Obama: Fire Imus  —  Obama First White House Contender to Call for Imus' Firing Over Racial Slur  —  In an interview with ABC News Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., called for the firing of talk radio host Don Imus.  Obama said he would never again appear on Imus' show …

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84  —  Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan.

Bush aides' use of GOP e-mail probed  —  WASHINGTON - The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

Prosecutors Drop Charges in Duke Case  —  RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Prosecutors dropped all charges Wednesday against the three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper at a party, saying the athletes were innocent victims of a "tragic rush to accuse" by an overreaching district attorney.

Gates Announces Longer Tours for Active-Duty Army Soldiers  —  Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced this afternoon that all active-duty Army soldiers currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan could serve extended tours of up to 15 months in combat, meaning more than 100,000 troops …

McCain campaign to cut back on staff  —  WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record)'s troubled presidential campaign is eliminating some non-senior staff positions and cutting some consultants' contracts.  —  The Arizona senator's campaign characterized the moves as …

Racist Literature Distributed in Berkeley  —  A study in hate, the left/right convergence, and media spin  —  During the first few days of April, 2007, racist literature was distributed in several Berkeley, California neighborhoods by members of an out-of-town white supremacist group.

In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud  —  Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Google puts the spotlight on Darfur  —  News blog: next stop - deleting Bolivia?  —  Google Earth, the search engine's online mapping service, has updated its images of the Darfur region in Sudan in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of people living there.

Biden Says Bush's Iraq Policy Doomed  —  Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D) said today that the Bush Administration's surge strategy in Iraq is doomed to fail and criticized Army General David Petraeus for offering what he called an overly optimistic assessment of the situation on the ground.