Past News Articles
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| A House panel Wednesday voted to cite former top White House aide Karl Rove for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to answer questions about the dismissals of several federal prosecutors as its Senate counterpart explored punishments for an array of alleged Bush administration misdeeds. Voting 20-14 along party lines, the House Judiciary Committee said that Rove had broke the law by failing to appear at a July 10 hearing on allegations of White House influence over the Justice Department, including whether Rove encouraged prosecutions against Democrats such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. |
| President Bush will leave his successor with a record-high budget deficit of $482 billion, according to an administration estimate released Monday. White House officials blamed the slowing economy and a $150-billion bipartisan stimulus package for the worsening picture for the 2009 fiscal year, but Democrats cited the president's tax cuts and fiscal management over his eight years in office. "Mr. Bush came to office with the biggest surpluses in history and he will leave office with the biggest deficit in history. That's the bottom line," |
| Senior aides to former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broke Civil Service laws by using politics to guide their hiring decisions, picking less-qualified applicants for important nonpolitical positions, slowing the hiring process at critical times and damaging the department’s credibility, an internal report concluded on Monday. The report released on Monday goes much further in documenting pervasive evidence of political hiring for some of the department’s most senior career positions, including immigration judges, assistant United States attorneys and even senior counterterrorism positions. |
| Barack Obama enthralled a crowd of more than 200,000 people here yesterday as he appealed for a unified world to combat terrorism - which he likened to the communism that died in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. "If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope," Obama told the massive crowd - the largest of his campaign |
| Is Shaniqua living in a tenement in Brooklyn with five babies by five different “men” watching? Is James, who stands on a corner in Baltimore selling crack cocaine to his community watching? T-Bone, a Blood from South Central and his boys and rival Crips from cross-town, are they watching? Janice, who dropped out of Somerville High School in Massachusetts, will she be tuning in? I doubt it. And here in lies the problem with shows like “Black in America,” and books like “The Covenant with Black America” they don’t reach the people who need to hear and read it most. |
| Despite spending $230m an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy. The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries. The US is far behind many other countries in the support given to working families, particularly in terms of family leave, sick leave and childcare. The country has no federally mandated maternity leave. |
| The New Yorker magazine hits the news stands today with a shocking cover a caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama depicting the presidential candidate in a turban, fist-bumping his wife who has a machine gun slung over her shoulder, while the American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover is shocking in that it depicts the Obamas in bizarre caricatured images and associations which reflect the very stereotypes with which the conservatives, particularly Fox News, have been trying to frame both the Obamas. |
| Bowing to President Bush's demands, the Senate sent the White House a bill Wednesday overhauling bitterly disputed rules on secret government eavesdropping and shielding telecommunications companies from lawsuits complaining they helped the U.S. spy on Americans. Opponents assailed the eavesdropping program, asserting that it imperiled citizens' rights of privacy from government intrusion. |
| At Fox News, media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them. Shooting the occasional messenger is baked right into the process. As crude as that sounds, it works. By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years. Honesty compels me to admit that I have choked a few times at the keyboard when Fox News has come up in a story and it was not absolutely critical to the matter at hand. |
| Plummeting home prices have in recent months eliminated jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, from bankers and real estate agents to construction workers and furniture manufacturers. Tighter lending standards imposed by banks in the wake of huge mortgage losses have made it hard for many Americans to secure credit — the lifeblood of expansion in recent years — crimping the appetite of consumers, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the economy. |
| frican leaders pointedly avoided public criticism of Robert Mugabe yesterday as he arrived in Egypt for a summit expected to press him to negotiate with the opposition that his Zanu-PF party bullied out of last week's election. The African Union summit allowed the 84-year-old leader to take his seat, despite strong criticism from African election monitors who questioned the legitimacy of Friday's uncontested vote. |
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