The White House will ask Congress next week to approve another massive spending measure for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan totaling nearly US$200 billion, the Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site late on Saturday.
Citing unnamed Pentagon officials, the newspaper said if US President George W. Bush's spending request is approved, next year will be the most expensive year of the Iraq War.
GROWING COSTS
US war costs have continued to grow because of the additional combat forces sent to Iraq this year and because of efforts to quickly ramp up production of new equipment, such as mine-resistant trucks, the report said.
The new trucks can cost three to six times as much as an armored Humvee, the paper said.
The Bush administration said earlier this year it would probably need US$147.5 billion for the next fiscal year, but Pentagon officials now say that -- and US$47 billion more will be required, the Times said.
That would put spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at about US$195 billion for the next fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1.
This represents an increase of approximately 12 percent from the US$173 billion spent this year.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other officials are to formally present the full request at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday, the report said.
PRICE TAG
When costs of CIA operations and embassy expenses are added, the war in Iraq currently costs taxpayers about US$12 billion dollars a month, said Winslow Wheeler, a former Republican congressional budget aide who is a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
"Everybody predicts declines, but they haven't occurred, and 2008 will be higher than 2007," the paper quoted Wheeler as saying.
"It all depends on what happens in Iraq, but thus far it has continued to get bloodier and more expensive," he said.
RISING
In 2004, the two conflicts together cost US$94 billion; in 2005, they cost US$108 billion; last year, US$122 billion, the paper said.
The new spending request is likely to push the cumulative cost of the war in Iraq alone through next year past the US$600 billion mark.
The bill is more than the Korean War and nearly as much as the Vietnam War, based on estimates by government budget officials, the Times said.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS