A fight to the finish

The latest: The Senate passed a trimmed-back energy bill Thursday that would bring higher-gas mileage cars and sport-utility vehicles into showrooms in the coming decade and fill their tanks with ethanol.

The playback: The measure was approved 86-8 after Democrats abandoned efforts to impose billions of dollars in new taxes on the biggest oil companies.

What's next: The House is expected to vote on the bill next week and President Bush is expected to sign it.

What's at stake: Car companies will have to achieve an industrywide average 35 mile per gallon for cars, small trucks and SUVs over the next 13 years, an increase of 10 mpg over what the entire fleet averages today. And it would boost use of ethanol to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold increase.

The latest: Negotiators struggled to cut hundreds of federal programs as they fashioned a $500 billion-plus catchall government funding bill. But agreement with the White House remained elusive, even though negotiations went ahead on the assumption that Democrats would largely accept President Bush's budget for domestic programs and that he would ease up a bit if additional funding for Iraq is approved.

Stop-gap measure: In the meantime, the House passed a bill 385-27 to keep the federal government open for another week to give negotiators time to fashion the omnibus spending bill, pass it in the House and Senate and then adjourn for the year. Senate approval Thursday evening sent the bill to President Bush.

What it means: It would fund through Dec. 21 the 14 Cabinet departments whose budgets have yet to pass.

What's next: The 222-199 vote sent the measure to the Senate. The White House has threatened a veto.

Details: The bill, a House-Senate compromise to authorize intelligence operations in 2008, also blocks spending 70 percent of the intelligence budget until the intelligence committees are briefed on Israel's Sept. 6 air strike on an alleged nuclear site in Syria. The 2008 intelligence budget is classified, but it is more than the $43 billion approved for 2007. The bill also creates a new internal watchdog to oversee all the intelligence agencies.

The latest: The House Intelligence Committee has summoned the CIA official who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes, launching what will likely be several months of hearings. The panel requested that Jose Rodriguez, the agency's former top spy, appear Tuesday.

The key issue: Central to the investigation is whether Rodriguez sought and got permission from agency lawyers to destroy the tapes.

The latest: The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-7 to hold a current and a former aide to President Bush in contempt of Congress.

The latest: Ending an airline industry controversy that has smoldered for a half-century, President Bush signed a bill that raises the retirement age for commercial pilots to 65 from 60, a standard observed worldwide.

What it means: The law doesn't allow pilots who have turned 60 to reclaim their jobs or seniority. Pilots who have retired would be allowed to resume flying, provided they go back as new hires, assigned as co-pilots on a carrier's smallest aircraft.