CNN 2008-09-20

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Hope you're having a great day, I'm Nicole Lapin, at the CNN Center in Atlanta, here is a look at what's happening NOW IN THE NEWS.

The economic movers and shakers in the Bush Administration plan to shake up the US financial system in ways we haven't seen in decades. The biggest, a plan to let the government use taxpayer¹ money to take over the bad debt and shaky securities that are really weighing down the titans of Wall Street. By some estimates that could cost half a trillion, with a t, dollars. In the meantime the government plans to guarantee deposits in money market mutual² funds and also bar the short term selling of stocks in financial companies.

Senator Barack Obama meanwhile is supporting a federal bailout to plan to deal with the country's deepening financial crisis. The democratic presidential candidate is campaigning today in Florida. This morning he was in Coral Gables; he was meeting with a team of high-powered economic advisors³ to drive and craft proposals to calm the crisis.

Senator John McCain also wants the federal government to start bailing⁴ out failed financial institutions. He said the answer is to get them before they go broke. McCain also said that if he's elected he would set up a new federal agency to deal with any immediate⁵ economic crisis. The Mortgage And Financial Institutions Trust or MFI will be formed within the Treasury⁶ Department.  

Day five of testimony⁷ in O.J. Simpson's armed robbery trial is underway  in a Las Vegas courtroom right now. First up on the witness stand today is a key prosecution⁸ witness Thomas Riccio. He of course is the sports memorabilia dealer⁹, broker¹⁰ we should say who set up that meeting in a Las Vegas hotel room last year. He also secretly recorded this confrontation¹¹. The jury is hearing portions of the IO tape again today. Yesterday you might recall that Riccio said everything was going perfectly¹² until "The gun came out". All the defense¹³ claims that Simpson had no idea that guns were in the room, and he was only trying to get his own stuff back.

It may be another week actually before residents of Galveston, Texas can go back home. Texas Governor Rick Perry says that the city is simply not ready to house residents yet. Galveston's mayor says that if people stay away, it's just gonna be a lot easier to get water sewer¹⁴ and power services back on-line.

Those are the headlines at this hour. For more on those stories and other news of the day, CNN is always your source online, on TV or on your cellphone, take care.

Vocabulary:

the defense: all the lawyers who try to prove in a court of law that someone is not guilty of a crime.