In the news

WORLD

TORONTO – Students across Canada are staging rallies today to call for reduced tuition fees, but at least one province is defending its record.

The Ontario government said it has done a lot for college and university students and the federal government must step up with funding.

The students are calling for more support from the provincial and federal governments to bring tuition fees down.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said he has three sons in university and knows well that tuition has gotten very expensive.

But he said the Ontario government has a $6.2 billion five-year plan to invest in post-secondary education, and, as a result, more students are continuing their education after high school.

Chris Bentley, Ontario’s minister of training, colleges and universities, said he thinks tuition is pricey but called it an investment, which most students recognize as necessary in today’s world.

NATION

WASHINGTON – Prosecutors in the CIA leak trial on Wednesday sought to limit how much they must reveal about how they gained the cooperation of NBC News reporter Tim Russert, whose testimony is key to the case against former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The dispute came as jurors listened to the final two and a half hours of Libby’s recorded grand jury testimony, which forms the basis of perjury and obstruction charges against him.

Once the tapes are played in their entirety, “Meet the Press” host Russert is expected to testify that he didn’t talk to Libby in 2003 about the CIA employment of Valerie Plame, wife of war-critic and former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Russert’s much-anticipated version of the July 2003 telephone conversation is important to the case because Libby told the grand jury that his conversation with Russert was the first time the White House aide had heard about Wilson’s wife. He later said he had forgotten that Vice President Dick Cheney had told him about Wilson’s wife a month earlier.

Various witnesses have testified that they discussed Wilson’s wife with Libby before the Russert-Libby conversation.

STATE&LOCAL

RICHMOND – Legislation backed by the state’s dominant power company to pull the plug on the state’s experiment with electric utility deregulation was unanimously endorsed by a Senate committee Monday evening.

Meanwhile, the House of Delegates gave preliminary approval to a similar but competing version of the “re-regulation” bill that contains some provisions the utility, Dominion Resources, dislikes.

The two bills likely are headed to a conference committee to work out differences.

The House and Senate bills arose after the competition envisioned in 1999, when the legislature voted to deregulate utilities, failed over five years to develop. The bills would establish a “hybrid” version of regulation in which the State Corporation Commission would have limited control of how much the utilities could increase their rates in Virginia.

Without new legislation, capped rates that were part of the deregulation plan would be lifted in 2010.

“There are going to be price increases for electricity, and part of that is because we’ve had capped rates,” Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, and sponsor of the Dominion-backed bill, told the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee. “The price has been artificially held down.”