By PAULINE JELINEK and RYAN LENZ
Military commanders in Iraq are developing a plan to move as many as 5,000 U.S. troops with armored vehicles and tanks into the country’s capital in an effort to quell escalating violence, defense officials said Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security, as required by law, has a office that is supposed to protect the privacy of American citizens. But in a pattern that is all-too-familiar in that bloated bureaucracy, the guy running it doesn’t have a dime’s worth of experience on privacy issues.
The Bush administration and GOP leaders on Thursday renewed their push for Senate approval of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador. Democrats maintained he is too brash and ineffective to be confirmed.
By MARGARET TALEV
McClatchy Newspapers
John Bolton, the controversial U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, seemed destined for another partisan showdown on the Senate floor as hearings began Thursday on a new bid for his confirmation.
By BEN WAXMAN
The Providence Journal
About a year ago, a conservative organization called the Independent Women’s Forum commissioned a study to gauge the sexual activity of interns working on Capitol Hill. The report surveyed 200 interns and found that about half had engaged in some kind of physical intimacy over the summer. Most relations occurred between fellow interns, but about 11 percent reported flirting or relationships with staffers and elected officials.
By MYUNG OAK KIM
Rocky Mountain News
Former Gov. Richard Lamm is under fire for comments in a recent speech and in his new book that Hispanics remain an "underclass" in America because their culture is "not success-producing."
By JAY AMBROSE
In Virginia this month, Brandon Hedrick, a convicted rapist and murderer, chose the electric chair over lethal injection as his means of execution, perhaps because he had heard of the pain that sometimes results when stuck with needles that anesthetize, paralyze and then kill.
Lethal injection was supposed to be a humane way of ending life. That’s why it is used in 37 of the 38 states that have the death penalty and why it was used in every execution in the United States last year. For various reasons, though, the drugs can induce agony. The convict may sense himself dying of suffocation, it has been reported. He may feel his insides burning.
A string of disappointments in recent weeks has left Washington’s role as a global power broker diminished. The unalloyed U.S. support for Israel during two weeks of fighting with Hezbollah insurgents in Lebanon and American refusal to agree to a quick cease-fire are leaving the Bush administration ever more isolated internationally.
The government is too strapped to handle congressional legislation that would strip state-ordered warnings from food labels, a former Food and Drug Administration official said Thursday.
President Bush on Thursday signed a 25-year extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and promised to vigorously enforce its political protections for minorities.