Day: December 20, 2006

South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson has been exceeding expectations in his recovery from emergency brain surgery last week, his son Brendan said Tuesday.

Brendan Johnson, a Sioux Falls lawyer, said in an interview with The Associated Press that his father has been responding repeatedly to directions from his mother, Barbara. But he is not yet speaking.

"It’s fair to say he’s been exceeding expectations up to this point," Brendan Johnson said. "All the tests and the indications now are positive."

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

"This is reality-check research," said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."

At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, the English admiral John Byng was sent to relieve Fort St. Philip on the island of Minorca. Commanding an undermanned fleet, Byng was unable to repulse the French warships besieging the island, and the fort was forced to surrender.

The Bush administration’s mania for secrecy is well known but it recently got way out of control.

The Justice Department obtained a grand jury subpoena to force the ACLU to return a government document it had obtained, on the grounds that the documents’ disclosure would do "serious damage" to national security.

Our Campaign 2008 Primer for Pols and Pundits begins today by focusing on one of the most basic, yet least understood, cogs of a winning presidential bandwagon: The People Gear.

Every successful candidate must possess a power-gliding, fully automatic people gear. It can’t be bought belatedly along the campaign trail. It can’t be designed and retrofitted by one of those Campaigns R Us strategists-for-hire. It is the gear that enables the best politicians to relate smoothly, instinctively, personally with people of all persuasions. And it has to be there from the get-go.

A suicide car bomber slammed into a police checkpoint in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 11 people and injuring 24.

Four policemen were among those killed in Baghdad’s Jadriyah district, and six were among the injured. Police kept the neighborhood cordoned for hours, and commuters passed by the wreckage on foot. Jadriyah is home to several prominent Iraqi politicians, including President Jalal Talabani, and to Baghdad University.

New Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday, armed with a mandate from President Bush to help forge a new Iraq war strategy. He made the unannounced trip to the battlefront just two days after taking over at the Pentagon.

Gates went in pursuit of advice from his top military commanders on a new strategy for an increasingly unpopular, costly and chaotic war — one he has conceded the U.S. is not winning. His trip so soon after taking office underscored the Bush administration’s effort to be seen as energetically seeking a new path in the conflict.

President Bush, who has contended that the U.S. was winning the war in Iraq, said Tuesday for the first time that American forces were not winning there. He also said the military would be expanded to fight a long-term battle against terrorism.

Bush did not say the U.S. was losing the war, which began in March 2003 and has cost the lives of nearly 3,000 troops. Instead, when asked during an interview with The Washington Post whether the war was being won, the president borrowed the phrasing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace.

President Bush, working to recraft his strategy in Iraq, said Tuesday that he plans to increase the size of the U.S. military so it can fight a long-term war against terrorism.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Bush said he has asked his new defense chief, Robert Gates, to report back to him with a plan to increase ground forces. The president did not say how many troops might be added, but said he agreed with officials in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that the current military is being stretched too thin to deal with demands of fighting terrorism.