NPR 2010-03-25

From NPR News in Washington, I’m Korva Coleman.

President Obama has signed an executive order spelling out limits on federal funding for abortion 1 under the new health care law. NPR’s Scott Horsley reports.

Michigan Congressman 2 Bart Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats 3 were invited to join the president in the Oval Office for the signing. The executive order helped sway Stupak and others to support the health care overhaul 4, giving House Democrats the majority they needed just hours before Sunday’s vote. The order is potentially awkward for President Obama who supports abortion rights, but White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says it merely reaffirms existing limits on federal funding for abortion.

“The president has always believed that health care reforms should be about that, not about other issues. The president did not, in health care reform, believe we did change the status quo, and believes that this reiterates 5 that it’s not changed.”

No news cameras or microphones were allowed into the Oval Office to record the signing. Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.

Meanwhile, the House majority leader says some congressional Democrats have been threatened in the wake of a law. Democratic Congressman Steny Hoyer says the FBI and Capitol Police have been called in. Over the weekend, black lawmakers were menaced by protestors who oppose the new law with racial and homophonic epithets 6. One lawmaker was spat 7 upon.

The House has approved another bill on job creation and now forwarded it to the Senate. The bill would offer more than three billion dollars in tax cuts to local builders. It will also offer states more money, so they may continue to pay unemployment benefits to out-of-work Americans.

Saudi Arabia says it has arrested 101 suspected terrorists who may have been planning to attack the country’s oil sector 8. The Saudi Interior Ministry 9 says more than half of those arrested are foreigners. NPR’s Peter Kenyon reports from Cairo.

According to a statement from the Interior Ministry, the suspects were seized along with suspicious documents, computers and weapons, including explosive belts of the type worn by suicide bombers 10. The statement did not say when the arrests were made. It identified the suspects as 47 Saudis, 51 Yemenis and a Somali, an Eritrean and a Bengali. Many of the arrests occurred in the southern district of Saudi Arabia near the border with Yemen. In 2006, suicide bombers attempted to cripple the giant Abqaiq oil complex in the eastern part of the kingdom. The attack on the world’s largest oil processing compound failed. Saudi press reports are quoting security officials as saying at least one of the suspects is a Yemeni with no links to al-Qaeda. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Cairo.

The White House says the United States and Russia are very close to signing a new nuclear arms reduction treaty. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says nothing’s final until President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev speak again in the next few days.

On Wall Street before the close, the Dow Jones industrials were down 49 points at 10,839.

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Reading scores for the nation’s eighth graders are up slightly, but that’s not true for kids in fourth grade. NPR’s Claudio Sanchez reports.

The latest reading scores from the National Assessment 11 of Educational Progress show that 33% of eighth graders are reading at or above grade level. That’s 1% higher than a year ago, 4% higher than in 1992. Despite a 13-point increase for black students and an eight-point increase for Latinos, the gap between white and black and Latino children is still significant and has not budged 12 in nearly 20 years because white children’s reading scores have gone up, too. Overall, a whopping 70% of eighth graders read below grade level. That means they struggle to draw conclusions from what they read or locate and recall information. Average reading scores among fourth graders, meanwhile, are unchanged since 2007; scores of private school students were stagnant 13; the average score for Catholic school students, however, is up six points. Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.

Thousands of people lack power in the Greater Denver Area. A heavy snowstorm blanketed the region, forcing airlines to cancel thousands of flights but rather hundreds of flights. The National Weather Service says Denver received about nine inches of snow as of this morning and as much as 23 inches have fallen in Jefferson County, west of the city. The weather service is predicting a few more inches of snow will fall on the region before the spring storm moves out.

The government reports sales of new homes dropped sharply last month. The Commerce Department says they were down 2.2%. Some regions of the country were especially hard hit. The Midwest saw a drop in new home sales of about 18%. The government says bad weather is partly to blame.

I’m Korva Coleman, NPR News in Washington.