office has an amber extreme heat warning in floors and temperatures could reach 37 in some of the south. in force. in sport, the beginning of the end for serena williams as the 23 time grand slam champion says the us open this month could be her last tournamnet. a force of nature strong and kind olivia newton john remembered. we ll speak to close friend and singer delta goodrem. it s wednesday, the 10th of august. our main story. households owe more money to their energy supplier than ever before, with bills set to rise even further in october. a survey by the comparison site uswitch has found the overall debt is already three times higher than it was a year ago. nina s here to talk us through the details. the timing is interesting when normally people would save up cash in the warmer summer months. ideally, and a lot happening in terms of budgeting and taking into account household bills. comparison site uswitch say that households owe £1.3 billion to their energy su
ministry of commerce says their outbound will probably receive foreign investment in the next five to ten years. the unrest cut abroad. china s outbound direct investment or odi in the non-financial sector hit $59 billion in 2010. political turmoil has caused domestic businesses to suffer setbacks which. in the first two months of 2011 the value of china s newly signed contracts in after ka fell 53.2% to 3.47 billion u.s. dollars. that s, of course, because of all the turmoil there. algeria s is down, more than 97% as contracts in the uae dropped 52.3% and as the libya war
use those names to raise money. scratch whatever plans you may have had. something very interesting by dana bash on the ticker. that is for the first time in ten years lobbying, the cost of lobbying, in washington went down. meaning the sorry. the amount of money spent on it. the amount of money spent on lobbying went down. but before we, you know, make too much of it, they still spent $3.47 billion, corporations, unions, et cetera. it s not exactly a possity of dollars running around washington. a story i really like about shannon travis again on the ticker is in his second year, president obama was the most polarizing president in recent history. that is, the difference between his approval rating between democrats and republicans was the largest of any president in his second year in history. the last one that polarizing was eisenhower. i understand obama in a certain
congressman scalise, i have a couple of questions. we just got the total lobbying number for 09. this represents everybody from labor unions and all the rest of it to bankers and big oil to peta. $3.47 billion went to congress in 2009. that s a big number. but let me put it in context for you. between 1998 and 2009, i want you to look at the growth which is even more startling, an explosion in the flow of money to washington, d.c. now, in the financial world, which is largely my history, you put a lot more money into something that s working. so in other words, if lobbying with money was not effective, i don t know why it would triple over the course of ten years time. we hear a lot of people talk about getting rid of this type of thing, offer at least making it more transparent so we know who s working for who really as opposed to who they say they re working for. how would you address it? i think we need to continue