Off the wire
• Spanish stock market rises 0.35 pct  • East African think tank urges regional infrastructure collaboration towards mutual growth  • FTSE 100 drops slightly on U.S. GDP data  • Erste Bank records 1.6 bln USD loss in 2014  • Turkish currency drops to record low against US dollar  • Ukraine says gas dispute with Russia not to harm transit to Europe  • Urgent: Obama prefers short-term DHS funding over shutdown: White House  • UAE reopens Yemen embassy in Aden  • Danish GDP up 1 pct in 2014  • Hungarian PM upbeat about past year in State of Nation Address  
You are here: 　 Home

1st LD Writethru: Obama prefers short-term DHS funding over shutdown: White House

Xinhua, February 28, 2015 Adjust font size:

As lawmakers are racing to nail down a plan to save the Department of Homeland Security from running out of money in less than 10 hours, the White House said on Friday that U.S. President Barack Obama would sign a short-term funding bill if necessary to save the department from shutdown.

"If the president is faced with a choice of having the Department of Homeland Security shut down or fund(ing) that department for a short term, the president is not going to allow the agency to shut down," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

However, Earnest pushed hard on the U.S. top lawmaker, House Speaker John Boehner, to put the clean funding bill already passed in the Senate up for a vote in the House of Representatives, saying that the short-term funding bill should not be regarded by Boehner as a choice over passing the Senate-proposed clean bill.

"The good news is (that) that's not the choice that's facing the Speaker of the House and it's not the choice that should be facing every member of the United States Congress." Endite