Houston Is Largest City to Elect Openly Gay Mayor  —  HOUSTON — Houston became the largest city in the country to elect an openly gay mayor Saturday night, as voters gave a solid victory to the city controller, Annise Parker.  —  Cheers erupted at Ms. Parker's campaign party as her opponent …

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: Climate change emails row deepens as Russians admit they DID come from their Siberian server  —  The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.

Drug money ‘saved banks from crisis’  —  Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions  —  Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Summers: ‘No more important issue’ than job growth  —  President Barack Obama's top economic adviser said Sunday that “there's no more important issue facing the country than job growth,” but it will take time to see the recession recovery that's expected.  —  National Economic Council …

WMD not point of Iraq war, Tony Blair says  —  Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the staunchest ally of President Bush, says that absent the WMD claims, he still would have found an argument for invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein.  —  Tony Blair, seen here at the United Nations …

Lieberman, Nelson: Public-option compromise still not good enough  —  Two key senators criticized the most recent healthcare compromise Sunday, saying the policies replacing the public option are still unacceptable.  —  Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) both said a Medicare …

Paul A. Samuelson, Groundbreaking Economist, Dies at 94  —  Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.  —  His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute …

Late Night: If “Freedom” Means Having to Look at Mitch McConnell's Raisiny Ass, I for One Welcome Our New Commie Healthcare Overlords  —  OMG, he's raising his kilt!  Look away, look away!! (graphic with help from watertiger)  —  The Red State Trike Force never fails to delight and amaze.

Ask Ashley  —  Spitzer's babe answers all your love-life questions!  —  Sure, she's made some mistakes.  But now Ashley Dupre, the former escort who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is sharing what she's learned in her new sex, love and relationship column — exclusively in the New York Post.

Hollywood's Brilliant Coda to America's Dark Year  —  ON Christmas Day, Hollywood will blanket America with a most unlikely holiday entertainment.  That's when “Up in the Air,” the acclaimed new movie starring George Clooney, will spread from its big-city engagements to more than 2,000 screens.

MOTIVATION.... Post-election governing tends to feature a familiar pattern.  Presidents take office with high hopes, governing proves difficult, the policymaking process gets bogged down, and supporters get discouraged and start to walk away.  It can be pretty disheartening.

The End Of Hand Crafted Content  —  Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death.  And we always enjoy adding our own two cents - the AP not knowing what YouTube is, the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc.  —  Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters …

Twitter Tapping  —  The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters.  A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting …