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108TH YEAR I ©2011 THE MIAMI HERALD

INDEXTHE AMERICAS ...........4AWORLD NEWS.............6AOPINION........................7A COMICS & PUZZLES .....6B

POOR JOB NUMBERS SHOW RECOVERY FALTERING, BUSINESS FRONT

S. SUDAN CELEBRATES BIRTH WITH RAISINGOF FLAG, 3A

U.S. BEATS BRAZIL INWOMEN’S WORLD CUP,SPORTS FRONT

Geithner says Obama to seek biggest debt cut possible

Obama suspends$800M in aid to Pakistan

Family battles U.S. over 10 coins worth millions

Former U.S. first lady Betty Ford dies

BY GARDINER HARRISNew York Times Service

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday that President Barack Obama would continue to press for the largest defi cit reduc-tion possible in negotiations with Congressional leaders over raising the government’s debt ceiling, add-ing that “it’s not clear that it’s easier trying to do less.”

The remarks came after House Speaker John Boehner released a statement Saturday night saying he was pulling back from efforts for a deal that would reduce the defi cit by as much as $4 trillion over 10 years. Boehner said he would instead focus on crafting a smaller package more in line with the $2 trillion to $3 tril-lion in spending cuts and revenue increases negotiated earlier by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

On the CBS program Face the Na-tion, Geithner said the main problem in the negotiations was the Repub-lican insistence that any deal in-volve only spending cuts and no tax increases.

“And as you saw on the Ryan bud-get,” he said, referring to a plan pro-posed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that would cut entitlement programs, “if you try to do it with just cuts, you’re putting unacceptably deep cuts in benefi ts for Medicare benefi ciaries in the future and you can’t do that politically, and it’s unfair to do it.”

Top Republicans reiterated Sun-day that they would not accept a deal that included increased taxes. On Fox News Sunday, the Senate Mi-nority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said that he was “for the biggest deal possible, too, it’s just that we’re not going to raise taxes in the middle of this horrible economic situation”.

Although Republican presidential candidates like Rep. Michele Bach-mann, R-Minn., have said that rais-ing the debt ceiling would be a mis-take no matter what deal is struck, McConnell said on Sunday that “no-body is talking about not raising the debt ceiling. I haven’t heard that dis-cussed by anybody”.

McConnell said he had a “con-tingency plan” for raising the debt ceiling before the Aug. 2 deadline, when the Treasury has said the gov-ernment would begin defaulting on some debt. He said he would reveal his plan later this week if negotia-tions with the White House fail.

BY DOUGLAS BIRCHAssociated Press

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered the sus-pension of $800 million in aid to the Pakistani military, his chief of staff said Sunday, as part of what experts say is a tougher line with a criti-cal U.S. partner in the fi ght against terrorism.

Top aide William Daley described the U.S. relationship with Pakistan as “diffi cult” and said it must be made “to work over time”. But he added that until “we get through that dif-fi culty, we’ll hold back some of the money that the American taxpayers are committed to give” Pakistan.

The suspension of U.S. aid, fi rst reported by the New York Times, followed a statement last week by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Paki-stan’s security services may have sanctioned the killing of a Pakistani journalist who wrote about infi ltra-tion of the military by extremists.

The allegation was rejected by Pakistan’s powerful military estab-lishment, including the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, which has historic ties to the Taliban and other militant groups and which many Western analysts regard as a state-within-a-state.

Daley, interviewed on ABC televi-sion’s This Week, suggested the deci-sion to suspend military aid resulted from the increasing estrangement between the United States and Paki-stan, especially since the U.S. raid in May that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden not far from Paki-stan’s equivalent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

“Obviously there’s still a lot of pain that the political system in Pak-istan is feeling by virtue of the raid that we did to get Osama bin Laden,” Daley said.

A senior U.S. offi cial said the sus-pension was triggered by the Paki-stani army’s decision to signifi cantly reduce the number of visas for U.S. military trainers. “We remain com-mitted to helping Pakistan build its capabilities, but we have commu-nicated to Pakistani offi cials on nu-merous occasions that we require certain support in order to provide certain assistance,” said the offi cial, who was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

TURN TO AID, 2A•

BY JOHN SCHWARTZNew York Times Service

PHILADELPHIA — Who owns 10 exceedingly rare U.S. gold coins from 1933?

Is it the family of a local gold dealer who died 21 years ago? Or is it the U.S. government, which produced a half million of the coins before melting all of them — well, almost all of them — down?

F a m i l y members, who say they found the coins in a safe deposit box in 2003, argue they are the right-ful owners of the ex-quisite “double eagle,” $20 denomination coins, each now worth millions of dollars. The government argues that the coins, never offi cially released, belong to the United States and not the heirs of Israel Switt, the gold dealer.

And so to court.In a case that began Thursday,

jurors are getting an unusual lesson in Depression-era history and will

ultimately decide whether Switt was merely “colorful,” as a lawyer for the family described him, or a thief.

Each side explained in opening arguments that, for all of the histo-

ry and complexities of 1930s Mint procedures and records to

come, the case is quite simple. They dis-

agreed, however, about what the simple point of the case was.

A s s i s t a n t U.S. Attor-ney Jacqueline Romero, pre-

senting the gov-ernment’s case,

told jurors, “You are going to hear a remark-

able and intriguing story about gold coins that were stolen

from the U.S. Mint.”“Israel Switt was somehow in-

volved” in the theft, she said, prob-ably with the help of a corrupt ca-shier at the Philadelphia Mint. The government had linked Switt to ev-ery double eagle that had emerged

TURN TO COINS, 2A•

BY MARLENE CIMONSLos Angeles Times Service

Former U.S. fi rst lady Betty Ford, who captivated the nation with her unabashed candor and forthright discussion of her per-sonal battles with breast cancer, prescription drug addiction and alcoholism, has died. She was 93.

Ford died Friday at the Eisen-hower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., according to Bar-bara Lewandroski, a family rep-resentative. The cause was not given.

As wife of Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president of the United States and the only person to hold that offi ce without fi rst being elected vice president or president, she spent a brief yet remarkable time as the nation’s fi rst lady. But after he left offi ce and even after his death in 2006 at 93, she had con-siderable infl uence as founder of the widely emulated Betty Ford Center for the treatment of chem-ical dependencies.

“Throughout her long and ac-

tive life, Elizabeth Anne Ford dis-tinguished herself through her courage and compassion,” Presi-dent Barack Obama said Friday in

a statement. “As our nation’s fi rst lady, she was a powerful advocate

TURN TO FORD, 5A•

AFP FILE, 1974

Betty Ford hugs her husband, U.S. President Gerald Ford, at the White House.

PHOTOS BY GETTY IMAGES

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, center, speaks with his son James, right, and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International.

TROUBLED HEIRHACKING SCANDAL POSES DEFINING TEST FOR MURDOCH’S SONBY TIM ARANGONew York Times Service

On Thursday afternoon, James Murdoch assembled se-nior executives in the top-fl oor boardroom in News Corp.’s London headquarters and told them of a momentous decision: to shutter the 168-year-old tab-loid at the center of a deepening phone-hacking scandal and the original heart of the Murdoch media empire in Britain.

Hours earlier, he had pre-vailed on his father, Rupert, and his chief lieutenant, Chase Carey, in a phone call from Lon-don to Sun Valley, Idaho, where they were attending a confer-

ence, according to two people briefed on the matter. Under pressure to quell the scandal and preserve a lucrative deal for a pay-television company, James Murdoch argued that closing the newspaper was nec-essary to restore respect to the company, they said.

Now Murdoch faces a new test as he jockeys to one day run his father’s company and salvage the biggest deal in the Murdochs’ history, a $12 billion takeover of British Sky Broad-casting, or BSkyB. With the scandal mushrooming as two former employees were arrested and new charges surfaced that

executives had tried to obstruct investigations, he could emerge as the company’s decisive new leader or as the tainted son who mismanaged one of the great-est crises the family business has faced.

The struggle is both a gener-ational shift and economic one: how best to respond to changes that face the news industry, and who at News Corp. is best equipped to decide.

Murdoch appeared to act quickly to close the News of the World, Britain’s largest-circulation Sunday paper, which

TURN TO MURDOCH, 2A•

Editor Colin Myler, center, leads staff out of the News of The World offices in London on Saturday.

U.S. MINT

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