Vatican plays down pope’s Hitler Youth past
by Agence France-Presse
JERUSALEM (AFP) — Pope Benedict XVI celebrated mass outside of Jerusalem’s Old City on Tuesday after two days in Israel spent navigating the currents of the region’s conflicts and appealing for reconciliation.Benedict was greeted by thousands of cheering pilgrims as his white popemobile trundled through the olive groves in the valley of Kidron between the Mount of Olives and the 400-year-old walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. |
Is Florida Gov. Charlie Crist Gay? Even After Straight Wedding?
by dekerivers
When I first heard that Florida Governor Charlie Crist was going to marry a woman I actually laughed out loud. Who is he kidding? When Crist stepped onto the national stage while running for governor a couple years ago I think most ‘gaydars’ around the nation went BING. So all I could think about when hearing of his wedding plans was the extent that some will go to gain power. Even to the point of denying who they truly are as a person. That type of personality is not what we need in the White House, or anywhere near it. |
How Low Can They Go?
by Wayne Besen
It was unusually satisfying to watch beauty contestant turned Bible-thumper Carrie Prejean crash and burn. In the bat of an eyelash, she went from Christian role model to wannabe underwear model after racy pictures of her surfaced. "They were quite inappropriate and certainly not photos befitting a beauty queen," Alicia Jacobs, a Miss USA judge, told NBC's Today Show. |
Father Alberto Cutié makes national apology
by JENNIFER LEBOVICH, LYDIA MARTIN AND JAWEED KALEEM
In his first English-language television interview since photos surfaced showing him frolicking with a woman on a Miami Beach, the Rev. Alberto Cutié appeared on national TV Monday -- without his priestly collar, showing a bit of neck under a white button-down shirt and apologizing profusely to the church and his fellow Catholics. |
Democrats rush to capitalize on torture memos
by Larry Margasak
Casting aside their president's misgivings, Democrats are racing into hearings to criticize newly released Bush administration memos justifying harsh terrorism interrogations.So far, however, the biggest embarrassment has engulfed a Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. |
‘What Color Is That Baby?’
by Bob Herbert
I remember as a young deputy city editor at The Daily News attending my first “sked meeting,” a large gathering of editors held every afternoon to consider which stories would go into the next morning’s paper and how they would be played.I was sitting at the far end of a conference table from the editor who was conducting the meeting. The News had very seldom had a black person at those gatherings. Mine was the only black face in the room. |
Pelosi: Torture Protest Improper in '03
by Glenn Thrush & John Bresnahan
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn't protest directly out of respect for "appropriate" legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday.The Pelosi camp's version of events is intended to answer two key questions posed by her critics: When, precisely, did she first learn about waterboarding? And why didn't she do more to stop it? |
A Year Later, Iowa Raid Still Marks a Flashpoint
by Mike McGraw
POSTVILLE, Iowa - If there is an epicenter in the shifting, emotionally charged debate over U.S. immigration policy, it is here, amid some of the richest soil on Earth.That alluvial black dirt nurtures corn, beef cattle, chickens and turkeys, which require massive slaughterhouses. And that in turn nurtures a lively trade in the illegal immigrants willing to work in them. |
A glossary of Republican doublespeak
by Jaime O'Neill
— from the San Francisco ChronicleThe Republican universe is a bit topsy-turvy, rather like the one created by Lewis Carroll in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." In that story, the Queen of Hearts did not restrict herself to the generally accepted meaning of words. When she used a word, she said, it meant exactly what she wanted it to mean, no more and no less. It was good to be queen. |
Three Worst Reasons to Delay Putting Cheney in Prison
by David Swanson
#1: Cheney says that he and Bush ordered torture but did nothing wrong.On Sunday, Cheney said: "The fact of the matter is that these [torture] techniques that we're talking about are used on our own people. In the SERE program that in effect trains our people with respect to capture and evasion and so forth, and escape, a lot of them go through these same exact procedures." |
Get Obama!
by David Michael Green
Hey, did you notice that Barack Obama completed his first hundred days in the White House last week?Maybe you didn't realize that. And who could blame you? With the near complete absence of media coverage, I'm sure most Americans didn't realize that the magic date came and went. |
Former CIA agent slams Cheney as ‘hypocritical’
by David Edwards and Stephen Webster
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is acting like a hypocrite, according to CIA special agent turned radio host Jack Rice. Appearing on MSNBC Monday morning, Rice said he would like to see all the torture memos released, not just the ones Cheney is pushing to have disclosed. |
Miss California director shames anti-gay marriage group
by David Edwards and Stephen Webster
Carrie Prejean, the winner of Miss California who made public appearances with anti-marriage equality groups, was strongly criticized by Miss California USA officials on Monday, though she retained her title.Prejean was humiliated last week when a topless photo of her surfaced on thedirty.com. She had been under fire for an alleged breach of contract for her work promoting the anti-marriage equality cause. |
Official: More than 1M child prostitutes in India
by CNN
NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- Around 1.2 million children are believed to be involved in prostitution in India, the country's federal police said Monday.Ashwani Kumar, who heads the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), told a seminar on human trafficking, that India occupied a "unique position" as what he called a source, transit nation and destination of this trade. |
