A new Missouri law is making it illegal for teachers to correspond privately with students via social media. For instance, Facebook chat between a student and their teacher would be considered illegal while a wall post would be fair game. What’s Trending Live raised the question: Are private student/teacher interactions online all bad?

Panelist Trend Hunter TV’s Jeremy Gutsche found this particular law a good thing, saying private interactions “gets a little weird” and that he doesn’t think “it’s really necessary for a teacher to have private conversations in that social setting of Facebook.”

Actress Brea Grant disagreed asking, “Can’t we just trust our teachers? If we don’t trust them then they shouldn’t be in the school system.”

Shira pointed out that some the concerns about one on one online conversations might stem from fears over how new social networking tools are, “starting to infiltrate our lives more.”

Of the teacher opinions online, a Missouri teacher named Randy Turner rang loudest when she wrote a blog post arguing that she and hundreds of teachers will have to “trash years of work because all teachers are potential criminals” in Missouri Senator Jane Cunningham’s view.

The law will go in effect in a few weeks, and it will be interesting to see how and if it affects the education system in Missouri and if outlawing private interactions will stifle education or protect students. Viewers were pretty split on the effect of the law with 58 percent saying that private conversations crossed a line and 42 percent saying that it was a necessary way to inform and educate on our What’s Trending poll.

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US President Barack Obama has signed a emergency austerity bill that averted a devastating debt default, but warns the contentious plan was ‘just the first step’ on a long road to economic recovery.

‘It’s an important first step to ensuring that, as a nation, we live within our means,’ Obama said in the White House Rose Garden after polarised lawmakers sent him the legislation. ‘This is, however, just the first step.’

The measure lifts cash-strapped Washington’s $US14.3 trillion debt limit by up to $US2.4 trillion while cutting at least $US2.1 trillion in government spending over 10 years, a step forecast to drag down already sluggish US growth.

‘Slowing down the big-government freight train from its current trajectory will give us the time we need to work toward a real solution,’ said Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Obama spoke on Tuesday after the US Senate voted 74-26 to pass the measure — which cleared the House of Representatives by an overwhelming 269-161 margin on Monday — with just hours to spare before a midnight deadline that could have triggered a first-ever US default on its debt payments.

Congressional approval paid immediate dividends as the Fitch ratings agency said the hard-fought 11th-hour compromise would spare Washington from losing from its sterling Triple-A debt rating.

A downgrade would have likely led to a spike in US interest rates, making debt payments more pricey and hurting Americans holding flexible-rate loans — anyone carrying credit-card debt, or seeking a car loan.

But Fitch said it would keep a close eye on the country’s long-term finances and pressed for ‘a credible multi-year deficit reduction plan’ if Washington is to stay in the elite club of healthy, low-risk debtor economies.

Obama’s 2012 reelection bid will turn on voters’ perceptions of his handling of the US economy, which has laboured under historically high unemployment above nine per cent as it struggles to recover from the global meltdown of 2008.

The president promised that the deficit-cutting would not starve education and research nor happen ‘too abruptly while the economy is still fragile’ and railed against the ‘manufactured crisis’ over the debt limit.

Republicans have promised that the spending cuts will create jobs, but top Wall Street economists have warned the austerity measures will actually be a drag on already sluggish US growth even as government stimulus measures run out.

The overall shift from priming the US economy to government belt-tightening is expected to reduce US growth next year by about 1.5 percentage points, according to JPMorgan Chase economists.

The vote came as the US Commerce Department reported that US consumer spending, the economy’s key driver, fell 0.2 per cent in June relative to May, while personal income was basically stagnant, with just a 0.1 per cent increase.

Both figures fell short of analyst’s expectations and offered the latest discouraging omen about the US economy, which grew at a feeble feeble 1.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2011, much worse than economists had expected.

Despite such wrenching worries, major US companies like 3M, Caterpillar, Goodyear, Microsoft, and Apple have been packing away record profits.

Moreover, if the current trend keeps up, the SP 500 companies are poised to have their most profitable quarter ever, according to Standard Poor’s analyst Howard Silverblatt, who marvelled at the ‘amazing numbers.’

Obama signalled that he would campaign for raising tax revenue on the rich and wealthy corporations, a proposal that has already generated lockstep opposition from Republicans who contend it would smother job creation.

‘I’ve said it before, I will say it again: We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s going to have to chip in. That’s only fair.’

Democrats, especially on the party’s left flank, have expressed outrage that the bargain Obama struck with his Republican foes omitted any tax increase on the wealthy.

‘It is my hope that we have reached the high tide of an ideological movement that has sought to hold tax cuts for the wealthy sacred, while imposing increasingly draconian cuts on American families,’ said Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who voted for the bill.

In a veiled slap at Obama, Levin also stressed that ‘success also is going to require presidential leadership and stronger use of his bully pulpit.’

The new law calls for more than $900 billion in cuts over the next 10 years — $US350 billion of it in defence — and creates a special congressional committee tasked with coming up with another $US1.5 trillion in cuts to report by November 23, with Congress voting by December 23.

A failure by the committee would trigger painful, automatic cuts to key priorities of both parties.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee has voted to extend a wide-ranging surveillance law targeting foreigners overseas, but Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden says he will block the measure unless the public is told more about the law’s impact on people living in the United States.

In a closed-door session, the committee turned aside an amendment by Wyden and Democratic Sen. Mark Udall that would have directed the Justice Department’s inspector general to estimate how many people inside the U.S. have had their telephone calls and emails monitored by government agents under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008.

The law, due to expire at the end of next year, would be extended to June 2015 if the committee action becomes law.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which were bitterly disputed in Congress, allow the government to obtain from a secret court broad, yearlong intercept orders that target foreign groups and people overseas, raising the prospect that phone calls and emails between those foreign targets and innocent Americans in this country also will be collected and reviewed.

The 2008 amendments also shielded telecommunications companies from lawsuits that complained that the companies helped the government spy on Americans without court warrants during the Bush administration.

The proposed 2 1/2-year extension was inserted without any public notice into the Intelligence Authorization Act for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The move was unusual because it took place a full year and a half before the law’s expiration date. Ordinarily, a proposed extension isn’t brought up until closer to the expiration date of the law.

The committee approved the intelligence authorization bill, including the extension, at a closed-door meeting last week, at which it also rejected the Wyden-Udall amendment. Details of the meeting emerged Tuesday after the authorization act and an accompanying report were printed and made public.

Recently, the expiration dates for some other intelligence laws were set at June 2015. The accompanying report that surfaced Tuesday said that aligning the dates would enable Congress to review the laws comprehensively rather than in piecemeal fashion. Addressing the FISA amendments act now instead of waiting until next year will help assure stability of the foreign intelligence collection system during the “critical times immediately ahead,” the accompanying report added.

In a letter Tuesday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Wyden said he stands ready to place a “hold” on the measure, which would force a Senate debate on it if there is an effort to pass the legislation by unanimous consent. Wyden said his goal is to amend the bill to meet his concerns. A hold by Wyden would mean it would take 60 votes to end debate and vote on the bill.

“One of the central questions that Congress needs to ask is, are these procedures working as intended?” Wyden said in a statement. “Are they keeping the communications of law-abiding Americans from being swept up under this authority that was designed to apply to foreigners?”

Wyden pointed out that the purpose of the existing expiration date of Dec. 31, 2012, was to force members of Congress “to come back in a few years and examine whether these new authorities had been interpreted and implemented as intended.”

Separately, the committee, on a voice vote, rejected another amendment by Wyden and Udall to require Attorney General Eric Holder and the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to submit a report to the congressional intelligence committees on what Wyden has said are secret interpretations of domestic surveillance law. Such a report would assess the problems that occur when executive branch agencies and departments rely on interpretations that are inconsistent with the public’s understanding of the law.

The proposal was aimed at provisions in the USA Patriot Act that allow government agents to conduct broad searches for records in national security investigations without court warrants.

On the Senate floor in May, Wyden said “there are two Patriot Acts in America. The first is the text of the law itself and the second is the government’s secret interpretation of what they believe the law means. The American people will be extremely surprised when they learn how the Patriot Act is secretly being interpreted.”

Wyden has said official secrecy prevents him from disclosing the interpretations that trouble him.

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