from www.guardian.co.ukBarack Obama yesterday gave the clearest hint yet that he may consider Hillary Clinton as his vice-presidential running mate in the November election for the White House. With the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination close to finished as a contest, Obama began looking beyond his battles with Clinton to the one with the Republican John McCain.
A Florida teacher may have to pull an unemployment check out of his hat after performing magic in front of students, according to reports. Jim Piculas said he made a toothpick disappear and reappear in front of students at the Rushe Middle School in Land 'O Lakes, Fla., Local6.com reported. He said he later got a call from the supervisor of teachers, saying he had been accused of wizardry.
Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive. But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages.
Five signs that pot might become legal soon -- and five reasons why it probably won't.
The lawyer for US vice-president Dick Cheney claimed today that the Congress lacks any authority to examine his behaviour on the job. The exception claimed by Cheney's counsel came in response to requests from congressional Democrats that David Addington, the vice-president's chief of staff, testify about his involvement in the approval of interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo Bay. Ruling out voluntary cooperation by Addington, Cheney lawyer Kathryn Wheelbarger said Cheney's conduct is "not within the [congressional] committee's power of inquiry".
The Fox News Sunday interview is over. And Obama didn't take on Fox at all in any meaningful sense. On Friday, a senior Obama adviser responded to criticism of his decision to go on Fox with a bunch of tough talk, saying that Obama knew full well that Fox has been at the forefront of spreading "the most specious of rumors" (i.e., lies) about Obama and vowing that he would "take Fox on." Well, it didn't happen.
Tony Zirkle, a GOP congressional candidate in Indiana, recently came under heavy criticism for speaking to the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP) on the 119th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth. At the event, Zirkle "stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background." On his website, Zirkle has responded to the criticisms by railing against Jews and prostitution...
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was attacked with pies in the face by environmental activists during a speech about energy at Brown University yesterday.
Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments calling for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer. He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens. "Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don't elect Democrats," Limbaugh said during Wednesday's radio broadcast. He then went on to say that's the best thing that could happen to the country.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
It may hold our financial records, innermost thoughts and pictures of our loved ones - but there's nothing private about a laptop computer at the nation's borders, a federal appeals court ruled Monday. In a closely watched search-and-seizure case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court's decision to toss evidence of alleged child pornography found on a traveler's computer at Los Angeles International Airport.
Former White House press secretary Tony Snow will join CNN as a conservative commentator beginning today, it was announced by Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S.
Report suggests US may have buried politically sensitive proof relating to abuse by interrogators
The Huffington Post has learned that Randi Rhodes quit Air America after being asked by the network to apologize for her inflammatory remarks against Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro. A source at Air America, who asked to remain anonymous, said, "Many people screw up and then apologize and move on. Like Imus. Like David Shuster. Like Jay Rockefeller on McCain. Like Obama on Rezko. Like Hillary on Bosnia. Randi Rhodes refused to apologize for her obscene comments and has chosen instead to terminate her relationship with Air America." The source also said that there is no love lost between Rhodes and her colleagues at the network.
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice Pr
A new book by liberal writer and political consultant Cliff Schecter lays out a detailed blueprint for how Dems can mine presumed GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain's political and personal past—including already well-documented incidents of his temper—to defeat him in the fall. But in The Real McCain, scheduled to be released May 1, Schecter, citing unnamed sources, also relates two previously unreported incidents of McCain's allegedly losing his cool.
A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.
Air America host Randi Rhodes called both Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton "whores" in a recent appearance [video at the link]. Rhodes, who hosts a weekday radio show on Air America, said to the cheering crowd, "What a whore Geraldine Ferraro is! She's such a fucking whore!" She then proceeded to say, "Hillary is a big fucking whore, too" to a mixed audience reaction. "You know why she's a big fucking whore? Because her deal is always, 'Read the fine print, asshole!'"
A chunk of Antarctic ice seven times the size of Manhattan Island has suddenly collapsed, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk, according to scientists. Satellite images starting Feb. 28 show the runaway disintegration of a chunk covering 414 square kilometers, or 160 square miles. The ice was on the edge of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and had been there for possibly 1,500 years. This is the result of global warming, David Vaughan, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, said Tuesday.
The Bush administration is scrambling to engage with Pakistan's new rulers as power flows from its strong ally, President Pervez Musharraf, to a powerful civilian government buoyed by anti-American sentiment. On Tuesday, senior coalition partner Nawaz Sharif gave the Americans a public scolding for using Pakistan as a "killing field" and relying too much on Musharraf.
Sebastian Horsley, a British author who has written an eyebrow-raising memoir detailing a life of rampant drug use and voluminous encounters with prostitutes, was turned back at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to enter the United States for a book party and New York news media tour.
Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for inappropriately looking at Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's passport file. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the department itself detected the instances of "imprudent curiosity," which occurred separately on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14. He would not release the names of those who were fired and disciplined.
... so says The Onion.
If the media were to apply the same standards to John McCain that they applied to John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, they would report (endlessly) that John McCain, a very rich man, is embracing tax cuts that even John McCain has said unfairly benefit the very rich. And they would be demanding that he release his tax returns so voters could see how much money John McCain would personally save under McCain's tax plan.
