Daily News Channel
In the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tobacco was widely viewed as the model for effective special-interest lobbying. “My own view is that in many ways, the tobacco industry invented the kind of special-interest lobbying that has become so characteristic of the late 20th- and earlier 21st-century American politics,” said Allan Brandt, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Anti-secrecy campaigners have criticized a decision by UK lawmakers to censor a report on their expenses claims, some of which was leaked earlier amid huge public outcry. The online publication on Thursday is the result of a newspaper filing a freedom of information request to see the claims by MPs, but some of the information is blacked out. The redaction prompted criticism from campaigners seeking transparancy.
AIG and Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, in their latest legal fight, seem both to be hoping that they can convince a judge and a jury that the ends justify the means, and perhaps also that they are the nicer of the two parties. The insurance company and its former CEO head to court on Monday in a tussle over who should be allowed to keep hundreds of millions of shares of AIG that Greenberg and a company he controls, Starr International, took when he left his former employer
American student Amanda Knox was on the stand Saturday for a second day, this time facing questions from the public prosecutor in her trial on charges of murdering her housemate about two years ago. Knox, 21, is charged in the death of British student Meredith Kercher, who was her housemate in this university town north of Rome. Kercher, 20, died in what prosecutors say was a “drug-fueled sex game” after suffering a sexual assault
As the possibility decreases that investigators will learn what happened to Air France Flight 447 on Monday over the Atlantic Ocean, the chances of it entering the folklore of mystery crashes grows. Brazilian air force officials still have not identified debris from the Airbus A330, and a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board official said currents would be scattering any debris from the flight over an increasing area, reducing the probability of finding the jetliner’s voice and flight data recorders.
Gunmen on motorcycles fired Friday on a campaign office for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wounding two adults and a child, according to a report by Iran’s state-run news agency. The shooting happened about 5 p.m
You know things are getting weird when Britain’s largest mass-market daily, the Sun, co-opts a regicidal 17th century republican who shut down Parliament at gunpoint as an avatar of democracy. But Oliver Cromwell’s angry exhortation to MPs supplied the paper’s front-page headline yesterday: “In the Name of God, Go.” British voters — or at any rate, those voters who work for Britain’s robustly opinionated media — are calling for heads to roll as each day brings new revelations about MPs’ overblown expense claims. Today, Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, became the scandal’s highest-profile victim, announcing that he will stand down in June, the first time a Speaker has been forced out in 300 years.
This weekend was the peak of the college graduation season.
Here’s a little-known fact: Under current law, it’s possible to hold a patent on a piece of human DNA, otherwise known as a gene. Companies that have acquired patents for genes have specific rights to their use, which may include diagnostic tests based on those genes, as well as future mutations that are discovered
It is in refugee camps like Chotha Lahore, rather than on the battlefields of the Swat Valley, that the outcome of Pakistan’s decisive showdown with the Taliban may be decided. The camp, near the town of Swabi, is sheltering some of the hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis displaced by the government offensive to drive the militants out of the Swat Valley and its surrounds. “The purpose [of the campaign] is to cleanse the areas of these miscreants and militants,” Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told TIME