Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Japan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl - NYTimes.com
Image via WikipediaJapan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl - NYTimes.comBy HIROKO TABUCHI and KEITH BRADSHER
TOKYO — Japan has raised its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, meanwhile, called on the country to rebuild. While acknowledging the decision to raise the severity of the nuclear accident at Fukushima to the highest level, he took pains in a nationally televised speech on Tuesday evening to say that the reactors were being stabilized and to emphasize that radiation releases are declining.
The prime minister said he had ordered Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of Fukushima Daiichi, to present its plans and expectations for the stricken nuclear power plant. He also expressed concern about the economic consequences of the accident, calling on people across Japan to continue buying products from the affected areas of northeast Japan.
Mr. Kan defended the government’s record in releasing information.
“What I can say for the information I obtained — of course the government is very large so I don’t have all the information — is that no information was ever suppressed or hidden after the accident,” he said.
The decision to raise the alert level to 7 from 5 on the scale amounts to an admission that the accident at the nuclear facility, brought on by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, is likely to have substantial and long-lasting consequences for health and for the environment. Some in the nuclear industry have been saying for weeks that the accident released large amounts of radiation, but Japanese officials had played down this possibility.
The new estimates by Japanese authorities suggest that the total amount of radioactive materials released so far is equal to about 10 percent of that released in the Chernobyl accident, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
Mr. Nishiyama stressed that unlike at Chernobyl, where the reactor itself exploded and fire fanned the release of radioactive material, the containments at the four troubled reactors at Fukushima remained intact over all.
But at a separate news conference, an official from Tokyo Electric said, “The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”
The accident at Chernobyl involved a burning graphite reactor that pushed radioactive particles high into the atmosphere and downwind across Europe. The Japanese accident has mostly produced radioactive liquid runoff into the Pacific Ocean and low-altitude radioactive particles that have tended to blow out into the ocean and quickly fall into the water.
On the International Nuclear Event Scale, a Level 7 nuclear accident involves “widespread health and environmental effects” and the “external release of a significant fraction of the reactor core inventory.” The scale, which was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and countries that use nuclear energy, leaves it to the nuclear agency of the country where the accident occurs to calculate a rating based on complicated criteria.
Japan’s previous rating of 5 placed the Fukushima accident at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Level 7 has been applied only to the disaster at Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union.
“This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude,” said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate.”
Mr. Nishiyama said “tens of thousands of terabecquerels” of radiation per hour have been released from the plant. (The measurement refers to how much radioactive material was emitted, not the dose absorbed by living organisms.) The scale of the radiation leak has since dropped to under one terabecquerel per hour, the Kyodo news agency said, citing government officials.
The announcement came as Japan was preparing to urge more residents around the crippled nuclear plant to evacuate, because of concerns over long-term exposure to radiation.
The authorities have already ordered people living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to evacuate, and recommended that people remain indoors or avoid an area within a radius of about 19 miles.
The government’s decision to expand the zone came in response to radiation readings that would be worrisome over months in certain communities beyond those areas, underscoring how difficult it has been to predict the ways radiation spreads from the damaged plant.
Unlike the previous definitions of the areas to be evacuated, this time the government designated specific communities that should be evacuated, instead of a radius expressed in miles.
The radiation has not spread evenly from the reactors, but instead has been directed to some areas and not others by weather patterns and the terrain. Iitate, one of the communities told on Monday to prepare for evacuation, lies well beyond the 19-mile radius, but the winds over the last month have tended to blow northwest from the Fukushima plant toward Iitate, which may explain why high readings were detected there.
Officials are concerned that people in these communities are being exposed to radiation equivalent to at least 20 millisieverts a year, he said, which could be harmful to human health over the long term. In addition to Iitate, evacuation orders will come within a month for Katsurao, Namie and parts of Minamisoma and Kawamata, said Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary.
People in five other areas may also be told to evacuate if the conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant grow worse, Mr. Edano said. Those areas are Hirono, Naraha, Kawauchi, Tamura and other sections of Minamisoma.
“This measure is not an order for you to evacuate or take actions immediately,” he said. “We arrived at this decision by taking into account the risks of remaining in the area in the long term.” He appealed for calm and said that the chance of a large-scale radiation leak from the Fukushima Daiichi plant had, in fact, decreased.
Mr. Edano also said that pregnant women, children and hospital patients should stay out of the area within 19 miles of the reactors and that schools in that zone would remain closed.
Until now, the Japanese government had refused to expand the evacuation zone, despite urging from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States and Australia have advised their citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the plant.
The international agency, which is based in Vienna, said Sunday that its team measured radiation on Saturday of 0.4 to 3.7 microsieverts per hour at distances of 20 to 40 miles from the damaged plant — well outside the initial evacuation zone. At that rate of accumulation, it would take 225 days to 5.7 years to reach the Japanese government’s threshold level for evacuations: radiation accumulating at a rate of at least 20 millisieverts per year.
In other words, only the areas with the highest readings would qualify for the new evacuation ordered by the government.
Aftershocks have continued in northeastern Japan since the March 11 quake and tsunami. The latest occurred Tuesday at 2 p.m. local time when a shock measuring magnitude 6.0 struck off the Fukushima coast at a relatively shallow depth of about six miles under the seabed, according to the United States Geological Survey. Officials at Tokyo Electric said that workers were moved to safer areas within the Fukushima Daiichi plant, but there appeared to be no damage to the power supply and no disruption to pumps sending cooling water into the plant’s four most severely damaged reactors.
The aftershock appeared to be centered very close to the epicenter of a magnitude 6.6 temblor that struck the area on Monday, knocking out power to the plant for almost an hour and stopping vital cooling work.
Moshe Komata and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting from Tokyo.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Julian Assange Interview - ABC TV Australia 4/11/11
Image via WikipediaTranscript
LEIGH SALES: Julian Assange: given your circumstances, is Wikileaks currently operational?
JULIAN ASSANGE: We have increased our publishing since late last year when my present difficulties began to include over 63 media organisations from around the world. We have now published over 7,000 US Embassy cables relating to Cablegate, so, yes, we're continuing on. Even when I was in prison for 10 days we continued publishing.
LEIGH SALES: So Wikileaks exists outside of Julian Assange?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, we have been structured that way quite deliberately to avoid interruption to our publishing, although certainly there has been very aggressive efforts to do so, but also to provide disincentive for decapitation attacks on the organisation.
LEIGH SALES: The US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates basically said that the impact of Wikileaks has been overstated; that it was a little awkward and embarrassing for the US but it basically hasn't had any effect on foreign policy, what's your response?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Of course the hype that the Pentagon has always drummed up and the White House has always drummed up in response to bona fide scrutiny of its national security sector is to say, well, the end is nigh, people are going to die. No official from the US Government or anywhere else has claimed that anyone has come to physical harm as a result of what we have done. Certainly politicians have been embarrassed and lost elections and officials have lost their jobs, but that is not the end of the world
LEIGH SALES: Commentators have noted that in terms of what the cables revealed about American diplomacy, it didn't show anything particularly scandalous, if anything it showed that there was quite a bit of consistency between America's public positions and their private positions, although in private of course they are more frank. Do you agree with that assessment?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The statement that embarrassing information, information, internal information is revealed and it simply shows the US Government to be a good guy is something that is done by apologists. The cables across the board reveal a very nuanced position - everything from that state security apparatus using a diplomatic core to spy on NGOs and take their DNA all the way through to bona fide pushing of a human rights agenda in some countries. So we can see that the State Department and US embassies in their interactions with other governments are not the caricature that the White House presents, but neither are they the caricature that some leftists present.
LEIGH SALES: I want to whip around a couple of other quick issues before we're out of time. In a book about you that's recently been released by two Guardian journalists, David Leigh and Luke Harding, they say they had an exchange with you last July, they wanted you to redact the names of informants mentioned in the Iraq War logs and they claim that you said, "Well, they're informants, so if they get killed, they've got it coming to them, they deserve it." Did you say that?
JULIAN ASSANGE: No, and we are suing them for liable and we have witnesses to show that is a libellous claim, and is an ongoing dispute, so there's a lot of vitriol in the top end of the news business and a lot of back-stabbing, and unfortunately we happen to be on the receiving end of it from this individual.
LEIGH SALES: So you're saying that that statement was completely fabricated?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It is completely fabricated.
LEIGH SALES: When the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard appeared on the 'Q and A' program and you asked her a question, you wanted to know what information she'd supplied foreign powers about Australian citizens working or affiliated with Wikileaks, and you also raised that point in an SBS interview in February. What exactly are you suggesting there?
JULIAN ASSANGE: What I am suggesting and what we have, what our sources tell us is that the Australian Government provided in its liaison, in its intelligence liaison function, foreign powers information about me and other individuals working for Wikileaks. Why? Simply because I am an Australian citizen. What possible pressure could enable them to do that? Well it's bootlicking for the United States, that's the reality, that unfortunate reality is as a result of the ALP being grouped, some people in the ALP like Mark Arbib being groomed for many years by the US Embassy and other inducements from Washington.
LEIGH SALES: If you have that information from sources, will you be prepared to release that into the public domain?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well unfortunately thus far the type of information we have is such that to reveal it would be to reveal the sources of it, so that is why we want the Australian Government, and Australian Government personnel who know that statements to the contrary are false to step forward to the Australian media and reveal that this sort of liaison has been occurring. It is not acceptable for that sort of liaison to occur.
LEIGH SALES: But Australia shares intelligence with its allies all the time, you're the subject of a Justice Department investigation in the United States. What's wrong with Australia sharing what intelligence it has?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, yes, but not on Australian citizens. The Australian Government's purpose is to protect Australian citizens. It has no other purpose.
LEIGH SALES: You've come from being a kid who's had a suburban Australian upbringing, to at times sleeping rough on the streets of Melbourne to being Time magazine's Person of the Year and being talked about by the President of the United States. Does it feel unreal?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well it does feel unreal because I've never slept rough on the streets of Melbourne, although I have ...
LEIGH SALES: That's a myth is it?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I had when I was 20 slept in the Dandenong Ranges, but not as a homeless person but rather because I enjoy the wilderness, but yes, of course it feels unreal. On the other hand I know we're doing good work and very, very important work and the trials and tribulations that we all go through is really quite a small price to pay to do something that is so profoundly meaningful and which our sources and the public at large demands that we do.
LEIGH SALES: Is your motivation genuinely that altruistic or is there a side of you that enjoys the power and the spotlight?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Encoded within me from a young age is a sense about what is just and what is not just and those things that I see in the world that I feel to be unjust I want to do something about.
LEIGH SALES: As I said before you've developed a very high profile and not everybody likes you, to put it gently. Do you fear for your life?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I have to disagree with that actually
LEIGH SALES: You think everybody does like you?
JULIAN ASSANGE: No, not everybody, but these sorts of statements are in fact mischievous. I mean, if we look at Australian opinion polls, actually Wikileaks and myself have far greater popularity amongst the Australian population than sitting prime ministers have had in many years.
LEIGH SALES: So does that mean you?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It's not right to say - it is not right to say that this organisation is polarising or that somehow the critics are evenly balanced with our supporters because it's simply not true.
LEIGH SALES: So does that mean you feel comfortable then about your personal safety?
JULIAN ASSANGE: In terms of my personal safety and the safety of my team, we have had right wing politicians in the United States such as Sarah Palin calling for our assassination, kidnapping, rendition, etc. Now some of that goes a bit beyond mere rhetoric which can inflame mentally unstable people. We have bills in the US Senate to declare our organisation a transnational threat, to take us from the status of individuals, Australians, Americans and turn us into enemy combatants where we can be dealt with in the same manner as senior figures in the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. That's a serious business.
LEIGH SALES: Julian Assange, I know our audience will be very interested to hear your views. Many thanks for making time to speak to us.
JULIAN ASSANGE: You're most welcome.
LEIGH SALES: The full half hour interview with Julian Assange will be available shortly on our website.
Obama to Call for Broad Plan to Reduce Debt - NYTimes.com
Image via WikipediaObama to Call for Broad Plan to Reduce Debt - NYTimes.comBy JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — President Obama will call this week for Republicans to join him in writing a broad plan to raise revenues and reduce the growth of popular entitlement programs, as the battle over the nation’s financial troubles moves past Friday’s short-term budget deal and into a wider and more consequential debate over the nation’s long-term fiscal health.
In a speech to be delivered at a university here on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will in effect come off the sidelines on the debate over reducing the nation’s debt, which is reaching dangerous heights as the population ages.
After months of criticism that he has not led on budget talks, Mr. Obama will urge bipartisan negotiations toward a multiyear debt-reduction plan that administration officials said would depart sharply from the one proposed last week by House Republicans.
The Republican plan includes a shrinking of Medicare and Medicaid and trillions of dollars in tax cuts, while sparing defense spending. Mr. Obama, by contrast, envisions a more comprehensive plan that would include tax increases for the richest taxpayers, cuts to military spending, savings in Medicare and Medicaid, and unspecified changes to Social Security.
In his remarks, which come after Friday’s bipartisan deal to cut domestic spending by about $38 billion for the remainder of this budget year, Mr. Obama will not offer details but will set deficit-cutting goals, White House officials said. The numbers were still under discussion on Sunday.
“He’ll lay out his approach this week in terms of the scale of debt reduction he thinks the country needs so we can grow economically and win the future — a balanced approach,” David Plouffe, the senior White House political strategist, said on “Fox News Sunday,” one of four talk shows on which he appeared Sunday.
“Obviously, we need to look at all corners of government,” Mr. Plouffe said, adding, “We’re going to have a big debate.”
Until now, Mr. Obama has avoided prescribing specific changes to entitlement programs like Medicare, beyond those contained in his health care overhaul. Indeed, few of the recommendations made by his own bipartisan fiscal commission were included in the budget he presented to Congress in February.
What is more, while Mr. Obama proposed a five-year freeze on the growth of domestic spending, he recommended increases in education, research, infrastructure and clean-energy programs — emphasizing that although deficit reduction is important, so are investments to create jobs and skilled workers.
The growing debate over federal spending and taxes is certain to ripple from the White House and Congress to the 2012 presidential campaign, helping to shape voters’ assessment of Mr. Obama’s record and challenging rivals for the Republican presidential nomination to respond, even as they court conservative voters who oppose any compromise with Mr. Obama.
Whether anything tangible comes of the debate, it will contrast the parties’ visions of the role of government.
Republicans reacted skeptically to word of Mr. Obama’s speech. “I sit here and I listen to David Plouffe talk about, you know, their commitment to cut spending and knowing full well that for the last two months we’ve had to bring this president kicking and screaming to the table to cut spending,” Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, said on Fox.
The timing of Mr. Obama’s remarks reflects a White House strategy devised late last year after Republicans won their House majority, together with the confluence of four events, two last week and two ahead.
Friday night’s 11th-hour agreement on spending cuts, which averted a government shutdown, removed what had been a distraction for months over this year’s unfinished federal budget. Administration officials said they also hoped that the compromise helped build trust with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, that would carry over to the larger debates about long-term spending and the national debt.
Some lawmakers said Sunday that they opposed the compromise, but leaders in both parties remain confident it will pass in the House and Senate this week.
Also last week came a moment the administration had been awaiting for months: Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, outlined House Republicans’ long-term budget plan.
Mr. Ryan said it would cut $6 trillion in the coming decade, though budget analysts questioned some of the claimed savings. The plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program for future generations and slash spending for the need-based Medicaid program and other domestic initiatives, while largely sparing the Pentagon and cutting $4 trillion more in corporate and high-income taxes.
The White House settled on a strategy in December by which Mr. Obama would wait for the House Republicans to lay down their cards before he proposed major reductions in popular entitlement benefit programs, according to interviews with administration officials at the time.
Mr. Obama’s budget waiting game, however, has helped to fuel widespread criticism by Republicans, pundits and some Democrats that he has failed to lead.
Another impetus to Wednesday’s move is the White House’s belief that a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators will announce this week that they have reached agreement on a debt-reduction package similar to that of the president’s fiscal commission.
After months of private discussions, the tentative agreement among the three Republican and three Democratic senators would cut military and domestic programs and overhaul the tax code, eliminating popular tax breaks but using the new revenues to lower income-tax rates and reduce annual deficits. It would be the model, if not in all details, for Mr. Obama’s own goals, Democratic officials say.
Perhaps the biggest prod for Mr. Obama to act, however, is the need for Congress to vote to raise the legal limit on the federal debt, now $14.25 trillion. The government will hit that limit on its borrowing authority in as few as five weeks, the Treasury Department has said. Without an increase by early July, the government cannot continue to make payments on its existing debt, potentially forcing it into an economy-shaking default.
Speaking on Saturday in Connecticut, Mr. Boehner said Republicans would not agree to raise the cap “without something really, really big attached to it.”
Unlike the recent spending-cut negotiations, in which Mr. Obama was not active until the final days, “he knows he has to take a greater role from the beginning” on the debt-limit measure and any companion plan for reducing debt, said an adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Several presidential advisers interviewed in recent weeks said Mr. Obama has been torn between wanting to propose major budget changes to entice Republicans to the bargaining table, including on Social Security, and believing they would never agree to raise revenues on upper-income Americans as part of a deal.
Three House Republican leaders, including Mr. Ryan, were on the fiscal commission; unlike the three Senate Republicans, they opposed the recommendations because they raised revenues and did not cut enough from health care.
The risk to Mr. Obama includes further alienating liberals in his own party. Progressive groups have formed coalitions to oppose any changes to Social Security, for instance.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Brain structure differs in liberals, conservatives: study - Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear
WASHINGTON — Everyone knows that liberals and conservatives butt heads when it comes to world views, but scientists have now shown that their brains are actually built differently.
Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.
"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala," the study said.
Other research has shown greater brain activity in those areas, according to which political views a person holds, but this is the first study to show a physical difference in size in the same regions.
"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Ryota Kanai of the University College London, where the research took place.
"Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."
The study was based on 90 "healthy young adults" who reported their political views on a scale of one to five from very liberal to very conservative, then agreed to have their brains scanned.
People with a large amygdala are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions," the study said.
Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that "monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts," it said.
"Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."
It remains unclear whether the structural differences cause the divergence in political views, or are the effect of them.
But the central issue in determining political views appears to revolve around fear and how it affects a person.
"Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty," the study said.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Budget Deal Reached to Avert Shutdown - NYTimes.com
Budget Deal Reached to Avert Shutdown - NYTimes.com
By CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders and President Obama headed off a shutdown of the government with less than two hours to spare Friday night under a tentative budget deal that would cut $38 billion from federal spending this year.
After days of tense negotiations and partisan quarrelling, House Republicans came to preliminary terms with the White House and Senate Democrats over financing the government for the next six months, resolving a stubborn impasse that had threatened to disrupt federal operations across the country and around the globe.
Speaker John A. Boehner, who had pressed Democrats for cuts sought by members of the conservative new House majority, presented the package of widespread spending reductions and policy provisions and won a positive response from his rank and file shortly before 11 p.m.
Both Democrats and Republicans proclaimed they had reached a deal and would begin the necessary steps to pass the bill and send it to Mr. Obama next week.
Democrats said that under the agreement, the budget measure would not include provisions sought by Republicans to limit environmental regulations and to restrict financing for Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions. But Mr. Boehner said in a statement that the agreement included a restriction on abortion financing in Washington.
“This has been a lot of discussion and a long fight,” Mr. Boehner said as he left the party meeting. “But we fought to keep government spending down because it really will in fact help create a better environment for job creators in our country.”
Speaking from the White House after the Republican meeting ended, Mr. Obama said that both sides gave ground in reaching the bargain and that some of the cuts accepted by Democrats “will be painful.”
“Programs people rely on will be cut back,” said Mr. Obama, who said Americans had to begin to live within their means. “Needed infrastructure projects will be delayed.”
The announcements capped a day of drama as lawmakers and members of the federal work force waited anxiously to see whether money for government agencies would run out at midnight.
“We didn’t do it at this late hour for drama,” Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, said. “We did it because it has been hard to arrive at this point.”
In the closed-door Republican session, according to people present in the room, Mr. Boehner described the plan as the best deal he could wring from Democrats and said the cuts — an estimated $38 billion in reductions — represented the “largest real dollar spending cut in American history.”
Although both sides compromised, Republicans were able to force significant spending concessions from Democrats in exchange for putting to rest some of the vexing social policy fights that had held up the agreement.
Because of the need to put the compromise into legislative form, Congressional leaders said the House and Senate would vote overnight to pass a stopgap measure financing the government through Thursday to prevent any break in the flow of federal dollars. The actual budget compromise would be considered sometime next week.
The Senate approved the stopgap measure by 11:20 p.m. and the House approved it after midnight. The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo saying normal government operations were back on track.
The developments came after Republicans and Democrats spent the day blaming each other for what could have been the first lapse in government services brought on by Congress in 15 years.
As the midnight deadline approached, efforts to finish a deal intensified, and Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner spoke by telephone to try to find an agreement.
“Both sides are working hard to reach the kind of resolution Americans desire,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, who had consulted closely with Mr. Boehner on strategy during the fractious talks. “A resolution is actually within reach. The contours of a final agreement are coming into focus.”
Mr. McConnell’s optimism could not disguise the fact that time was steadily slipping away, and testy leaders of the two parties were pushing hard to shape public perceptions of who was responsible for an impasse that threatened to have serious political repercussions — and to presage even more consequential fiscal showdowns in the months ahead. Democrats said Republicans were insisting on overreaching policy provisions; Republicans said it remained about money.
After nightlong negotiations that ended before dawn on Friday yielded no agreement, Senator Reid went on the offensive. He told reporters and said on the Senate floor that Mr. Boehner, the Senate Democrats and Mr. Obama had essentially settled on $38 billion in cuts from current spending, a figure that represented a substantial concession for Democrats.
But he said that Republicans were refusing to abandon a policy provision that would withhold federal financing for family planning and other health services for poor women from Planned Parenthood and other providers.
“This is indefensible, and everyone should be outraged,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “The Republican House leadership have only a couple of hours to look in the mirror, snap out of it and realize how truly shameful they have been.”
In a terse statement of his own to reporters, Mr. Boehner said there was “only one reason we do not have an agreement yet, and that is spending.” He asked, “When will the White House and when will Senate Democrats get serious about cutting spending?”
As the day went on, aides reported progress in attempts to reach an accommodation on the family planning provision. Even veteran anti-abortion Republicans, like Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, indicated a willingness to compromise, not wanting the party to be accused of shutting down the government over divisive social policy and diluting its new emphasis on cutting spending. Other Republicans, in interviews and statements, indicated that it was time to end the stalemate.
The dueling characterizations of the negotiations added to the frustration, extending far beyond the nation’s capital, among federal employees and the people who rely on their services, as they waited to find out whether serious disruptions were imminent, and how long they might last.
Despite the disagreement over what still divided the two parties, it was clear the dollar difference had been reduced considerably, to about $1 billion or $2 billion. That amount left some lawmakers and their constituents grappling to understand how the federal government could be shut down over such a relatively small sum. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said he was embarrassed. “People across Virginia cannot understand why we can’t get this done,” he said.
Allies of Mr. Boehner, the veteran lawmaker in his first months as speaker, said he seemed to be pursuing a strategy of pushing the negotiations to the last possible tick of the clock to appease rank-and-file conservatives, who have been very reluctant to give an inch from the $61 billion in cuts approved by the House.
In a private party meeting Friday afternoon, Mr. Boehner told Republican lawmakers that he was fighting for all the cuts he could get, and regaled them with reports of how angry Mr. Obama was with him for the hard line he has taken in the talks — news that elated his membership.
Emerging from the meeting, Mr. Boehner called the negotiations “respectful,” but added: “We’re not going to roll over and sell out the American people like has been done time and time again in Washington.”
In the absence of a deal, Mr. Boehner again urged the Senate to pass a temporary House budget resolution that would finance the military for the balance of the fiscal year, cut $12 billion in spending from the current year’s budget and keep the rest of the government operating for another week, as Republicans in the House had voted to do.
“This is the responsible thing to do,” he told reporters.
Senate Democrats rejected that approach as a gimmick, and Mr. Obama said he would veto the resolution.
Mr. Reid, who at one news conference was surrounded by about three dozen Democratic senators in an unusual tableau, told reporters that the Senate would explore the possibility of a stopgap bill that would keep the government open for another week. But it was unlikely to clear procedural barriers.
It was an unusual Friday on Capitol Hill, a day when corridors are often empty of lawmakers who have left for the weekend. Instead, they milled about, and took the Senate floor to expound, as they nervously awaited news of an agreement or braced for the expiration of government financing. It was frustrating to some because most lawmakers were not privy to the high-level talks.
“I hope that negotiations are continuing by someone somewhere,” Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said as he spoke about six hours before funding would run out.
Lawmakers said they realized that the outcome of the negotiations would have implications not only for them, but also for the federal work force, the public, the economy and the nation’s image.
“We know the whole world is watching us today,” Mr. Reid said.
Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
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