In this week’s address, President Barack Obama discusses the steps he’s taking to improve the country’s economy, which include a plan to reform the nation’s credit card industry.

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"Obama Weekly Address"

Credit Card Reform

Washington passes stimulus bill. The long-debated economic stimulus bill has passed. Legislators in Washington agreed Friday on a plan of well over $700 billion dollars that is designed to turn around the American financial crisis. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill into law next week. The passage of the plan marks Obama’s biggest successful initiative since he took office last month. The president went round after round with Republicans who argued that earlier versions of the proposal involved unnecessary spending that would only make things worse. Obama consistently argued that action was necessary sooner than later.Bill would reform police procedures. A man whose rape conviction was reversed years after he died in prison is having an impact from beyond the grave. Tim Cole was recently exonerated of sexual assault by a Texas judge for the first time in the state’s history that a conviction was reversed post mortem. Now Texas Sen. Rodney Ellis has introduced reform bills that will keep cops from wrongly influencing witnesses in identifying suspects. Cole rejected plea deals he was offered to serve a lighter sentence in the 1985 rape of a college student. He said he wouldn’t plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. The woman identified him as her attacker, but a different man later confessed to the crime and was proven guilty through DNA tests. But Cole died of an asthma attack while picking cotton on a prison farm before the evidence surfaced.

Almost 1,000 People Died From Katrina: Study. Hurricane Katrina caused the deaths of some 986 deaths in Louisiana either directly or indirectly, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in 80 years, new research timed to the storm’s third anniversary finds. Study authors - who were from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - said in a news release that the leading cause of death was drowning (40 percent), followed by injury and trauma, then heart conditions. Almost half of the victims were 75 or older. Eighty percent of the deaths occurred on the day of the storm — Aug. 29, 2005. “What we learned from Hurricane Katrina is that disaster preparedness efforts must focus on evacuating and caring for vulnerable populations — particularly the elderly — including those in hospitals, nursing homes and private residences,” said lead study author Joan Brunkard of the CDC. The study was published on the Web site of the Ameirican Medical Association.

Obama, McCain take different approaches to health care reform.  
Vital Signs: Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have laid out very different plans for how they’d fix the health care system, according to the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution’s estimates. Which one covers the most people, and when will the candidates actually provide details? Read more at Vital Signs.

Salmonella outbreak over, FDA says. U.S. health officials declared Thursday that the nationwide salmonella outbreak has ended and lifted a consumer advisory against eating raw jalapeno and serrano peppers grown in Mexico, reports HealthDay news. “Based on the available information and reports, it appears that this outbreak is over,” Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of foodborne, bacterial and mycotic diseases, said during a teleconference. The CDC’s announcement was based on the falling number of new cases since early July, Tauxe said. “By early August, the number of cases was down to the number of cases we would expect to see anyway in the absence of a major outbreak. There are some cases of this infection that occur every year,” he added.