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President Barack Obama feels he has struck just the right budget balance between providing more short-term support for the economy while putting forth a long-term plan to get control of the government’s soaring budget deficits.

Republicans vehemently disagree, attacking his 2013 budget as a replay of the failed economic policies they say have resulted in an economy growing at subpar rates and government debt soaring to record highs.

Both parties would agree that Obama’s latest budget, released Monday, will feature heavily as a debating point in the November elections to determine who will win the White House and whether Democrats or Republicans win control of the House and Senate.

Republican Mitt Romney, who is campaigning for the GOP nomination to challenge Obama in the fall, called the budget Obama released Monday “an insult to the American taxpayer.” GOP candidates Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are all advocating bigger spending cuts to control the deficits, and all the GOP candidates oppose Obama’s tax increases.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the administration’s chief economic spokesman, was scheduled to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday in what will be the first of four congressional appearances this week by Geithner to explain and defend Obama’s budget plan.

Judging from the GOP reaction Monday, Geithner could be in for some sharp questioning.

“The president’s budget is a gloomy reflection of his failed policies of the past, not a bold plan for America’s future,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said. “The president offered a collection of rehashes, gimmicks and tax increases that will make our economy worse.”

Democrats in Congress were for the most part supportive of the president’s proposals. Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said Republicans forget that Obama inherited an economic mess when he took office, with the economy struggling to emerge from the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.

“The reality is that the president inherited a fiscal and economic disaster,” Conrad said Monday. “The only true way forward is through a comprehensive and balanced deficit-reduction agreement. We need to come together on a plan that modernizes our tax system, reforms our entitlement programs and attacks wasteful spending.”

Republicans are arguing for deeper spending cuts and a frontal assault on the biggest drivers of the deficit, the soaring costs of Medicare and Medicaid, whose already sizable costs are projected to double in future years as baby boomers retire.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, said Monday that he expected the Republican-controlled House would in coming weeks pass an alternative to the Obama budget that would gain control of the deficit, not by raising taxes but by curtailing Medicare and Medicaid.

“President Obama’s irresponsible budget is a recipe for a debt crisis and the decline of America,” Ryan said.

Obama’s cuts in Medicare and Medicaid avoid cuts in benefits and instead make modest trims in payments to health care providers. In contrast, the Republican House last year approved Ryan’s plan, which would essentially transform Medicare into a voucher system in which future seniors would get a fixed amount to buy medical insurance.

The Obama budget proposes spending $3.8 trillion in the 2013 budget year, which begins Oct. 1. It would achieve $4 trillion in deficit cuts in part through restraining the growth of many government programs, adhering to the agreement Congress approved in August for spending caps to achieve $900 billion in deficit reduction over a decade.

Obama’s plan also proposes additional deficit reduction in order to avoid $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts scheduled to take effect next January.

But the president relies on $1.5 trillion in tax increases, mainly by allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire on families making more than $250,000 per year, imposing additional taxes on those making more than $1 million per year and eliminating various corporate tax breaks.

The tax increases all have been rejected by Republicans.

With both parties holding entrenched positions, it is very likely that no solution will be found before the November elections, with both sides preferring to use the debate to score political points.

If that occurs, Congress will probably be back in Washington after the November elections for a lame-duck session to resolve the battle over taxes and spending cuts.

Lawmakers are facing end-of-the-year deadlines when the Bush-era tax cuts on all taxpayers expire and across-the-board spending cuts will go into effect if lawmakers can’t agree on $1.2 trillion in further deficit reduction over the next decade.

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The Bank of Korea held off raising borrowing costs for an eighth straight month as the economy slowed and exports declined due to the European debt crisis.

Governor Kim Choong Soo and his board kept the benchmark seven-day repurchase rate unchanged at 3.25 percent, the central bank said in a statement in Seoul today. The unanimous decision was predicted by 18 of 19 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Policy makers in export-driven Asian countries have relied on monetary or fiscal stimulus to weather the European debt crisis. Australia unexpectedly held off cutting interest rates this week on signs of improvements in the U.S. and Europe. Kim has signaled that rates will have to rise at some point and said today that inflation expectations are high and the central bank is

Swiss central bank interim Chairman Thomas Jordan

Haiti’s biggest employer has named a new chief executive to run Digicel, the mobile phone company announced Wednesday.

The Jamaica-based private company is bringing in Damian Blackburn to replace Maarten Boute, who will be leaving in March to spend more time with his family, Digicel spokeswoman Antonia Graham said.

Boute added in an email message that he was going “to do a deep recharge of (his) batteries” as he and his wife await the birth of their second child.

The new head, Blackburn, recently CEO for Digicel Honduras, has more than 14 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. He will oversee operations for the company’s largest market, Haiti, which accounts for about a quarter of its 11.1 million subscribers.

Digicel, whose Irish CEO Denis O’Brien promoted development in Haiti before the 2010 quake, has invested $600 million in the impoverished Caribbean nation since it began work in 2006 short term personal loan. The company’s foundation has also done charitable work such as building schools and helping with other infrastructure projects.

In recent months, the company erected street signs in the capital and road signs in the countryside and last year spent $18 million to renovate the historic Iron Market damaged in the quake.

In November, Digicel and Marriott International announced plans to build a $45 million, 173-room hotel in Port-au-Prince. The hotel is slated to open in 2014.

Digicel’s competitors include Voila and Natcom, a joint venture created last year between Vietnam’s Viettel and the Haitian government to replace the state-run Teleco.

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On a quiet afternoon in Manhattan’s East Village, I’m having lunch inside a monastery while Rasanath Dasa, a banker-turned-monk, tells us about the moment he decided to leave Wall Street.

"My desire to work in Wall Street arose back in 1992, when foreign TV first came to India and I watched Charlie Sheen in the movie Wall Street," he tells the group of five who have traveled to his monastery. "For some reason, the images stuck in my head of ‘man, that’s what I really want to do — that fast-paced life.’"

But the religious life also appealed to Dasa. He joined a monastery while he was still hustling deals on Wall Street for his employer, Bank of America. When he started work on a project for Playboy, the stark contrast between his inner life and his day job became too much.

"At the time that the economy was tanking, I was actually making money selling sex," he says.

He’s a slight man who speaks slowly and carefully, pausing to gather his thoughts as he narrates. He’s sharing his story with us thanks to a startup called SideTour. Almost every week, Dasa hosts a lunch for those who want to chat with him about his journey from Wall Street to the monastery.

Forget daily deals on restaurants and spas, or flash sales on designer clothes. The hot e-commerce trend at the moment is selling one-of-a-kind experiences.

Lunch with Dasa — priced at $20 — is just one offering from SideTour’s lineup. Its roster also includes a race down an ice luge with an Olympic medallist (that’s $150) or a cooking session with the host of NBC’s America’s Next Great Restaurant at his West Village townhouse ($35), among dozens of other options. The company takes a 20% cut when customers pay for an event.

SideTour is far from alone in the market. In the U.S., a key competitor is Zozi, which has raised $11 million from investors and currently operates in more than 60 cities. Germany has a whole pack of startups in the field, including Regiondo, Yasuu and Gidsy, which recently expanded into the San Francisco market.

One notable rival, Vayable, offers up experiences around the globe. Launched in April, the service’s tours range from an exploration of an abandoned Soviet hospital in Berlin to an expert-led wine tasting in Paris.

Vayable founder Jamie Wong attributes the interest in selling experiences in part to the rough job market. More people are finding themselves out of work or in need of a second job.

"I think we’re in an era where both the economy and cultural shifts are really dictating this kind of change, where people are moving more towards a freelance type of lifestyle," Wong says.

SideTour founder Vipin Goyal backs that view. He says his startup gives people the opportunity to make money doing what they love.

"It’s a platform for people to share their expertise and monetize that," he says. "It’s a huge opportunity for folks to supplement their income or to create new sources of income for themselves."

Goyal got the idea for SideTour after he and his spouse left their jobs and bought around-the-world plane tickets for a six-month trip.

"In places that we had local folks to share experiences with, it made all the difference," he says. "In places we didn’t, our own experiences were highly dependent on serendipity."

He came home with the desire to build a platform that would help others connect with those kinds of experiences. Investors flocked to the idea: SideTour landed a spot in incubator TechStars’ first New York cohort this summer, and it recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding. Since launching five months ago, SideTour has hosted 70 experiences, with a 90% sell out rate.

So is this a lasting market or a flashy trend?

Both Wong and Goyal cite studies concluding that experiences, not things, are what make people truly happy.

"People are starting to reevaluate — especially in this economic environment — how they’re spending their money," Goyal says. "I think that’s where you see a lot of this focus on experiences." 

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For the first time, Indian prosecutors are taking Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other networking sites to court for refusing to remove material considered insulting to Indian leaders and major religious figures.

Government officials are upset about material insulting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi and major religious figures. Some illustrations have shown Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions and pigs running through Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.

On Friday, the federal government told a New Delhi court that there was sufficient material to proceed against 21 social networking sites for offenses of “promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration,” according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

The cases, which PTI said name companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, represent a new risk of doing business in the nation of more than 1 billion people, which is looking to technology to boost its economy and standard of living. The dispute highlights India’s difficulty in balancing the Internet culture of freewheeling discourse with its homegrown religious and political sensitivities.

Convictions could bring fines and up to five years’ imprisonment, through prosecutors have named only the companies involved rather than any executives. Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar on Friday asked India’s External Affairs Ministry to serve summons to officials of foreign-based companies for court appearances March 13 my credit score.

In December, Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal said he had spoken repeatedly with officials from major Internet companies over the past three months and asked them to come up with a voluntary framework to keep offensive material off the Internet. He said that the companies told him there was nothing they could do.

There was no immediate comment by the networking sites after Friday’s court proceedings.

However, Facebook said last month that it would remove content that “is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity.”

Google said in a December statement that it removes content that violates local law and its own standards.

“But when content is legal and doesn’t violate our policies, we won’t remove it just because it’s controversial, as we believe that people’s differing views, so long as they’re legal, should be respected and protected,” Google said in a statement in December.

Sibal had shown reporters Web illustrations showing Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions as well as a site showing pigs running through Islam’s holy city of Mecca, a clear insult to Muslims.

Sibal said the Internet companies had told him that they were applying U.S. standards to their sites, and he objected, saying that they needed to be sensitive to Indian sensibilities.

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The editor of a British tabloid has outlined a culture where reporters exaggerate headlines, dramatize stories, and occasionally go too far.

Daily Star Editor Dawn Neesom was speaking at the judge-led inquiry into British media ethics set up in the wake of the phone hacking scandal centered on the now-defunct News of the World tabloid

She shied away from claims that her paper played fast and loose with the truth, but acknowledged that the paper’s mission was “to put a smile on people’s faces payday loans.”

Neesom said Thursday: “Occasionally, I admit, we do cross lines. But we do have standards.”

The Star is owned by media magnate Richard Desmond, who is also to give evidence at the inquiry.

Desmond also publishes the Daily Express and celebrity magazines OK! and New!

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Iran has begun uranium enrichment at a new underground site well protected from possible airstrikes, a leading hardline newspaper reported Sunday in another show of defiance against Western pressure to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program.

Another newspaper quoted a senior commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guard force as saying Tehran’s leadership has decided to order the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic oil route, if the country’s petroleum exports are blocked. Revolutionary Guard ground forces also staged war games in eastern Iran in an apparent display of resolve against U.S. forces just over the border in Afghanistan.

“The supreme authorities … have insisted that if enemies block the export of our oil, we won’t allow a drop of oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. This is the strategy of the Islamic Republic in countering such threats,” Revolutionary Guard deputy commander Ali Ashraf Nouri was quoted as saying by the Khorasan daily.

Iranian politicians have issued similar threats in the past, but this is the strongest statement yet by a top commander in the security establishment.

The latest statements are certain to fuel tensions with the U.S. and its allies, which are trying to turn up pressure on Iran with new sanctions to punish it over its disputed nuclear program. The West suspects Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons, but Iran denies this.

The United Nations has already sanctioned Iran for refusing to stop uranium enrichment _ which can produce both nuclear fuel and fissile warhead material. Tehran says its nuclear program is only for energy and medical research, and refuses to halt uranium enrichment.

Kayhan daily, which is close to Iran’s ruling clerics, said Tehran has begun injecting uranium gas into sophisticated centrifuges at the Fordo facility near the holy city of Qom.

“Kayhan received reports yesterday that show Iran has begun uranium enrichment at the Fordo facility amid heightened foreign enemy threats,” the paper said in a front-page report. Kayhan’s manager is a representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all important matters of state.

Iran’s nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, said late Saturday that his country will “soon” begin enrichment at Fordo. It was impossible to immediately reconcile the two reports.

Iran has a major uranium enrichment facility in Natanz in central Iran, where nearly 8,000 centrifuges are operating. Tehran began enrichment at Natanz in April 2006.

The Fordo centrifuges, however, are reportedly more efficient. And the site better shielded from aerial attack.

Nouri said Iran’s leadership has made a strategic decision to close the Strait of Hormuz, should the country’s exports be blocked. One-sixth of the world’s oil flows to market through the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf unsecured personal loans.

President Barack Obama approved new sanctions against Iran a week ago, targeting the central bank and its ability to sell petroleum abroad. The U.S. has delayed implementing the sanctions for at least six months, worried about sending the price of oil higher at a time when the global economy is already struggling. But the new sanctions nevertheless prompted a series of threats from Iranian officials about closing the Strait of Hormuz.

The newspaper paraphrased Nouri as saying that a 10-day naval war game which ended Tuesday was preparation for such a closure. The Guard, which is Iran’s most powerful military force and which has its own naval arm, has planned more sea maneuvers for February.

“The exalted leader (Khamenei) determined a new strategy for the armed forces, by which any threat from enemies will be responded to with threats,” Nouri said.

The U.S. and Israel have said that all options remain open, including military action, should Iran continue with its enrichment program.

Tehran says it needs the program to produce fuel for future nuclear reactors and medical radioisotopes needed for cancer patients.

The country has been enriching uranium to less than 5 percent for years, but it began to further enrich part of its uranium stockpile to nearly 20 percent as of February 2010, saying it needs the higher grade material to produce fuel for a Tehran reactor that makes medical radioisotopes needed for cancer patients. Weapons-grade uranium is usually about 90 percent enriched.

Iran says the higher enrichment activities _ to nearly 20 percent _ will be carried out at Fordo. These operations are of particular concern to the West because uranium at 20 percent enrichment can be converted into fissile material for a nuclear warhead much more quickly than that at 3.5 percent.

Built next to a military complex, Fordo was long kept secret and was only acknowledged by Iran after it was identified by Western intelligence agencies in September 2009.

Buried under 300 feet (90 meters) of rock, the facility is a hardened tunnel and is protected by air defense missile batteries and the Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s most powerful military force. The site is located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Qom, the religious nerve center of Iran’s ruling system.

“The Fordo facility, like Natanz, has been designed and built underground. The enemy doesn’t have the ability to damage it,” the semiofficial Mehr news agency quoted nuclear chief Abbasi as saying Sunday.

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U.K. manufacturing (PMITMUK) shrank less than economists forecast in December as demand increased in Germany and China.

A gauge of factory output based on a survey by Markit Economics and the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply rose to 49.6 from a revised 47.7 in November, the groups said in an e-mailed statement today. The median forecast of 19 economists in a Bloomberg News survey was for a drop to 47.3 from an initially reported 47.6 in November. A level below 50 indicates contraction.

The sovereign debt turmoil in Europe, the U.K.