SPB News for Tuesday.

House passes $516 billion spending bill The House Monday approved a $516 billion measure funding for troops in Afghanistan and funding 14 Cabinet agencies, setting the stage for a year-end budget deal with the White House. President [sic] Bush has signaled he'll ultimately sign the measure -- assuming up to $40 billion more is provided by the Senate for the Iraq war -- despite opposition from GOP conservatives. The Senate is expected to approve the bill after substituting $70 billion in funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. The result would be a twin defeat for DemocRATs, who had vowed not to allow additional Iraq war funding without conditions and had spent months on legislation to add $27 billion to domestic programs, an almost 7 percent increase.

UK Guantanamo detainee near suicide after years of torture, doctors warn A British resident being held in Guantanamo Bay may be close to suicide after five years of captivity and torture at the hands of the Americans, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband has been warned in a medical report sent to the Government this week.

Did Bush Get New Iran Intel Last Winter? White House officials have now admitted that George W. Bush was told that the intelligence assessment on a covert Iranian nuclear programme might change last August, but they have avoided answering the question of when the president [sic] was first informed about the new intelligence that led to that revised assessment. That evasion is necessary, it now appears, to conceal the fact that Bush likely knew about that intelligence as early as February or March 2007.

Greenspan urges 'disaster relief' for US homeowners The US government should hand cash to struggling mortgage borrowers in a "disaster relief" effort to prevent a wave of repossessions, the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has suggested. A government bail-out would be better than the Bush administration's current plan to freeze interest rates for struggling homeowners, the retired chairman said in a television interview addressing the credit crisis.

ASIO tried to hire me as spy, says Habib ASIO agents twice tried to recruit Mamdouh Habib to help find a former Australian soldier who had joined al-Qaeda, according to sensational testimony by the former Guantanamo Bay inmate. The approaches were made just before he went to Afghanistan in 2001, the beginning of a journey that ended with the former Sydney cafe owner being abducted to Egypt and later held in the US military prison in Cuba.