Domestic Glance
The appeal, from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner -- a Democrat -- and other election officials follows a Tuesday ruling from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati that sided with the state GOP.
The ruling ordered Brunner to create a system by Friday to provide a list of newly registered voters whose Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers do not match their names.
The state Republican Party contends there is widespread voter fraud in Ohio -- a crucial battleground state for the 2008 presidential election -- and that Brunner "turned off" its process for verifying voter registrations while allowing Ohioans to cast ballots on the same day they registered.
Emergency Supreme Court appeal filed in Ohio voters case
Criminalising dissent
US states are spying on political activists and classifying them as terrorists in order to stifle protest.
Two recent events demonstrate how easy it is for the government to dilute words and their meanings to close off opposition and dissent. Last week, the Maryland state police disclosed that 53 nonviolent anti-war and anti-death penalty activists were tracked for 14 months in 2005 and 2006 under the state's terrorism surveillance programme, and that their names had been added to the state's and the National Security Agency's database.
Sheriff: Man shot as he walked out of his home to go to work
Law enforcement personnel from 3 jurisdictions, with an assist from personnel and equipment from Blackwater, searched a rural area in the county Tuesday morning for a suspect they say shot a county resident as he walked out his house to go to work.
Ex-AIG chief Greenberg takes the Fifth
Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the legendary former chief executive of AIG, declined to answer questions Saturday from the New York Attorney General's office about his role in a controversial transaction between AIG and another insurer. Instead, Greenberg invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, his defense lawyer confirmed.
They said repeatedly that as long as he was provided with the full results of AIG's internal investigation of the deal - which he eventually was - he would answer all of state regulators' questions.
Greenberg's chance to testify finally came on Saturday, but he declined. It was a stunning turnaround for a man who has spent just shy of a quarter of a billion dollars to tell his side of the story and clear his name.
Bush Declares Exceptions to Sections of Two Bills He Signed Into Law
President Bush asserted on Tuesday that he had the executive power to bypass several parts of two bills: a military authorization act and a measure giving inspectors general greater independence from White House control. Mr. Bush signed the two measures into law. But he then issued a so-called signing statement in which he instructed the executive branch to view parts of each as unconstitutional constraints on presidential power.
In the authorization bill, Mr. Bush challenged four sections. One forbid the money from being used “to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq”; another required negotiations for an agreement by which Iraq would share some of the costs of the American military operations there.
TVNL Comment: Understand that signing statements allow George Bush to ignore the bills he signs into law.
Where's the congressionally mandated WMD czar?
The prospect that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group might get its hand on a nuclear bomb is widely viewed as the scariest national-security threat facing the country. But more than a year after Congress passed a law creating a White House "czar" to focus on the issue, the post has yet to be filled—the apparent victim of yet another clash over presidential powers.
Bush Rule Changes Could Block Product-Safety Suits
Bush administration officials, in their last weeks in office, are pushing to rewrite a wide array of federal rules with changes or additions that could block product-safety lawsuits by consumers and states.
The administration has written language aimed at pre-empting product-liability litigation into 50 rules governing everything from motorcycle brakes to pain medicine. The latest changes cap a multiyear effort that could be one of the administration's lasting legacies, depending in part on how the underlying principle of pre-emption fares in a case the Supreme Court will hear next month.
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