Pelosi threatens to reject funds for troop surge - "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats yesterday said their party might deny funding for President Bush's expected call this week for a troop surge in Iraq if he doesn't meet their demands for detailed consultations and congressional debate on military strategy."
White House uses secret memo to fight court order - "The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public. The Bush administration did not reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding until last fall. The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney." -- Actions speak much louder than words.
Will Bush Provoke a Constitutional Crisis? - "The new Democratic Congress will likely subpoena documents that the White House may refuse to hand over -- if that happens, we may witness a struggle that puts our democratic republic on the brink."
Intel: A Writer's Blocked - "A CIA panel has told former officer Valerie Plame she can't write about her undercover work for the agency, a position that may threaten a lucrative book project with her publisher. Plame's outing as a CIA officer in July 2003 triggered a criminal probe that culminates next week when Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby goes on trial for perjury and obstruction."
Bush's dusty veto pen may soon get a workout - "President Bush has vetoed just one bill in nearly six years in office. That soon may change. As newly empowered Democrats forge ahead with their own agenda, some items may make it to his desk as prime candidates for veto."
American Passports Found on Bodies of Al Qaeda Fighters in Somalia - "A senior official in the Somali government's new Ministry of the Interior told ABC News government forces had recovered "dozens of foreign passports," including several American passports, on the bodies of al Qaeda fighters killed in combat between forces affiliated with the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and Ethiopian forces in Somalia."
Immigration debate gets religious - "A number of leading Christian conservative groups have formed a coalition on immigration and illegal aliens that will push religiously grounded positions that both sides of the current immigration debate will both love and hate."
Detroit may shut up to 52 schools - "The Detroit Public Schools announced a massive restructuring plan Friday to close 52 schools, a number that would shrink the state's largest district by more than 20 percent." -- But billions of dollars are used for Iraq.
Mayors Seek to Gain Control Over Schools - "The statistics tell a sorry tale about the public schools in America's capital. A majority of fourth- and eighth-graders are failing to read or do math at basic levels. Roughly four in five schools are not meeting achievement goals under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Just 43 percent of students graduate from high school in five years."
Transforming Fear into Power: The Politicization of Child Sexual Abuse - "Politicians trying to gain points are pushing laws to "get tough" on child sexual offenders. But a new movement has a better idea -- work with offenders instead of ostracizing them."
Desperate waiter's sick offer - "DESPERATE Umer Maqbool calmly laid out his demands — as he sold parts of his OWN body. The waiter revealed: “I’m ready to sell my kidney, a section of liver and maybe after three months do the cornea in my eye. “I’m ready to do it today. I want £100,000 for all three.”"
'New stem cell source' discovered - "The Harvard University team say they have recovered functioning stem cells from amniotic fluid - the liquid that surrounds the baby in the womb."
Brain Scans Predict When People Will Buy Products - "This study challenges the conventional economic account of consumer purchases, which views consumers as deciding between the immediate pleasure of making a purchase and the delayed pleasures of alternative things for which the same money could be used. The results of this paper support an alternative perspective that views consumers as trading off the immediate pleasure of making a purchase against an immediate pain: the pain of forking out the money for the item. The results can explain the growing tendency of consumers to overspend when purchasing items with credit cards instead of cash, because consumers do not immediately pay for items charged to credit cards and the "pain" of the potential loss is minimized. Economic policies designed to promote savings would thus need to take this into account. It also suggests that differences in how much people spend and save may be partly explained by differences in the degree to which they find spending money painful."
Bills would require 6th grade girls to get HPV vaccine - "Now, Texas lawmakers will soon debate two proposed bills requiring all sixth grade girls to be vaccinated against cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine is an issue in 17 other states as well."
Cosmetics Ingredients Linked to Breast Cancer? - "A new study suggests that women who begin using makeup at an earlier age and in greater amounts may have an increased risk of developing breast cancer later in life."
The pill may raise odds of having allergic kids - "Mothers who have previously used oral contraceptive pills seem more likely to have children with nasal allergies, Finnish researchers report."
Who's Killing MP3 and iTunes? - "Here are seven reasons why MP3 is the future of the music industry:"
The universe gives up its deepest secret - "One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is about to be unravelled with the first detailed, three-dimensional map of dark matter - the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos."
Scientist: NASA found life on Mars -- and killed it - "Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing. The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said."
Space life search turns to TV, radio signals - "Astronomers plan to search 1,000 nearby stars for television broadcasts and other signals that could indicate extraterrestrial life, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said on Monday."
Birthday-suit parties all the rage for Ivy League students - "STUDENTS at America's prestigious Ivy League universities are rebelling against their colleges' stuffy reputations, casting off society's norms along with their clothes to hold naked parties. The Pundits, a secretive society at Yale University, initiated the events - which profess to be non-sexual in nature - in the mid-1990s, open to a select few. The society claims that president George Bush's daughter, Barbara, attended a naked party during her second year, in 2002. The White House has always declined to comment. But the naked parties are now fixtures among liberal students being primed to become the nation's elite."
Quote of the Day
"All war is deception."
~ Sun Tzu
No comments:
Post a Comment