end of his ambassadorship with possible presidential-campaign positioning, because in this latest statement he should be seen as speaking for the whole American nation and not any partisan subset. The one involving Rep. Paul Ryan is of course his budget plan. There are people who consider Ryan “courageous” and “serious” and bravely “truth-telling” for the ideas he has put together. David Brooks has been most unrestrained in this view. There are others who consider the plan gimmick-ridden , fiscally and economically harmful, politically unrealistic verging on suicidal   (for Republicans), and in the words of the Economist’s “Democracy in America” column, ” fundamentally immoral .” Count me with this latter group. Details and “reasoning” to come, no doubt sometime around 4am, and mainly involving the history and future of Medicare. For the moment, these to-me convincing words from another Republican (non-elected category), the former Bush speechwriter David Frum : > > The debt reduction plan actually increases the debt over the medium term — by even more President Obama’s budget would…. The real message of the Ryan plan is: Upper-income tax cuts now; spending cuts for the poor now; more deficits now; spending cuts for middle-income people much later; spending cuts for today’s elderly, never… As politics, the message is even worse than the economics. Cut Medicaid and Medicare to fund tax cuts? Isn’t that the issue that returned Bill Clinton to the White House in 1996?… And if the plan did somehow become law, is it not a formula for an economy in the 2010s that will underperform for most people in the same way that the economy of the 2000s underperformed for most people? Those are the questions that will worry economists and swing voters alike. But the plan is not written for economists and swing voters. It is written for the GOP core. Yet one has to wonder: What happens to a party that invests so much energy talking to itself?

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Gradual Return, Featuring Huntsman and Ryan

The U.S. seems to think Gaddafi must go. So where’s the plan for that?

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Dazed and confused by the Libyan mandate

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. — A 22-year-old U.S. soldier pleaded guilty Wednesday to the murders of three unarmed Afghan civilians, telling a military judge “the plan was to kill people” in his coordinated conspiracy with four fellow soldiers.

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US soldier pleads guilty to murders of 3 Afghan civilians, faces up to 24 years in prison

Under the plan, which begins on March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month free. The most frequent users will pay $15 for a four-week subscription; print subscribers will have unlimited access.

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The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan

Another Middle Eastern regime bites the dust: Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has agreed to create a plan with the opposition party by the end of the year for his exit, a government official confirmed Wednesday. Although no details of the plan have…

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Yemeni Leader Agrees to Leave

President Obama’s new budget plan was quickly dismissed Monday by Republican congressional leaders, but the document serves as a measure of his presidency – revealing vastly diminished ambitions and practical political calculations.

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Analysis: Obama budget plan reveals vastly diminished ambitions

Violence in Iraq reached its lowest levels in 2010 since the start of the war, U.S. military commanders said Tuesday, giving some optimism to their plan to have all security forces out by the end of 2011. Security incidents fell overall by 20 percent…

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Violence Dropped in Iraq in 2010

Representative Darrell Issa of California calls his plan a way to promote transparency on requests under the Freedom of Information Act, but his request worries some civil libertarians.

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Republican Congressman Proposes Tracking Freedom of Information Act Requests

In an inaugural speech, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo pledged to unveil the plan a month before his budget proposal is due.

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Cuomo Promises Emergency Financial Plan

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is poised to vote on net neutrality regulations today, implementing rules that would prevent Internet providers from interfering with traffic over their networks – but analysis of the plan sparked widespread fear that certain Internet services could favor cable companies more than the consumer. read more

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FCC Set to Approve Corporate-Friendly Net Neutrality Rules