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President Barack Obama says he’s waiting until more Republican presidential hopefuls are “voted off the island” before he starts tuning into the GOP race.

During an appearance on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” Obama says once the field of contenders aiming to replace him is narrowed down to one or two, he’ll start paying attention.

The president taped his appearance with Jay Leno Tuesday morning in Los Angeles before heading north to San Francisco for a campaign fundraiser.

Obama also addressed the recent killing of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, the end of the war in Iraq and the NBA lockout during his appearance on Leno’s show. The full interview is scheduled to air late Tuesday night.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

President Barack Obama is making the rounds in reliably Democratic California, joking with Jay Leno and tapping the coffers of wealthy, celebrity donors as he raises money for his re-election bid.

The president taped an appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” that was scheduled to air Tuesday night. It’s his second stop on the show as sitting president and fourth appearance overall. From Los Angeles, Obama headed north to San Francisco for a fundraiser featuring a performance by folk rock singer-songwriter Jack Johnson. Obama also had fundraisers scheduled in Denver, all part of a three-day, three-state swing through the west.

Tuesday’s fundraisers follow star-studded campaign events in Los Angeles on Monday. Obama joined actor Will Smith and basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson at a dinner at the home of producer James Lassiter. Then he mingled with Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas over canapes at the movie star couple’s home just a few blocks away.

Obama was in California for money events last month. The state ranks as Obama’s top donor state, and he raised about $1 million in the Los Angeles area alone during the last two fundraising quarters, according to an Associated Press review of contributions above $200.

The western tour is one of Obama’s busiest donor outreach trips of the season. Celebrities are tried and true fundraising draw, particularly for Democratic presidents. Both the president and the stars bask in their reflected fame and the endorsement of stars can be a useful asset.

Not that he needs the votes here. California is a solidly Democratic state, though Sacramento-based Democratic consultant Roger Salazar said the president, echoing national trends, is less popular now in the state than he was when he was elected.

“Democrats by their nature are going to give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said Salazar, a veteran of California and national political campaigns. “But they want him to do something about it. They want to see some movement.”

Obama is promising some movement. He has been promoting his $447 billion jobs bill, which has been broken up into its component parts in hopes Congress can pass some of them business cards design.

Addressing about 240 donors at the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas Monday, Obama said the pieces that Republicans reject would likely linger as campaign issues in 2012.

“This is the fight that we’re going to have right now, and I suspect this is the fight that we’re going to have to have over the next year,” Obama said. “The Republicans in Congress and the Republican candidates for president have made their agenda very clear.”

Addressing donors in Los Angeles, Obama ticked off his administration’s accomplishments, eager to reinvigorate supporters whose enthusiasm has flagged since his 2008 election.

“Sometimes I think people forget how much has gotten done,” the president said, as Smith and Johnson looked on. He urged his backers to rally once again, at the same time joking, as he often does, that he is older and grayer now. “This election won’t be as sexy as the first one.”

At Banderas’ and Griffith’s house, its entrance path lined with rose petals and votive candles, Obama told about 120 mostly Latino contributors that he has kept a list of his campaign promises and that, by his count, he has accomplished about 60 percent of them.

“I’m pretty confident we can get the other 40 percent done in the next five years,” he said to loud applause.

The Griffith-Banderas event was Obama’s first Latino fundraiser, with donors giving at least $5,000 per person to attend. It featured guests such as actress Eva Longoria, comedian George Lopez, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and mayors Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Julian Castro of San Antonio.

Obama drew the loudest applause when he vowed to tackle an overhaul of immigration laws, a promise from 2008 that has gone unfulfilled in the face of Republican opposition.

The Las Vegas fundraiser attracted about 240 people who paid from $1,000 to $35,800 toward Obama’s re-election campaign and to the Democratic National Committee. The bigger donors met the president personally. Guests at Lassiter’s home contributed $35,800.

Obama has been displaying campaign-style vigor. At a Las Vegas subdivision where he promoted housing proposals, Obama waded into the neighborhood crowd to shake hands, sign autographs, even lift a baby.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Obama headed to a diverse neighborhood minutes from Lassiter’s home south of Hollywood and stopped at Roscoe’s, a popular Los Angeles chicken restaurant chain. Obama roved through the dining booths greeting customers, leaving at least one awestruck young boy holding his hand aloft after shaking the president’s hand. One man gave him a hug and a Hispanic man told his daughter that if she studied hard “you’ll be like him.”

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Associated Press writer Jack Gillum contributed to this report.

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Investors waded into Asian stocks Thursday, heartened by new efforts by European leaders to strengthen their continent’s banks and deal with Greece’s massive debts.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index gained 1.2 percent to 8,839.13 and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was 1.3 percent higher at 18,563.34. South Korea’s Kospi index rose 1 percent to 1,828.67. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.7 percent to 4,232.30.

Benchmarks in Taiwan, Malaysia and the Philippines also rose, while those in Singapore, Shanghai and New Zealand fell.

On Wednesday, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso called for European banks to raise billions in new capital and for a stricter accounting of their exposure to sovereign debt. Barroso also called for a permanent bailout fund to come into force by mid-2012, one year ahead of schedule.

Barroso’s proposals for helping Europe’s struggling banks fueled investor appetite for riskier assets like stocks, analysts said.

“Risk appetite improved, bank stocks rallied … after EC President Jose Barroso pledged for urgent recapitalizing of European banks,” Credit Agricole CIB said in a research note.

Investors also shrugged off Slovakia’s rejection Tuesday of a measure to strengthen Europe’s bailout fund, focusing hopes that a solution would be found before a summit of EU leaders next week.

In the U.S., meanwhile, companies have begun to release their third-quarter earnings reports, and so far the results have been mixed.

The results “will be crucial” to determining the direction of stock markets over the coming days, Credit Agricole said.

PepsiCo Inc. rose 2.9 percent after the company said its income rose because of stronger sales of snacks and beverages, especially overseas. But Alcoa Inc. dropped 2.4 percent after the aluminum maker reported earnings that were weaker than analysts expected.

The Dow rose 0.9 percent to close at 11,518.85. The S&P 500 rose 1 percent to 1,207.25. The Nasdaq composite index rose 21.70, or 0.8 percent, to 2,604.73.

Benchmark oil for November delivery was down 83 cents to $84.74 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell 24 cents to end at $85.57 per barrel on the Nymex on Wednesday.

In currencies, the euro slipped to $1.3779 from $1.3793 late Tuesday in New York. The dollar dropped to 77.08 yen from 77.30 yen.

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Greece’s international debt inspectors have completed their review of the government’s reforms, saying Tuesday that if their conclusions are adopted by the eurozone and IMF, Athens is likely to receive the next batch of its bailout loans in early November.

The inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank, collectively known as the troika, said Greece’s deficit targets for 2011 were “no longer within reach,” but that additional measures announced were adequate for 2012.

They said additional measures would likely be needed for 2013-2014, and that they should “focus on the expenditure side.”

Greek authorities “continue to make important progress, notably with regard to fiscal consolidation,” the troika said in a joint statement.

“To ensure a further reduction in the deficit in a socially acceptable manner and to set the stage for a recovery to take hold, it is essential that the authorities put more emphasis on structural reforms in the public sector and the economy more broadly.”

Greece has been dependent since May last year on a euro110 billion ($150 billion) bailout package from other eurozone countries and the IMF. Without the next euro8 billion loan installment, the country has said it would run out of funds to pay salaries and pensions in mid-November.

Mired in a recession that is deeper than originally expected, Greece’s economy is now only expected to recover from 2013 onwards, the troika said.

“There is no evidence yet of improvement in investor sentiment and the related increase in investments, in part because the reform momentum has not gained the critical mass necessary to begin transforming the investment climate,” it said free credit report and score. It noted, however, that exports were rebounding.

The debt inspectors said the Greek government had achieved a “major reduction” in the deficit despite the recession. However, it said, “the achievement of the fiscal target for 2011 is no longer within reach, partly because of a further drop in GDP, but also because of slippages in the implementation of some of the agreed measures.”

Additional measures the government recently announced _ which include extra taxes and suspending about 30,000 civil servants on partial pay _ “should be sufficient to bring the fiscal program back on track and ensure that the deficit target of euro14.9 billion will be met.”

The troika said that delays in the country’s privatization effort combined with worse market conditions would lead to “significantly lower” revenue than expected this year, but that the government was still committed to raising euro35 billion through privatizations by the end of 2014.

“Ensuring that the privatisation fund remains independent from political pressures remains key for success in this area,” it said.

Once the other eurozone countries and the board of the IMF approve the troika’s review, “the next tranche of euro8 billion … will become available, most likely, in early November.”

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The Iraqi army was supposed to pull out of the nation’s cities by the end of this year but is delaying the pullback over security concerns, the Iraqi military spokesman said Saturday.

The delay is an acknowledgment that even after four years of declining violence, Iraq’s police force is not capable of maintaining security on its own. The other worry is that violence will increase when American troops complete their own withdrawal from the country at year’s end.

The government’s plan remains to eventually hand over security to the police and pull Iraqi troops back to bases outside the cities. But the spokesman for the Baghdad military operations command, Qassim al-Moussawi, said Saturday that the military is worried that the police will not be able to handle security in all areas of the country.

“We started to hand over gradually in some areas. But other areas we can’t hand over to the police because still the Interior Ministry needs the support of the Iraqi army. It is not capable now nor by the end of 2011.”

The Iraqi army’s presence can be felt all over Iraq’s quasi-militarized cities, where soldiers in helmets and flak vests and carrying AK-47’s man checkpoints and drive around in Humvees. The army has received the bulk of the training and support from the U.S. military and is generally seen as more competent than the police.

The police, since they tend to work and live in the same areas, have had problems with infiltration by various militant factions and are perceived as less willing to go after lawbreakers.

“We are monitoring the situation to see when police have the capability to maintain the security in order to hand over the responsibility to them,” al-Moussawi said.

Al-Moussawi said there were concerns that if the Iraqi army pulled out of the cities, violence would return.

According to the 2008 agreement signed between the U.S. and Iraq, all American troops are scheduled to leave Iraq by the end of this year. The American government will still keep a sizable presence in Iraq where it has its largest embassy in the world plus offices in Irbil, Kirkuk and Basra.

Iraqi political leaders have said they would like to have American military training help, but negotiations between the two sides are stuck on what type of legal protection to give any American troops who remain behind.

Even if a contingent of American forces were to stay behind, they would likely have a very limited role that would not extend much to combat operations, meaning the job of protecting the country against both Sunni and Shiite militias would rest solely with the Iraqis.

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Rebuffing an election boycott by Shiite protest groups, supporters of the country’s Sunni rulers voted in a special parliamentary election that is likely to reinforce divisions after seven months of unrest in the Gulf’s main Arab Spring showdown.

Bahrain’s confrontation between a reform-seeking Shiite majority and Sunni rulers holding near-total power remains one of the trickiest puzzles for the West as the Middle East’s politics are redrawn.

The Shiites’ calls for a greater say in national affairs echoes the same notes as in other Arab nations whose uprisings gained clear Western support. But Bahrain’s Sunni rulers have strong cards that most others cannot play, including a critical military partnership with Washington as hosts to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet _ the Pentagon’s front-line force against potential threats from Iran.

“This is a fake election. It’s useless,” said one man among a group of young Shiites gathered in streets littered with trash, rocks and tear gas canisters from clashes the night before.

“We don’t have any stake in the political system anymore,” said the man, who only gave his first name, Ali, fearing retaliation by the authorities.

The elections were needed to fill 18 seats in the 40-member parliament left vacant by a mass resignation of Shiite lawmakers to protest crackdowns, including deadly clashes, arrest sweeps and workplace purges. The boycott call by the main Shiite blocs effectively turned their backs on Bahrain’s political system and staked their hopes in an embarrassingly low turnout at the elections.

But Bahrain’s state TV announced the turnout at 51 percent in the districts with open seats _ lower than the 67 percent turnout in last year’s full parliamentary election, but an apparent strong reply against the boycott.

Most of the voters who turned out Saturday appeared to be supporters of the government.

Full results are expected by early Sunday. But the most important outcome was already determined by the Shiite boycott: The opposition must now decide whether to escalate public protests as their best remaining option.

“Leaving the political process opens up the obvious question of where to go from here,” said Toby Jones, an expert on Bahraini affairs at Rutgers University. “This opens the door for groups calling for more confrontation.”

More than 30 people have died in the unrest and hundreds have been arrested, including activists sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of plotting to overthrow the ruling system.

In recent months, Bahrain has faced near daily skirmishes after security forces crushed a wave of large-scale marches and sit-ins inspired by other Arab uprisings. The current clashes are isolated in Shiite neighborhoods and pose no direct danger to the leadership. But they highlight the deep frustrations among many Shiites _ who account for about 70 percent of the population _ and the growing belief in poorer districts that mass protests are the only way to force change.

Hours after the voting ended, clashes raged in some mainly Shiite areas into early Sunday.

Shiites claim they suffer widespread discrimination, including being blocked from top political and government posts. They also bristle at daily evidence of perceived second-class status, such as security forces bringing aboard Sunni Muslims from other Arab nations and south Asia under a government program that grants citizenship in exchange for loyalty.

“Each side sees itself as the legitimate voice of the country and the others as those standing in the way,” said Jones. “The election just drives home this message. It’s political theater on both sides to make a point.”

Security was boosted to high-alert levels for the election. Police set up dozens of checkpoints and patrolled key roadways.

An election coordinator, Brig. Abdullah bin Saif Al Nuaimi, said several arrests were made for trying to disrupt the voting, including throwing stones at cars coming to polling stations.

The voting in predominantly Shiite areas appeared light. At one polling station in the Manama neighborhood of Sanabis, which has been the scene of clashes since Friday, only about 30 ballots were cast in the first four hours of voting.

But at a polling station in Hamad Town, a mixed Sunni-Shiite area, the voting was noticeably stronger with a steady stream of people. Voting was also brisk at special locations, including a mall in the capital, Manama.

Bahrain’s parliament has little direct powers, but it carries important symbolism as part of limited political reforms started about a decade ago. It also is one of the few popularly elected bodies permitted by the Arab kings and sheiks who rule the Gulf from Kuwait to Oman.

“It was my duty to vote and show I have solidarity with the leaders of Bahrain,” said Samira, a 32-year-old Sunni, who only gave her first name for fear of being harassed after she voted in Sanabis.

Bahrain’s prime minister, Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, claimed the voting “asserted that we are on the right path toward a better future.” A government-issued guide to the elections carried the heading: “From anarchy to action.”

The U.S. has urged all parties in Bahrain to restart reconciliation talks, which were opened by the government in July and produced a set of proposals that included boosting the powers of the parliament. But the U.S. has been careful not to reprimand Bahrain’s leaders too harshly in public to avoid jeopardizing strategic bonds in the Gulf.

Bahrain has the backing of powerful neighbors. A Gulf force, led by Saudi Arabia, was dispatched to Bahrain in March to help prop up the 200-year-old Sunni dynasty.

But the protests across the region have stirred some small steps toward more political openness.

The United Arab Emirates also held elections Saturday for seats on a national advisory council, which has no legislative powers but is promoted by Emirati officials as part of a widening “experiment” in allowing a greater public voice in affairs. The UAE’s elections will be decided by about 129,000 hand-picked voters.

Next week, Saudi Arabia plans to hold municipal elections after a nearly two-year delay. Women, however, will be still barred from participating or voting.

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Greece will try to avoid international “blackmail and humiliation” by speeding up reforms and civil-service staff cuts, the finance minister said Monday, hours before holding an emergency teleconference with creditors.

Greece’s international bailout creditors stepped up the pressure at the start a crucial week in the nearly two-year debt crisis, urging the government to do more to heal its finances. Global markets were skeptical, however, and fell sharply on fears Athens will default on its mountain of debt.

Out of patience with the Socialist government’s delays on promised reforms, Greece’s partners and creditors are threatening to cut the cash lifeline without which the country would go bankrupt in less than a month.

Athens is struggling with a deepening recession that is eating away at the impact of its austerity measures while also causing unemployment and public anger to grow.

International debt inspectors will talk to finance chief Evangelos Venizelos around 1600 GMT ahead of a government meeting called by Prime Minister George Papandreou, who canceled a scheduled trip to the U.S. on Saturday.

“We expect the Greek authorities to explain, in particular, how they intend to close the fiscal gaps in 2011 and 2012 and how they plan to proceed with the structural reforms and privatizations,” said Amadeu Altafaj Tardio, a spokesman for the European Commission.

Ahead of the discussions, Venizelos said the government still seeks to generate euro3 billion ($4.1 billion) more revenues next year than it spends, before counting the cost of interest on existing debts.

Greece’s economy is expected to contract by about 5.5 percent this year _ more than the 3.5 percent earlier assumed _ and a further 2.5 percent in 2012, according to new government and IMF estimates.

“The country cannot go forward without the true implementation of major structural reforms _ we have delayed them,” Venizelos said at a conference south of Athens, adding that achieving the 2012 target was vital.

The government still must live up to its commitment to lower the 2011 budget deficit goal to 7.6 percent of gross domestic product.

When it became obvious earlier this month that there was a more than euro2 billion ($2.75 billion) shortfall in the budget, Greece’s creditors threatened to withhold the sixth installment of a euro110 billion rescue package agreed upon in May 2010.

Without the installment, worth euro8 billion, Greece faces defaulting on its debts by mid-October no checking account payday advance.

A review by officials from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, collectively known as the ‘troika,’ was suspended earlier this month amid talk of missed targets.

The government hurriedly announced an extra two-year property tax _ payable through electricity bills to ensure its collection _ to compensate for the shortfall.

But the news was greeted with an outcry from a public already reeling from salary cuts and the recession. State electricity company unionists also threatened to refuse to collect the taxes, and to prevent those who don’t pay having their power supply cut off.

A Communist labor union has called a protest against the tax outside parliament Wednesday.

Venizelos said Sunday night that the backlash led to skepticism among Greece’s creditors about whether the government would manage to raise the projected revenue.

While technical staff from the troika have been back in Athens for about a week, trying to figure out whether the recently announced measures will be enough to meet the targets, senior debt inspectors have stayed away until progress is made.

Altafaj Tardio said that, depending on what Venizelos says at the teleconference, the troika “will decide on the resumption of the review mission.”

IMF representative Bob Traa urged the government to speed up structural reforms and avoid further emergency taxes, arguing that Athens should give up the “taboo” of firing public servants.

“I have compared Greece to a Mercedes that can go 120 kilometers per hour but is only going 40 because it has so much sludge in the engine,” Traa told the conference.

He said Greece needed to speed up its reforms in tax collection and reducing the size of the overmanned public sector.

In an interview, Traa said Greece needed to implement key commitments including plans to slash 150,000 public sector positions by 2015.

“If you can do it (staff cuts) up front, you get over it much more quickly. Whether society can support that is a different issue,” Traa told the AP. “Our experience is that … if you do things gradually that may induce the public getting very tired. Adjustment fatigue is something that happens in every country.”

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stl jobwatch

Highlights from our blog tracking trends in employment, the economy and labor in St. Louis and beyond. stltoday.com/jobwatch

St. Louis cab company is cited for job discrimination

A St. Louis taxi company has been ordered to pay damages totaling $85,000 for denying a driving position to a candidate after he disclosed a prior medical condition during the applications process.

The Laclede Cab Company’s rejection of the applicant constituted workplace discriminaton, according to a report filed by the Missouri Commission on Human Rights.

Laclede Cab claimed its insurance carrier wouldn’t cover a driver because he’d suffered a stroke some years before.

The commission said the driver had been employed by other cab companies in the years after he was stricken.

“A company violates the law when it assumes that a person with a disability cannot perform a job,” commission executive director Alisa Warren said in a statement issued Monday morning.

“Such stereotypes deny people with disabilities the chance to earn a living and it also deprives employers of capable and dedicated employees.”

The commission, a division of the Missouri Department of Labor, ordered Laclede Cab to pay $50,000 in damages and another $35,000 for violating the applicant’s civil rights.

Dave McNutt, the owner of Laclede Cab, said the company is appealing the commission’s ruling.

(09.13.11)

Missouri unemployment edges up slightly

Democrats on a special congressional debt-reduction supercommittee want it to include jobs creation as part of its work, a task that would complicate the newly created panel’s already formidable assignment.

The bipartisan, 12-member committee was scheduled to hold its opening meeting Thursday, a session that was supposed to be limited to opening statements and approval of its rules. The initial meeting was expected to be far less rancorous than this summer’s bitter partisan brawl over extending the federal debt ceiling, which ended with a deal between President Barack Obama and lawmakers that created the supercommittee.

The panel is charged with finding, by Thanksgiving, $1.5 trillion in savings over the next decade, no easy task given the capital’s sharp partisan divisions. Democrats want to produce a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases. Republicans have insisted they would oppose tax increases, though some have indicated they might accept the closing of some tax loopholes.

“Failure is not an option,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Wednesday. He said congressional leaders have appointed serious lawmakers to the panel, “and we fully anticipate they will meet their goals. And we’ll see whether they can even go beyond that.”

Many in Washington, though, are pessimistic that the panel will take a serious bite out of the nation’s enormous $14 trillion in accumulated debt, especially with next year’s elections approaching. They note that Democrats are ardently against cuts in expensive benefits like Medicare while Republicans are adamantly against higher taxes _ the two most plentiful sources of potential budget savings.

“Politically, there’s not a lot of motivation on either side” to produce a major package, said Chris Krueger, a political analyst for the brokerage firm MF Global.

Some Democrats on the supercommittee, though, want it to go even further and address voters’ angst over the nation’s stubborn unemployment problem. With the government reporting that the economy essentially stopped generating jobs last month, next year’s presidential and congressional elections are pressuring lawmakers to do something about it.

“It’s part of recovery,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., a supercommittee member who said in a brief interview that he wanted the panel to tackle job creation. “Growth will create revenue,” which would help reduce the debt.

“I’m not saying it will be easy, but it should be addressed,” he said.

Another supercommittee member, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., asked whether he wanted the panel to tackle job creation, said he “may lay out that thought” at Thursday’s meeting.

“I don’t think you can reduce the deficit of the country to the scope that we need to without growth” of the economy, he said.

A third Democrat on the special committee, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., wrote an opinion essay this week in The Washington Post saying deficit reduction must have three components: jobs, cuts and revenue.

None of the Democrats specified what job creation program they might favor.

Part of that answer might come Thursday evening when Obama delivers an address on jobs to a joint session of Congress. He is expected to propose extending a reduction in the payroll tax that will otherwise expire, giving tax incentives to companies that hire the jobless and boosting spending on public works.

Republicans would be likely to oppose adding spending to the committee’s debt-reduction effort.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., a supercommittee member, said debt reduction would create jobs because reducing the federal debt would help the economy grow.

“Overspending has really spooked the markets and made it more difficult for employers to have confidence to invest and hire people and create jobs,” Camp said in an interview.

Under the debt ceiling agreement, which narrowly averted a potential federal default, Congress must approve at least $1.2 trillion in savings by Christmas. If it doesn’t, the difference would be made up by automatic spending cuts, divided evenly among defense and many domestic programs.

Behind the scenes, the supercommittee’s work has already begun. Republicans and Democrats each held closed-door, daylong strategy sessions on Wednesday. Boehner, R-Ohio, attended part of the GOP meeting, highlighting the importance of the panel’s work.

Democratic aides to the House Ways and Means Committee have produced documents listing possible options for revenue increases and savings from health care programs, including many that were discussed in previous deficit-reduction talks.

The options, which a Ways and Means spokesman said have not been discussed by lawmakers, include various tax increases on the wealthy, oil companies and businesses that transfer some assets overseas, and savings from Medicare, including trimming reimbursements to health care providers and gradually raising the program’s eligibility age to 67 _ which the documents call “a radical departure from current policy.”

Though he has no formal role in the supercommittee’s work, Obama plans to soon give the lawmakers his own debt-reduction plans. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president’s ideas will be “bigger, in fact, than has been mandated for the supercommittee.”

A second public meeting of the committee is set for next Tuesday, when the head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, will explain how the government’s debt got so huge.

The panel has six members each from the House and Senate, evenly divided by party.

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Disposing of vacant St. Louis public schools is proving a tough sell cash advance to savings account.

With 20 school buildings on the market

Stocks rose Wednesday, capping a wild month in the stock market, after a surge in factory orders reassured investors that the manufacturing industry remains healthy.

Factory orders rose 2.4 percent in July, the biggest increase since March. Demand for automobiles jumped by the largest amount in eight years and orders for commercial airplanes soared. Manufacturing has been one of the strongest parts of the economy since the recession ended about two years ago.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 143 points, or 1.2 percent, to 11,703. The Dow turned positive for the year, and has risen seven of the last eight days. Aluminum maker Alcoa Inc. rose 4.3 percent, the most of the 30 companies that make up the Dow average.

Joy Global rose 5.1 percent after the mining equipment maker said its earnings rose 46 percent because of strong global demand for commodities like copper and coal.

That helped to push up other stocks in the mining and commodities industry. Mining operator Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. rose 3.2 percent and equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. rose 2.4 percent.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 16, or 1.4 percent, to 1,229. The Nasdaq composite index rose 34, or 1.3 percent, to 2,610.

August has been volatile for investors. After S&P downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating, the Dow had four consecutive days of 400-point swings. That’s the first time that happened in its 115-year history.

The S&P 500 hit a low for the year on Aug. 8., immediately after the downgrade Since then, it has risen 9.7 percent.

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