Daily News Channel
In Rialto, on old route 66 just outside Los Angeles, young Mexican Americans in sharp cars and glittery, cowboy-goth clothes are pouring into a hangar-size nightclub to hear El Komander sing. Brawny, buzz-cut and with a midnight pallor, El Komander looks as if a Mexican drug cartel might have sent him on a summer internship with the Russian mob.
On Friday, before an audience of military officers from around the world, Russia’s top generals made a startling admission of weakness.
It looked at first like the chance of a lifetime, if not a millennium. On April 10, when Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his entourage died in a plane crash in eastern Russia, the flood of grief from the Russian people struck such a chord in Poland that the long history of war, betrayal and oppression between the countries finally seemed to turn a corner.
It was impossible to pinpoint the exact moment of the transformation, but by the time Russian President Dmitri Medvedev left the podium after his first big press conference on Wednesday, he had morphed into a lame duck. The problem was not so much that he failed to state his plans for re-election next year, but, as some members of his own circle now admit, the President seemed to be courting a constituency of just one man — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who will alone decide whether Medvedev stays or goes
By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief.
Israel’s domestic culture war between religious communities and the secular courts took to the streets on Thursday as tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews paralyzed the streets of Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak in a protest march. The target of their outrage was the imprisonment of 43 couples for refusing to allow their daughters to attend a religious school where they would have to mix with the daughters of religious Mizrahi Jews .
There are a lot of things American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts have in common — not the least being a certain nonchalance about where and when they urinate. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, famously relieved himself inside his silver pressure suit while waiting out the countdown in his tiny Mercury capsule — a far better solution than canceling the launch and pulling him out just because no one had thought he’d need the loo during a 15-minute suborbital mission, and his spacesuit thus had no collection bag built in
The name Taliban means “seekers of knowledge.” Since they seized control of most of Afghanistan in 1996, the clique of fundamentalist zealots who go by that name have eliminated virtually all human rights within their reach.
Turkish international Gokdeniz Karadeniz stuck a second-half winner as Rubin Kazan claimed a shock 2-1 Champions League Group F victory over holders Barcelona at the Nou Camp. Karadeniz netted with 17 minutes to go to earn the Russian champions their maiden win in the competition and inflict a first competitive defeat over Barcelona since May.
An impassioned U.S.