PARIS (AP) – Former French President Jacques Chirac has been ordered to stand trial in an alleged corruption scandal dating back to his tenure as Paris mayor, a judicial official said Friday. A magistrate has ordered Chirac to stand trial on charges of “embezzlement” and “breach of trust,” the official said on condition of anonymity [...]
ISLAMABAD (AP) – Pakistani forces killed two dozen militants in 24 hours and were closing in on a prominent insurgent stronghold in the mountains of South Waziristan, the army said Friday. Government soldiers now control the hills above the village of Sararogha, where Taliban leaders long have operated openly, officials said in a statement. The [...]
CNN: The next time you see a motorist obliviously straddling two lanes, don’t fault bad driving, but genetics. In a study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex, researcher Steven Cramer found that people with a certain gene variant performed more than 30 percent worse on a driving test than people without it. The study [...]
Canada News Network: (CNN) — A rising Canadian singer was killed by coyotes this week in a national park in Nova Scotia, a park spokesman said Thursday. Taylor Mitchell, 19, was at the beginning of the Skyline Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park on Tuesday afternoon when she was attacked, according to Chip Bird, [...]
DALLAS (AP) – A 1970s-era Texas law that allows parents to show “harmful material” to their children has come under fire after a prosecutor said he couldn’t file charges against a man accused of forcing his 8- and 9-year-old daughters to watch hardcore online pornography. Randall County District Attorney James Farren has asked the Texas [...]
Times Online: Pakistani troops fighting Islamist militants in the mountains of South Waziristan have picked up the trail of a leading al-Qaeda figure wanted in connection with the attacks on America on September 11, 2001. The Times was shown yesterday the German passport of Said Bahaji, a close associate of the September 11 hijacker Mohammed [...]
ISLAMABAD (AP) – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chided Pakistani officials Thursday for failing to press the hunt for al-Qaida inside their borders, suggesting they know where the terror leaders are hiding. American officials have long said that al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden and senior lieutenants of the network accused in the Sept. [...]
The Guardian: Tony Blair’s hopes of becoming Europe’s first sitting president were receding fast last night as Britain admitted his chances of success were “fading” after the continent’s centre-right leaders made it clear one of their own must have the post. Hours after Gordon Brown delivered his strongest statement of support for Blair – disclosing [...]
Agencie France Presse: Technology stars, pundits, and entrepreneurs joined the Internet’s father on Thursday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his culture-changing child. “It’s the 40th year since the infant Internet first spoke,” said University of California, Los Angeles, professor Leonard Kleinrock, who headed the team that first linked computers online in 1969. Kleinrock led [...]
IBD Editorials: Old Soviet joke: Moscow, 1953. Stalin calls in Khrushchev. “Niki, I’m dying. Don’t have much to leave you. Just three envelopes. Open them, one at a time, when you get into big trouble.” A few years later, first crisis. Khrushchev opens envelope 1: “Blame everything on me. Uncle Joe.” A few years later, [...]
The Weekly Standard: You likely won’t see this poll result elsewhere, so I thought I’d highlight it here. This is a Pew Political IQ test conducted over the phone with 1,002 adults from Oct. 1-4. They were asked 12 questions, and answered an average of 5.3 questions correctly, according to Pew. But here’s the part [...]
Fox News: The Obama administration (White House and Transportation Depatment) did some heavyweight policy sparring with Edmunds.com today over criticism that Cash for Clunkers might have cost taxpayers $24,00o per vehicle sold. Edmunds.com came to that figure by estimating that only 125,000 of the Cash for Clunker program’s 691,000 documented vehicles sales were a direct [...]
NewsBusters: Candidate Barack Obama made a big deal about government transparency and giving citizens ample opportunity to read pieces of legislation before they’re voted on. With this in mind, all 40 Republican Senators signed a letter sent to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Thursday demanding the new healthcare reform proposal be published on the Internet [...]
TNR: Tea partiers, townhall protesters, Texas secessionists–for the past few months, grassroots organizing has seemed to be mostly the domain of the right. And for a period this summer, they (okay, not the Texas secessionists, but the others) appeared to be successfully tugging the national debate in their direction. As conservative activists, organized by groups [...]
