Top Items:
New York Times:
Verizon Denies Turning Over Local Phone Data — Verizon, the country's second-largest phone company, said yesterday that it had not provided local phone records to the National Security Agency as part of efforts to compile a database of calling records to track terrorist activities.
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Katherine Shrader / Associated Press:
Hatch: Court Briefed on Bush Surveillance — WASHINGTON - Two judges on the secretive court that approves warrants for intelligence surveillance were told of the broad monitoring programs that have raised recent controversy, a Republican senator said Tuesday, connecting a court to knowledge …
Carolyn Lochhead / San Francisco Chronicle:
Senate guest worker plan survives attack — Boxer, Alabama Republican fail to kill provision, but number of visas is reduced — Washington — Seldom do California's liberal Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and Alabama's conservative Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions agree on anything.
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Mark Tapscott / Tapscott's Copy Desk:
Conservative Battle Fatique? The "What If" Issue — More bad news for the GOP in today's edition of The Washington Post as 56 percent of the respondents to the latest Post/ABC News survey say they prefer Democrats in control of Congress. — There is a distinct, though not quite as deep …
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CBS News:
Bush Is Now A Lame Duck — CBS' Meyer: Forget November, Forget '08; President Is Done — (CBS) This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer. — The great impulse of the punditocracy right now is to look at President Bush's swelling problems with the public and his party …
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TCS Daily:
The Parent Trap — Not long ago we worried about baby booms and overpopulation. Now some people are worrying about a "Global Baby Bust." Writing in Foreign Affairs, Phillip Longman says it's mostly because of economics: … He's clearly right about the economics.
PittsburghLIVE.com:
'Earthquake in Pennsylvania' — TRIBUNE-REVIEW — Angry taxpayers on Tuesday tossed out the two Republican Senate leaders who helped engineer last year's legislative pay raise, an issue that apparently cost 15 House members their jobs, too. — Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Jubelirer of Altoona …
Washington Post:
U.S. Secretly Backing Warlords in Somalia — More than a decade after U.S. troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia's interim government and some U.S. analysts of Africa policy say the United States has returned to the African country …
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David Germain / Associated Press:
Albinos Condemn 'Da Vinci' Assassin — The notion of Christ as a family man is not the only raw nerve "The Da Vinci Code" has touched. Albinos are bothered that one of their own has yet again been depicted as a villain. — Dan Brown's best seller begins its worldwide debut Wednesday …
Claudia Parsons / Reuters:
INTERVIEW-US satirist Art Spiegelman tackles Danish cartoons — NEW YORK, May 16 (Reuters) - Controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad have been reprinted in a U.S. magazine with commentary by leading U.S. cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who offers what he calls a "fatwa bomb meter" to rate their offensiveness.
Associated Press:
Venezuela may sell U.S. jets to Iran, others — CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela's military is considering the possibility of selling its fleet of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to another country, perhaps Iran, a Venezuelan military official said Tuesday.
Patrick Yoest / public.cq.com:
DHS Does About-Face In Backing Use of National Guard to Seal Border — In December of 2005, Fox News talking head Bill O'Reilly floated an unlikely — even brash — idea to the Homeland Security secretary to seal off the porous southwest border. — "Why don't you put the National Guard …
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Robert J. Samuelson / Washington Post:
Still Dodging Immigration's Truths — President Bush's immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren't dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future …
Kathy Matheson / Associated Press:
Foster Quotes Eminem at Penn Graduation — PHILADELPHIA - You can add rapping to the list of Jodie Foster's talents. The Oscar-winning actress spoke Monday at the University of Pennsylvania's commencement ceremonies, ending her address with the chorus of Eminem's "Lose Yourself" from …
John Hawkins / Human Events:
Tackling a Handful of Immigration Myths, Misnomers and Red Herrings — There's no topic hotter in the body politic right now than immigration. — Everywhere you turn, especially in the blogosphere, somebody has an opinion. So, since illegal immigration is the topic du jour …
Alessandra Stanley / New York Times:
At White House Briefing, Polish Replaces Testiness — Tony Snow said he didn't want to "hug the tar baby," and then he did just that by using the expression in his first televised White House press briefing yesterday. — The tar-covered doll that Br'er Fox used to ensnare Br'er Rabbit …
Patrick Cockburn / Independent:
Basra carnage escalates as one person killed every hour — One person is being assassinated in Basra every hour, as order in Iraq's second city disintegrates, according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry official. — And a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition …
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No More Mister Nice Blog