NATION IN BRIEF

Fiscal issues summit set

With the ink on the $787 billion economic stimulus package now dry, President Barack Obama will hold a bipartisan summit Monday at the White House to hash out ideas about keeping the government’s books sound over the long haul.

The summit —- to which Obama has invited members of Congress, analysts and community leaders —- comes as the cost of the stimulus package and other anti-recession measures stoke fresh worries about huge deficits and threats to popular entitlement programs. Obama faces serious fiscal challenges ranging from the long-term costs of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid to grappling with rising government debt.

“The summit’s a first step in the process of beginning to lay out how we can bring down the deficit and put our economy back on sound financial footing,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.

State takes over peanut recall

Peanut Corp. of America, the bankrupt Blakely, Ga., company at the center of a national salmonella outbreak, hasn’t carried out a recall of its products manufactured in Texas, so that state is notifying customers itself, officials there said. The Texas Department of State Health Services said the company did not respond to its Feb. 12 order to recall all products ever shipped from a plant in Plainview after inspectors found dead rodents, feces and bird feathers there. The company said in a press release on its Web site that bankruptcy proceedings were hampering its ability to carry out recall orders.

Drought could spur irrigation cutoff

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials say they may have to cut off all water to some of California’s largest farms as a result of the deepening drought affecting the state. The prospective cutoff could drive up some crop prices.

Border agents kill drug suspect

U.S. Border Patrol agents shot a suspected drug smuggler in the New Mexico desert after the man ran over an officer with a pickup truck, officials said. Doug Mosier, a Border Patrol spokesman, said agents found a large quantity of suspected marijuana inside the truck.

Ex-aide to senator charged in scandal

A former aide to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) was charged in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Court documents say Ann Copland took thousands of dollars worth of event tickets and meals out from Abramoff and other lobbyists in exchange for her help getting favors for a top Abramoff client, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

Political sign seized, returned

Oklahoma City, Okla., police officers seized a sign saying “Abort Obama not the unborn” from driver Hal Harrison’s pickup truck, but later returned it after supervisors decided the officers had been “overzealous.” “I thought, ‘This is something from Nazi Germany, not in Oklahoma,’ ” Harrison said.

—- From news services

Sept. 11 memorial schedule set

Officials are pledging to dedicate a memorial to the 40 passengers and crew killed on United Flight 93 at the western Pennsylvania crash site by the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter joined other officials and members of Families of Flight 93 in committing to the schedule and called the site near “sacred ground” that is as important as Valley Forge, Gettysburg and Pearl Harbor.

—- Associated Press