Obama worried about slowing economy

WASHINGTON - With few options at hand and his poll numbers sagging, President Barack Obama expressed concern Tuesday about the sudden slowdown in the economy but said he is not worried about a second recession and the nation should "not panic."

The president spoke about the new economic trouble in detail for the first time since a report late last week showed job growth had slowed sharply in May. He tried to reassure Americans worried about high unemployment and expensive gas that the nation is on a slow, if not steady, path to recovery.

"I am concerned about the fact that the recovery that we're on is not producing jobs as quickly as I want it to happen," Obama said at an appearance with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "We don't yet know whether this is a one-month episode or a longer trend."

CDC: Salmonella illnesses on the increase in U.S.

ATLANTA - More Americans got food poisoning last year, with salmonella cases driving the increase, the government reported Tuesday. Illness rates for the most common serious type of E. coli fell last year. There was a rise in cases caused by other strains of the bacteria, although that bump may just reflect more testing was done for them, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

An unusually aggressive strain of E. coli is behind the current large outbreak of food poisoning in Europe, mostly in Germany. That strain has never caused an outbreak in the U.S.

The CDC estimates that 50 million Americans each year get sick from foodborne illnesses, including about 3,000 who die.

The report released Tuesday is based on foodborne infections in only 10 states, or about 15 percent of the American population. But it has information that other databases lack and is believed to be a good indicator of food poisoning trends.

More than 19,000 cases of food poisoning were reported in those states last year. That was up from 17,500 cases in 2009, and about 18,500 in 2008.

House GOP leader optimistic about spending cuts

WASHINGTON - A key GOP negotiator in talks on lifting the government's borrowing cap said Tuesday that it may take more than a decade to accumulate savings to pay off the approximately $2.4 trillion in new debt needed to keep the government afloat for about a year and a half.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., also said that he believes any agreement to raise the so-called debt ceiling - and avoid a market-rattling, first-ever default on U.S. obligations - should be enacted sometime next month, before an Aug. 2 deadline. Kyl is a participant in top-level talks aimed at producing spending cuts to pass in concert with the debt limit increase.

"A debt ceiling increase is only over roughly an 18-month period of time. The savings could play out (over) more than a decade," Kyl told reporters. The time frame is important because spreading the cuts over a longer period means that they would be less severe than if they were imposed over a decade, as is typical for legislation considered by Congress.

Kyl's comments came as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., told his GOP colleagues that he's "cautiously optimistic" that ongoing budget talks led by Vice President Joe Biden will produce an agreement on budget cuts at least as large as the accompanying increase in the government's ability to borrow.

Clinton heads to Persian Gulf to plot Libya plan

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will confer later this week with NATO nations and others prosecuting an air campaign in Libya that has recently become more intense and apparently more focused on Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Clinton was heading for the United Arab Emirates, where she and other members of the so-called Contact Group on Libya will assess the effort to get Gadhafi to leave and increase support for the country's opposition.

NATO has stepped up its operation this week, launching a ferocious series of nearly 30 daytime airstrikes on Tripoli to limit Gadhafi's ability to fight the rebels and attack civilians.

Gadhafi responded by angrily denouncing the rebels and vowing not to surrender.

- The Associated Press